Beyond the personal

Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

Sandy Edwards, Marina and Laura in Lady Grounds Pool,
Bithry’s Inlet, Tanja, NSW, 1998

Indelible represents the suite of images that remained after photographer Sandy Edwards spent months viewing, re-viewing and culling the hundreds of rolls of colour film of family and friends that she had shot over the last decade. The images record Edwards’ visits to some of her favourite haunts, such as New York City and the New South Wales south coast, as well as documenting certain rites of passage and leisure activities of her close personal network. A child opens a Christmas present while another squirts a hose at the camera; a pair of adolescents pose in formal wear while others lie face down on the surface of a rock pool; a girl surveys a wedding reception, while another warms her legs by a fire.

The challenge faced by the artist, as Edwards herself describes it in her room-sheet notes, was the transformation of these images from personal snapshots into an exhibition with broader, or ‘universal’ appeal. Edwards has attempted to achieve this through honing in on content, selecting representations of those moments in life to which most of us are witness, events that mark the passage of time or personal change, such as weddings and birthdays, holidays and house-warmings.

There are several perils in such an approach. One is the by now familiar dubiousness of the traditional documentary photographer’s credo of truth and objectivity. Another is the equally problematic nature of any appeal to the ‘universal’, whereby culturally specific assumptions are necessarily made but not always acknowledged. Further, there is the related risk that in aiming for the general, one might lose the poignancy of the particular.

Edwards may have run these risks, but her erudition and experience allow her to navigate them, albeit with varying degrees of success. Her role in the documentation process—the images are to some degree autobiographical, with the artist herself appearing on occasion—is explicitly acknowledged, underlining the subjective nature of photography. The titles of the photographs locate them very specifically in time and place, as does the frequent reliance on the genre of portraiture that heightens the individual identity of the subjects; clearly these images are less universal than representative of a particular class and lifestyle. However, despite this, some of Edwards’ images fail to engage, and appear to suffer from a lack of intimacy. Perhaps, in seeking a more public mode of address, Edwards has at times sacrificed a personally charged register.

There is a sense of emotional reticence about some of the images, as if any scenes deemed too intimate or revealing have been edited out. For example, awkward moments are not really tackled, although there is a moving hint of discord in one title that tells us the artist’s mother no longer wishes to be her daughter’s subject. Indeed, at times the portrayals tip into the anodyne, remaining unremarkable and prosaic, not unlike those shots in an ordinary family album that attempt to evoke the significance of events through their sheer quantity rather than through a definitive image.

As a result, it is those photographs tending to the abstract, which demand a shift in the mode of spectatorship, that are the strongest and most evocative. When Edwards’ unmistakable eye for colour and composition is most in evidence, her photographs come alive for this viewer, as in the vibrant contrasts in Merilee’s hands, where fingers are outstretched to a pot belly stove and clothes highlight pattern and colour; or the cool sinuousness of Lisa’s legs in mum and dad’s pool; or the delight in the abstract arrangements haphazardly created by Adrian’s sarong blowing on my mother’s clothesline and Byron Bay Classics cozzies. The appeal of such images lies largely in Edwards’ ability, through her formal strategies, to transform the unremarkable into the aesthetically delightful. Her photographs infuse the ordinary with beauty in such a way that the viewer can bring a refreshed vision to his/her own surroundings, with eyes more attuned to colour, pattern, correspondence.

One correspondence that repeatedly structures Edwards’ images is between people and nature. A certain unapologetic Romanticism permeates her compositions: people are often shot in natural landscapes, or at least in contact with natural elements such as fire and water, with an emphasis on ‘naturalness’, ‘immediacy’ and ‘sensation.’ The urban shots, by contrast, tend to be less inhabited: fragments of the built environment, such as a neon sign or pedestrian crossing, stand as synecdoches for the city, while portraits shot in the street are closely cropped to limit the allusion to place.

While the emotional reticence and prosaic nature of some of the images detract from their power, this is counterbalanced by the formal rigour, aesthetic empathy and affirmation of human/nature interaction in others. On viewing this exhibition, I was reminded of Susan Sontag’s observations in her recent book about the ethically dubious nature of “regarding the pain of others.” Perhaps in offering us images of everyday beauty, Edwards is honing our powers of attention more effectively.

Sandy Edwards, Indelible, Stills Gallery, Sydney, March 17-April 17

RealTime issue #61 June-July 2004 pg. 45

David McDowell, The Passenger

Courtesy Canberra Contemporary Art Space

David McDowell, The Passenger

In The Passenger David McDowell explores the contrast between still images and time-based video as a way of demonstrating the traveller’s experience of time. These 2 media forms remain separate in this large installation, in which the artist sets up a tension, yet narrative connection, between motion and stillness.

Large panels hang around the gallery like makeshift walls in a theatre set. Each panel comprises a grid of separate stills. Printed on transparent film stock, the back-lit images resemble projected moving images, only they are motionless moments caught in time. The fragmented surface is deceptive, with each still like a David Hockney photograph, capturing part of a larger image. With different depths of field for each fragment, it takes some time to focus and decide whether the panels in their entirety capture the vista of a passing mountain range, the view through a travelling car windscreen, an aeroplane wing on a tarmac, or sleeping passengers in a transit lounge. It is as if you have lost your focus in that moment of travel through unfamiliar places.

The artist seems to revel in the romance of older forms of apparatus used to capture and display images, alongside an acknowledgement of modern technologies like the domestic handycam. The lighting set-up on the panels recalls the bygone era of slide projection and the family display of slides from overseas trips. The stills, printed in muted tones, have a warm old-fashioned feel, with the light seeping through from behind. Each image looks like an old monochromatic photographic plate that you hold up to the light to see detail. They reminded me of a very old clunky projector that my father had, which required the viewer to slide in each precious glass plate to bring the image to life on the wall. The notion of projection in these static images intersects with the 2 centrally placed video works when you enter the gallery.

The first video work you encounter is screened on a monitor. The second is projected onto a hanging panel constructed from the same materials as the panels of photographs. The video on the monitor has a highly compressed quality, making the image blurry and again hard to focus on. The projection seeps through the hanging panel and can be seen in fragmented parts on the back. Both videos capture a moment of travel; a plane leaves the tarmac on the monitor and a car drives through a tunnel in the projection. These moments of time are slowed down and looped in an endless monotony. There is a connection with the still imagery combined with a sense of dislocation, of the world passing by while you are standing still and going nowhere. I got caught up in the tunnel and found a connection with the low droning audio track that permeated the space of the gallery. The soundscape seems to use treated environmental recordings, which can only occasionally be synched with the moving images. There is an instant where the sound of truck brake exhaust can be linked with truck headlights gliding through the frame. Placing these sounds with the moving images resonates with our attempts to focus on the wider image on the panels and form some kind of connection and escape from the shifting terrain of being a moving passenger.

In The Passenger, David McDowell uses the differences between stasis and movement to play with our perception of time, questioning the progressive narrative of the moving image. The viewer reading the panels pieces together static fragments to create a scene. The viewer watching the moving imagery arrives in the looped narrative and travels only part of the journey, never really going anywhere.

The Passenger, photo and video works David McDowell, sound Somaya Langley; Canberra Contemporary Art Space, March 26-May 1

RealTime issue #61 June-July 2004 pg. 45

Ricky Swallow, Killing Time (detail), 2003-2004

Courtesy of Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney

Ricky Swallow, Killing Time (detail), 2003-2004

In the middle of a darkened space sits a heavy, old fashioned and roughly hewn kitchen table. A single spotlight illuminates fruits of the sea spilling out over the table top: dozens of oysters, a crayfish on a plate, squid, snapper, mullet and garfish. A knife rests on the edge, next to a lemon that is partly peeled, its skin curling away off the table. This cornucopia is laid out for our viewing pleasure.

Ricky Swallow’s sculpture/installation Killing Time possesses a ‘gasp’ factor that turns adult viewers into kids dying to touch. What takes our breath away is the fact that nothing is as it appears. The entire work—from the fragile curling lemon peel and the finely wrought legs of the crayfish, to the bucket and folded cloth—has been meticulously carved out of wood. Swallow’s mimetic skills are awesome and his ability to re-present reality captivates audiences who can’t seem to help taking a ‘reality check’ through physical contact with the work. Little wonder the gallery positioned an attendant to watch over it.

Ashley Crawford wrote in The Age (April 17) that Killing Time is based on Swallow’s childhood experiences as a San Remo fisherman’s son. Without doubt this work is personal, but it connects with viewers on a far more profound level. For all the carving skill demonstrated in the recreation of this laden table the work is disconcerting. There is no tell-tale fishy smell or seductive colour, no sounds of laughter or kitchen noises that such bounty would engender. It is as if all the life and colour has been bleached out of the scene.

Given that Swallow dedicated 6 months to crafting the work, Killing Time is an apt title. However, the title, the dramatic chiaroscuro lighting and the tableaux link the work to the Dutch and Flemish traditions of still-life painting or natures mortes— literally ‘dead life’. Seen in this light, Killing Time potentially takes on a political edge.

At a literal level, Dutch still-life paintings offer a skilful mimetic rendering of simple everyday things. However, simultaneously these everyday things assume symbolic meaning, a warning against the seductiveness and emptiness of material excess, reminders of the need to maintain balance between the spiritual and carnal. Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s La Raie (The Rayfish, 1728) for example, warns of the danger of licentious living, through its juxtaposition of sexually laden symbols: a cat with its hackles risen, oysters, jugs, the underside of a rayfish and a knife balanced on the edge of the table with its blade thrusting into the delicate folds of the tablecloth.

The similarities between the composition of Chardin’s La Raie and Swallow’s Killing Time begs a reading of one through the other. In La Raie, we are also presented with a rough hewn kitchen table groaning with seafood. And I ask: What does it mean to show the underbelly of a rayfish or to present a profusion of oysters? Is the knife balanced on the edge of a table just a knife or does it signify how delicate the balance of life is? Why is Swallow’s knife balanced on the edge of the table? Is the half peeled lemon hanging precariously off the side of the table intended to show the virtuosity of the artist, or something more significant? And why has the artist presented the crayfish with its underbelly to us in a state of helpless vulnerability and impotence?

In the silence of the gallery space viewers have responded to Swallow’s work in whispers and with an almost religious reverence. Yes, the work is a virtuosic feat. However, in the tension between its tactility and untouchable fragility it demands that we do more than just gasp in awe. In his interview with Ashley Crawford, Swallow makes the evocative comment that Killing Time is something to do with “owning up.” Perhaps this is what the work is asking of us.

Ricky Swallow, Killing Time, Gertrude Contemporary Art Space, Melbourne, April 2-May 1

RealTime issue #61 June-July 2004 pg. 46

Maria Blaisse, Silverspheres, 1989

photo Anna Beeke

Maria Blaisse, Silverspheres, 1989

Remember when we dreamt of cyborgs and talked about “becoming” as if it all actually meant something? As if it was possible, this future of endless human plasticity? It seems naïve now that we’ve grown beyond the narcissistic phase of our social evolution and have a better grasp of the limits of our bodies. Now that we remember before bodies mutate they break, mash, incinerate, humiliate, decapitate. Humpty can’t be put back together again.

It’s because of this that I feel if I was looking at the work of Marie Blaisse at PICA, say, 5 years ago, I might have had a different reaction. Today I cannot help but respond with a sort of melancholy; that of the disenchanted futurist. Blaisse’s work was for me a phantom limb, missing but present, a reminder of a whole we once enjoyed, that we maybe took for granted, made too much of. As such, it is somehow more than just Lucy Orta for jazz ballet fans…as the faintly thrumming pain throughout this latently morose show gives it a kind of dignity I wouldn’t have thought possible.

Admittedly, these sombre reflections were far from my mind when I first dipped into the show. It did what I’d thought it would: reactivated all the striving playfulness of the 1980s and early to mid-1990s. The retro, brightly coloured foam costume pieces Blaisse is known for were strewn about the floor with a casual, licorice allsort quirkiness. A few dangled from the roof. The feel was Yazz meets Bananarama downtown at Mangoes for Shirley Temples—light, giddy, soft. This cutie harmlessness was amplified by the kids playing with the costumes, supervised by smiling, good-natured gallery staff. They placed tubes on their heads, slotted skinny arms through cymbal-like shapes. It was goofy good times and arty/fashiony merriment.

This feel was matched in the Paula Abdul video piece where dancing fascists in Blaisse-molded attire gleefully gyrate and hump and goosestep and jitterbug and arse-bounce. Foam-fattened cartoon frames for the Abdul stage show, they were more properly part of an extended extravaganza that had begun with Kiss or Bowie and led to Michael Jackson and worse and then worse still. Art or fashion (or whatever the hell Blaisse does) was a stadium act, just for a moment, but in the process was reduced to being simply part of the era’s dominant culture’s yearning for surface glitz. It’s worth comparing Blaisse’s work for Abdul with Cirque de Soleil’s efforts for New Order in the True Faith video. The French company used a similar aesthetic but to a more rabidly creative and compellingly artful end. Blaisse’s effort couldn’t escape the gravitational pull of the middle-of-the-road. It ended up as its road kill.

Naturally, this satisfied-with-itself escapade was the least interesting part of the show. The film work (produced in collaboration with dancers/models and filmmakers) was an altogether different experience, albeit one that revealed its intensity only on repeat visits. It took solid time and effort to clear away the surface froth to get at the fragile, haunted skeleton of this richly cold work. In one monitor-based work, for instance, we see a woman wrestling with gravity wearing a red, bud-shaped hoop around her waist. One moment she’s Kafka’s giant beetle who cannot right itself. Next she’s Minnie Mouse. Then a ladybug. Oh, metamorphosis is just so fucking hard.

The other works, tucked away in the screening room, took this dynamic to another level entirely. Immensely, awkwardly artful and fun—Godard for the Xanadu generation—they were full of unexplained, unexplainable jump-cuts, formal interruptions and visual and auditory non-sequiturs. Uniting this strange fruit was the fact that the otherwise graceful models who sport Blaisse’s works are forever struggling with the limitations of their new appendages. Blaisse’s bodily additives are definitely, defiantly prototypes. The films are test runs. The models are the fashion world’s equivalent to crash test dummies (which maybe they always are?). My favourites involved rollerskating women (precursors to the genius video for Cat Power’s Cross Bones Style?). One skate flick features a gal with elongated arms connected to her feet. She’s a bug bent on all fours, but not quite; suddenly the arms dislodge from the feet, and she doesn’t know what to do. Then she (or was it a man?) is spinning around, legs splayed thanks to a foam insert.

The rollerskates are significant here. Both skates and the foam body attachments extend and amplify bodily pleasures. Despite this, the logic of the films offers pleasure and then achingly hems it in: the performers are specimens acting out their limitations and possibilities in rooms of clinical clarity and texturelessness. Ultimately, this instills a sense of elegiac melancholy that overrides any overt playfulness and evokes more than a whiff of S&M (in the Freudian sense).

So when, as in the glorious images of a woman’s back turning into a dove, the body reaches a state of grace, it does so surprisingly, as a temporary release made all the more sweet because of its cloistered context. What is clear is that elegance is also a result of being frozen rigid. Indeed, in the still shots of Blaisse’s work on models, the body is pure graphic. The head appears severed from the body. Limbs protrude, a new being is created. The film works, though, show that this is merely an empty promise. The condition of human as graphic is an interlude, a fantasy, a projection of art.

Of course, Blaisse’s work activates these dynamics within a very precise context of sartorial modernism. Elements of futurism and surrealism fuse with 1960s design sensibilities of a Panton-gone-to-the-Moon flavour. There’s something retro-futuristic about Maria Blaisse’s work, but it has learnt from, and moved past, its inherited utopianism. Nevertheless, the thin margin for pleasure, within and against restraints, is obvious and locates her alongside designers such as Belgian Martin Margiela who continue to make fashion along the line between containment and chaos.

Curiously, the flaws in the show’s presentation, while initially annoying—the lack of labels, monitors running side-by-side with inaudible sound—aided the Blaisse effect. Blaisse’s work is best approached at a remove, as a memory trace, as a gesture that doesn’t hold. At its best it opens up the problem of being human, at its worst it is a distraction. It’s pleasure and pain, pop and philosophy, lycra and foam as existential fundament.

Marie Blaisse, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, April 1-May 9; part of The Space Between: Textiles_Art_Design_Fashion

RealTime issue #61 June-July 2004 pg. 46-

The performer smiles. She’s met a policewoman who has confided tales of her dysfunctional relationships. She makes a series of tentative moves, a little half dance of self-protection, a hand swinging almost instinctively over the groin. She moves along the wall, a dance suggesting impact and defence. An alarm summons her to a desk where she operates a transcription machine with her foot while typing the policewoman’s words onto a laptop (for us they unfold on the screen behind her). She stops, rewinds, catches up, ignores errors, speeding on as the story spills out. In it the policewoman transforms from victim to defender to near-murderer of her attacker, her partner.

The performer joins us at the front of the space, sitting, smiling, commencing a slow, silent writhing and twisting, conveying a desire to burst free, but also strain, the anxiety of the almost-murderer as the recorded voice runs backwards in aural space around us. Eleanor Brickhill’s performance in An Unknown Woman is the embodied emotional aftermath of the story, it is an act of empathy, acknowledging moral complexity, a taking in of a story and of a fellow being. This short, tautly contained work makes an intriguing companion piece to Kay Armstrong’s The Narrow House in which we see the premeditation of a female murderer (see article).

In Stand Still, a small precise work, 2 dancers share a space, together and apart, but never in a duet. One turns and turns, slowly, an arm out, leading. The other’s simple articulations suggest semaphoring, a vertical to the first’s horizontal reaching and turning back in. Stillness. They start up again, the movement slightly faster, more articulation, greater extension, Nalina Wait is fluid, bending at one knee to reach out further, arms arching out, hands in to meet with a sense of completion. Lizzie Thomson opens out and up, more angular, less certain. Stillness. Here too is empathy, across different forms and rhythms, sharing the same space, the same momentum and stillnesses, like a dialectic that almost but never resolves.

A man paces in his underwear. Is he lost? Looking for something? Mapping out space? The walking becomes almost hypnotic, its obsessive footfall subtly extended by a sound score evoking stranger spaces than the one we see before us. Between these walkings (rectangular mappings, sudden diagonals, impulsive stop-starts, on the spot reachings-up like involuntary signallings, half-squats, circlings) the man stops, faces a mirror, wipes himself down, drinks water. These are quiet, slow moments. He looks at himself. Each time he stops here he adds an item of clothing before coming to address us, or, once, singing…before setting out on another, more intense walk, the sound score sometimes pulsing as if rippling through him and, in a rare moment of extroversion, suggesting a demented carnival.

He addresses us quietly. He’s been to a psychiatrist, not that he’s off the rails, “but if the rails are not clear…” It’s about loneliness he says and the thin line between self deception and self perception. About what you want to be…a singer? Is it about happiness? He thinks we can get “homesick for sadness…we wouldn’t be happy without it.” Later he talks about a moment in his flat, an impulse to destroy, and acting on it, tearing apart magazines, documents, passports…but, unable to let go, keeping them in blue plastic bags sitting on the top of bookshelves. By the time he sings, a searching, fine interpretation of a Friedrich Hollaender and Robert Liebmann cabaret song, he is fully dressed. The suit appears to contain him, bulking the strange reaching gestures—a half-hearted aspiration for transcendence? He walks again, looking to connect. He stops, he shudders.

The piece resonates with the nuanced musings of Gail Priest’s improvised sound score which involves the miking of the space to pick up, amplify and ever so slightly alter del Amo’s footsteps, breath and movement. When he sings, the increasing resonance has the effect of separating the performer more and more from the real world as he retreats into that of the cabaret singer, and also pushing the microphones to the point where they too ‘sing.’

At 40 minutes, Unsealed is a complete, quietly disturbing, confiding and important work from Martin del Amo that makes an art of walking, invites our empathy and offers a sad paean to the virtues of melancholy.

Performance Space, Parallax: An Unknown Woman, Eleanor Brickhill, sound Michelle Outram; Stand Still, Nalina Wait, Lizzie Thomson; Unsealed, Martin del Amo, sound Gail Priest; design Virginia Boyle; producer Fiona Winning, lighting Simon Wise, project coordinator Michaela Coventry; Performance Space, April 21-May 2

Experiencing Kay Armstrong’s The Narrow House is like getting into the head of a murderer by way of her body, her words and into the evolution of a psychosis, onto the planning and into the crime. It’s a claustrophobic trip as the will to act forms and the rehearsal of the murder forces choices. Naked seduction followed by a knifing? Or a cup of poisoned tea served with domestic grace in an apron? The fantasy is full-bodied, sexual, likely bloody; the fact is the female murderer’s favourite, the inversion of nurturing: poisoning.

Unlike John Romeril’s early work Mrs Thally F, a play about a real Australian poisoner, Kay Armstrong’s murderer is an invention but a nonetheless convincing one. This worryingly sensual, perversely poetic dance theatre work is about a consuming state of being. As the passion escalates we see the murderer across the theatre’s pitch dark spaces through various psychologically refractive perspectives. She’s a naked woman (self-)fondled in a kitchen window. She’s a close-up confidante of the audience. She serves tea at a table over which a mirror swings low so we watch her from above, doggedly rehearsing the increasingly mad moves of her murder. She appears in a distant corner of the ceiling like a spider alert in her web. She’s disembodied, projected onto a wall perpetually entering the crime scene-to-be.

But it’s in the naked and vulnerable but aggressive body that we see both the desire and the torment of the compulsion, an idiosyncratic and increasingly tormented dance to an unseen force that tugs at her, drags the woman off-centre. It’s a barely controlled agony heard too in Garry Bradbury’s rich, enveloping sound score. This body connects only with a few objects in this closed universe: a large, threatening kitchen knife, a bone china teacup that glows like the Grail and a statuette of the Virgin. The Narrow House is an absorbing and disturbing creation. Armstrong’s writing needs distilling and her acting more restraint, but after some tentative and difficult steps towards creating her own brand of dance theatre, she has now proven herself capable of a bracing totality of vision, not least in the self-choreographyof an aching dance of limbs, of a body dissociated as painfully as its psyche.

One Extra, The Narrow House, performed and choreographed by Kay Armstrong, dramaturg Nikki Heywood, composer Garry Bradbury, video Samuel James, lighting Simon Wise; Performance Space, March 10-21

Choreographer Sue Healey is a survivor in the Australian dance scene. Beginning her career with Dance Works (1983-88), Healey led the Canberra-based company Vis-à-Vis from 1993-95. Since then she has choreographed independently, creating works for a fluid company of dancers which has included Michelle Heaven, Philip Adams, Jennifer Newman-Preston, Shona Erskine and Nalina Wait. She has been commissioned by many Australian dance companies and has an ongoing relationship with the Aichi Arts Centre in Japan. Healey has worked with filmmaker Louise Curham (RT58, p15) on several film and installation projects since 1997 and has recently begun directing her own films, including the award-winning Niche (2002) and Fine Line (2003).

Healey is currently a Research Associate with the Unspoken Knowledges Research project, led by Professor Shirley McKechnie at the Victorian College of the Arts. Her recent Niche series has been part of McKechnie’s project and consists of 5 works created between 2002 and 2004: the films mentioned above, 2 live works (Niche/Japan and Fine Line Terrain) and an installation (Niche/Salon). Healey’s finely crafted, intricate choreographies are too rarely presented in Sydney and her upcoming season of Fine Line Terrain at The Studio (Sydney Opera House) has been much anticipated since a showing of the work last year. Since then, the piece has been performed in Auckland, Canberra, Melbourne and New York.

Healey talked to RealTime about the logic behind the Niche series, her interest in space and perception and the challenges she faces as an independent choreographer working with an increasingly consistent company of dancers.

The Niche series covers 5 works and has traversed a number of formats: film, video, installation and performance. Why a series and how is the variety of formats tied to your exploration?

Each work ‘found’ its own niche, so to speak. I started with a dance video focus—wanting to make dance for that specific space rather than my usual method of choreographing the action before its translation into video or film. As our focus was space, it made absolute sense to keep finding new spaces and contexts to explore, manipulate and extend our material, including the screen space, a traditional proscenium space, a white gallery, a new cultural context (Japan) and a ‘site specific’ (30 metre deep) space. I didn’t set out to create a series—it evolved quite organically. I can look back and see that the driving force was a search to place the ‘right’ work in the ‘right’ space.

You are particularly interested in movement and perception. How does this relate to your use of both live and screen formats?

I am not interested in dance as fashion or in movement that disengages perception. I believe that art can make a difference to the way we live our lives. (Experiencing) dance, whether as observer or performer, can enhance the way we perceive our reality as moving, sentient beings interacting on this fragile planet. Perhaps it is even vital. I explore this in both live and screen formats. My current choreographic research is devoted to the manipulation of time and space that video and film makes possible and which offers me a range of new devices only dreamt of when creating live performance. However, I think I will always need to have the visceral, the physical, the real, underpinning the work I create—to keep in touch with the tangible physical drama that occurs as you choreograph. This is because I highly value the memories of performing that I have in my own body.

You have a very strong group of dancers working with you now. How important is it for you to work in this way and what is the real economic viability of such relationships?

The dancers I work with are simply extraordinary. To say that they are fundamental to my process is an understatement. It is a top priority for me to maintain the relationships I have with my dancers. Sustaining employment opportunities for these dancers is the toughest aspect. I can only employ them for short periods scattered throughout the year—I can’t offer them any financial security. What I can offer is a creative framework that has an ongoing sense of development and support. This has been a successful model for us over the last couple of years. For example, Shona Erskine worked on every stage of the Niche series through an initial mentorship grant from the Australia Council. This sense of an ongoing partnership is unusual and difficult to achieve outside of a company scenario.

The difficulty lies in timing grant applications and negotiating around dancers’ other contracts, juggling dates, venues, budgets, schedules, in the hope that providence will bring everything together. Strangely enough it mostly seems to work out. At times I do wonder, however, about the work I could be making if things were different. I do have an occasional lusting for a company model that provides ongoing administrative and production support. Having had that previously, I do think that I have found a unique structure to create within. The success of the Niche series bears witness to this so I think I am on the right path.

Fine Line Terrain, choreographer Sue Healey; dancers Victor Bramich, Shona Erskine, Lisa Griffiths, Nelson Reguera Perez, Nalina Wait; lighting Joseph Mercurio, composer Darrin Verhagen; The Studio, Sydney Opera House, June 29-July 3

Light and Shade explores the boundaries, spaces and possibilities of darkness and light, blurring the notion that light is pure while darkness is a menacing force devoid of innocence. Conceived and curated by TasDance’s artistic director Annie Grieg, the show comprises Swimming the Luna Sea by Chrissie Parrott and Tanya Liedtke’s Enter Twilight.

In the opening sequence of Luna Sea, entitled “Dark”, Parrott situates 3 male and 3 female dancers in a stark and shattered landscape. Jonathon Mustard’s sound score of rainfall, howling dogs and the relentless creak of timber enhances the sense of unease and loss. Accomplices and competitors in an alien place, the dancers move between corporeal claim and counter claim of initial touch and support, to the squared-off angular movements of threat and abandonment.

In this space of lunar dispossession the ensemble (re)enact the frisson and fragility which co-exist in the habitual province of human encounter, potential and rejection. Theresa O’Connor’s lighting design has a precursor in the hoary light we associate with the first moon landing. The semi-dark state enhances both the group’s isolation and their body motifs: the recurring minutiae of a dancer’s clawed hand, a finger flick, an inverted foot, a jagged hip.

A stone rolls from one cheek to another, momentarily counter-pointing the alienation of place and space. Words have yet to assume the shape and potency of meaning. Consonant and vowel provide an aural ostinato, as sound stumbles on the tongue and splits around the mind’s incomprehension. Each dancer’s physical vocabulary moves between recall of lost humanness juxtaposed against the whip-strength and aggression of a non-human state. They move from acquiescence to a dominance of each other while remaining submissive to the hiss and whisper of a landscape before language.

The apprehensive mood shifts in “Light”, the second section of Luna Sea. Trisha Dunn appears as a White Dew figure draped in a silver gown and shedding astral dust. This figure of innocence and immanence offers declamatory gestures. She mouths half-realised sounds suggestive of a seer uttering fragments of language, which allay the sense of estrangement and terror.

Three bare-chested male dancers glide in white-hooped skirts like retainers in an imagined Tutankhamen court. They present an image of beauty and quirkiness as the dancers’ weighted skirts swing and wrap their bodies. When pulled over the head, the skirt accentuates the dancer’s facial structure through a taut cloth mask. Moving like wraiths in space, Craig Bary, Ryan Lowe and Malcolm McMillan offer gestural homage to White Dew as they mirror her hand motifs. This provides an enlivened and illumined resolution after uncertainty and darkness.

Tanja Liedtke is a choreographer who re-imagines the parameters and possibilities of dance. Her choreographic finesse in Enter Twilight explores the paradox that exists within life’s rituals through the allure, seduction, playfulness and danger enacted between a male and 3 female dancers.

Craig Bary sleeps on stage while 3 young women—Trisha Dunn, Lisa Griffiths and Tania Tabacchi—observe, chat and speculate. Liedtke knows how to set her dancers on a trajectory that makes deft and detailed use of the body. The performers split and navigate space, generating a simultaneous allure and frisson of excitement. They reveal the paradox of dangerous states teetering between humour, innocence and treacherousness.

This dance is stylish, pert, cheeky and flirtatious. Each girl targets, then engages in an alternately naïve, groovy and sensuous dance conversation with the boy/man. The dancers whisper and tease, embarking across the terrain of taunt and threat implicit in relationships. Composer DJ Tr!p’s lo-fi electronic sound score projects the crack, scratch and pop of tired vinyl, the result of too frequent playing by kids making their moves on each other and the world. Seated dancers are intriguingly lit from beneath as they glide around a wooden bench in playfulness, entanglement and pursuit.

Liedtke’s strengths include inventiveness and visual surprise. In one sequence each dancer falls and rebounds from the floor as an agile unit of momentum. The reversed upward movement is like watching a film in slow motion replay. In another visually arresting moment, 3 pairs of inverted legs disconcertingly appear in space, luring the eye away from the site of action.

Swimming the Luna Sea and Enter Twilight use the languages of the body and the tongue to illuminate the territories of light and shade, seduction, corruption and desire.

TasDance, Swimming the Luna Sea, choreographer Chrissie Parrott, music Jonathon Mustard, lighting Theresa O’Connor, design Chrissie Parrott with Darren Willmott; Enter Twilight, choreographer Tanja Liedtke; music DJ Tr!p, design Tanja Liedtke with Darren Willmott; Hobart College Auditorium, May 6-9

A radiant turquoise wall seeps pink light, warmly greeting audiences arriving for Stompin Youth’s latest dance work, Age of Consent. A futuristic vending machine requires us to speak into it before tickets are dispensed with a too soothing voice oozing automated menace. Extra-terrestrial lights crane above the hall’s tiered seating, to which we’re escorted and allocated age-tags. The space fills with urgent, automated whispers, sweeping us through a reverberating void.

The entrance wall of milk-crates is reconfigured to form 5 dividing walls on a central platform, each containing a peephole. The walls allow half the audience to partially view scenes played out before them, while the remaining half are privy to the uncensored version.

The vignettes—a girl dancing seductively in her room, young people venturing first touches, the surreptitious application of makeup, shotgunning a can—depict the forbidden in a voyeuristic form, while sound effects and voiceovers snake around the walls. In this way the work rotates and gradually unfolds on a spare yet cleverly devised set, reminiscent of Lars Von Trier’s Dogville and similarly functioning to bring the drama into sharper focus.

The set is suddenly and violently dis-assembled to the tense rhythm of a bouncing ball. Mattresses are introduced and the sexes divided. In a nice inversion, boys preen and groove in a nightclub while girls lounge and leer. As the night progresses, intoxication is conveyed in limp, puppet-like movement, accompanied by a slow, aggressive soundscape. Trouble could be just around the corner and there’s a sense of clinging eroticism, at once languid and intensely menacing. Voiceovers recounting bouncer/ID stories drop the intensity, but the energy rises again with a montage in which a progression of dancers is each asked to ‘act your age’ to dramatically different pieces of music.

Composer Luke Smiles manipulates electronic recordings live, dropping or accentuating layers in response to the energy of the performance. The symbiosis achieved between sound and choreography is one of the strongest aspects of Age of Consent and the director, Luke George, believes this is largely attributable to Smile’s considerable experience as a dancer.

Age of Consent emerged from an exploration of the written and unwritten codes that pervade and influence young people’s lives. A 12 month creative development involved 30 young dancers. Luke George says he was careful not to impose his stylistic preferences, preferring to shape the dancers’ own responses to the subject matter. The exception was the final sequence in which 2 groups of dancers move in formation to the rattling pulse of marching drums, but with an ironic twist. Influenced, he says, by the “highly objectionable Bitch Rock” band Peach, George introduced a defiant shoulder thrust, to represent the way it feels to ‘break the rules.’ Military elements gradually dissolve into ecstatic anarchy and Stompin’s trademark electric energy—a fitting finale.

Stompin Youth Dance Company, Age of Consent, director Luke George, sound Luke Smiles, design bluebottle; Pilgrim Hall, Launceston, May 6-9

Micronations

On September 2, 1967 Ex-Major Paddy Roy Bates decided to occupy an ex-World War II military sea fort just off the East Coast of England and have it declared a separate nation state. The principality of Sealand was born. Thirty seven years later Prince Roy, as he proclaimed himself, has handed over the throne to his son Michael and managed to gain de facto recognition of its sovereignty from a number of European countries. Over 25 years, lobbying the UN for nation state status has so far proved unsuccessful.

Sounds fanciful but it’s all true. The Principality of Sealand is today considered one of the leaders of what is often referred to as the micronations movement. Micronations are countries which have been declared independent by individuals or small groups. In many cases such claims have been made on pieces of land, usually tiny islands. Since the internet got into full swing the traditional concept of micronations has evolved into cyber and digitally programmed territories too.

The principality of Sealand was the fruit of an error in judgement on behalf of the UK government. It had designed Roughs Tower (the sea fort) approximately 7 nautical miles from the coast, more than double the then applicable 3-mile range of territorial waters. Basically it had unwittingly located it in the international waters of the North Sea. While Roy Bates’ experience has been perhaps the best known (he’s fought off invaders from Germany and landed himself in a court case for fighting against the British navy—and won), his Sealand functions like many other micronations in that it has its own constitution, issues its own currency and provides its own passport.

Such is the evolution of the micronations movement and its growing popularity amongst a number of artists and musicians that the Sonar Advanced Music and Multi Media festival has this year decided to run the very first Universal Exhibition of Micronations.

Holding an exhibition of micronations would seem in keeping with a return to the festival’s roots—Sonar has always enjoyed positive critical and public responses when it’s dared to be at its most cutting edge. And in the case of micronations you might even say, eccentric.

Sealands’ micronation will be on display along with 4 quite different examples of the phenomena—Barcelona therapist Evru’s Evrugo Mental State, the multilayered kingdom of Elgaland-Vargaland, State of Sabotage from the creative label of the same name and NSK, A State in Time from the Slovenian industrial music collective Laibach.

Multimedias

Now in its 11th year, Sonar has over a decade grown from a small, almost underground electronic music festival with a few strands of multimedia thrown in to become one of Europe’s most prestigious multimedia events. Its music programming has in recent times attracted criticism for its growing commercial and conservative choices and the organisers appear to have listened by focusing this year’s line-up around the explosion of hip hop both in and out of Spain.

The festival’s multimedia arm though has strengthened considerably over the past 4 or 5 years and according to Andy Davies, the curator of Sonarcinema, that might very well reflect a changing of the guard between the mediums. “I certainly feel there’s a shift in the electronic music/electronic image thing,” says Davies. “It seems to me that there’s more interesting new things happening in the image side than the music side. And that’s a technological thing—now the technology is becoming more available for the image and quicker and cheaper—all the things that happened in the music. So there’s a whole lot of people coming to work in video that wouldn’t previously have had access to equipment. And for the same reason there’s this explosion of work that was originally there in the 90s in electronic music.”

The Sonarama section of this year’s festival as usual will put on show some of the latest developments in new sound and audiovisual creations, installations, software presentations and audiovisual concerts. A highlight this year is Thomas Koner’s Banlieue du Vide, at once a critique of the repressive possibilities of internet technology and a reflection on the passing of time. Koner’s work recently won the prestigious Ars Electronica’s Golden Nica award in the digital music category.

Switzerland’s Hektor, a suitcase containing among other things 2 electric motors, a spray can holder and a circuit board, and Canada’s Artificiel’s light installation Bulbes are also eagerly anticipated. Along with the media lab presentations displaying software and sound combinations, Sonar importantly continues to give a space to new creators.

Oscar Abril, Sonar’s Multimedia coordinator, says the event is still making a place for itself internationally: “Sonar is most definitely the main festival of its type in Spain and it certainly plays a defining role overseas even though you couldn’t classify it as an arts electronic festival. Nevertheless, it still retains that independent streak and belongs to a movement within a global movement.”

Like Abril, Sonarcinema’s Andy Davies has this year conjured up a film festival from a wide range of sources. It’s a neat mix of the original—Simon Pummell’s unscripted and wordless Bodysong documentary (with a soundtrack from Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood) to the hysterical—Shynola’s computer animated adverts—to the retrospective—a showing of Ramon Coppola’s music videos that include Fatboy Slim’s Gangsta Trippin’, Moby’s Honey, Air’s Playground Love and Daft Punk’s Revolution 909.

In amongst that lot there will be a session on one of the pioneers of digital animation, Lillian Schwartz, and a menu of low budget electronic short films. To round it off there’s some very contemporary documentary takes on the hip hop scene in Venezuela as well as the punk and rap movements in Japan, China and India.

It’s this kind of visual social commentarist role that festivals like Sonar crucially play. “For me there’s places which produce a lot of interesting work and it’s surprising that should be so and I don’t really understand why it is,” ponders Davies. “Austria for example has fantastic video and visuals. Britain as well, there’s a lot of interesting stuff happening there, quite particular… Japan has a very particular take image-wise, especially graphically, so a lot of work that comes from there stands out. And I also think Finland is a very curious place. We show a lot of things from Finland!”

Davies believes it’s hard to get good local work to be shown in Sonar. He attributes that to a combination of cultural factors and a lack of investment from television and the state in experimental work or, for that matter, independent record companies who tend to finance low budget filmmakers in other parts of Europe. “One thing’s for sure. What makes a good public isn’t necessarily what makes a good creative environment.”

Morganics’ shows at Sydney Opera House’s The Studio and Brisbane’s Powerhouse are taking this hip hop virtuoso to a wider audience, recognition he fully deserves. He’s more often to be found in workshops for young people in regional areas, prisons and Aboriginal communities right around Australia and it’s that presence which frames and informs much of this solo outing. He plays it as if we are a group of young violent offenders in an institution participating in a hip hop workshop, teaching us beat-boxing and free-styling and demonstrating his moves: “this is about breaking, not entering.” He shows videos of his work, largely with Aboriginal youngsters, reflects on his hip hop beginnings as a kid (Circular Quay, 1984) and conjures a range of workshop experiences that reveal the pain of the lives of the people he teaches: teenage mothers, prostitutes, the dispossessed. As much as it’s a mission, Morganics’ journey is also an adventure, sometimes exhausting, as he crisscrosses the country, sometimes tense, as cross-cultural clashes loom. He recreates these moments with a vivid but laidback theatricality. It’s also a role model show. It’s hip hop evangelism with an Australian voice. It’s a critique of commercial hip hop (“I love it when I forget it’s a business”) and the sexism of the form, and satirical when it comes to record company and undergraduate responses to the art. And it’s a thrill when Morganics raps and dances: you just want more. His work with young Indigenous hip hoppers from Northern NSW is part of this year’s Message Sticks at the Opera House and will be reported in RT 62. The big question is will schools be able to use their $1600 pocket money from Johnny Howard’s 2004-5 federal budget to bring Morganics in to teach values? I hope so.

Morganics, Crouching B-Boy Hidden Dreadlocks, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, March 30-April 3

The CD cover photo says it all: Paul Grabowsky strolling around Manhattan looking very pleased to be there. And why wouldn’t he be, since he’s there to record 9 of his compositions with such top ranking American jazz musicians as Branford Marsalis, Joe Lovano, Ed Schuller and Jeff Tain Watts (although Marsalis, due to the dreaded ‘contractual obligations’, performs on only 2 tracks). Australian trumpet player Scott Tinkler jets in to complete the group. The sheer logistical effort of assembling these musicians in one time and place is no doubt a tale in itself, but the effort was worth it. This album is many things: a showcase of inventive compositions, a mix of styles and structures and a collection of uniformly excellent performances. Most of all, it is a statement of the possibilities of modern jazz.

The opening track Tailfin defines the album: highly ambitious, technically superb and a study in contrasts. At 9 and a half minutes, Tailfin is by turns blazing and meditative, yet it is the structure of the composition that leaves the final impression. It opens with a kinetic drum solo by Watts, played as if his mission is to compress as much dynamism as possible into 30 seconds. This serves as an opening statement for the album: beginning with a drum solo suggests the focus is to be on the compositions, not 88 keys and one ego.

Tailfin takes many surprise twists. Once the drums have settled down into the middle ground (Watts is never really in the background), a theme is played by Marsalis on soprano sax, accompanied by Tinkler on trumpet and toilet plunger (bought, according to the engaging album notes, from a Chelsea hardware store). This theme is a little disorienting: a fast vertiginous round that’s part folk dance and part Ornette Coleman. Once it’s done, Tinkler launches into an incendiary trumpet solo, backed only by the tumultuous drums. The trumpet is pure brazen energy, delivered in a clear tone that rides above and across the drumming. After this energy burst, the tune slows down, turning lyrical and reaching almost a still point. Grabowsky takes over the composition with melancholy piano lines, dropping to the lower register before stepping up to a chordal progression. This rhythmic development attracts the drums, which build up momentum again, this time summoning Marsalis. Now the composition is in a new phase, with Marsalis unwinding over drums and bass, while Grabowsky re-enters with those chords.

Marsalis takes the tune apart, in the decontructivist manner pioneered by Coltrane. Jack Kerouac described Miles’ bop trumpet as “speaking in long sentences like Marcel Proust”; Coltrane liked to play the same sentence over and over, from different angles until it was exhausted, an avant-garde re-writing of the Proustian sentence. This is what Marsalis does here, speaking one long soprano sentence upwards, downwards and sideways, building to a peak as the other musicians add their support. Then a return to the vertiginous theme, some stabs in unison like exclamation marks, and the trumpet trails off and upwards to end the composition. All this on the opening track: no wonder Marsalis cries “Great Caesar’s ghost!” when it’s over.

After this delirious ride, the album settles down a little but loses nothing in ambition. Tales of Time and Space is just that; a sweep across music history and cultural difference. Styles and methods are taken from a startlingly wide range of sources, from 17th century Spanish dance to Silverchair. But this is no postmodern pastiche. The various source materials are absorbed into Grabowsky’s jazz compositions, adding distinctive flavours but never spoiling the texture or status of the works. On a larger scale and at a different time, Duke Ellington did the same with his great compositions.

Sideshow Sarabande, the second track, is a jazz version of the Baroque triple-time dance, featuring Grabowsky in buoyant mood. Silverland is a sprightly tribute to the Aussie rock band, with bouncy piano, silvery trumpet, and a crescendo embracing the grunge-pop cadences of its inspiration. Angel is an overtly lyrical turn, featuring the album’s most beautiful melody. A collective commitment to simplicity allows the musicians to explore the lyricism while avoiding sentimentality, especially in the solos by Tinkler and Lovano on tenor sax.

The best—or at least most memorable—of the album’s tracks are these first 4; the second half of the CD does not quite match the first. Perhaps Grabowsky the pianist could have showcased himself on a solo or duet track to add formal variety. But these are minor quibbles. On this album the compositions and ensemble playing are the thing. The many times and spaces subsumed into this recording produce a here and now that is truly exciting to hear.

Given our everyday listening is spatial—the sound of the world is not in stereo, it’s 3 dimensional—it is interesting that its recreation through surround sound systems still seems a novelty. We are used to listening to our Dolby Surround Sound in cinema complexes, but it is still not standard sound event procedure to gather enough speakers and people with the techniques to perform live spatial audio mixes. So there was a degree of understated excitement about the evening at Lanfranchi’s Memorial Discotheque in Sydney’s Chippendale, featuring live surround sound performance by Sam Smith, Julian Knowles, Alex Davies and Melbourne duo Robin Fox and Anthony Pateras.

First up was Sam Smith, who has been appearing over the last year, as both sound and visual artist, but who is a relative newcomer to spatial audio. Smith’s soundscapes are luscious, featuring snippets of keyboard chords and broken melodies that drift in and out of focus, mixed with static sprays, tweaked harmonics and pulsing drones. He also blends in organic sounds, in this case the squeals and groans of children, perhaps, and grating metallic timbres. His spatialisation was intense, sometimes verging on the hyperactive, a temptation when you first discover the joy of pinging sounds around a room. It will be interesting to hear some more of his work when he has settled into the ideas and technology.

Julian Knowles is one of the undisputed masters of spatial audio, having worked in the area for many years before recent technology made it more accessible. Knowles’ sounds—the familiar palette of electronic hiss, click, crackle and drone—are so finely processed and sculpted that they take on new depths. His sense of composition is meticulous with an underlying tension, yet he never gets caught in the crisis of endless crescendo, instead shifting through different textural territories with fluidity, giving momentum and intensity to his work. What distinguishes Knowles from other artists is his restraint. He very rarely moves a whole sound, but sprays out elements of it. The effects play around you, frequencies swim while the core remains anchored. Knowles avoids the special-fx rollercoaster ride, preferring to work on a deeper psycho-acoustic level, expanding the sonic space of the room and creating a sphere of sound in which you are aware of every vibrating particle.

The initiator of the evening, Alex Davies, is well known for his interactive audiovisual installations so it was good to see him hone in on audio. Initially he showed a similar restraint to Knowles with a very slow accretion of details. Starting off with the organic sounds of voices, the work gradually developed into a beat piece with big bass and rhythmic glitch loops. Davies’ samples have a beautiful clarity, however some structural anomalies meant that the piece lacked cohesiveness, as we were often lead into zones that were not explored and then dropped. There is an interesting perceptual shift in spatialised audio when sounds are organic or completely synthetic. With organic samples there is a tendency to look for a ‘narrative’ cause and effect moving it closer to a cinematic experience, however when using digital sounds the placement becomes purely about the movement through space.

Restraint is not a word to be used when describing Melbourne’s Robin Fox and Anthony Pateras. Fox on laptop processing Pateras’ vocals and mixing desk emissions make for a fantastic aural assault. Facing each other like old men playing some demented card game they rupture the dominant trend of slow sustained works with pieces that are short abrasive bursts the length of rock songs. Each piece explores a different set of ideas. From Pateras there are snuffles, gurgles and belches, a bubbling cauldron of hisses and pops, bleeps and wild cries. Each of these textures is ripped apart and cellularly rearranged by Fox’s magic fingers creating sonic meteorites that burn brightly and disintegrate on entry. The works are so dense and fast that the spatialisation served merely to make the pieces twice as loud.

Fox and Pateras performed the same set 2 nights later at impermanent.audio in stereo, and nothing was lost with fewer speakers. In fact the multitude of speakers tended to separate the sound from the source, so that in stereo there was more of a visceral quality to Pateras’ cacophonic mouth clicks, lipsmacks and utterances, making the pieces, edgier and grittier. The piece based on kissing noises was particularly impressive in its uncomfortable over-amplified closeness. However even more impressive were the artists’ solos.

Robin Fox created a stir by bringing visuals into the well-defined audio only environment of impermanent.audio. (There have been 1 or 2 moments of visual stimulation previously but such things are generally not encouraged.) In Fox’s words his photosynthetic piece “explores the 1 to 1 relationship between sonic electricity and its effect on a single light photon excited across a phosphorous screen.” In other words his crafted oscillations make a little green dot grow and dance. The purity and fusion of the sound and visuals creates an interdependent realm that is at once mesmeric and invigorating.

Anthony Pateras performed a prepared piano improvisation on the already battered baby grand at the Frequency Lab. His approach to everything seems to be fast and furious, bashing at the keys to reveal all manner of timbres. Top notes rattle and vibrate like demented toys while bass notes thump and ominously thud. You hear the wood, the metal, the hammer, the pluck. Pateras plays a lot of notes…and then he doesn’t…letting a clanging chord ring out naked, carving silence out of chaos. A magnificent performance.

Fox and Pateras have just departed on a European tour, and it will not be long before they join Pimmon and Oren Ambarchi on the A-list of Australian sound exports taking the international scene by storm.

Sam Smith, Julian Knowles, Alex Davies, Robin Fox & Anthony Pateras, Lanfranchis Memorial Discotheque, April 2; Fox & Pateras, impermanent.audio, The Frequency Lab, April 4

Since 1995 Sydney-based Ensemble Offspring have been performing and commissioning new musical works. These new works are often presented in themed concerts alongside pieces written up to 80 years ago, highlighting some of the broad themes in recent music. Partch’s Bastards, for example, took up instrument building and alternative tunings, and other projects have centred on movements such as Parisian Spectralism and Polish Sonorism. This contextualising has an enriching effect, both in bringing out recent currents and ideas, and fostering new interpretative pathways within individual works. Offspring writer-in-residence Rachel Campbell talked to artistic director Damien Ricketson about the ensemble’s work.

Programming

At the core of the ensemble is a dedication to bringing out new material. A continual mission has been providing a platform, an outlet, for the aspirations of numerous young composers. This entails embracing risk in programming—the potential for failure is high but so too are the potential rewards, and some of these have been astounding.

The ensemble’s birth was an accident. Co-founder Matthew Shlomowitz and I, like any composers, just wanted a gig, a chance to hear our music. But we were able to seize on the enthusiasm of our performers to go on to promote fellow composers as well as countless seminal 20th century works that should also be heard.

It’s meaningful to draw new work into some kind of context, be it historical or just a broader, less parochial vision of contemporary Australian music. Profiling a key composer or theme and then drawing links to the activities occurring here and now helps to illuminate new material. Ideally we aim to present a new music event where the totality of the experience extends beyond the sum of its component parts.

Bozidar Kos

The forthcoming A Composer Profile—Bozidar Kos, Celebrating 70 Years features chamber music by Bozidar and by younger composers who have been his students at the Sydney Conservatorium. A particular highlight will be the world premiere of Fatamorgana, especially commissioned for the event.

Bozidar is a composer with an eye for detail, his works are like well-crafted gems—the more you go into them, the more you appreciate their depth and refinement. His music draws upon a raft of influences ranging from the French Spectralist tradition to his own jazz and folk heritage. His eye for detail also made him a highly respected educator. To this day, the best composition lesson I ever had was when he once tore strips off me.

We also have the world premiere of a piece by English composer Michael Finnissy dedicated to the ensemble’s co-founder Matthew Shlomowitz. In our postmodern milieu he is one of a few composers drawing tangible references to other musics in strange and wonderful ways. There are emotive extremes—he’s a new and different kind of romantic.

Philip Glass

The Philip Glass we’re performing in Concert 2, 2004: Art of Glass is the early stuff. This is the pre-Einstein on the Beach experimental process music from a period when the composer was little known outside of a small New York loft scene and his music was a profound alternative to Euro-modernism.

Over the years, as Minimalism has become more style than concept, the term has become something of a conservative war-cry. In this concert we hope to recapture the bold experimental aesthetic that underpins the music’s origins. This is music stripped to its bare essentials, mechanical patterns repeated again and again. It will either irritate the hell out of people or induce a wonderful hypnotic state of listening. Philip Glass has authorised us to perform these works usually reserved for his own ensemble. We find ourselves in the curious position of being the first band outside the Philip Glass Ensemble to perform works such as Music In Fifths.

There’s also a piece I’ve been working on with Melbourne poet Christopher Wallace-Crabbe whom I met on residence at Bundanon. The work, A Line Has Two, is a spacious meditation on time and impermanence. Temporal references pervade the music’s structure, drawing a boundary between the familiar and the unfamiliar, from citations of Strauss and Mahler to exotic instrumentation such as the Tusut, an ancient Arabic glass instrument, and the ancient Greek aulos.

International

We have an invitation to play at the World Music Days in Croatia next year. And last year we toured Europe as guests of the Warsaw Autumn Festival. We performed in London, Amsterdam, Krakow and Warsaw, and the festival commissioned my Trace Elements which will receive its Australian première in the Bozidar Kos concert.

At Warsaw we had a packed auditorium of over 300 people. The reviews were good and the standard of playing was commented on a lot—especially encouraging given that we were performing back to back with some of Europe’s leading new music specialists such as MusikFabrik.

The Future of New Music

I think the more experimental end of the spectrum will always cycle between a more peripheral and more central role in the creation of new classical music. We’ve had a very conservative decade or 2 but I am encouraged by signs of a renaissance of interest in musical alternatives to the mainstay classical staples. When I was talking with the artistic director of the Warsaw Autumn, he felt they went from the radical 60s to a very conservative position at the end of the century and now their audiences were back in the mood for something a little more challenging. Encouragingly, this demand is not coming from old die-hard modernists, but from the young generation. Indeed, over half the audience at our Warsaw concert were under the age of 30.

Ultimately I am a long-term optimist. I keep the flame alive. I genuinely believe that there is a new ‘new music’ and it will have its place enriching the art-music tradition of the future. The possibility of a novel, original sonic experience that has a profound emotive effect is still very much alive and apparent.

A Composer Profile—Bozidar Kos, Ensemble Offspring; Sydney Conservatorium of Music, July 4; Art of Glass, Ensemble Offspring; The Studio, Sydney Opera House, July 29, www.newmusicnetwork.com.au/ ensoffspring

Un/Cage[d] Version 1.1 was the latest live offering from Brisbane-based percussion ensemble Isorhythmos. The title gives a clue to the creative impetus behind the event: the words, music and ideas of John Cage providing the performance’s conceptual framework. The show was interspersed with recitations of texts by Cage and Gertrude Stein (a kindred spirit and influence on the composer). These effectively functioned as a structural and theatrical device during transitions, shifting the focus from energetic ensemble playing to the whimsical, obscure and profound words from these sages of 20th century art and thought. The characteristic ‘stream of consciousness’ approach and poetic deftness of both Cage and Stein set the pace for a performance that was rarely predictable and often surprising.

Cage’s Living Room Music for percussion and speech quartet (with text by Gertrude Stein) opened the performance. Members of Isorhythmos eased on to stage and made themselves comfortable in a make-shift lounge set up behind the main performance space. True to Cage events, the audience were disconcerted. “Has it started?” “Should we listen?” “Should we keep talking?” And then the music commenced. Clever speech rhythms, tightly rehearsed, soon had all of us enthralled.

Gerard Brophy’s Songo, a percussion composition influenced by Cuban drumming rhythm and style, was performed with great energy, precision and joy, the structure of the work allowing for high levels of interaction and improvisation among the players.

Guest artists Topology joined forces with Isorhythmos for Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm (Bartok arranged by David Montgomery) and the wittily titled Six Bulges in Dancerian Rhythm composed by Montgomery. The Six Dances, originally composed as piano studies for Bartok’s son Peter, were transformed into something altogether different, fleshed out and rendered in Technicolour through Montgomery’s arrangements.

Six Bulges represented something of a world tour of drumming traditions: West African, Brazilian, Senegalese, Turkish, Cuban and jazz styles all got an airing. Montgomery’s very clever creation of an ‘uber’ work gave Isorhythmos and Topology ample opportunity to show off their considerable talents. High energy performing alternated with moments of calm and delicacy, skilfully demonstrating the range of this 8 piece percussion ensemble.

Although it was difficult to pick one highlight, the performance of Toru Takemitsu’s Rain Tree was stunning. The text on which the piece was based, Kenzaburo Oé’s poem The Ingenious Raintree, was projected on the overhead screen. Even without the text, the piece is mesmerisingly beautiful. The keyboard percussion and especially the vibraphone with the added quality of crotales created a delicate shimmer and resonant raindrops of sound. Isorhythmos’ attention to detail and subtlety, the careful shading and interaction between parts and the precision of their playing reflected a ‘chamber music’ aesthetic in the best sense of the term.

The final work for the evening, Imago (Montgomery/Scholes/traditional) was another large scale multi-section piece designed to showcase the talents of Isorhythmos and Topology. Once again the strong influence of West African drumming was present, the work incorporating a mix of rhythmic cells and motifs. There were some very effective sound gestures, utilising the spacing of the performers to create waves of sound moving around the semicircle of drummers. Having sat comfortably in the ‘living room’ at the rear of the stage, Topology returned to the main performance space and joined with Isorhythmos for the final section of Imago. After an extended piece of drumming, Topology’s line up (strings, sax and piano) was a welcome addition to the sound world, with some lovely spots for soprano sax and viola woven into the piece. Imago was perhaps a little on the long side, diverging from the formula of carefully paced material that characterised the rest of the evening.

The audience’s enthusiastic applause at the end of the performance confirmed that Isorhythmos are doing something right. They are attracting large audiences to contemporary music and keeping them entertained, not just through their considerable skill as musicians, but also through the enthusiasm and imagination with which they present the music.

Isorhythmos, Un/Cage[d] Version 1.1, guest artists Topology; Brisbane Powerhouse, March 26-27

It’s not blood, it’s metres of colour splashed wide across the floor, rich red, yellow and blue, thick and waxy (Mark Titmarsh, installation) as if just cooled and come to rest. We gather round it for the sung whoops and cries and expressive double bass patterning of Raffaele Marcellino’s Via Dolorosa 1 (1993) for Station 1, Jesus is condemned to death. It’s Good Friday night in Sydney Town Hall and a large crowd has gathered for 14, a once regular musical and visual art collaboration resurrected from its last appearance at the MCA in 1993, the source date for most of the compositions for this program (unless otherwise indicated), but accompanied by 2004 art works.

We wander into Centennial Hall on the next stage of an engrossing joumey, reflecting on the power of one’s belief or the efficacy of myth for others; art is the means here. Directors Neil Simpson and Roland Peelman put the hall to excellent use, constantly shifting us and our perspective: we’re on the stage, up in the balcony, out in the ante-rooms, each area distinctively and evocatively lit, the main hall often radically transformed. Voices descend on us from above or speak to each other across the hall. Between compositions and showings, David Drury improvises with a fine sense of mystery and awe on the Town Hall organ.

The correspondence between music and visual art is variable, from lucid to opaque, with the compositions just long enough to reflect on possible connections. To Andrew Schultz’s beautifully fluent soprano duet, Silk, Michael Hutak releases a slow shower of small black papers from the high ceiling, worded “Every man for himself. Go back to your homes” (Station 2, Jesus bears his cross). Lee Paterson’s banner (“bird/mother/sun at 20 degrees/barking dog in the background”) obliquely but suggestively accompanies Moya Henderson’s “Now Madness Half Shadows my Soul” (2004) for Station 4, Jesus meets his Holy Mother. A sublime trio of female voices meets a male voice from across the hall above us.

For station 5 (Simon of Cyrene helps Jesus), Michael Whaites, lying on a bed of straw fringed with leaves, patiently loads bricks onto his body to Stephen Cronin’s grimly expressive Bright and Black Blood. A gagged Lucy Young is immersed in a tank of water (labelled “Absolution”) which is served to us in small cups by a helper, for Jesus meets St Veronica (Station 6), to Andrew Ford’s Palindrome. To Edward Cowie’s The Third Stumble (Station 9), Ana Wojak in high-booted military attire tugs at a cruel leash hooked into the back of a woman in red with sewn lips (Fiona MacGregor).

For the premiere of Elena Kats-Chernin’s Golyi (2004, to Les Murray’s A Study of the Nude), we gather in a long corridor where Kate Champion projects an image of Christ onto a surface that she tears at to reveal a blue sky and a red sun as Kats-Chernin’s music marches on with Prokofievan inevitabilty, all pain and beauty. Hobart (John) Hughes gathers us on the stage for Station 11 where he’s angled his projector to a screen with a Christ mask which he floods with rapidly morphing, surrounding imagery, creating a kind of furious timelessness, an animated Sydney-Nolan-does-Christ, finally focusing on the face so that it seems to come alive.

The sense of occasion and mystery is heightened at Sation 13 (Jesus is taken down from the cross) by Mary Finsterer’s remarkable Omaggio all pieta (video by Dean Golja) with its rich dramaturgy of voices nasal and guttural evoking some primal, quite foreign Christianity. With 14’s suggestive pairings of artworks and music, and the Song Company in superb voice and a wonderful set of spatial transformations, you didn’t need to be a believer to be moved.

The Song Company, 14: 14 Stations of the Cross, directors Roland Peelman, Neil Simpson; Sydney Town Hall, April 9

Noah’s job of getting pairs of the world’s animals onto the ark must have been a whole lot easier than moving some 1000 people through the streets of Lismore for the final night of NORPA’s The Flood. What could have been an effective tale soon became a distended epic, far removed from the economy of the comic Noah’s Flood of the great mediaeval English Mystery Cycles. But once we got to the riverside for the final act things looked up and that’s where most of the music happened with a small but very effective big band.

The Flood opens at an old school, now an arts centre, video monitors peering out of windows blinking images of the floods that have beset Lismore, accompanied by a projection of a flood level marker. On the ground there’s a truck dressed up like a ship, a modern version of the mediaeval float we recognise from modern street pageants. Neville, The Flood’s Noah, is a former plumber. He’s the town’s mayor and a man with an evangelical mission and a wary wife, in the classical Mrs Noah manner. Before Neville can get things going a 950 year-old prophet, a dirty, hairy man, tumbles from a carboard box, ready to predict the next Lismore flood. Neville’s not interested, he wants the town’s population to follow him on the straight and narrow.

The choir sings neo-gospel and we’re on the way into the back streets of Lismore. A garage door rolls up to reveal a large video screen featuring locals telling their stories of floods past. Neville and team quibble on the float (out of earshot at this point). Pairs of animals played by local children in immaculately made masks pass almost unnoticed through the dense crowd (we get to appreciate them later). We enter the Star Theatre by the fire escape to find it post-flood—the aisles and seats littered with possessions and wreckage, nets decked with photos, and more video footage of disaster, all cast in a grim blue light. A couple of blocks away we stop beneath a bridge with Neville’s float to witness an elaborate tussle between the mayor and the prophet who would like to end his career with a proper death by drowning rather than be recycled through more floods to come. The script hits and misses with the audience, the song delivery is wobbly. There are some nice jibes: “A flood is not a miracle in Lismore.”

Finally we crowd onto the riverbank, flood workers guiding us about, passing sandbags. There’s a band on a stand powering out Michael Hannam’s well crafted, dynamic mix of Latin, jazz and contemporary classical compositions. The old timber building at the end of the road turns out to be an illusion, a giant magical screen transforming variously into shadow plays, broadcasts of flood news and powerful images of swirling waters changing in colour, complexion and power. For Neville the flood is a time for revelation, “to get to know who you are.” But his epiphany is realised as a parade of cut-out white goods and the latest technology, in pairs!

Tension builds as water levels are reported to be rising, ebbing and then building again. Opinions contrast. An expert would like a little flood to see if the new levee will work. An Aboriginal woman tells how her people in the century before last watched in astonishment as the Europeans built down on the flood plain. Shadow figures rescue people and furniture, rushing about against mournful classical-jazz clarinet, bass and drums, with the organ calling forth until thundering, followed by a quick subsiding…Will the flood come? Optimistic partying is evoked by Latin numbers clashing with disturbing video imagery. One way or another, everything is eventually resolved. Neville, lost in the flood, is recovered in person and spirit, and the prophet set free. The question remains on the screen, ‘Can Lismore save itself from another large flood?’ The music parties on.

The Flood had its moments. As a blend of theatre, installation, video and concert it worked best when its images were strong and concise. However, big street theatre of this kind cannot sustain an elaborate script, let alone sometimes convoluted satire. It needs something spare that goes straight to the point and can make many of its points physically. Sure, the big crowd slowed things down until the last act on the riverbank, but the work itself lumbered along regardless of the multitude of talent involved. However, if you want proof that there’s an audience for work on this scale, The Flood was evidence of curiosity, patience and an encouraging sense of community.

NORPA, The Flood, writer Janis Balodis, composer Michael Hannan, director Patrick Nolan, designer Kathryn Sproul, lighting Bernie Tan, sound design Colin Black, instrument builder Steve Langton, visual artist Craig Walsh; Lismore CBD, April 8-10

One of our most popular editions in 2003 was titled Book-ish. Here it is again as Meta-Crash, reviews of new books about the art-science nexus, artificial life (a-life), media ethics, censorship, youth culture, and sex and the media. We open with an essay from Anna Munster about one of the major issues of the moment, art’s new complicity with science and what’s in it for both. Greg Hooper reviews a backlash against the art of the 20th century that includes Stephen Pinker’s assertion, on genetic grounds, of the unnaturalness of avant garde art. Revealing more complexities in the science-art venture, Stuart Bunt, scientific head of Perth’s SymbioticA art-science project, reviews Mitchell Whitelaw’s new book, Metacreation, on artificial life forms created by artists. The other crashes we are constantly witness to, and which are the subject of books reviewed in Meta-Crash, cluster around the forces of government and corporate media as they hit sex and truth head on. KG

Meeting the documentary challenge

The Australian documentary scene appears healthy: locally-produced films screen regularly on SBS and ABC TV, the REAL:life festival attracts eager audiences, Tom Zubrycki’s Molly and Mobarak is enjoying a theatrical release and documentaries like Scott Millwood’s AFI Award-winning Wildness are superior to many recent local dramas. Nevertheless Zubrycki and fellow documentarist Carmela Baranowska, reporting from the Australian International Documentary Conference in Fremantle, paint a grim picture in the pages of OnScreen. They argue that a chronic shortage of funds has bred an increasingly conservative funding culture. A resolute market focus at this year’s AIDC reinforces this.

I heard grimly humorous tales from Scott Millwood (p17) about his efforts to raise funds for a Chris Marker-inspired essayistic film several years ago. Broadcasters and funding bodies were not only horrified by the thought of experimentation, Millwood claims they often didn’t understand what he was talking about.

The political control and financial strangulation of cultural institutions is only part of the Howard government’s ongoing war on culture. The recent refusal to screen Tom Zubrycki’s Molly and Mobarak in the National Parliament illustrates the pressures faced by directors who manage to actually get a film made. In her new book, Snatched (reviewed, p11), Helen Vnuk shows how the manipulation of Australia’s deeply flawed classification system has allowed a wave of censorship in recent years to go largely unnoticed by the Australian public.

OnScreen’s documentary feature depicts a sector under financial, commercial and governmental pressure. It also reveals a community of filmmakers fighting to have their voices heard. What needs to be done? Improved funding would assist, not least to cover the costs of blowing up film for theatrical release, but more important is the need for a serious review of funding criteria and processes (cf Peter Sainsbury on feature film funding, RT53-54) and a detailed strategic report on market possibilities for documentaries on free-to-air TV, cable, the internet, in cinemas and documentary markets. Tom Zubrycki cites European models that are worth looking at. Not least, the AIDC should commit itself to discussion of form and vision as an integral part of its market forum. DE

ABC: the pressure’s on

Pressure on the ABC to justify its arts policies is building with a number of public forums being held in Sydney and Melbourne in April and beyond. Contradictions between charter obligations and programming practice must be addressed. The recent changes to ABC radio and Classic FM radio must be challenged. The calibre of new entertainments hosted by comedians on ABC TV must be queried. One of the first forums is Art by Stealth? The ABC and the Arts, a half day seminar presented by UTS’ Transforming Cultures Centre and Currency House. Speakers included Liz Jacka, Professor Communications Studies, UTS, who has prepared a report on the issues for the ABC staff union; Tamara Winikoff, Executive Director, NAVA; Terry Cutler, Principal, Cutler & Company, Jonathan Mills; ex-Director, Melbourne International Arts Festival; and RealTime’s Keith Gallasch. ABC executives overseeing arts and entertainment will also speak. Currency House, rear 201 Cleveland St, Redfern, Sydney, 2-6pm April 4.

To put the ABC crisis in a larger perspective, we suggest you visit Artshub and read Senator John Faulkner’s “From Blue Poles to Red Fans” (March 22), the 2004 Whitlam Oration. Faulkner details the Federal Government’s systematic attack on arts institutions and corrects the notion that Howard is not interested in art and culture, but to what end? KG

In the contemporary art world the relationship between art and science is a hot topic of conversation, arousing the passion and innuendo of something resembling a sex scandal. If an artist has managed to notch up some time in a molecular biologist’s laboratory or found a technician willing to share the secrets of electron scanning microscopy, they will be jealously eyed off by others unable to make the right contacts.

Hot too because with their separate cultures, approaches and practices, the capacity of art and science to really intersect and talk to each other is vehemently contested by scientists, artists and cultural critics alike. On the one hand, some molecular biologists and geneticists use the rhetoric of aesthetics, declaring DNA to be a kind of ‘clay’ and the artificial creation of in-vitro organisms ‘creative practice.’ On the other hand, anecdotes from artists working in actual collaborations often suggest a more tenuous connection. In a public talk at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2001, Irish artist Dorothy Cross, who was collaborating with marine biologists on a piece about Great Barrier Reef jellyfish, recalled the bemused looks on the scientists’ faces when she asked them a question of interest to her as an artist. Why had they discarded imperfect jellyfish specimens when collecting material for their study? It seemed to her that getting the questions right required enormous intellectual labour before collaboration even got off the ground.

In a lecture originally given in 1959, CP Snow famously commented on the gulf between the cultures of art and science and the “mutual incomprehension…sometimes… hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding” (CP Snow, The Two Cultures, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993). According to Snow, the arts and humanities were steeped in tradition while the sciences were turned towards the future. If he were to cast his gaze around artistic ventures today his eyes would probably pop out of their sockets! Art is increasingly turned towards the technological futures presented and imagined by medicine and the life and physical sciences. The scales have tipped and now scientists such as renowned physicist David Bohm claim that science and art might converge by sharing common paradigms for understanding and approaching the world.

But a lot of grandiose statements are made about the commonalities between art and science: that they are symmetrical currents of human thought; that they spurt forth from the same wellspring of creativity; that they are equally concerned with innovation. What is overlooked is that neither art nor science is an homogenous field. Each has areas of specialisation with their own conceptual underpinnings, methodologies and—of particular relevance now—financial support and constraint. All these parameters affect the ability and willingness of artists and scientists to collaborate. We don’t hear a huge amount about artistic collaborations in palaeontology, for example, but we do see a lot of artists courting and being courted by the life sciences. Art and science are no longer disciplines existing within the rarefied atmosphere of the academy, but are increasingly engaged with and situated in relation to corporate capital. Sometimes it is these corporate interests that pull the 2 cultures into converging streams, as artist Natalie Jeremijenko notes in reference to the willingness of biotech corporations to support art celebrating advances in genetics: “What is it that the artists have that these corporate interests are interested in? It is not the art, it is the access to the public imagination” (N Jeremijenko, “Invest Now!”, 2000.

Artists participating in the Biotech Art Workshop,<BR /> Extracting DNA Molecules from a Pea,produced by EAF Adelaide, 2004″></p>
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Artists participating in the Biotech Art Workshop,
Extracting DNA Molecules from a Pea,produced by EAF Adelaide, 2004

Recently there have been a number of art-science initiatives displaying a more constrained and respectful attitude towards the limits of collaboration. At a symposium held in conjunction with the exhibition Art of The Biotech Era at the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide, the scientific director of SymbioticA, Stuart Bunt, addressed the differences between the fields. Bunt is well versed in the topic, having established SymbioticA within the School of Anatomy and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia. Both Bunt and SymbioticA’s artistic director Oron Catts are clear about the collaborative nature of this laboratory. Science is there to be critically appraised and explored but the work carried out under SymbioticA’s aegis is artistic, not scientific. Although this may seem like policing disciplinary boundaries, it is more just a realistic appraisal of what collaboration between art and science is likely to achieve. By working from a position of mutual respect for their differences and armed with scepticism balanced by thorough background research into each other’s respective fields, art and science can come together in modest ways on specific projects.

The most exciting contemporary art-science collaborations are fuelled by artists who take a critical stance on the instrumentalist ethos of technophilic culture. Sometimes this means criticising the very technologies used in making the artwork. Artists find themselves in an ambiguous position, steeped in the techniques of a scientific practice in order to comment upon the cultural scenarios which that very practice may be leading us towards. This is particularly the case with much bioart, foregrounded by work such as Extra Ear and other tissue-engineering pieces by The Tissue Culture and Art Project (TCA). This “semi-living” object—a tissue-sculptured quarter-scale ear modelled on Stelarc’s actual ear—exists due to the artists’ perfection of tissue culturing and engineering techniques. Although these are now standard procedures in biotech laboratories and industries, their arrival in the gallery space conjures fears of a society’s science gone mad. The important point is that Extra Ear retains rather than resolves the ambiguities involved in its own production. So rather than adopting an oppositional attitude towards biotechnology or using the gallery space to aestheticise science, Extra Ear operates on the border of instrumentalisation and care. Recently on display in the Art of the Biotech Era, the tiny, fragile ear nestles in a sea of nutrient solution enclosed by a large incubator behind a glass wall. The audience can look but not touch. The scene is familiar and distant, linking us to the experiences of birth and death obsessively technologised by our culture.

These kinds of collaborations derive from an artistic base in spite of the deep understanding required of the techniques involved in their production. Other modes of engagement with science are also surfacing, some involving the use of artefacts produced by medicine and science. Justine Cooper’s works deploy medical and scientific imaging techniques like MRI, electron microscopy and ultrasound to focus on embodied and experiential responses to disease, medicalisation and death, are one example (RT55, p4; RT45, p13, and RT26, p27).

There are also more speculative engagements and here the science can be stranger than the art. In the various projects of Belgian new media collective FOAM, also exhibiting in Art of The Biotech Era, the art is itself an interface and demonstration of what might be possible between the 2 cultures. In many of its projects, FOAM engages with dynamic evolutionary theories to create unstable and creative ecologies involving humans, machines and plants. These theories are themselves disputed among scientists, many of whom adopt more conservative and deterministic Neo-Darwinian approaches. To take them up in an artistic context injects them with new possibilities. In one project, groWorld, the artists will create localised, site specific ‘gardens’ implanted with bio-sensors from which they will gather data to map correlative and changing virtual spaces. This data will merge with cultural and sociological material gathered at the site from local inhabitants and ethnobotanical research. A groWorld is currently in the making in Adelaide. Here the hard and soft sciences cross-pollinate and co-evolve to produce a new kind of aesthetic object that is really concerned with the creative and speculative possibilities of the more maverick sciences.

As many scientists will readily agree, the contemporary practice of science is bound to industry and its demands for problem-solving and profit-making. Perhaps then ‘making art’ is one of the few opportunities science now has to become speculative again. Science is increasingly engaged in various forms of life management, from what we put into our bodies to how they appear and behave. If art in a sense has always been concerned with life, from the everyday to the unimaginable, then it cannot afford to ignore the permeation of science through the minutiae of everyday living. Science becomes the arena in which art can best comment on what it means and feels like to be alive at this moment in time.

Art of the Biotech Era, Experimental Art Foundation, Lion Arts Centre, Adelaide, Feb 27-April 3

Paul Virilio, culture theorist, architect, claustrophobe and asthmatic, sits high on the ridge, communing with the supernatural and looking down on the herd below. He sniffs the wind, scouts the boundaries, stares into a wide open sky that’s blue as the eyes of the white-boy Jesus.

“They don’t know what’s a-coming”, he thinks, looking down on the brutes below. “There’s poison up ahead”

His brow furrows. There’s been poison all along, and some of it has got into the herd.

“They don’t understand the danger”, he thinks. “I’ll have to shout louder.”

So what is Virilio so upset about that he has to put pen to paper in Art and Fear and Crepuscular Dawn. Who and what is causing le boeuf de Virilio? Well, it’s those pesky artists up to their no good tricks again. Not just any artist–Charlie Chaplin is good and Bob Dylan sets the toes a tapping in a wholesome sort of way, but Stelarc, Christian Boltanski, Meg Stuart, and even Rothko have been way too negative and transgressive for the old architect from Paris. Virilio senses that the absence of the body in Abstraction leads to the absence of the living body through suicide, and the distorted images of the body in Expressionism encourage the torturer to distort the body of the victim. It’s the slippery slope argument, and for Virilio that slope leads art down into suicide, torture and genocide, so that “The slogan of the First Futurist Manifesto…led directly to the shower block of Auschwitz-Birkenau.” If he is right and art after Impressionism is responsible for all these things one wonders what the causes of suicide, torture, and genocide were during the long years before the twentieth century and in populations completely isolated from European art history.

But it is probably unfair to subject Virilio’s writing to the light of evidence and the scrutiny of reason. Like a shock jock, Virilio is pissed off and he’s not going let the facts stop him telling us who is to blame for his fear and anger. In a sense Virilio is the last of the medieval men, a pre-Baconite who is quite happy to appeal to authority rather than evidence; to not talk about the world as an independent external, but the world as it makes him feel.

Enough of art for the phenomenologist, what about art for the scientist? The problem there is that art has no obvious function yet appears to be universal so the hunt is on for why people spend an awful lot of time and energy doing something that apparently confers no benefit. Steven Pinker, cognitive neuroscientist (once MIT, now Harvard), has devoted a chapter of The Blank Slate to write about art as one of the adaptive strategies of an ape on the make. He’s not dogmatic about it, he knows we don’t know the adaptive value of art-making, but he’s willing to toss his hat in the ring and give it a try. For Pinker art is a by-product of the hunger for high status as indicated by doing things that have no overt value. The reasoning goes that if you can waste time in gratuitous displays of consumption or effort then you must be rich. And riches make for are an attractive mate. Creating and owning art, that item of gratuitous display, is therefore an indicator of high social status and high social status gets you a better class of root. More often and with more partners as well.

Pinker also likes Ramachandran’s idea that there is an aesthetic pleasure in experiencing adaptive objects and environments–art tunes you into the best bits of the environment and lets you know that your cognitive perceptual apparatus is working. It does seem that people prefer some images over others and that this may relate to ancestral environments and health. Komar and Melamid surveyed the art preference market worldwide and found strong commonalities across all the groups surveyed — people like pictures of comfy landscapes. Science-wise the same thing turns up: pictures of the savannah are good and if the time of the day is sunset then people like the picture to show somewhere safe to shelter for the night as well. As far as images of people go, it’s healthy over sick – and happy over sad – every time. Usual limitations of experiments though: average responses, very constrained experimental conditions. In other contexts representations of all sorts of things–eg warnings — are important and valued as well.

Pinker’s use of behavioural genetics and evolutionary psychology to shed light onto the existence and function of art production and consumption is pretty interesting. But then Pinker goes too far and claims it all went horribly wrong with modernism and post modernism. Artists stopped pandering to the evolutionary limits of perception and cognition. They stopped going for realism, started painting outside the lines, that jazz don’t swing no more and who can find a tune worth whistling. Besides, art theory is for wankers and nobody listens to the critics anyway.

As is common in arguments touting the ‘Once was an age of gold but now is in an age of mud’ theme, there is a whole lot of edited highlights of history going on. Pinker has found a bunch of art that doesn’t communicate to him and then generalised that to elite art doesn’t communicate to anyone worth knowing because elite artists flout evolutionary constraints on communication. He has oozed over from science to taste without noticing the transition. (Pinker here differs from Virilio who thinks that a similar set of artworks do communicate but the result of this communication is profoundly negative). Well, using 10 or so individuals to represent the activities of millions people over hundreds (or thousands) of years doesn’t make for a very compelling critique. Rather than think of art as a set of objects or practices in some edited highlights package–Constable is in and good, Stelarc is in and bad, Mum’s not in even though she paints all the time–art practice can be seen within the broader context of the production and exchange of representations. That is, art can be discussed within the framework of cognitive neuroscience without rejecting modernism, post-modernism, or any other -ism.

We are the animal that represents. Our social lives are built upon representations and our brains are hard-wired to make them. On the left hand side of your head and a tad inside the skull from the temple are the mirror neurons–the part of the brain responsible for imitation of biological motion. It’s still early days in understanding mirror neuron function but it seems that if you watch someone move the mirror neurons in your brain will light up just as if you were making that motion yourself. More abstractly just the trace of a movement, or its sound, will trigger the same reaction from the brain. So mirror neurons provide evidence of a neural mechanism for exchanging representations via sight and sound. Feel the passion in those brush strokes, hear the emotion as that voice catches. Meaning, at least in part, comes by mapping the trace of someone else’s motor behaviour onto a memory of your own internal states when you made similar movements.

Art practice can be seen as a component within the exchange of representations. The dominant social practice is to transmit core representations–representations that are read immediately by many–and most art has this function. However art also has an exploratory function within the space of all possible representations – from an evolutionary perspective it is adaptive for the group to have a representation space available that allows for understanding the present environment whilst also being able to represent possible environments. Such a system makes the group robust in the face of environmental change. Innovative art practice can then be interpreted as a claim for the necessity to foreground new representational parameters, such as chance events, abstract forms, and biological systems, or as a claim that areas of the existing representation space are under-explored or under-represented within the core. It is inevitable that most explorations will end in failure–if the world is changing in unexpected ways then some artworks will get the future right and others will not. And artworks that were once radical explorations can become core if the changed circumstances they represent lock in over time.

Pinker, and to a lesser extent Virilio, confuse art that deals with core representations as indicative or prescriptive of art as a whole. It is inevitable that many of the modernist and post modernist works they dislike will fade into obscurity along with most of the works of any period. However that does not mean that the enterprise of modernism and postmodernism is a failure. It may be that the space of representations coming out of a collaborative research group like SymbioticA, or being explored by artists like Stelarc, Meg Stuart and Orlan does not prove fruitful. In science that is known as a negative finding— showing what doesn’t work. Whilst a negative finding is not as exciting as a positive one, it does have value—like finding that a particular supermarket is crap so you never have to go there again. However, these or other artists will almost inevitably provide positive findings—representations whose ability to trigger meaning generalises out to a larger population.

Catherine Lumby & Elspeth Probyn eds, Remote Control: New Media, New Ethics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003 ISBN 1 86508 926 5

Remote Control ends with John Safran’s comment that: “it’s pretty hard for satire to change things, but overall it helps add to a liberal kind of culture.” Safran thinks alternative culture is doing it a little tough at present: “If you’re working on your own little alternative cartoon, how do you make it more subversive than this thing [The Simpsons] that’s put out by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox?” This observation reflects the complex ground that technology, increased competition and global capital and information flows have created for contemporary media makers.

Safran is the subject of one of 7 interviews that supplement the 13 short essays in this book on the “ethical dilemmas thrown up by the contemporary media.” Like Safran, editors Lumby and Probyn and most of the contributors are modest about what they want and think they can do. Remote Control is not an attempt to create a new charter of ethical principles for a new media age. In fact it’s quite the opposite. It is sceptical about such universal standards. It’s primarily a plea for ethical reflection, which acknowledges and celebrates the likelihood that different producers and consumers will choose different standards.

As the editors argue, there is an urgent demand for greater consideration of “how emerging genres and technologies are re-shaping our public sphere, and how this might in turn cause us to rethink the assumptions grounding our ethical norms.” Lumby writes about Reality TV, Probyn about food journalism, Michael Moller about the campaign to save the South Sydney Rabbitohs and Kath Albury about internet porn and the contrast between the ethics of the commercial industry and ‘amateur’ producers.

Each of these is an example of media ethics not as “a specialised domain to be deliberated upon by experts”, but as a “politics of everyday life.” Reality TV “might be said to humanise ethical dilemmas”, food media might provide “fodder for rethinking ethics” and the proliferation of online sexual imagery that transcends conventionally desirable porn stereotypes might offer “a perfect example of internet porn’s ethical sensibility.” The Souths’ fans struggle shows “responsibility, opportunity and respect for the emotional commitments of others communicated through the consumption of media products”, through the audience’s resistance to Foxtel and the dumping of Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph in favour of Fairfax’s Sydney Morning Herald.

This exploration of particular ethical challenges and opportunities is welcome, but the case against ‘universal’ ethical standards seems to be oversold. The principles embedded in media codes already often express less than slavish adherence to “universally desirable…goals and ideals.” The best of them are drafted precisely to allow the kind of difficult weighing of competing interests—privacy versus public interest, disclosure of sources versus confidentiality—that is the bread and butter of ethically reflective journalism.

Beyond mainstream journalism, new genres raise familiar as well as novel ethical issues. Probyn’s case for food journalism is a particular case in point. “Detachment and distance are at odds with the passionate, subjective and close relationship of food journalists to their topics and ultimately to their readers” she writes, but this could also be a description of film reviewers, sports writers and the Press Gallery. The internet didn’t invent subjectivity and most journalists live with a daily awareness of the impact of stories on the commercial health of particular enterprises, the reputation of individuals and the durability of personal relationships.

There is, however, much evidence of ‘universal values’ in many of the contributions. Duncan Ivison wants individual freedom, self-rule and distributive justice, which seems close to Ghassan Hage’s desire to sustain each other’s “viability as human beings.” He uses an everyday Lebanese exclamation—‘Hey! Include me in your dreams!’—to guide journalists choosing ethnic identifiers, a practice that turns them into participants in “people’s struggles to construct viable fantasies of themselves.” Graeme Turner draws a universal line in the sand before ‘cash for comment’, which Probyn seems to agree with. She suggests that “the dodgy practices of ‘comps’, the collusion with restaurants or any perception of nepotism needs to be closely regulated. In fact, perhaps more than any other genre, food journalism needs to be strictly scrutinised.”

Finding words for these positions need not turn “the politics of everyday life” into ethical stone or blind us to the specifics of future practical dilemmas. It just enables us to remember how we resolved the problem last time, what we learned and what should happen in the future. The words can change as new things are learned, but not just because they become uncomfortable or inconvenient. Margo Kingston’s chapter provides a fascinating description of the invention and modification of a code of practice for her WebDiary that borrowed from, but adapted in crucial ways, the Media Alliance’s code for journalists. Cherry Ripe similarly articulates wise, hard-won lessons and principles from long experience in food writing.

Duncan Ivison argues that “our philosophical orientation should be less towards consensus and more towards how we can live with the disagreements we have with each other.” He is, however, reluctant to concede that there is no point talking about common values. As he reminds us: “States can declare war. In some places, they can execute people. Decisions have to be made about the allocation of scarce resources…in liberal democracies at least, a public view has to be formed about these things.” Some liberal democracies, even the World’s Best Practice ones, still go to war without popular mandates, on the basis of inaccurate information and then argue that the ends justify the means.

It is pretty hard to change these things. “A liberal kind of culture” helps and Remote Control provides a great snapshot of the lively, contested ways that culture is evolving in Australia. An ethics that does not engage with the shifting everyday realities of people’s lives is not an ethics at all. But neither is one which is not constantly reaching beyond itself and its specifics to the often frighteningly large issues which shape the ground on which lives are lived.

Barbara Creed, Media Matrix: Sexing the New Reality, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2003 ISBN 1 86508 926 5

Barbara Creed’s Media Matrix: Sexing the New Reality centres primarily on sex and representations of the self in various contemporary media. These include online and virtual forms, New York comedies like Sex and the City, women’s romance novels and erotic/pornographic films by female directors. She also examines the breakdown of public and private domains through ‘Reality TV’ and ‘crisis TV’ (such as coverage of the September 11 attacks) and the effect of this breakdown on perceptions of sex and violence. Alongside this Creed discusses the concept of a ‘global self’ and the potential of the internet to effect social change, a nice counterbalance to the usual focus on the web as a sordid generator of evil intent.

Given the time involved in book publishing it’s inevitable that parts of Media Matrix already seem dated. Creed’s discussion of Reality TV and shows like Big Brother unfortunately comes at a time when people appear to be tuning out in droves from shows like The Resort and My Restaurant Rules. This rather undermines her claim that: “Given the postmodern disrespect for traditional forms and values, Reality TV promises to offer ever more explicit and dramatic glimpses into areas once considered taboo.” Instead, Reality TV seems to be offering increasingly banal and mind-numbing glimpses into personalities and scenarios no-one is interested in watching after a few episodes. Creed uses the word ‘taboo’ a lot, but I think she is stretching the definition. Sure, if a Hot House contestant slept with a donkey or a Resort player was filmed showing everyone her vagina (as in an Annie Sprinkle performance mentioned later in the book) the description might be more appropriate.

Media Matrix’s chapters read like discrete essays. As variations on the same themes this is not a problem if you are just dipping in and out (as many readers probably will), but it means the book as a whole doesn’t quite gel. However, there are some strong offerings, notably Creed’s analysis of the female reader, the cyberworld and the erotic/pornographic. “Mills and Boon dot com: The beast in the bedroom” is a terrific update on that much-venerated cultural studies topic, the woman’s romance novel. Creed entertains with her comparisons between romances from the 80s and those from the aptly described noughties, revealing that the genre has certainly turned a new leaf and become soft porn for women: “What the Mills and Boon text is doing, then, is endorsing perverse forms of sensual and sexual pleasure for women.” This also helps explain the phenomenon of recent best-seller The Bride Stripped Bare: it’s Mills and Boon masquerading as ‘good’ fiction, or soft porn between decent covers. And it’s a lot more stimulating than The Resort.

Creed’s analysis of cybersex provides the most energised writing in the book. She examines the usual areas of readily available pornography, online dating and the creation of personae in online spaces like MUDs (multi-user domains) to express sexuality in creative ways. But what really interested me was the concept of virtual sex, or ‘teledildonics’:

…virtual sex will evolve in two quite distinct, but related, directions. The first, which is possible now, involves sex with a machine or a virtual body; the second, which is predicted to be at least 30 years away, involves sex with people who are not present.

At the moment it is apparently possible to don a helmet and have virtual sex with a celebrity. Can you imagine it? It’s revolutionary! Johnny Depp and Charlize Theron. Or both! A post-Oscar party in your own bedroom. People will never leave their homes. All their desires will be catered for. People will no longer be able to tear themselves away from George or Cameron or Lassie to go to work. While having sex with someone ‘not present’ is nothing new, the future possibilities for expressions of sexuality are pretty mind—or body-blowing. By wearing “special glasses and a sensory vibratory suit” a couple can dial into each other from different parts of the globe and actually feel what the other’s ‘virtual’ hands are doing. While disembodied, this experience offers up new worlds of fantasy, quite different from pornography, which is primarily visual.

Media Matrix is geared to a tuned-in audience and I like the fact that Creed self-consciously writes for people who are playing with the possibilities of the web, who love and are inspired by cinema and who are willing to take risks with what they imbibe. I also like her suspended judgement; she is displaying the wares for us to appreciate and question, without the censorious tone often found in academic texts. At times I find her use of history a bit enervating, but this might be because I did cultural studies 10 years ago and don’t want to go back to the same textbooks. The book is at its best when Creed writes passionately and poetically about current developments and the future; here her writing has the power to project you into fantasies about what’s to come and consider ideas not often mooted. After reading Media Matrix I have only one question: where do I get a virtual helmet? De Niro is waiting…

Ian Maxwell, Phat Beats, Dope Rhymes: Hip Hop Down Under Comin’ Upper, Wesleyan University Press, Conneticut, 2003 ISBN 0 8195 6638 1

The publication of Ian Maxwell’s Phat Beats, Dope Rhymes coincides with a boom in Sydney hip hop. Local bands are making a serious impact on national touring circuits previously dominated by rock and the record sales of some independent labels are breaking into 5 figures. Even major labels are getting in on the action with Warners commissioning a compilation of strictly independent local hip hop entitled Straight From The Art. Event promoters and touring companies are falling over themselves to tour hip hop artists and the dance scene is once again crossing over into hip hop territory through multi-stage events. Local hip hop periodical Stealth Magazine continues to grow and is now available in regular newsagents nationwide, as well as being exported overseas. Triple J has a dedicated hip hop show for the first time since Tim Ritchie introduced many to the sounds of electro and early hip hop in the mid-80s, while support from community stations like 2SER and FBI remains strong. There is now a hip hop film festival (RT 59, p44), a plethora of online forums and websites, and various conferences for producers, writers and MCs. It wasn’t always this way.

Maxwell’s book covers the formative period of Sydney hip hop from 1992 to 1994, a few years after the notorious moral panic surrounding the ‘Reebok bandits’ hanging around Hoyts on Sydney’s George Street. The book focuses on 3 main characters. The first is Miguel D’Souza, whose Mothership Connection radio show on 2SER was one of the seminal hip hop listening experiences for much of the 90s. Miguel was more a facilitator than presenter, with the bulk of his program dedicated to live-to-air freestyle sessions and guest DJs. The book’s second character is Blaze, editor of Vapours, a bedroom-produced fanzine and the most important document of early Sydney hip hop. Blaze was also an important part of The Lounge Room, the first incarnation of what is now Next Level, the prime independent Sydney record store for local and international independent hip hop. Blaze is also a DJ, radio presenter and record producer and remains a key figure today. The book’s final character is Ser Reck, MC and key player in Def Wish Cast and more recently Celsius. Def Wish Cast are best known for their debut Knights Of The Underground Table, which sold well locally and in Europe, making it possibly the first Australian hip hop record to earn such international respect.

Phat Beats is largely ethnographic in approach. There is an engaging dissection of particular freestyles on Miguel’s radio show and at The Lounge Room and a discussion of how the local hip hop scene has been created through the production of myth and identity. The book also dissects elements of Blaze’s writing style in Vapours and the production of Knights Of The Underground Table, which is evaluated against Sound Unlimited Posse (anyone remember them?). Maxwell reads these subcultural texts/events like an insider (although he is at pains to point out that he doesn’t consider himself a participant observer) and it is clear he has earned the trust of those involved in the scene. He excels at unpicking the internal politics and underlying tensions of style, subcultural capital and place in those early years. He also turns a spotlight on the serious academic thought within the scene through Blaze’s writing for Vapours and Miguel’s radio show and column in 3D World.

Interestingly, many of the same tensions and myths described in the book continue to play out in the Sydney hip hop scene today. Shortly after the period the book covers, one of the featured freestyle protagonists, JU (who also appears on the cover), became a member of Easybass. This group were part of a mid-90s crossover between the hip hop and the inner city/Eastern Suburbs house and rare groove scenes. Along with Metabass ‘n’ Breath, whose roots lay in performance art, theatrics and poetry, Easybass brought hip hop to a largely middle class inner city audience. So while hip hop boomed in the inner city, ‘real’ crews struggled to find an audience in the ‘authentic’ western suburbs, largely due to a lack of venues and the cultural impact of low density suburban planning. As every crew that made the leap from cipher to stage quickly discovered, subcultural authenticity doesn’t guarantee a good crowd. The same scene politics were played out a few years ago with the rise of ‘felafel rappers’, a disparaging term used to describe “leftie inner city vegan rappers.”

Where Phat Beats falls a little short is in its sometimes uneven incorporation of theory into the flow of the text. It is here that the book’s roots as a doctoral thesis and the concessions made to an intended overseas academic audience are most apparent. This is a minor annoyance however. Phat Beats digs deep inside subcultural politics, media and expression and gives proper definition to the formation of a distinctive local scene. Given the focus on subcultural music, it would have been nice if the book had also come with a CD.

Helen Bandis, Adrian Martin, Grant McDonald eds, Raúl Ruiz: Images of Passage, Rouge Press in conjunction with the International Film Festival Rotterdam, 2004 ISBN 0 97518 690 6

There is a challenge to film criticism in Ruiz’s work—especially to mise en scène criticism, which would have to transform itself utterly in order to cope with what is going on here, picking up the road it very rarely took when modernist filmmakers began radically reshaping mise en scène in the 60s.
Adrian Martin

The films of Raúl Ruiz are complex, compelling, lyrical, enigmatic, ambiguous and poetic. They have both delighted and bewildered serious film-goers, yet English language essays on Ruiz’s work have been infrequent. Raúl Ruiz: Images of Passage attempts to redress this by bringing together a number of quite different writings that invite us to think in new ways about Ruiz’s cinema. The book also engages, through its selection of material, with questions about the practice of film criticism, in particular the problem of thinking and writing about films that challenge our ideas about what cinema can be.

Raúl Ruiz is the first book published by Rouge Press, the publishing arm of the online journal Rouge (www.rouge.com.au). It was produced in conjunction with the 2004 Rotterdam Film Festival to coincide with the festival’s featured program “Raúl Ruiz: An Eternal Wanderer.” In their second issue Rouge also produced an online annotated filmography of Ruiz’s oeuvre of over 80 films. Along with the book, the annotated filmography is part of an extensive and ongoing database.

While the filmography presents a chronology of Ruiz’s prolific career, the book follows a less linear structure. Curiously, there is no introduction or editorial that explains the book’s organisation or the editors’ intentions. However, the book does contain a genuinely varied range of material, from analytical essays, to interviews and reminiscences, as well as 3 pieces by Ruiz himself. It also makes important writings on Ruiz available in English for the first time. There is a comprehensive filmography of Ruiz’s short films, features, incomplete works and television productions from 1960 to 2004 and a select bibliography of publications and pertinent web resources.

At the centre of the book are 2 excellent analytical essays. Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s “The Baroque Eye of the Camera (Part 1)” is an excerpt from a book-length study of Ruiz that explores connections between the history of the baroque, the thought of Gilles Deleuze and the images of Ruiz. Her project is ambitious and creative and her writing mirrors the complexity of Ruiz’s work:

…in this gigantic combustion of forms, the cinema can only be a baroque palimpsest, a theatre of shadows and memory. For if a baroque implies a ‘cinema of the seer and no longer of the agent’, to use a distinction made by Gilles Deleuze, Ruiz’s cinema would be a sort of second degree baroque—a baroque of the baroque.

The second central essay, “Displacements” by Adrian Martin, is written specifically for this book and inspiringly interrogates the way images function in Ruiz’s cinema. Disputing the claim that Ruiz is a montage director, Martin proposes that the director works with a “holistic conception of mise-en-scène” and it is therefore more productive to engage with multiple films rather than single texts. The essay also makes some interesting connections between Ruiz’s dream-like films and Freud’s essay “The Interpretation of Dreams.” Both essays not only offer unique frames of interpretation for thinking about Ruiz, but are impressive works of film criticism in their own right.

Ruiz’s own reflections are delightfully eloquent and perfectly complement the other essays in the book. In a lengthy 1986 interview with Benoit Peeters, he discusses the motivations behind his work and makes some telling remarks about the dominant American model of storytelling and its paradigm of conflict:

I refused this technique. I criticised it for leaving out a character’s internal logic, and what I called the archipelago structures of reality—which create great, silent spaces and zones of concentrated energy…Above all, I criticised it for harming the valorisation of the image, and replacing it by the valorisation of what it pretends to make the film’s centre: characters.

In terms of Ruiz’s writings, there are fragments from a screenplay of a film entitled The Comedy of Shadows that is still in post-production and an Eisensteinian exegesis titled “The Six Functions of the Shot” in which Ruiz elaborates, practically and poetically, on the “centripetal” and the “centrifugal.” The book also contains intriguing mini-narratives that Ruiz writes and presents to his actors several weeks before shooting begins. He describes them as “time bombs” because they are meant to “replace any rational analysis of the characters.”

Tributes, reminiscences, memoirs and interviews provide additional insights from those who have met or worked with Ruiz. The poet Waldo Rojas paints a picture of the avant-garde culture that he and Ruiz were part of in Santiago, Chile during the 1960s. The artist Jean Miotte, who was the subject of Ruiz’s film Miotte by Ruiz describes Ruiz’s methodology:

He associates facts from his unique knowledge of the rarest subjects in a completely unusual and unexpected way. There is also the ingeniousness and the creative impulse evident in his choice of scenes to shoot…And also his arrangements of transparent objects: glass tables, vases, reflections in water after a stone is thrown into a pond—all of that gives a surprising effect of both the lived and the illusory. That is how he leads us into his dream.

Marie-Luce Bonfanti, who worked as an assistant and actor on Professor Taranne says: “he is someone who censors nothing. He allows everything—and that’s precisely the gift he hands to his actors.”

My favourite recollection comes from Bérènice Reynaud, who relays a story from a colleague at Cahiers du Cinéma. Ruiz had mistakenly arranged to meet 2 people for lunch at the same time. Instead of cancelling one of the meetings, he rescheduled so that he could run from one restaurant to the other through a back door, each time excusing himself by saying he had to make a phone call. He ended up having 2 lunches and 2 conversations at the same time rather than disappoint anyone. And so the doubling, the repetitions, the parallels and mirror-like reflections that create so much of the fabric of Ruiz’s cinema are also echoed in his daily life.

There is a small black and white image reproduced in the lower right corner of every double page spread in this book—the imprint of a frozen moment from Ruiz’s Shattered Image. As you read the book you are aware of this small and constantly shifting image and the visual context it gives to the writing. But if you flick through the pages, the images suddenly become animated and a scene from the film is replayed. Readers move from thoughts grounded in still images to watching a scene in motion pictures. This is just one more example of the way this thoughtfully composed book invites us to reflect on the many layers in the remarkable cinema of Raúl Ruiz.

Helen Vnuk, Snatched: Sex and Censorship in Australia, Random House, Australia, 2003 ISBN 1 740 51088 7

Helen Vnuk’s Snatched: Sex and Censorship in Australia is a high impact, detailed exposé of Australia’s appallingly quiet censorship of sexual content in entertainment media. Some of the material in this book is so shocking that as an ex-pat New Zealander, I wondered just what kind of sick and bizarre society I had relocated to 6 years ago.

Most people would know that the sale of X-rated videos is illegal in all Australian states. But why are women’s magazines forced to hide female anatomy in sexual health articles? Why does the Australian state think it can single-handedly ban porn from the internet? And how is any of this consistent with the first principle of the National Classification Code, which states that “adults should be able to read, hear and see what they want”? Helen Vnuk has interviewed key politicians, government censors and porn industry personnel to find out how, over the course of 2 decades, we have ended up with a censorship regime in which “facts, majority views and basic civil liberties have been overridden.”

Vnuk takes a swipe at the classic anti-porn campaigners: conservative ‘morals’ crusaders and Andrea Dworkin-style feminists. In Australia, this alliance has enabled religious lobby groups and right-wing politicians to adopt pseudo-feminist rhetoric to legitimise their stance. Ultra-conservative Senator Brian Harradine, for example, argues that Australian-produced X-rated material “degrades” the image of Australian women. Vnuk reiterates the view of the opposing camp of feminists who believe that far from advancing the rights of women, censorship silences us:

Despite the disapproval of the moral minority, despite the disapproval of anti-porn feminists, many women are discovering that they enjoy watching porn films. Restricting the availability of these films restricts the social freedom of the women who want to watch them.

She challenges the view that pornography is a male domain with some interesting data about the readership of adult magazines. 23% of People’s readership is female for example. She also cites films, websites and magazines created by women, for women, which are frequently attacked by Australian censors. Vnuk is the former editor of one of these publications, Australian Women’s Forum. She lays a large part of the blame for the magazine’s demise on the rising costs of meeting unclear classification requirements and the alienation of readers due to the forced gradual toning-down of content.

Already riled over the sinking of her magazine, there was one final incident that incensed Vnuk enough to write Snatched. This was the foiling of an attempt to show her readership what women’s genitals are supposed to look like, in order to reassure women who are running off to get plastic surgery because they’ve somehow acquired a distorted view of female genitalia. The fact that Australian magazines since the mid-90s have had to Photoshop the genital “detail” from photographs of naked women as a result of the classification guidelines undoubtedly has something to do with this trend. “When a guy goes down on a woman, he’s going ‘What’s all this stuff?’” Graham Brown of Penthouse told Vnuk. Interestingly, men’s sexual organs aren’t considered offensive enough under the guidelines to warrant similar treatment.

From protecting women to protecting children, Vnuk also interrogates one of the legislation’s fundamental principles of censorship in relation to sexual content: that “minors should be protected from material likely to harm or disturb them.” She’s not the only one to take issue with a system of censorship based on “the belief that sex is a bad thing” and that effectively criminalises “sexual activity among 16 and 17 year olds.”

I heard Gunnel Arrback, Head of the Swedish National Film Classification Board, speak on this topic at the International Ratings Conference in Sydney last year. She gave an example of a complaint from a mother alarmed that her 7 year-old daughter asked awkward questions after watching explicit sex scenes in a G-rated movie. Arrback’s response was simple: “If you haven’t told your daughter the facts of life by now that’s hardly our fault, now is it?”

Unfortunately for teenage boys looking for sexual excitement (or should I say “minors looking to be harmed or disturbed”), they’re better off having a perve at their sister’s copy of Cosmo or their mum’s Mills and Boon than a Penthouse. This is because of the inconsistencies and double standards in the regulation of sexual content between media. Erotic literature in book form remains untouched while “unwarranted” or “highly detailed” descriptions must be cut from the text of porn magazines, zines and comics to avoid restriction. It should be added that video games endure the harshest treatment of all media when it comes to sexual content. Perhaps the most powerful and controversial point this book makes is about cultural snobbery and the double standards at play in the classification debate.

Vnuk points to the subjectivity of such a nebulous concept as ‘artistic merit’, a phrase in the classification guidelines that allowed the Classification Review Board to lift the ban on the film Romance in 2000. The Board concluded that the depictions of actual sex and sexual violence were allowable, given the ‘sophisticated’ nature of the film’s likely audience, thereby implying that a different set of rules should apply to ‘unsophisticated’ people who don’t appreciate French arthouse movies.

She chastises the “letter-to-the-editor civil libertarians” (perhaps some of the people who read and write for RealTime?) for their tendency to fight censorship on the grounds that exceptions should be made for certain material because “it’s art.” Vnuk asserts that these arguments serve to bolster the notion inherent in the guidelines that sex viewed for entertainment is somehow not legitimate.

So, who or what should we blame and what changes should we argue for? Vnuk criticises the structure of the OFLC board, the vagueness of the guidelines and the ability of minority groups to exert undue influence through a community consultation process based on submissions rather than statistically representative surveys. She also cites surveys that show the guidelines are out of step with current community attitudes towards the availability of X-rated material.

Given the reactionary political climate of the last few years, it seems likely that it will take more than a simple change to classification processes to alter the current censorious environment. Freedom of sexual expression will have to be fought for in the broader context of attacks on free speech through “anti-terrorism” laws and the ‘family values’ agenda pushed by both major political parties. From the denial of the rights of lesbian couples to IVF treatment, to the continued illegality of abortion and the contracting-out of social services to religious organisations, the censorship regime described in Snatched is only the tip of a much broader reactionary trend.

According to Paul Virilio, the invention of the highway was the invention of 300 cars colliding in 5 minutes. Perhaps the invention of the imaginary car of all those glamorous car advertisements designed to appeal to male fantasies accounts for the appearance of Amplification, a new book by Melbourne photographer Jeff Busby featuring 21 eerie images of car wrecks.

In vivid colour printed full-bleed on mirror gloss paper, Busby’s camera lingers on the crushed folds of metal, the rust-stained dings and dangling diffs, the wild patterns of smashed windscreens against blue sky. Turning each slippery page takes you from outside the car, inside past torn upholstery and deflated airbags and out again, and never a word—nothing to distract your eyes from their smooth if unnerving ride.

Jeff Busby is a Melbourne-based photographer with 20 years experience and particular interests in arts and entertainment, architecture, landscape and designer-based work. He is best known for his impressive performance photography.

Amplification is the latest title from 3 Deep Publishing, a company specialising in the work of emerging and established artists. “Each title is considered and detailed, its form and production values, serving to extend and highlight the artist’s/designer’s conceptual premises and approach to their work.” Bird, by young Melbourne designer Kat McLeod, replicated her original hand-embroidered pages and has since won several national awards for design, publishing and illustration. 3 Deep has recently procured distribution rights from international publishers Lucas & Sternberg (NY), Richter Verlag and Quart Verlag (Germany).

Jeff Busby, Amplification, 48pp, hardcover, 210 x 310mm, 3 Deep Publishing, Melbourne, 2004 ISBN 0-9580508-2-1, $85

Unlike some of its visionary predecessors of the 1990s, the 2004 Adelaide Festival was small, quiet and thematically restrained. Nonetheless, director Stephen Page included some striking choices in his broad programming mix. I took in the second week of the festival, primarily an opportunity to see the British performance group Forced Entertainment, who proved to be among the greats of the Adelaide Festival’s remarkable history. Gulpilil provided a truly unique experience and New York’s Absolute Ensemble played 2 superb concerts, offering, as Chris Reid suggests (p27) new possibilities for new music. The Indigenous content of the festival was strongly felt, aided by an eminently wise decision to collaborate with the Adelaide Fringe to present a joint program. As Jeremy Eccles comments, “Despite his efforts to play down the Indigenous core of the festival, Stephen Page has created a fascinatingly non-prescriptive mix. His only agenda seems to be to make an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander presence seem normal…” (p29).

Canstage’s movement work The Overcoat (inspired by Gogol and Shostakovich; Canada) was over by the time I arrived and appeared to have sharply divided its audiences, while the dance work Conjunto di Nero from choreographer Emio Greco and PC Company (Netherlands) won the hearts of RealTime readers and associates. In her piece on Marco Frascari, one of the guests of the festival’s Architecture Symposium, Linda Marie Walker writes that Conjunto di Nero was a “dance performance where bodies present themselves as living/dying compositions immersed in scores of light and sound, ‘drawn’ irrevocably by the ‘fact’ of their own mingling flesh” (p30). I did see La Carniceria Teatro’s (Spain) I Bought a Spade at Ikea to Dig My Own Grave but, though nicely performed, its ragbag of performance art cliches added up to little. It was interesting to see 2 of the performers stuff food up their naked arses and the audience not take exception. Forced Entertainment’s verbal assault on its audience had a much more palpable effect. Here then are responses to a selection of performances and events RealTime encountered in the 2004 Adelaide Festival. At the end of the report there are links to Adelaide Fringe shows also reviewed in this edition.

Story-telling in various manifestations emerged here and there as a rich festival theme, whether in the musings of architect Marco Frascari (p30), the marvellous 6 hour reverie of interrupted tales from Forced Entertainment (p27) or in various works presented by Indigenous artists including Gulpilil, performed and co-written (with Reg Cribb) by David Gulpilil and directed by Neil Armfield. Apparently Gulpilil, who doesn’t read English, told stories from his life to Cribb and Armfield. These were arranged into a script and told back to Gulpilil who then performed them. The result is a performance enriched by its improvisational qualities with a tone that is both remarkably relaxed but also curiously volatile.

Gulpilil appears both at ease and restless on the large stage, thinking his way into stories, dropping into silences, regarding us as listeners with the necessary time on our hands— his time. He is not an actor who assumes an automatic contract between performer and audience: addressing us directly, he wants to make that contract, remind us of it, hold us to it with a gentle but firm cajoling. It’s as if in the cavernous space of the Playhouse he has to make sure we’re there. We have to forget our theatre manners and let him know we’re ready to go croc hunting with him, read English for him, recognise his films and share the recollection of his AFI Award speech (“I deserve this”). He wants to hear us. We want to hear him, and see him, a man who always moves like a dancer, long-limbed, graceful, sudden, a hunter sharing with us his respect for the totem of his mother’s clan: the crocodile. His is the dance of the hunter with the tools of his role (spear, woomera, twine) and a crocodile skull he addresses affectionately and playfully.
David Gulpilil, Gulpilil

With Gulpilil we forever fall into 2 worlds. He describes himself as “David Gulpilil born with 2 legs in 2 different countries,” whether in his parents’ respective moieties, or uneasily astride the schism between the safety of his Arnhem Land community and the traps of the white film industry. This is epitomised by the slippery slope introduced to the young film actor by “that mad bugger” Dennis Hopper and John Mellion during the making of Mad Dog Morgan. Gulpilil “joins in the corroboree” of these whitefellas and in the long term the result is gaol for 6 months for drunken driving. “The bad spirit in your country tapped me on the shoulder.” In prison, he says, he becomes an expert and committed dish washer. Just as he inhabits multiple worlds so does he address the world in 2 ways resonant with the dynamic of the overall performance; with self-deprecating frankness and consummate pride. There is no middle ground. Similarly his stories oscillate between the yarn, where truth is a variable (he tells a string of stories about a missing finger all predicated with “It’s the truth”), and clear-eyed straight talk that speaks regret, disappointment and bitterness. The same white culture that has given him the fame of which he is so very proud has in many ways reneged on its promise and made that fame dangerous and unrewarded.

Gulpilil is a work rich in detail and observation. There are recollections of the making of Walkabout, of a boy appearing in a lap lap at Buckingham Palace and taking snaps at Cannes (the camera caused a bomb scare). There are personalities and political wit—he ‘phones’ Philip Ruddock at one point suggesting refugees be shown his tin ‘humpy’: “they’ll see how hard it is and they’ll row home.” Gulpilil bemoans the lives of “kids full of white ideas…boredom and kava.” What can he do? Teach and pass on his culture, he tells us. This is all framed in an easy-going theatricality of a broadly chronological telling with a patterning of themes and film excerpts, and simple staging; a chair, table, possessions and a fire against a huge backcloth. The arrival of The Wet, replete with thunder track, lightning and real water in a fine glasshouse spray, is one of the few moments of theatrical excess.

Gulpilil is a big one-man show, at least 2 hours plus an interval. The life may well warrant the duration and the performance our admiration, but, once the work settles, an uninterrupted 90 minute version might be more comfortable for the performer and more focused. Not that audiences thought so: standing ovations were the order of the day and there was the sense that audience and performer were at one. Gulpilil held us to our contract with charisma, skill and stories the like of which we’ve rarely heard.

In the Adelaide Festival’s long history of programming remarkable and often provocative works taking on the challenges of form and the politics of performance, Forced Entertainment is in there with the best.

This is nightmare theatre. It realises the worst fears of performers (and audience) on the stage of a first night performance. Wracking nervousness, hestitancy, forgetting, being abandoned and going too far all fester and erupt amidst perverse versions of formulaic routines that have long lost their meaning. Performer fear and hostility is masked for the 2 hour duration with faces perpetually locked into steely grins and voices into rigid good manneredness regardless of the anger and anxiety issuing from between clenched teeth. From this taut physical framework, an appalling state of being, Forced Entertainment wrench a world of meaning. And it’s a peculiarly British world with its thin veneer of obligatory good behaviour and its evocation of an exhausted theatre tradition of music hall and beachside entertainment (appropriately presented in Adelaide’s tacky old Royalty Theatre), suggesting the limits this culture has reached. British television comedies and detective dramas display some of the same astonishing hostility and paranoia, but not at this surreal level and are nowhere near as testing of their audience.

The performers reassure us that all is well, that we will not be disturbed, that there will be no smells, no blood, no erections…and the list goes on and on escalating with possibilities alarming and banal until you feel like you’ve actually been submitted to all these horrors or, fascinatingly, that you encounter very few of them on your average night out at the theatre. You also realise pretty soon that you are trapped in a litany-based show and that every very long list will be followed by another or a set of repeated actions that will initially interest and then bore and then become curiously fascinating as you sink into the reverie groove and the sheer poetry of bitterness, fear and loathing acquires a patina of unseemly beauty.

The reassurances are empty gestures. The blindfolded company point into the audience, uttering horrifying predictions of car crashes, cancers and ruined relationships: “I’m getting something….she doesn’t blame you entirely.” The routines are bland (a woman perfunctorily explodes the balloons she is dressed in with a cigarette), surreal (an utterly unslick card trick routine has performers brutally stuffing cards into mouths and down trousers) and panicky to the point of existential crisis. Not only can the comic not recall punch-lines, he can’t even get the set-up right and lurches from one faulty joke scenario to ever more appalling and obscene ones, as if having no belief in what he does or tells, flailing about with a saw in his hand (as if from some other routine he’s forgotten), until he cries out for his fellow performers to save him. “I’m scared now. I’m dead now.” The upshot is that a female performer immediately apologises for the comic’s “indulgent” performance. True to the evening’s form, she overdoes it and has to be hauled off stage, kicking and screaming, shaking off her captors behind a curtain, crawling back on stage, ever repeating her histrionic apologies to be dragged off again in a rancorous dance of frustration.

As the night unfolds routines return with added intensity. Early reassurances are replaced with requests to “try to forget about cars, cigarettes…sperm, blood, shit on the sheets…really good blow jobs…refugees in shipping containers…” and more and more. The blindfolded seers return assigning horrible fates (including “refugees in your living room”), eliminating many of the audience as they point wildly around the theatre and we squirm in our seats.

The pressure on the audience increases painfully with a barrage of thank yous along with “you were super” and “give yourselves a round of applause,” escalating into telling us we were “politically spotless”, “not racist”, “not the kind of men in suits who go home and beat up their wives” and, greeted with applause and laughter: “You stayed.” However, the mood changes alarmingly, initiated by the female performers. We are told we stink, that we are losers and worse. The men are embarassed and apologetic but their interjections are greeted with the bluntest statement of the night, a loud and repeated “Shut up!”, abrasive, shocking even in these horrendous circumstances.

The comic with the saw enters blindfolded, flailing about, asking us, begging us to forget all about this night. Elsewhere on stage the ‘dummy’ from a comic duo has been tucked into a plastic carry bag by his partner, zipped up and left onstage, only his head in view. Fearing the saw, the man in the bag inches agonisingly away, tips, landing on his forehead, rests there, falls sideways, struggles up…For a moment it looks like something very real and very ugly might happen. But it’s only theatre.

First Night is one of the most thorough demolitions of the theatre-going experience I’ve witnessed, a satisfying totality, rigorously framed and performed with a courageous and brutal consistency. Without any of the usual character mechanisms the performers create a believable team of theatrical delinquents and misfits, bizarrely puppet-like with their fixed demeanours , limited gestures and list-speak. Without a plot they still induce pity, fear and even, for some, catharsis. This is wonderful ensemble playing borne of a 20-year company history, pushing to the limit even the most affectionate fans of contemporary performance, testing the contract between performer and audience and giving pause for reflection on what the theatre gives us and what it neglects, fears and avoids.

Two unusual and immensely powerful concerts by the Absolute Ensemble demonstrate the capacity for development and innovation still remaining in contemporary music.

The late Frank Zappa is an under-appreciated composer. In the 1960s and 1970s his work was generally pigeon-holed with rock, albeit of the progressive variety. However, his was an eclectic mix of diverse influences, blended with great subtlety, and, above all, fully cognisant of the wide variety of classical and contemporary idioms that musical history has thrown up. It was self-conscious music—Zappa was a satirist and parodist, and he made the listener think about his musical sources and their meanings. His work is characterised by multiple voicings and frequent shifts of metre, rhythm, tempi and dynamics, so that, while the music is often foot-tapping, it keeps the listener on edge, waiting for the next shift.

The Absolute Ensemble has taken Zappa’s work to another level. Modern electronic instrumentation allows further developments beyond those Zappa pioneered, and the Ensemble’s arrangements of his work fully brought out its mesmerising structures, motifs and rhythms. Absolute’s visionary conductor, Kristjan Järvi, controlled the event wonderfully, using a computer to cue electronic elements and also using his own keyboard while conducting.

In the hands of Absolute, Zappa’s work resembles concert band music, but played with extraordinary flair and energy. Some of the 19 Zappa pieces in the concert were almost beyond human playability, recalling Conlon Nancarrow’s gymnastic compositions for pianola. A multitude of different instruments might carry Zappa’s lyric melodies: marimba, piano, synthesiser, violin, guitar, flute, saxophone, clarinet, even bassoon and contrabassoon. Sometimes 2 contrasting instruments pair in a melodic line; flute and bassoon, for example, creating a wonderfully dense texture. But the key to Zappa’s music is his use of competing metres and sudden metric shifts, say from 3/8 to 7/8, while 4/4 or 2/4 continues in the background. Thus the ensemble must divide and aggregate instantaneously into various component sub-groups, a drummer taking one rhythmic line to support a soloist’s melody and synthesised percussion taking another rhythmic line with other soloists. Zappa also rapidly shifts keys and uses chromatic elements, connecting passages with cascades of notes. The music is intense not only because of its energy and striking melodies but also because of its disjunctions and contrasts.

On top of this, Zappa uses parody and pastiche, introducing musical forms as diverse as klezmer, pop, country ballad, blues and rap, all built on a foundation of rock and jazz forms. Overall the music is frenetic and while it has a satirical edge, it is ultimately joyous, even cathartic. Keeping the whole thing together is a great feat, and Absolute do it wonderfully.

Mark-Anthony Turnage’s 9 movement Blood on the Floor (1996) starkly contrasts with Zappa’s musical style, yet the 2 concerts, on consecutive nights, formed a delicious whole—a re-energising of contemporary music. Blood on the Floor might best be described as a jazz suite of symphonic proportions for jazz ensemble and orchestra. The work could also be used as a ballet score or augmented by dancers, such are its dramatic and rhythmic properties. Though partly a tribute to the composer’s brother who died from drug addiction, it is far from sentimental. Its opening self-titled movement is dramatic, dissonant and raucous, setting the tone for the suite. Short solo themes build and are then broken by brief intervals; a longer pause near the movement’s end precedes its cacophonous resolution. Here are the sounds of the city and of the anguished mind.

The dreamy second movement, Junior Addict, retains the intensity of the first, perhaps suggesting the addict’s entrapment. Bruce Arnold’s enchanting guitar solo emerges as a long, introspective thought. The third movement, Shout, returns to the clamour and blare of the first, with a machine-like intensity built on strong playing from the brass section. Sweet and Decay begins with a bass drum roll, a motif that returns to haunt the movement. While Turnage evidently did not write the work expressly for his brother, Sweet and Decay evokes death’s inevitably.

Needle is a series of unconducted solos, including one for bass clarinet. The slow, cool Elegy for Andy follows, its soprano saxophone evoking the wailing human voice. The last 3 movements continue the extraordinary writing and orchestration, shifting through jazz, funk and blues, variously suggesting filmic narrative, cries in the night and howls of mourning. The finale to the work requires 2 trumpets, one at times suffocatingly muted, culminating in a return to the suite’s characteristic blare. Turnage theatrically ends the work with a single, heavy bass drum note.

That jazz idioms could be used to sustain such an extended, complex and evocative work reminds us of jazz’s richness and fertility. Blood on the Floor naturally recalls Gershwin and, contrastingly, Miles Davis’s film score for Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’Échafaud (Lift to the Scaffold) as examples of longer works in the genre. The performers sustained a controlled energy throughout the performance and Absolute’s arrangement and instrumentation created unworldly textures with great dramatic effect. Blood on the Floor showcases the performers’ interpretive ability and capacity to combine notated elements with engaging improvisation. Both composer and ensemble have mastered a musical language in a way that revitalises and opens it for further experimentation. There is wide scope for virtuosity, but Blood on the Floor is not merely a vehicle for dazzling solos. Turnage’s music takes precedence, and the audience sits as it would for a Mahler or Shostakovitch symphony. The Absolute players blended smoothly with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra players—there was a clear understanding of the work as a concept and how it might unfold in performance.

These extraordinary and well attended concerts remind us of the considerable developmental possibilities still remaining in music. Why is there not more like this? Turnage explores both classical and jazz traditions, but his work is unique-neo-modern rather than postmodern. Zappa’s music too has an essential integrity and Absolute’s arrangements retain and extend its character and resolution. Both composers have drawn on the mythology a well as the musical idioms of contemporary society to make reflective, powerful work.

ADT’s Held is about dance and photography and, inevitability, dance photography, a sub-genre of performance photography in general. Some photographers, like Sydney’s Heidrun Löhr and Melbourne’s Jeff Busby (see p13) have the capacity to suggest more than classical fly-in-amber photographic documentation, conveying a sense of moment and movement in real time. In dance, mirror-gazing narcissism has long been reflected in a kind of unruffled portraiture, all stillness, form and beauty, but for many years now there have been excellent exceptions, opening the lens to the realities and rawness of the body and the rush and blur of movement. Most popular has been an anti-gravitational fetish, drawing on one significant aspect of the appeal of dance (logically extended into Meryl Tankard’s aerial dances for the previous incarnation of ADT). Images of dancers flying, backgrounds erased, have become a cliché, a Freudian fantasy of arousal lift-off. But the leaps of the Sydney Dance Company, for example, are just not the same as those of a new generation inspired, say, by La La Human Steps or Wim Vandeykebus or hip-hoppers. I’m thinking of in-the-air horizontal rolls, for example, which I watched casually performed by a couple of teenagers practising Capoeira in Victoria Square one festival afternoon. These people can also leap from zero—no run-up, there’s no lift, no wire, no flyman. It’s magical, especially when almost instantaneously captured on screen as a still image by a photographer standing centre stage between audience and dancers in the Australian Dance Theatre’s Held..

The primary power of Held is not just the moment caught, but specifically the moment of suspension, gravity defied. It’s a camera moment, one that our eye only just registers, when the dancer is mid-air, ascending or falling. It’s in the eye, the eye of the photographer, the prosthetic eye of the camera but also caught in the eye of the dancer—in one scene in Held I was transfixed by eyes of dancers enlarged on the screen and the alignment of look and movement.

Held is a sustained photo-shoot. American dance photographer Lois Greenfield is on stage when we arrive, already at work on informal portraits of the dancers. A big bank of lights and a reflective screen behind amplifying the flash confirm the sense of studio and session. From then on the theme of photographer and dancers at work together is subjected to numerous variations, interpolated with scenes without Greenfield which are nonetheless photographic in essence, such as a deep red darkroom reverie. In each variation, Held plays with our perceptions. After the ease of association between dancer and image in the pre-show gambit, the company erupts into its trademark power dancing and Greenfield and choreographer Garry Stewart suddenly stretch the duration between the live moment and its projection. The effect is disorienting as our eyes switch from bodies to screen and back, registering flickers of recall or seeing shapes and movements barely remembered. The dancers engage in dynamic tussles, fights but not-fights that allow them with martial arts moves to propel each other through space. The next scene allows the eye to adjust a little more, narrowing the time gap between action and image. Against a wall of sombre, cool green light the magic begins as individual dancers roll though the air, one falling as another rises, the relationship between action and image now and then correlating, the mind muttering “That was a good one…and that one…but not that one” as if flicking through a pile of photographs.

In the next shoot the dancers occupy a small space. Alone and in clusters they leap directly up from the floor, Greenfield’s photographs projected almost instantaneously, confirming and more intricately revealing the dancers’ capacity to fly from zero, to tuck legs beneath them and curl feet in the same second they are airborne. At last, movement and photograph become almost one perceptual field.

Between these sessions, Stewart sustains his play with the phenomenology of perception with shadow (an important part of the pre-history of photography), dancing in the dark (we see and hear the bodies and then glimpse them in flashes of light), darkroom scenes (in one, the collective body of dancers as a wonderful still life with tiny flickers of almost robotic movement, developing into something) and video which alerts us to the substantial difference between moving and fixed images. It is in some of these scenes that Darrin Verhagen’s sound score comes into its own, ranging from delicate piano to solo guitar against musique concrete textures.

Stewart and his designer Geoff Cobham also work the screen as a theme. The dancers move two huge vertical light boxes around the stage at various angles, creating coloured backdrops, shadow surfaces, the all important projection screens and spaces from which dancers emerge. These transform the space architecturally, moving beyond the studio to suggest, as so much work in new media art proposes, other projection possibilities to do with mobility, transparency and the interplay between real and virtual selves. A video of the dancers slowly falling and another of them leaping, in effect, from one screen to another have a peculiar cinematic beauty that confirms the very different feel of the still and the moving image. It also made me mindful that the most potent still images in Held were those of flight (solo or group) rather than the powerful interplay of bodies that threads through the show. Although memorable in its choreography, it does not figure strongly in my recollection of Greenfield’s photography.

Towards the very end, Held loses its grip as if the team has exhausted the repertoire of photographic possibilities. A slow solo against lime green screens and, finally, a series of polished coloured stills of the dancers from Greenfield against an overwrought soundtrack fail to take the dynamic that Stewart has so carefully and rigorously conceived any further. We know these photographs almost too well by now and the absence of the dancers from the stage seems misjudged, sentimental even, giving way to the photography’s recollection of them. That aside, Held is a richly considered and innovative essay in dance photography and visual perception. It also suits a company that deals in speed: the sheer pace and expertise demanded by Garry Stewart means that Held indeed holds moments for us that we would otherwise forget or generalise, yielding brilliant synaptic flashes, extending our appreciation of the virtuosic ADT dancers and Greenfield’s astonishing quickfire intuition.

Inspired by Ian Abdulla’s autobiographical Murray River country paintings, Windmill Performing Arts’ play for young people, RiverlanD (director Wesley Enoch, writer Scott Rankin, design Richard Roberts) begins with a high quotient of wit and magic. On a sand-filled stage rising to a riverbank and the deep blue of an Abdulla sky, a bunch of pelicans gather around a campfire. joking about their artist creator as if he is God—he who created everything from a tube of paint in 6 days and on the 7th had a cup of tea and a lie down and and that’s how they got the Dreaming. After a bit more postmodern larking with the audience and a litany of Murray floods (the biggest being in 1956) the play settles into a more conventional framework. The rich and idiosyncratic suggestiveness of Abdulla’s naïve paintings inspired by childhood recollections gives way to contemporary sophistication and social complexities.

Headlights blaze through the night as an urban Indigenous family arrive in search of their country: Nanna Gracie (Lillian Crombie) knows this land, her bureaucrat daughter Gail (Pauline Whyman) doesn’t (beyond her report on the sustainability of Indigenous culture in the Riverland), and her children, Luke (Luke Carroll) and Milly (Ursula Yovich), are already missing city comforts. The comedy of camping out is broad: Gail has her laptop open in minutes and does Tai Chi in the morning, Nanna has her portable TV, so she won’t miss The Simpsons (“that poor whitefella needs our help”) and the children sleep in the car when Nanna’s farts rock and billow their tent. The tone is comic but the dislocations are serious. There are 2 generation gaps here, complicated by the absence of the children’s father and Nanna’s mysterious refusal to share her culture with her daughter. And there are spirits about, warning children not to come down to the river at dusk. But they do, entering another time, a time of flood, where the ghostly Paulie (Rod Smith), somehow connected with Nanna’s silence, introduces Luke to male independence and he risks all on a lone canoe ride on the mighty river.

As in all plays predicated on secrets, the truth will out, and here it comes in an ungainly, complex rush of danger, guilt and forgiveness. Had such a short play been opened out a bit and had it stuck with the breadth of concerns it opened with it might have been more magical and less melodramatic and convoluted. Poor Gail and Milly get less and less attention as the play increasingly swerves into a male rite-of-passage drama coupled with an abrupt revelation of Nanna’s tragic past. By now the play’s humour has long gone. Nevertheless, RiverlandD keeps the audience fascinated with engaging performances, cut-out puppets of birds and river skiers in the Abdullah style, spooky apparitions and immersive lighting. Children from the Kaurna Plains School ably wield the pelican and river life cutouts and play spirits but their presence is oddly subdued, suggesting a need for greater integration in subsequent productions. With a bit of work, RiverlandD deserves a long and successful stage life, as long as its initial success does not blind its creators to the work’s flaws.

It’s wonderful that a play for young people should have a prime place in an international arts festival. The only pity was that the audiences were largely adult. Windmill CEO Cate Fowler quipped, “For future Windmill festival shows all adults will have to be accompanied by a child.”

The Museum of Australia’s currently touring Indigenous exhibition, Stories from Australia, was never supposed to be seen in this country. Dawn Casey was insistent on this point when the exhibition was created especially for the Guangzhou Museum of Art as part of the 30th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Australia and China. Guangzhou initiated the exhibition: they wanted a great show to outshine Beijing. Local businessmen had seen Aboriginal culture in Australia and saw it as a vehicle to promote tourism and educational links with our country, and they were prepared to pay much of the cost. But what they and the Museum wanted didn’t necessarily coincide with the former NMA Director’s agenda. She told me at the time that she didn’t want to reinforce stereotypes about a “past beautiful” culture.

But a diverse and dynamic picture of the Dreaming is emerging at the Adelaide Festival, and that’s as true of Stories from Australia as any other part of the event. Despite his efforts to play down the Indigenous core of the festival, Stephen Page has created a fascinatingly non-prescriptive mix. His only agenda seems to be to make an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander presence seem entirely normal in a major south-eastern city festival. It’s already pretty normal in the west.

The module system designed for Stories from Australia produces a fairly episodic picture, with only bare links between the various components. It also seems that Tandanya could only fit parts of the show in, so we’re missing a module dear to the NMA: film of the Wik people dancing in 1962 when they created an important set of Flying Fox and Bonefish sculptures for the Museum. When they eventually saw their work 40 years later, after all the exigencies that delayed the NMA’s opening, the result was an explosion of ceremony and sculpting on Cape York.

And that’s exactly what Stories is trying to reveal: cultural renewal. So there’s Rover Thomas and Paddy Jaminji’s Kurirr Kurirr Ceremony, dreamed in 1974, which is an inspiration in the Kimberly (though I’ve never heard of Rover “composing” it before—a very Western concept!).

There’s also the Yirrkala’s 300 year long relationship with the Macassans, collecting trepang (sea cucumbers) for the insatiable Chinese market. This story was presumably chosen specially for the exhibition’s original Chinese audience. The relationship appears in barks and photographs, but the captions reveal that the Macassans had a deep impact on the Arnhemlander’s psyche, changing burial rituals and being awarded rock formations, the ultimate acceptance into country. This surely suggests an openness and flexibility to which a more sensitive white invasion force could have responded.

Interestingly, that astute elder from Yirrkala, Munduwuy Yunupingu (of Yothu Yindi fame) is planning a Garma Festival project which will bring songmen together from all over north east Arhemland to compare their reportage of the Macassans. Yunupingu spoke at the Adelaide Festival’s Sacred Symposium, a broad-church gathering of the Aboriginal clans in which they talked about the sacred in their particular lives. There was also an exhibition exploring the Christian in Aboriginal art, entitled Holy, Holy, Holy. Not much great art—where was George Mung Mung’s gorgeous Mary of Warmun?—but certainly an interesting diversity to the works.

Stories similarly dealt with Christianity in the Torres Strait, displaying costumes and photos of the Coming of the Light ceremony on Saibai Island, which annually celebrates the arrival of the missionaries. There was also a riposte from contemporary artist Kathryn Norris. In a surprisingly McCahonesque way, she portrays a chained Islander against images of a troubled Paradise. I wonder what the Chinese made of this inconsistency, especially as the Sabai dancers appeared live in Guangzhou.

But down the road at Yarrabah, North Queensland, the exhibition’s captions focus on cultural renewal in the community where the Reverend Ernest Gribble tried so hard to overcome the rainforest battle culture. The Queensland Art Gallery’s Cape York show last year revealed powerful new shields and spears emerging in the area, although nothing in Stories post-dates 1970! Mind you, possibly the stand-out piece of the entire exhibition is an exquisite bicornual basket from 1900.

Then there’s Papunya, surely the best publicised site of cultural renewal in the country. But it’s represented only by beads, batik and pokerwork-marked animal sculptures. Meanwhile a gorgeous canvas by Uta Uta Jangala hangs elsewhere, not related back to the Papunya module.

Dawn Casey’s philosophical doubts might have been justified with the module on the Ngarrindjeri, the Murray River’s proud guardians. While Ian Abdulla’s naïve paintings of his childhood by the river are about cultural renewal in the present, the unregenerate past is also there in the form of George Angus’ Painting of the Natives from 1844. Captions explain that the old images have helped contemporary Ngarrindjeri learn the design and deployment of their weaponry. Not a problem in Yarrabah! But as Aden Ridgeway pointed out in the Sacred Symposium, the painstaking rediscovery of the old ways (in his case the language of his North Coast people) is bound to be easier in country. But 70% of Aborigines now live out of country in Australian cities.

Will Stories from Australia travel on? It remains to be seen what the new NMA management will think. But it has found a generous context here at the Adelaide Festival, which may be un-reproduceable elsewhere, even in Canberra. Not that our southern cities don’t need regular exposure to the full range of Indigenous culture. And that has to include the likes of Djakapurra Munyurryin’s brilliant dancers from Yirrkala in the festival, who were all dust, intensity and just enough explanation to be able to read the public levels of their dynamic Dreaming.

And on the Thousandth Night was a radically different experience from First Night. The company appear in cardboard crowns, red gowns with ordinary clothes beneath and bare feet. An upstage table holds food and drink supplies which they work through over the 6 hours, saving the beer to the last hour. The performers are affable, address us directly in a conversational tone from a row of chairs across the front of the stage and come and go taking the chairs with them. Every utterance begins, “Once upon a time there was…” and over the 6 hours a feast of tales is told but none completed: someone will interrupt with another tale, either picking up on the one just told, or another from earlier, or it’s something apparently brand new. Sometimes the interruption is infuriating, often it doesn’t matter, we know the tale or we know where it’s going: if it was any longer it wouldn’t be funny or significant. Occasionally a tale-teller is left helpless, no one interrupts and they have to string out their story until rescued. The result is a wealth of tales familiar, deviant, magical and banal, a kind of living structuralist encyclopoedia of story-telling. From the well of a few deep structure formulae come an astonishing plethora of stories.

Series and subsets of tales emerge drawing on classic fairytales, myths, famous plots (recurrent stories about a father and three daughters kick off with a version of King Lear), popular culture (The Fly and The Hulk find their way into the weave) and Kylie (“Once there was a perfect little princess with a pert little bott”), and, not least, jokes. Classic tales are given a modern edge—of the Gingerbread Boy bullies say, “that little baked kid, we’ll eat him”—and others are told quite laterally—7 un-unionised miners replace the 7 dwarfs. One teller’s version of Hansel and Gretel is usurped by another: “Once upon a time there was a housing inspector who came upon a dodgy house made of chocolate and sweets…” One performer particularly committed to incisive brevity began: “Once upon a time there was a country where people were made out of meat…” Later and more surreally, “…there was city where there were no people, only juice.” From the same speaker in the unfolding of a series on sex madness, a story about a man in bed with 4 women: “and as often is the case, the man was crap. He had a big erection but was not generous with it.” Sex mad scenes take place in schools, delicatessens, old folks’ homes and the theatre, sucking the Lear tale into the vortex as The Royal Blow Job. A later series darkens the mood in longer tales about parents, children and computer pornography. A small nation-big nation love story could equally be about Australia and the USA as about Blair and Bush: “a special relationship, but only kind of one way.”

Improvisation and the informality of the performance meant that we witnessed and shared the performers’ surprise at others’ inventiveness, the irritation at interruption, moments of desperation and plenty of solo and collective smiling, laughter and corpsing (a sure cue to be interrupted). An ah-hah gasp from the auditorium mid-story immediately prompted an interruption: “Once upon a time there was a woman in a theatre who was surprised to hear her own story.”

Recurrence of themes and story types led to a kind of collective hysteria over the 6 hours. You could leave the show at any time for food, rest or another show, but the longer you were away the further out of the loop you felt and the more technical the appreciation became when you returned, as opposed to shared delirium as waves of stories broke over each other. In the last hour there’s a return to fairy tales, a string of love stories (about 2 words, 2 turds, 2 birds), bizzare versions of creation myths (“concentrated nothing”, “the world is a snow dome”) and an increasing conflation of stories feeding off themselves and each other as thieves sell second hand stories and an evocation of the theatre we shared (“a very dark room, breathing, creaking…alive and dead”) and, finally (from a prepared text apparently), “a mouth that wouldn’t stop talking…and a pulse that wouldn’t stop beating.”

In this memorable show there were many amazing stories, regardless of their incomplete nature, and they were being recalled and told again as the audience wandered from the theatre and gathered in the street and for days after.

The solo work of Mugiyono Kasido in Triple Bill is an exemplar of the mimetic/dance form. Possessing a commanding presence, Kasido’s powerful movements literally hang in space. Draping limbs suspend in silence interjected with bird calls which emanate from the depths of an ever alert body. Kasido wears a simple white t-shirt which is used effectively, signifying a type of magician’s coat or sheath, through which his body transforms between abstract and still life shapes. Martha Graham’s Lamentations comes to mind, but more humorously used, with the stretching of fabric creating images: a bird, a yogi, a shell, the body as a vehicle for rumours. The political and sociological is revealed through the stance of gun-wielding bravado, quickly reversing to the victim’s fearful, cringing. Things are not what they seem. Sculptural order comes from disorder returning to upside down uncertainty, Rodin in stretched cotton. This work exercises the functional body in a constant display of balance and imbalance. The struggle to stay harmonious rests in brief moments of indigenous Indonesian stances reminding us of a mature culture subsisting under duress. The body as battle zone, the seat of self expression as well as the location for harmony.

Francis Rings’ Unaipon is based on the fissures and marriage between science, religion and Indigenous culture as exemplified by the life of David Unaipon, a Ngarrindjeri man of the Warrawaldi clan born in 1972 at Point McLeay Mission in South Australia. His life traversed 2 cultures entering the realms of complexity in his roles as inventor, philosopher, writer and storyteller.

A scrim projected with a cosmography interlayed with the image of the Australian $50 note absorbs the eye. An optical illusion excites our desire to trace a milky, astrological cartography of songlines intermingled with a familiar effigy. These images are not divisive, alluding to the influences of both Indigenous and European cultures on Unaipon’s vision of a universal force that can go by any number of names.

This work reflects elements of the bush with dusty winds and ochre coloured fibre coverings under which 6 dancers roll in unison like animated banksia bushes. The work weaves 2 worlds together with simple compositions, overlaying modern and Indigenous dance. Unaipon is a work rich in thematics and visual imagery, however the sections attempting juxtapostion and fusion of dance styles are choreographically thin. The strongest sections of the work are those that embody the raw, highly expressive physicality of regional Indigenous dances. References to celestial beings and prayer herald a ritual return to water, a life coming full circle.

Stephen Page’s Rush leaps out of Triple Bill with a startling shift in style. Superbly acted and danced it uses a dance theatre genre to take us on a journey through religion, confinement, substance abuse and the plight of the Stolen Generation. Woven through the stories is the presence of a spirit woman reminding us of a spiritual path which is ever present, guiding and calling us to return to our roots. The strength of Rush lies in its choreographic language which embraces contemporary culture whilst being deeply rooted in ancient myths. The stunning set designed by Peter England provides the final focal point with rivulets of flowing charcoal water, a symbol of hope but also a call not to forget a dark past.

There has always been a tradition of screening new documentaries at the National Parliament in Canberra. So it came as a surprise when Joint House leader Bob Wedgwood, acting on the advice of the Speaker Neil Andrew, refused a screening of my new film Molly and Mobarak.

Wedgwood’s letter (leaked to the Canberra Times) stated several reasons for the refusal, including the claim that “this film promotes the theme of widespread opposition to government policy and might cause offence to a significant part of the Australian community.” The outrageous ban was subsequently overturned in 48 hours after pressure from my local Labor member Tanya Plibersek. The publicity ensured that Canberrans responded and we had a full cinema.

I’ve been asking myself what significance should be read into this petty attempt at censorship? Part of the reason for the ban is possibly bound up with the difference between documentary and current affairs. While current affairs is essentially an investigation driven by a reporter, documentary is more an exploration of the contemporary/ historical through the personal. Perhaps the film struck a raw nerve because it actually humanises refugees.

I believe the ban is also a sign that documentaries are starting to be noticed and taken seriously in the general community. Some claim this is because documentaries are appropriating the devices of dramatic story telling and bringing emotional power to the form. However, good documentaries have always done this. I think it’s more to do with a real hunger to find meaning in the post-September 11 world and a public craving for ‘authenticity’.

Last year I attended The International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam (IDFA), the largest festival of its type in the world. 230 films were shown and 110,000 tickets were sold—a 17% leap in audience numbers over the previous year. IDFA is a celebration of the art of documentary and the styles ranged from observational narratives to extremely personal essay films.

The resurgence of documentary is a phenomenon few could have predicted, given its steady marginalisation on television. Since the mid-90s documentary has been separating into 2 totally different streams: ‘reality-based’ TV series and factual infotainment versus the traditional longer form social documentary, which has been pushed back to ever later time-slots. This has been a world-wide trend: in Britain social documentaries have been all but relegated to a new digital channel.

Finding reasons is not difficult. There’s always been an uneasy relationship between television and documentary. Television, by its very nature, constructs audiences as consumers. It tends to be prescriptive and concerned with ratings, creating a focus on diversion and entertainment. In contrast, documentary forces you to engage with the content and think for yourself. As well as complexity and depth, documentary films also generally have a strong and personal point of view.

Despite some important new prime-time slots, such as SBS’s Storyline Australia, long-form documentaries on television are at risk of becoming an endangered species. Certainly I would be the first to admit that without public broadcasters we wouldn’t have a documentary industry, but my concern is that we are losing the art of documentary. This year’s Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC) in February highlighted this very problem. The conference was essentially oriented around the business of buying and selling films, with the DocuMart being the core of the event. While I don’t disagree this should have been the main focus, where were the sessions about form, the discussions with filmmakers, the screenings? Only one documentary was shown at the festival, an appalling oversight by the organisers. No wonder many younger filmmakers were completely alienated by the event and saw it as a club for established practitioners. This is a poor way of fostering growth in the industry, especially in light of a shocking AFC statistic that 64% of first time documentary filmmakers never get to make another film.

The difficulties faced by the current ‘entry-level’ generation in getting a foothold in the industry account for an absence, I believe, of a variety of styles and ideas. People censor themselves, believing certain subjects are too ‘provocative’ for broadcasters to commission and elect instead to make safer films believed to have a better chance of getting funded. Broadcasters are also less inclined to take risks with first time filmmakers.

Meanwhile a crisis also exists at the other end of the spectrum. Around the world the feature documentary is being revitalised, but here in Australia we are being left behind. Just look at the long list of feature documentaries slated for our screens in the next few months. All are American. Not one is a local film!

Maybe it’s time to start thinking outside the box. In the US feature projects usually start without any broadcaster involvement. That comes later. Unlike America we don’t have private foundations to kick-start these projects. We do however have government agencies: the AFC fully invests in one feature documentary a year, the new Adelaide International Film Festival is investing $100,000 in a project for next year’s event, while the Film Finance Corporation has the capacity to invest in one feature documentary per year. Occasionally SBS allows one-hour documentaries, such as Fahimeh’s Story, to grow into features. It’s a start but there’s no guarantee these documentaries will ever hit cinema screens (or even be shown at film festivals) and that’s because broadcasters increasingly believe they will lose publicity, and therefore ratings, if they don’t insist on first run. Recently Ronin Films wanted to secure a theatrical window for The President versus David Hicks but because of its topicality SBS wanted the film to open its new Storyline Australia program instead. The film rated very well but Director Curtis Levy insists he will still press for a theatrical release later this year.

In America it’s a different picture entirely. The US cable network Home Box Office (HBO) has visibly stepped up its involvement in the cinema release of feature documentaries. Two recent examples are Spellbound and Capturing the Friedmans. Cinema exposure guarantees that reviewers and critics give these documentaries the attention they deserve, thus helping their eventual television release. At IDFA, HBO CEO Sheila Nevins noted that: “If a film doesn’t succeed theatrically it doesn’t hurt television broadcast, and if it succeeds it helps.”

Part of the problem with releasing feature documentaries here in Australia is the high cost of a 35mm blow-up. At AIDC Andrew Pike from Ronin Films referred to the box office success of Safina Uberoi’s My Mother India. The film ran for 6 months in Sydney, but barely returned its blow-up costs of around $60,000. Digital projection in Australia makes perfect financial sense, but venues for digital projection are strictly limited, which means feature documentaries finished on tape seldom attract mainstream distributors. In the case of Molly and Mobarak I was very lucky that Hopscotch got behind the film, but the release still wouldn’t have happened without a marketing loan from the AFC.

One of the resolutions passed at AIDC calls on the AFC to conduct a feasibility study into Docuzone, a European initiative started 3 years ago by the Netherlands Film Fund which could be the answer to cinema release of documentaries. Digital projectors were purchased and lodged in cinemas across the Netherlands on the condition that they screen independent documentary and drama at least 2 nights a week. The scheme was a huge success. This year Docuzone will link 175 screens across Europe via a digital network and a slate of 12 films to be simultaneously released from a central server. Kees Ryninks, who initiated the project, said at IDFA: “We need to carve out a separate space for specialist film and to protect and promote European culture.” Sound familiar? Australian documentary makers have been saying the same thing in a local context for years!

Television may be the saviour of documentary and may also be its curse. Whatever happens, documentary urgently needs to reclaim its proper place as an art form. Documentary filmmakers have an incredible ability to tell stories from the inside, exploring the contemporary through the personal using a rich variety of styles and approaches. While Reality TV has come and (almost) gone, documentaries are here to stay.

“We make dull documentaries. We make dull feature films. We have an unsustainable structure that’s rapidly crumbling”, declared Brian Rosen, CEO of the Film Finance Corporation, to a muted plenary session at the Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC). The audience’s silence reminded me of the opening minutes of The Graduate (1967), Mike Nichol’s brilliant dissection of the generation gap. Ben (Dustin Hoffman) attends a party celebrating his return home from college. One of the guests pulls him aside and says: “I just wanted to say one word to you…plastics…there’s a great future in plastics.” Are our documentaries just another ‘product’ to be selected from the supermarket shelf of Australian television? Is this why we make documentaries?

Ben’s reply echoed through many of the discussions I had with filmmakers who have recently graduated from documentary and media courses: “I’m just worried about my future…I want it to be…different.”

There was an air of gloom, depression and desperation at AIDC 2004, although this type of emotional response has come to characterise the conference in recent years. Every session seemed to be dominated by the broadcasters, the funding agencies or a highly selective pool of filmmakers (there were no independent directors under 40 for example). It was the usual elevation of the bureaucrat to the position of auteur, a weird psycho-pathology which now dominates documentary discussions. We were told that we “had to make films that the audience wanted to see”, although only the more cynical of us recalled that it had been Rupert Murdoch who first coined this phrase when talking about the delights of the page 3 girl in The Sun.

Dennis O’Rourke was in top form, a mixture of brazen outrage and quotable quotes. He refused to sit meekly on the sidelines and bravely confronted everything in his path. The broadcasters’ representatives, their hands shielding the bright conference lighting, referred to him as “the voice of god.” O’Rourke was particularly incensed that the Australian Broadcasting Authority’s definition of documentary, which excludes infotainment and light entertainment, was being used by SBS TV to justify the funding of the series Desperately Seeking Sheila, which they see as tackling “a serious social problem in rural Western Australia—the shortage of bush brides.” [This SBSi and Carlton TV (UK) co-production will see 5 rural men from WA choose 3 women each from a list of 25. Each will then take one woman back to the farm to live the life of a farmer’s wife. Ed]

ABC TV, in an adroit move, announced that its own exceptionally strong ratings at the beginning of 2004 were due to the public’s move away from Reality TV and the station’s insistence on the “documentary.” Two days before the conference began Channel 7 had released its ratings. Reality TV had bombed and there was a desperate dash to reorganise the schedule. But O’Rourke’s beef was more specific. He argued that comparing documentary to Reality TV was like comparing love-making to rape. Documentary evolves through practice and not from bureaucrats more interested in the “technocratic imperative.” He argued that TV was “electronic wallpaper” and “contaminated the possibility of transforming cinema into art.”

All this was discussed with great fervour at the networking events: the $70 Welcome Cocktail Party and for the financially solvent the $120 Boat Cruise. Money, it seems, was on everyone’s mind. The first question after the one and only documentary screened at the conference, Fahimeh’s Story (Faramarz K-Rahber) was “what was the budget?” Was this a conference or a market? It was still the AIDC (not the AIDM-arket) although realists argued that the change from a bi-annual to annual event meant that this year the focus should be on the market.

How international was the conference? Julian Burnside came all the way from Melbourne and spoke about refugees but there were no filmmakers from the areas most refugees are fleeing, such as Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. And there were certainly no films from these places. Astoundingly, there was not one Indigenous speaker. The conclusions are chilling. Even in the so-called ‘enlightened’ documentary community we are insular, isolated and yes, racist. We are Australia.

Yet despite all this I returned from Fremantle feeling up-beat. In his discussion session, Brian Rosen argued that we “needed to create excitement again.” One of his suggestions was to set aside 1 or 2 million dollars from the FFC documentary pool to inject into 10 or 20 documentaries funded at $100,000 each, without a broadcaster attached. Funding bodies and filmmakers then need to think about alternative modes of distribution.

Many documentary filmmakers are outside the broadcaster loop. The reasons are many and usually ignored by AIDC. We are not baby boomers, we do not live in Sydney and we may tackle difficult, political or—heaven forbid—personal documentaries, whose meanings are only felt by audiences over long periods of time and in many different contexts. If a broadcaster is not attached to a project the doors of funding bodies are routinely slammed shut. For those of us who have been working for years on long-term projects, Rosen’s comments provoked much passionate discussion and—dare I say it—relief. It is hardly utopian to argue for a mixed film economy which includes television, cinema and cross-platform distribution opportunities.

There are innovative ideas afoot to deal with the crisis in documentary, but these were severely under represented at AIDC. Even before the conference began discussions among informal networks had been pondering what should be done to move beyond the current impasse. AIDC consolidated some of these relationships, especially along interstate lines. One of the very few conference sessions that actually featured a filmmaker highlighted the extraordinary work in progress that is kNOT @ Home, a project relating stories from Australian families who are not at home because of a ‘knot’ at home. Phillip Crawford cited this series, involving 500 young people from 22 towns and 22 new directors, as an example of an initiative that bucks the status quo. And Melbourne independent media team Spinach7 are creating an online digital channel for the distribution of a variety of content including documentary films. If change is going to come, perhaps it will come from outside the traditional film funding channels. Watch this space.

Australian International Documentary Conference 2004, Fremantle, Western Australia, Feb 26-28

It’s rare to find an Australian filmmaker willing to discuss cinema in terms of art, let alone poetry. But at the Documentary Masterclass at this year’s Flickerfest Short Film Festival in Sydney, Tasmanian documentary maker Scott Millwood declared: “I want to talk about epic poetry. I know that’s probably a strange thing to talk about at a doco masterclass, but most of the work I’ve made has been influenced a lot by poetry.”

A casual glance at Millwood’s career would suggest that despite his literary rhetoric, he has made a spectacularly successful leap into the documentary elite with just 2 films. His debut Proximity (1999) did the rounds of film festivals and earned him some recognition as an ‘experimental’ filmmaker, while Wildness (2003) has screened twice on ABC television and earned him accolades, including the AFI award for Best Documentary last year. A more detailed account of Millwood’s filmmaking trajectory, however, offers a sobering account of how difficult it is for Australian documentary filmmakers to bring their vision to the screen and exactly how far they may deviate from accepted forms.

Proximity was shot over a 14 month period in 1996, when Scott Millwood was 23. He had left Australia, feeling “his life here was broken”, and travelled with a camera to Calcutta on a one-way ticket to see, rather masochistically, if the sub-continent could break him. From India he journeyed to Vietnam and China, through former Soviet republics like Kazakhstan, on to Russia, down into Iran and Turkey and finally back to India, where he spent time with a Western woman caring for people with leprosy.

Proximity is part travelogue, part social and political commentary and part philosophical musing, but for all its geographical scope, its concerns are essentially personal and almost defiantly myopic. The film is a collection of images born of a desire to find “beauty in the streets”, with a self-consciously poetic voice-over based on Millwood’s travel diary, making sense of these images in relation to the filmmaker’s inner journey as he moves across the globe. As Millwood himself puts it: “Proximity was me learning about myself.”

For all its occasionally portentous tone, Proximity is quite an extraordinary work from a young filmmaker coming out of a culture generally resistant to exploring the poetics of the documentary image. It clearly bears the influence of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1982) and similarly comprises a flow of images loosely connected by a voice-over that doesn’t strive for literal sense, but rather aims to trigger thoughts, memories and resonances in the viewer. Proximity is a film to dream by.

Australian broadcasters and funding bodies are not known for embracing flagrant experimentation and Millwood’s attempts to pursue and essayistic style of documentary filmmaking meant that he endured several years of unfinished projects before finally completing the more conventional Wildness in 2003. The first of these unfinished films was another Marker-influenced work set in Palestine, composed of stills and telling of a man standing at the end of time during the last days of the 20th century. Although Millwood lived in Israel and Palestine for a year and was able to make the film’s opening 5 minutes, as well as a book of the entire story, his talk of a film essay and epic poetry “scared the shit out of broadcasters” and he was unable to find backing to complete the project. As Millwood now wryly observes: “I was trying to make a European film in the wrong country.” A second project based on portraits shot at Melbourne street protests similarly failed to materialise as a film, but later formed the basis of an installation at Melbourne’s Federation Square.

Millwood’s second completed work, Wildness, has been something of a literal and metaphorical homecoming for the director: the film even opens with an aerial shot sweeping over the ocean, across a deserted sandy shoreline and into Tasmania’s wilderness. Wildness tells the story of 2 photographers, Olegas Truchanas and Peter Dombrovskis, who came to Tasmania from Eastern Europe as refugees in the aftermath of World War II. Truchanas arrived in Australia as a young man, and was soon exploring and photographing the relatively unknown south west corner of Tasmania. Dombrovskis was a small child when he arrived in Tasmania, and was later mentored by Truchanas in photography and surviving the conditions in the state’s south west. Truchanas’ images played a key role in the ultimately doomed fight to save Lake Pedder from inundation by Tasmania’s Hydro Electric Commission in the early 1970s, while Dombrovskis’ image Rock Island Bend was central in the successful campaign to stop the damming of the Franklin River in the early 1980s. Both photographers died in the wilderness they spent their lives documenting.

It’s easy to see why the story of Truchanas and Dombrovskis appealed to Millwood. It has all the elements of an epic poem, including rebirth in a new land, life, death and struggle on a grand scale, all contained in the deeply moving story of 2 talented men whose lives are inextricably linked with Australian art and politics. More specifically, like Millwood, these 2 photographers didn’t just utilise a documentary medium to record the world around them. Through their photographs they sought to interact with and understand their environment, bringing the clarity of personal vision to wild scenes of physical reality.

One of the most effective passages in Wildness clearly illustrates this application of vision. While a voice-over relates entries from Dombrovskis’ diary of trip he took down the Franklin in 1979, a split screen shows contemporary footage of the river on the left, while Dombrovskis’ photographs of the same scenes are displayed on the right. The twin images not only illustrate the river’s enduring grandeur (the scenes have barely changed in 25 years), but also illustrate Dombrovskis’ skill at freezing the pulsating life of the river in images that not only capture the Franklin’s majestic beauty, but actually enhance it.

It is in such subtle manipulation of form for lyrical effect that we see Millwood’s talent for bringing innovation and a poetic sensibility to the documentary form. The best documentaries create connections between different peoples, places and times, but Millwood’s films do more than this. His work allows us to experience something of other people’s lives and sensibilities by exploring how they have opened their eyes and their hearts to their surrounds.

Scott Millwood’s Wildness is available on video from Film Australia. Orders can be made via the Film Australia website and a study guide is available for free download. Contact Film Australia Sales, 02 9413 8634, sales@filmaust.com.au, www.filmaust.com.au

Sean Cubitt, The Cinema Effect, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2004 ISBN 0 262 03312 7

It’s been some time since a tome came our way which combines diverse theoretical paradigms to forge a fresh analysis of film history and the place of cinema in contemporary culture. Sean Cubitt’s The Cinema Effect doesn’t ask ‘what is cinema?’, but rather what does cinema do, or what is its effect? The analysis concentrates on a handful of films and employs a combination of semiotics, Marxist theory, ontological philosophy, and ambivalent applications of phenomenological and psychoanalytic writings.

A section on ‘Pioneer Cinema’ starts the book, with a rich analysis of cinema’s social, political and philosophical effect in its formative years. Predictably, Lumiére and Méliès feature, but Cubitt adds another rarely covered early figure, the Indian pioneer and Méliès imitator DG Dundiraj ‘Dadasaheb’ Phalke. Cinema is regarded here as embodying the dialectics of modernity from the start, as played out in Europe’s secularised public sphere at the end of the 19th century and in what the writer calls the “counter-modernity” of Phalke’s anti-colonial fables employing religious mythology.

The next section, ‘Normative Cinema’, addresses films of the 1930s. Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938) is treated as “an apogee of rhetorical filmmaking”, exemplifying what Cubitt calls “total film” in which the audience is forced to passively consume a mythology. This is contrasted with the active viewer demanded by Eisenstein’s dialectically-informed work of the 1920s. Cubitt argues that like classical Hollywood, total cinema seeks to remove itself from history, allowing Nevsky to be set in a past entirely constructed to feed the ideology of the present.

In contrast Rules of the Game (1939) is celebrated for confronting the viewer with “the autonomy of the signifier”, as Renoir’s detached camera style brings us “face to face with the film as other.” The film’s poetic realism encourages us to rain upon the world “a forgiveness tinged with the tragic realisation that it is necessary to love this world because it is the only one.”

While both realist and total cinema aim for symbolic depth, Cubitt sees classical Hollywood as constructing a “brilliant but depth-less surface.” With Hollywood we simply don’t want reality: to see Astaire “mount” Rogers in one of their classic RKO musicals would be unthinkable.

The third section, ‘Postcinema’, comprises half the book and focuses on contemporary films. Thirty years are ommitted from Cubitt’s account of cinema’s important moments, leaving out Italian neorealism and post-war European modernism, ignoring the work of such filmmakers as Antonioni, Resnais, Godard, Fellini, Bergman and Fassbinder. While he makes no claim to present an exhaustive history of cinema, this particular blank spot is familiar. So many established academics continue a reactionary rebellion against the heavy diet of demanding European cinema they were force-fed in their undergraduate years.

Cubitt argues that post-war modernism’s primary thematic of negativity is anachronistic from a 21st century perspective. He summarises Adorno’s argument—that after the Holocaust a clearly dysfunctional and ethically debased modernity needs to be negated by art and philosophy—as unnecessary today because simulation plays the same function. Though lamenting the loss of cinema’s ability to critically reflect upon society, Cubitt seriously over-invests in the possibilities of critique offered by simulation. Simulacra’s divorce of words and symbols from meaning and reality is exactly the kind of phenomenon Adorno argued needed to be negated and overcome. In the context of Cubitt’s argument, the correct assertion that no technique is inherently “progressive or subversive” implies both an inevitable surrender to the hegemonic aesthetics of spectacle and a glib dismissal of any critical potential in modernist textuality.

The closest Cubitt gets to acknowledging the potential of texts to act as critiques is in the familiar discussion of classicism’s autopsy in Sam Peckinpah’s “postclassical” Westerns. He posits Peckinpah’s corrective West as Hispanic, European and Indian, or the myth of origin rewritten as “a legend of cultural mixing, not racial purity.” This attempt at gleaning critique from the text quickly runs out of steam, and he ends up admitting The Wild Bunch often continues to blindly affirm what it is usually claimed to subvert.

The remaining chapters address contemporary cinema in a sophisticated way, based on a familiar postmodern tenet that is both egalitarian and elitist. Cubitt says big-budget Hollywood enacts a distinct doubling: as unsullied entertainment for those who “succumb” to the spectacle and something else for those who are able to “appreciate” its layered reflexivity. This doubling is heavily paradoxical, as he points out, with the hero often seeking to puncture what the viewer has actually come to see: the computer database, the virtual reality matrix, the spectacle itself. While realism aims to engage us as “arbiters”, Cubitt claims the “Hollywood neobaroque” of The Matrix (1999), Dark City (1998), and The Thirteenth Floor (1999) “recruits us as collaborators.” A “mistiness” of doubt shrouds everything in these films, except for a naïve investment in the basic forces of eternal love, home, nature and truth.

Cubitt notes that in rendering these dystopic worlds, the image becomes dematerialised, turning into an opaque curtain hiding a truth we cannot see but in which we are asked to invest. The hero lives on faith that there is a purer reality beyond the grimy visible world. But as Cubitt points out, even the image of this ‘reality’ is ultimately questionable: when we finally reach the perfect beach at the end of The Thirteenth Floor “we meet it not as actuality but as depiction”, gazing out at a clearly CGI-conjured image that serves as a dreamscape for the protagonist.

Despite his quite convincing political critique of globalised cinema, Sean Cubitt is determined to ultimately assert contemporary film as a positive event. A “commodity cinema” can possibly “regenerate” its audience he argues, concluding: “this possibility…is the utopian in film that has always made it so fascinating.” Cinema might not be fully manifesting its hopeful role, but Cubitt suggests it at least offers a starting point.

For all its robust theoretical discussion, The Cinema Effect ends on a naïve hopefulness in cinema’s empowering potential. This amounts to a wishful metaphysics of becoming that is not necessarily any less idealist or problematic than the ontological discourses Cubitt wishes to transcend. His impressive and rich response to cinema’s theoretical challenge deals with crucial questions we must continue to ask, just as his argument plays out familiar historical blind spots and prescriptive philosophical understandings of this still elusive artform.

Many of the most memorably absurd moments in recent Australian films have occurred in the crime comedy genre. In Gregor Jordan’s Two Hands (1999), a clueless, Stubbie-clad hit man loads rusty bullets into his ‘piece’ turning the murder weapon into a popgun and the murder attempt into a farce. Johnny Spiteri (David Wenham) has government fraud investigators in knots, and the audience in stitches, with his inadvertent obfuscations in Gettin’ Square (Jonathan Teplitzky, 2003). When Dale (Guy Pearce) robs the cashed-up Melbourne Cup bookies in The Hard Word (Scott Roberts, 2003), he addresses the crowd in the manner of a droll, Ned Kelly-inspired MC: “Can I have your attention: stick ‘em up. No need to be afraid, we’ve done this many times before.”

In the last 5 years, crime comedies have featured consistently on Australian screens, with varying degrees of critical and commercial success. Two Hands, The Hard Word and Dirty Deeds (David Caesar, 2002) achieved respectable box office returns, while last year Gettin’ Square won critical acclaim, a swag of awards and moderate commercial success. Other less prominent examples of the genre include Muggers (Dean Murphy, 2000), The Nugget (Bill Bennett, 2002), Horseplay (Stavros Kazantzidis, 2003) and Bad Eggs (Tony Martin, 2003). While these films tackle the crime comedy format in different ways, they are all genre films with explicit links to the American crime comedy tradition and the caper sub-genre in particular.

The genre film has had a problematic history in Australia ever since the mid-70s revival of the local film industry. The first decade was dominated by period dramas explicitly influenced by a European art house narrative tradition and aesthetic. Government funding through the Australian Film Commission actively supported the production of films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975), My Brilliant Career (Gillian Armstrong, 1979) and Gallipoli (Peter Weir, 1981), giving rise to the pejorative tag ‘AFC genre’. These films were the product of a funding strategy that discouraged films modeled on mainstream Hollywood genres.

There were sound financial reasons for not competing with Hollywood in the production of big budget genre pictures, but the motivation for funding so-called ‘quality’ films had more to do with an entrenched cultural, rather than mercantile, rationale. Graham Turner has argued that following the revival of the industry film became the dominant mode of cultural representation (Graham Turner, “The Genres are American: Australian Narrative, Australian film, and the Problem of Genre”, Film Literature Quarterly, Volume XXI, no. 2, April 1993). Feature films were required to articulate pressing issues of nationhood and national identity, hence the preponderance of narratives dealing with aspects of Australian cultural, social and political history. This necessarily limited the generic diversity of the feature film industry.

While the hegemony of the ‘AFC genre’ gradually gave way to an industry that could accommodate Crocodile Dundee (Peter Faiman, 1986) alongside High Tide (Gillian Armstrong, 1987), the genre film has generally continued to be regarded as fundamentally ‘un-Australian’. However, the current spate of Australian crime comedies arguably reflects an increased willingness on the part of filmmakers to tackle genre-based projects. Given that the 4 main examples cited earlier received substantial government funding and yielded reasonable box office returns, there also seems to be a corresponding willingness on the part of Australian film funding bodies and local audiences to support such films.

But the success of the local crime comedy does not necessarily attest to the industry’s overwhelming embrace of the genre film, but rather the appeal of a specific genre. Unlike the Western or horror film, the codes and conventions of the crime comedy—particularly the caper film—seem peculiarly suited to the collective temperament of Australian audiences.

A sub-genre of the American gangster film, the caper film typically features a group of professional crooks planning an elaborate robbery. Due to the personal foibles of individual characters and/or disagreements within the group, the plan often goes wrong. Think The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950) or Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1992). In both the dramatic and comic versions of the genre, the caper film is underpinned by a fundamentally anti-authoritarian and egalitarian imperative. Whether the target is a bank or a racetrack, much of the pleasure in these films derives from the social transgression represented by attacks on institutions. Equally, the emphasis on criminal camaraderie and group loyalty is paramount. Given the ingrained anti-authoritarian streak in the Australian national character, our history of venerating rogues and outlaws and our equally celebrated ethic of ‘mateship’, it is not hard to see why the caper film might have singular appeal.

In The Hard Word and Gettin’ Square, early scenes in jail establish the crucial criminal partnerships. In the former, it is the fraternal triumvirate of the Twentyman brothers, and in the latter, the unlikely alliance between Barry Worth (Sam Worthington) and Johnny Spiteri. In both films, the criminals are generally depicted as amusingly flawed characters who are more lovable louts than hardened mobsters. And while an audacious crime is central to the plot of both films, it is the nexus of corrupt law enforcement figures that constitutes the most pernicious manifestation of ‘organised crime.’

Much of the humour in both films arises not only from the planned assault on the bookies and banks, but also on the crooked cops and bent lawyers who are the real villains of the piece. It is also significant that, in contrast to the American tradition, crime in recent Australian caper films pays very well. Things do not go precisely to plan, but the criminals in The Hard Word and Gettin’ Square get more than square.

While these 2 films draw on the American caper tradition, it could also be argued that their appeal, and the appeal of other films like Two Hands and Dirty Deeds, derives largely from their distinctively Australian rendering of the crime comedy genre. All 4 films are memorable for their idiosyncratic incarnations of laconic, casually dressed, foul-mouthed crims who are capable of juggling home duties with hard crime. In Two Hands, for example, Pando (Bryan Brown) patiently instructs his son in origami techniques while simultaneously organising a hit.

Group dynamics in these films are characterised by a wonderfully expressive local vernacular. Dialogue is liberally peppered with rhyming slang and good old-fashioned Australian colloquialisms. Given the aggressively masculine milieu of the genre, the scripts have a humorous, unequivocally blokey tenor. In Dirty Deeds and Gettin’ Square, the presence of American and British characters respectively also highlights the peculiarities of the local lingo by comically foregrounding cultural differences in language and behaviour.

The presence of outsiders also represents an explicit acknowledgement of the way Australian crime comedy has actively engaged with the generic traditions of both British and American cinemas. Rather than being immutable, the genre film is a dynamic form that can be endlessly modified and reinvented in different national and cultural contexts. Three decades ago, the Australian film industry deliberately defined itself in opposition to a Hollywood, genre-inspired model of filmmaking. In addition to other genre projects, the moderate to strong success of recent crime films suggests that Australian filmmakers and audiences are gettin’ square with the genre film.

Although the annual Mardi Gras Film Festival is the largest lesbian and gay film festival in Australia, like most community arts organisations, Queer Screen (which runs the festival) has gone through its share of crises and transformations over the last decade. Queer Screen’s landmark 10th anniversary celebration last year coincided with the birth of the ‘New’ Mardi Gras, which saw the event returning to its protest roots after massive financial problems. Spending cutbacks have meant that since last year Queer Screen has operated without the substantial financial support it once received from Mardi Gras. Enthusiasm for the festival was not dampened, however, with several sell-out sessions and ticket sales up from last year.

The theme of this year’s festival was ‘Fresh’, reflecting the wider changes in Mardi Gras and in community expectations regarding the organisation. Using the cross-section of a watermelon as its logo, festival publicity offered “12 Juicy Days of Sex, Seduction, Comedy, Thrills, Tears, Tantrums and Drama.” Despite commercial imperatives accounting for some fairly conservative (ie ‘crowd-pleasing’) films in the program, there were several welcome new initiatives rejuvenating the festival this year. For the first time, a series of youth sessions were programmed, which were a great success. The festival also displayed a greater commitment to Australian film than ever before, in an attempt to reach out to the local queer community. Another refreshing innovation was Queer_pixels, an initiative by board member Debs McCann, which showcased short works by digital media artists prior to the feature films. These ‘byte-sized’ offerings were funny, quirky and often politically engaged

A centerpiece of the festival was a 2-part retrospective from the ScreenSound archives, “Imagining Queer: Historical Views on Australian Film and Television”, curated by Barry McKay and Marilyn Dooley. The first part covered the period 1910-1950, prior to the arrival of television in Australia. Part 2 covered 1950 to 1980 and was dominated by clips from 1970s Australian television. It also included a specially-created selection of scenes from Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright (1971), in which the protagonist’s decline into drinking, gambling and the culture of homoerotic mateship was edited into a remarkable sequence just a few minutes long. Dooley, in introducing both sessions, reminded audiences to watch the clips with a “camp sensibility” (as if this were necessary!). While this ‘sensibility’ was sometimes stretched to the limit (many of the clips were more about vague issues of gender than sexuality), the retrospectives were engaging and also held interest for those outside the queer community. Programmer David Pearce noted that the 4 bio-pics featured in the festival—The Life and Times of Count Luchino Visconti, Phooey Rosa (on Rosa Von Praunheim), A World of Love (on Pier Paolo Pasolini) and The Legend of Leigh Bowery—were also interesting to a wider audience.

In terms of Australian features, we were also treated to a screening of The Set (Frank Brittain, 1969), arguably the first gay movie made in Australia. The film was introduced by one of the film’s writers, Roger Ward, and 2 of the stars, Hazel Phillips and Ken “Kandy” Johnson. One of the pleasures of attending the screenings of Australian films was the Q & A’s with casts and crews. Also of note among the Australian features was Max: A Cautionary Tale (2003), an allegorical coming out tale by young director Nicholas Verso, who was also present at the festival. Described by Verso as “The Breakfast Club meets Carrie,” Max tells the story of teenager Damien Wilson. After moving house with his family, the boy comes to believe there is something lurking at the end of the corridor in their new home. Considering the film was shot in 12 days on a budget of $3000, it was quite an achievement.

Four sessions curated by programmer Megan Carrigy tackled issues aimed specifically at younger audiences, aged 15 and over. A youth program was certainly overdue (the Melbourne Queer Film Festival has had such a program for several years now), and this initiative in particular demonstrated that the festival is truly committed to meeting the diverse needs of the gay and lesbian community.

The stand-out film of the youth program and indeed the whole festival was Straight Out: Stories from Iceland, a documentary about queer youth that claims to be the first queer film to come out of Iceland. The films’ interviewees were honest and articulate in discussing issues such as first love, drugs, suicide attempts and coming out. The emotions expressed in the film were very direct and reduced some in the audience to tears.

Also well received was Pink Sheep, a collaboration between the youth at Twenty10 (a support organisation for young gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders) and Channel Free at MetroScreen. The youth sessions were well supported by audiences of diverse ages, but Carrigy stressed the importance of working to reach a youth audience from outside metropolitan Sydney and finding ways of making the festival more accessible to them. Carrigy put on an impressive program in her first year in this newly created position. It was wonderful to see queer youth having some control over the festival and enjoying a dedicated space where they were able to see themselves represented on screen.

Overall, the film festival had an optimistic vibe this year. Hearing queer youth cheer their own sessions, seeing lines of boys queue up outside the Academy Twin on Oxford Street and experiencing a truly collective viewing experience with a theatre full of vocal women at the sold-out session of the lesbian erotic film Madam and Eve, it was clear that the festival is doing its job of catering for the diverse queer audience. In ‘going local’, giving a voice to its youth and showing a commitment to embracing and promoting alternative screen cultures, Queer Screen proved that it is moving with the times. Hopefully this momentum will see the organisation sustain itself in coming years and retain the support of its growing audience.

11th Mardi Gras Film Festival, Academy Twin and Dendy Newtown, Sydney, February 11-22

Not since the halcyon days of the Weimar Republic has the German film industry been so active or enjoyed such popular success inside Germany. Goodbye Lenin, which opened last year’s Festival of German Cinema, was hugely popular. This year’s festival similarly opens with a box office hit that revisits Germany’s past.

The Miracle of Bern (director Sönke Wortmann) is a melodrama charting the restoration of the Germany’s self-respect through the story of a family reunited after the War. Their story coincides with Germany’s sporting triumph of winning the World Cup in 1954. Aptly described as the kind of film critics hate and audiences love, this vision of post-war Germany is at times bleak, but the overall tone is amiable and up-beat.

Like The Miracle of Bern, Swabian Children comes from a well established prize winning director, Jo Baier. His film deals with a little known chapter of German history as compelling as it is shocking: the child slave trade at the turn of the last century.

The Stratosphere Girl comes direct from the Berlin International Film Festival. The dark futuristic vision of this heavily stylised action mystery owes much to Japanese Anime and Blade Runner. Nightsongs also premiered at the Berlinale. A sinister and unnerving psychodrama, the film portrays the nuclear family as a repository of resentment and seething contempt.

One of the most curious features of the festival stars Franke Potente, the heroine of cult film Run Lola Run. In Blueprint Potente plays a double-role: a world famous concert pianist and composer and her clone daughter. Although the theme is topical and provocative, for historical-ideological reasons the cloning experiment takes place outside of Germany in Canada, where much of the movie was shot.

Two films screening at the festival deal with asylum seekers and illegal immigrants in Germany. Gate to Heaven is an airport romance between an Indian woman and a Russian man that includes Bollywood-style musical interludes. A Little Bit of Freedom is much more sombre in tone and is among the most remarkably vibrant films in the festival. It revolves around 2 teenagers struggling to survive in Hamburg’s red light district, bound by their experiences as illegal immigrants. Their mutual loyalty is their only solace in a harsh underworld of betrayal and deceit.

Film buffs will be delighted to see the 60 minute documentary Fassbinder in Hollywood (director Robert Fischer), which includes rarely seen footage and valuable insights into the famous director’s career.

The New Directions program, a selection of extraordinarily accomplished German film school shorts, will also be screening again this year. A range of innovative animations will be featured, including the breathtakingly lyrical Medea and My Parents, an uproarious satire about sexuality in the suburbs.

The greatest treats of the festival are the smaller, distinctive comedies, like Play it Loud, Learning to Lie and Gun Shy. The director of Play it Loud, Benjamin Quabeck, will be a guest of the festival. His film takes a satirical but affectionate look at the explosion of New Wave music and fashion in the provincial backwater of Schwabing. Paul, the irrepressible protagonist, is a trainee bank clerk, obsessed with staging a huge concert featuring his friends. All of the ridiculous solemnity of New Wave music and fashion are impeccably captured in this film: the haircuts, flamboyant clothes, nihilistic lyrics, robotic dancing and clubs. Gun Shy is a quirky black comedy, focusing on the idiosyncrasies and eccentric events in the life of Lukas, a loner who delivers “meals on wheels” to old people. His is a world populated by misfits and the film is a beguiling and unruly flight of fantasy.

The Festival of German Cinema provides audiences in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne with a rare opportunity to see a cross-section of films from one of Europe’s most vibrant and active filmmaking cultures.

3rd Festival of German Cinema, Chauvel and Valhalla Cinemas, Sydney, April 15-25; Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, April 16-25; Southbank Cinemas, Brisbane, April 21-24

The history of video art is closely allied to developments in performance and as an art form in itself video has made a strong investment in performativity. Visual artists turned away from canvas to their own bodies in the 60s through performance art, cross artform collaborations and other means to regain a sense of integrity outside the marketplace: video was to become one such tool observing everyday performance, performance artists and dancers, and video artists themselves in the frame.

John Gillies is a mainstay of and inspiration to the Sydney experimental arts scene as video-maker, sound artist, musician and teacher (College of Fine Arts, UNSW) with a long association with Performance Space where a retrospective of his video works is about to be held (April 16-May 13). His new work, the deeply engaging and politically suggestive Divide will premiere later this year.

Youth theatre in Queensland, says Gillies, kindled his interest in performance. At Darling Downs College of Advanced Education from 1978 to 1980 he studied film and video with David Perry of UBU fame. As well as creating sculptures and installations he also worked as a musician and sound designer, composing for theatre productions of plays by Peter Weiss and Bertolt Brecht. He also studied Balinese and experimental music.

Little projects, some of them performance-based videos which turned into the first works I showed in Sydney in the early 1980s. One involves me with a microphone feeding back, looking for resonant frequencies in a room. They’re formalist experiments in the style of 70s performance video.

I came to Sydney in 1980 because I had a show at Watters Gallery. It was quite an exciting time. There was a performance scene and artists like Mike Parr and a lot of music. I got involved with alternative spaces and people like [sound artist] Rik Rue and started doing tape cut-up works and live sound and releasing audio compilation cut ups—the whole cassette boom. By then I was also a student at Sydney College of the Arts making performances and some video work: still very much formalist performance art works, often looking at found gestures, and also making formalist, experimental sound works.

What about the synthesis of sound and video which is characteristic of your work?

In the early work the sound piece came first, then the video. In editing and constructing videos you’re actually playing with musical form. All that shaping and flow and repetition that I use a lot always echo musical structure.

Once you’d settled in Sydney, how long before you started sending videos out?

The Film-makers Co-op, the Super-8 Film Group and art-based video-makers like myself, Jill Scott, Peter Callas, Kathy Vogan (who’s just returned to Australia. She’s been living in France for the last 20 years). And Roslyn Oxley was showing art video in her gallery. Video seemed a thing you could possibly do.

Both. It’s allowed me to keep working. And remember technology was much more expensive then. The only way to access it was through institutions. It’s allowed me to really research and develop my ideas through the process of supervising and teaching. I get a lot from my students as well.

You’re still teaching though you’ve had 2 years out with a New Media Arts Fellowship.

I’ve had bits of time out all over the place but I’m still a full-time lecturer.

You’ve weathered the storms of change in the tertiary education system and to your 4D Studies Department.

In the early 90s it was particularly strong. There are still interesting people coming out of it all the time. It’s still potentially fantastic, the intersection between fine art practice and time-based forms that no one else is really doing on that scale. I think it was really important historically in terms of what happened with the creation of the New Media Arts Fund of the Australia Council. There was a bit of synchronicity there. A lot of the graduates got grants to create works right away. There’s a lot more university pressure now to produce more “packaged” work and to be more commercial…But I’m not pessimistic at all because I still see fantastic work from students.

That’s one of the reasons I live in Sydney. There continues to be a fantastically interesting performance scene here. People work and co-operate with each other, see and build on each other’s work. And I don’t know if this really happens in the music or in visual arts in the same way.

What is it about those performers? In your work they often appear to be in a state of being which is transcendent or trance-like. At other times they look like they might have been clipped from an Eisenstein film.

There are echoes of Eisenstein’s imagery. There’s lots of references. I see it all the time. I don’t even know that I’m necessarily doing it.

Your video works have a cinematic quality although they’re from a very different tradition.

I’m interested in cinema, in building a cinema. You can build it on texts and plays and books as in a narrative, naturalistic kind of cinema which seems problematic in Australia. But then there is another tradition here. My project is to build some kind of cinema based on that milieu. There’s a cinema language that can be explored a bit more. In the film Techno Dumb Show with the Sydney Front, there’s the idea of silent cinema—there are still possibilities within that form.

That comes from music. The editing there is mixing. It’s me physically switching between visual sources or, as in the last section with Nigel Kellaway of Techno Dumb Show, I’m literally playing the image of Kellaway on the keyboard of a tape-recorder. What you see is like take number 20.

That’s one of my favourite sequences, a gestural dance. Even though the sequencing of repeated and rewound gestures has since become a familiar device it’s still very powerful in your work. Initially it looks like Kellaway’s conducting, then like he’s gradually going off the air and, at the end, he’s thinking “where have I been?”

In that piece I tried to “flip-flop” all the way through. There’s pathos, there’s comedy. You’re watching the process of backwards-and-forwards. There’s no certainty. Nothing is pinned down.

Other bits look quite cinematic—the reverse field shots of Clare Grant at the phone—and others have a stranger sense of artifice: the performers running on the spot.

It’s actually a shot from a train, going in reverse. So it’s a contradiction again. They’re running in the opposite direction. It’s an impossibility. They’re trapped in this state. So yes, I use bits of cinematic shot construction. And that’s probably what makes my video art a bit different.

It’s video art with highly integrated cinematic referencing which is not there just for its own sake…

It’s another language.

From various Sydney Front shows. It was conceived as a catalogue, a couple of pages, a list of gestures. So it had no other structure. There were various takes so the performers could see themselves, look at the takes. It’s one of the great things about video. Or I’d suggest things, or heighten it a bit more so that they were performing for the camera rather than for a live audience…I’m really interested in the translation between mediums. I don’t want the work to be a representation of performance. I want it to be performative on the screen and some sort of essence of what the artists’ work is about.

In the enigmatic De Quincey Tapes there’s an opening rustling in bushes and in the next sequence some kind of tussle going on, until Tess De Quincey emerges in an intense whirling and eventually evaporates into the dark.

Yes, it’s Tess wrestling with herself. That’s a purely improvisatory work. We went to a studio for a number of nights over a month and I’d suggest things, she’d bring things along. It’s like a give and take, a kind of play between us. That’s something you learn from music, the ability to play with other people, listening and watching each other, picking up on each other.

A moving painting. That’s very much an installation. It’s not something you would sit in a cinema and watch. I tried to have no performers, but a sense of people absent, perhaps of ghosts. That was the starting point for the work that came after, of people not as complete, more as ciphers, holders of character but shifting and unstable. My new work explores that a lot.

Armada is full of iconic imagery and sounds. On the one hand, you have black and white footage of Armada ships vis a vis the intended Spanish invasion of England in the late 16th century. But on the other hand you have overlaid rotating and counter-rotating images of a Union Jack and of a 19th century train wheel alternating with pages from the Old Testament flicking backwards with a terrible tearing sound. How does that tally with this notion of absence you’re talking about?

I’m throwing all those images up as a painter might, even though I’m working with time. The images are pregnant with possibility rather than having any literal meaning. I’m trying to touch on something about Australian history and British colonialism.

With the Old Testament text is there a sense of prophecy and predestination?

When I showed it in Brazil it evoked connections with British colonialism which was very strong there in the 19th century. The imagery in my work is like ink-blot tests, sometimes indistinct and may be degraded in some of the really early work. That allows a space for a kind of reading from the audience which is more open. I hope the work is evocative.

No. It’s all done in video post-production. Everything in that video is appropriated imagery, even the boats. They’re models. Miniatures. It’s compositing. And all that work starts off in drawing. The work comes out of that. That’s quite important.

Speaking of place, I’ve been watching The Mary Stuart Tapes with Clare Grant as Mary Stuart wandering the city streets at night, a 16th century figure in a post-colonial site.

You can’t look at the history of Australia in isolation. The history of contemporary Australia goes back 60,000 years here. But it also goes back to other places.

(Laughs) Which is part of the body of Australia in a way. I was interested in the idea that she’s a possibility that could be buried inside the state of Australia. What if Australia was a Catholic state rather than the pseudo-Anglican state which it’s attempting to be at the moment?

Divide

Divide, your new 30 minute video work, is the most cinematic of your output in terms of the framing, shooting and narrative construction, even though it remains quite unpredictable. Did you storyboard it?

Sections are storyboarded. It started off as a list. Then cards and then juggling them around. Then I wrote a treatment, like a film scenario. That’s like a work in itself. Then I set about trying to realise it. Then shooting it was a matter of trying to reproduce that treatment which, of course, had to be different. Even though I say I storyboarded parts of it—and I’ve storyboarded stuff before—I wanted to shoot in an open kind of way, open to chance, to accident, to improvisation, to being in a location and having that seep in to the performers and the action. It would be crazy to go to a location, to have it all planned out and then actually miss the best things that were possibly there.

In a way, video is a process, a way of doing. If I had to shoot with film it would have been a very different thing and not as good. That goes for all the video work. That’s one reason I’m using video.

Just DV (digital video), but I did a lot of post-production all the way through. All the imagery in my work going back 20 years is highly processed. I was originally interested in painting but by using analogue and digital techniques I can explore ideas of surface and image and I can manipulate the image. Cinematographers talk about painting with light. It’s the same kind of thing.

As in the traditions of filmmakers like Kurosawa or others shooting in nature you give us time—

To see nature, to be part of the density of the trees, to see the light coming down. And some of the darkest shots are the most beautiful.

A lot of it was shot after the sun had gone down which is usually a real no-no with video.

The strangest thing about it—and this comes back to the idea of pulse—people don’t seem to be quite moving in real time. There’s that slightly pixilated feel.

You’re already dealing with performers Ari Ehrlich, Denis Beaubois, Lee Wilson, Shu Fengshan who are very good conveying that sense of otherness.

The central problem with making any kind of work is actually finding a sense of movement in the centre of the work. That goes for any kind of time-based work. It could be a piece of animation or even a straight drama. How do the people move? How does the movement work throughout the piece, not just the people but how the sense of movement flows through the whole work. When you’ve got that, you’ve kind of got the work…

Although we hear the sounds of movement of horses and people and water running and stones chipping beneath hooves, this is essentially a silent film, I mean it’s without dialogue, as if witnessed by a silent observer.

Every sound is post-produced. So with each piece I do there’s a technical as well as a conceptual experiment. It makes the process very slow but then I see the whole work, even though it appears to be naturalistic, as being like a concrete sound piece.

There’s a prevalent third person point of view but there are also quite a few subjective moments like the surprise encounter in the bush with a Peking Opera artist, where you feel you’re either with these men or looking over their shoulders. There’s a kind of in and out in the visual pulse.

I didn’t want the audience to be too close to these characters. And I didn’t want to use the classic techniques for suturing the viewer into the narrative. I still wanted them to be distanced from it, which could be alienating. Who are these men they are watching, what are they?

Most of the incidents in the work are in a sense historically accurate. These are 1840s sheep in an Australian forest—the first European animals here. And the forest’s not the right place for them. So it’s a different image from the one we have of sheep and their landscape now.

It’s ambiguous. I want it to be open to some kind of reading about the present as well.

You have a young voice narrating the story of Abraham. Are you drawing an analogy between the Israelites’ destruction of the Canaanites…

That’s very literal…

…vis a vis the current plight of the Palestinians, vis a vis European arrival in this landscape and the destruction of Aboriginal culture, even though the Aboriginal presence is not visible in the video? Is the child reader Indigenous?

But because of the way you begin with the Abraham story, repeat it and enlarge it, it must play a potent symbolic role. Then there’s the parallel image of the pages from the Bible being torn out and thrown away, beautifully shot and wafting through the air and in water. Is that manipulated post-production?

Nothing is slowed down in the whole thing. We spent a day throwing bits of paper around.

I think back to Armada and the sense of the colonialist belief in predestination which we so totally doubt now.

It’s there. It’s buried and it keeps coming back. And we’ve seen that so strongly in the last 5 years here. I tear my hair out. And it’s particularly the Bible, especially the Old Testament, which is obsessed with who’s worthy, who’s unworthy, who’s saved and who’s not, who belongs to the land and who doesn’t. All these dualities are set out in that text and it’s obviously the basis for Islam and Judaism—who God will bless and not bless. So it’s not like he’ll bless everyone. It’s the chosen. And it’s interesting to think about Australia in that paradigm and the forming of nations and the idea of the chosen nation.

By the end the imagery becomes stranger and richer, there’s a lamb and a burning tree—even more suggestive and more complex.

It can be anything. By the end of the piece the men are in cleared land. They’ve passed a threshold. After the credits it’s land which has no vegetation at all. And after the closing shot of the sheep, it’s just cracked ground. It’s the most literal thing I’ve done.

There’s a density of iconic imagery but it doesn’t feel forced because the rhythms are so easy.

It should feel natural. It belongs, it is of the place and it’s not a representation. I’m trying to tap threads or undercurrents.

Partly by putting the performers in that space, living in it and chasing after sheep up and down hillsides and rebuilding fences, and blocking off the rest of the world totally.

When we see the encounter with the Peking Opera performer it’s as if these European herdsmen arrive and find that Australia’s part of Asia.

People tell me stories about how something like that could have happened, or did. Someone told me about a burning tree. I’m trying to dredge up things that people will be able to add their stories to. It’s like a sub-current.

Symbolism can be heavy-handed and some of these images are very literal but others are ambiguous, like tearing up the Bible. Are the men tearing it up to plant it like seeds all the way through the landscape?

The work is inspired by the performers. This is an important point. I see them doing things and that sparks an idea. The Mary Stuart Tapes, it’s Clare Grant that sparked that idea. And Divide was sparked very much from Denis Beaubois and Ari Ehrlich.

But they didn’t have any conceptual input initially. It’s your response to who you could work with.

The images float around in my head and because their performance is open and the images they create are open, you can see them in all kinds of contexts or tailored in a particular way. I find that really interesting.

I’ll be submitting it to video and film festivals. There’s an installation version as well which has 2 screens. On one screen is the video as you’ve seen it. On the other are sheep watching it. And the audience is in the middle.

John Gillies is one of the facilitators for the hybrid arts laboratory Time_Place_Space 3 in Adelaide, July.

There is hope. There is no hope. Transmediale 04 ‘s theme “Fly Utopia” reverberates with the tug-o-war between idealism and cynicism. With the whole 21st century before us and the shattered illusions of the last in a pile at our feet, how do we actively construct our future realities? And what roles do art and technology play within those futures? Do we still believe that art can be wielded as a weapon, or is its role merely as an escape plan for collective imaginings?

Transmediale is an annual 5-day media art festival based at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt. It consists of a conference, a lecture series, exhibition, workspace and screening program. The majority of the content is selected via an international competition which divides work into the categories of Software, Interaction and Image. In 2003, over 1000 entries were submitted.

The festival started out 17 years ago under the name Videofest, so it’s not surprising that the Screening section makes up a large proportion of the event with 8 curated programs drawn from the Image entries. These are screened at specific times but also run as video-on-demand in a dedicated lounge area. Of particular interest is the re-emergence of narrative within the experimental video genre. The Tropfest-style short has made narrative a dirty word in the Australian digital art scene, but something different is happening here. The program Subtext Slides revelled in the trend, offering some fine examples such as Chubby Buddy by Erika Yeomans (US) in which a New York publisher in the midst of a mid-life crisis catches trains to the suburbs to steal stuffed toys (chubby buddies) from family houses; or 1.1 Acre Flat Screen in which a European family buys an acre of land in New Mexico on eBay and then attempts to recreate the cowboy existence. These narratives sound simple enough, however their gradual exposition and excessive attention to detail—a fetishisation of the mundane—shifts them into the surreal. Fashion Town 2: Race for Oblivion by Ivan Hürzler (US) is a 2-channel work shown as split-screen. One screen shows a progression of stills, the other short video segments set on the fictional Planet Los Angeles which is at war with the utopian state of Fashion Town. The literal ‘hit’ of the festival was a piece by Canadian Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay called I am a Boyband in which the artist plays all the members of a generic pop group singing a souped-up version of the Elizabethan song “Come Again, Sweet Love”, with joyous choreography. This work would sit perfectly alongside the pop culture parodies of our own Kingpins and Kate Murphy’s Britney Love.

As well as the competition programs there were also a number of invited features. Mark Boswell’s (US) The Subversion Agency questions ideas of control and the invisible powers that wield it through a stunning “Situationist satire.” Nine years in the making, the fictional footage actually makes up only 30 minutes of the 72 minute film which is sliced and mashed between propaganda and archival footage, creating a visually enthralling piece of parody and paranoia that would make William Burroughs proud. Other invited compilations included an Electrofringe program Alterna Terra Zones of work by emerging Australian video artists (including Anto Skene, Tania Doropoulos, Sumugan Sivansen, Tim Parish and Scott Morrison). An inspiring inclusion was Utopia Travel in which David Rych and Emmanuel Danesch (Austria) travelled from Cairo to Vienna in an old taxi, collecting video works which were screened along the way, creating a very immediate cultural exchange. The selected videos document a disturbing propensity for war and violence.

One of the more accessible pieces at the festival was Bioland—a virtual department store of the future catering for all human needs. Under the guidance of Fiona Raby and Gerald O’Carroll, students from the Architecture Department of the Royal College of Art in London developed design concepts for bio-products of the future such as Bio Trace which allows you to inject your DNA into a tree that will live on after you; or Utility Pets, your own pet pig infused with your DNA to make the bond more meaningful and subvert the desire to eat it; and engagement rings grown and spliced from the lovers’ own bone (now that’s what I call commitment). Beyond the heavy irony, these exercises in imagining, represented in the exhibition by a bricolage of items in Bioland shopping bags, were disturbingly insightful, raising many questions about collusions between science, technology and perhaps society’s greatest weakness—consumerism.

The exhibition comprised mostly competition entries along with curated video works. Of particular interest was Daniel Alina Plewe’s General News (www.generalnews.de), a meta-browser that rewrites any html website, substituting words drawn from a university database. The visitor can choose the levels of substitution from directly synonymous through to abstract. Plewe is interested in the challenges for meaning and language that such a tool opens up.

In the plethora of works hidden in computers and viewed on screens, Shilpa Gupta’s installation Your Kidney Supermarket offered a welcome engagement with the physical environment. Bags of brightly coloured kidneys decorated the walls around the appropriately kidney-shaped lounge where you could watch a sales video featuring William Shatner. A computer at the ready provided an online shopping experience—choose your own replacement organ. Gupta’s work won the Interaction award with the disclaimer that even though the work could exist free from the digital domain, “its meaning relies heavily on the social and economic culture of digital systems.” In 2003 no Interaction award was given and in 2004, although receiving 200 works, the jury was disappointed in the level of work. This perhaps has resulted from a narrowness in the definition of interactivity. Until now, the Interaction category has not considered the development of expert user interfaces, ie performer to technology inter-relations, as viable entries. The jury also complained that it had received a lot of non-interactive sound and installation works. As acknowledged by the jury, this would suggest aspects of practice are not being addressed by the present categorisations in Transmediale.

Sound, electronic music and audiovisual performance are the territory of Club Transmediale. Mostly this work is presented within the club environment (unfortunately meaning that the level of discussion is not as rigorous), however 2 events involved roving the streets of Berlin by bus. Unfortunately, I missed the Xplo bus, a journey driven by GPS audio programming, however the De-Place/Re-Place bus tour with sound performances was more than satisfying. The audience was taken to 4 different locations and treated to site-based works. Kaffe Matthews’ piece in the cellar of an old brewery was truly sublime. The escalating carnivorous nature of her sampling and resampling process caused every particle within the cavernous space to vibrate. The highlight of the night (and the festival for me) was the installation by Christina Kubisch which took place in the Research Institute for Water and Naval Engineering. The audience was invited to don gumboots and electromagnetic headphones and wade into an indoor channel of ankle deep water. At the other end was a beautiful loom of red wires that fanned out and into the water. As you walked along you began to pick up various hums and distant voices: each wire was transmitting a text around shipping and navigation. You could mix your own sonic experience by zigzagging across the wires, changing proximity to the loom for intensity. It was a stunning work in its sonic, visual, and physical elements.

Transmediale 04 in some ways was a perplexing event, not just in the thematic ground it was exploring but in its shaping of events. The conference provided some interesting discussion, however in the sessions I attended, the talk was often disconnected from the practice of art-making. Coupled with the limited space given to installation and performance work, it often felt like a head that had forgotten it had (or could not locate) a body. For instance, in one of the most interesting discussions, Andreas Broegger presented a paper on the Software exhibition in New York in 1970, equating the written instructions of the performance art works of Vito Acconci and associates with software. What never seemed to come up in the ensuing discussion was the agency and very real presence of the body within these works. At the same time the festival was challenging and enlightening as many of the works presented actively pushed, pulled and expanded form and technologies, illustrating that there are still subversive uses to be discovered, while also offering alternative visions and ideals.

Transmediale has secured funding from the Federal Culture Foundation, ensuring its continued existence 2005-2009. Perhaps this will allow an expansion and reintegration of some of the more physical aspects of media art. I live in hope.

Transmediale 04: Fly Utopia, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Jan 31 – Feb 4, www.transmediale.de

The music video is a sorely undervalued form that is finally gaining broader recognition through dedicated festivals, DVDs and the rising profile of many music video directors. With its potential for wide exhibition and emphasis on innovative style, the video clip poses an exciting challenge for short filmmakers and is increasingly an area in which digital filmmakers cut their teeth. Twelve clips were produced in South Australia last year under the 4 Minute Wonders initiative, to accompany tracks selected in Triple J’s Unearthed competition. These works screened alongside international clips produced under similar schemes at this year’s Adelaide Fringe.

The 4 Minute Wonders were funded by the South Australian Film Corporation (SAFC) and the ABC, largely thanks to the efforts of SAFC Project Officer Heather Croall. Observing the success of the original scheme in Scotland, Croall created 4 Minute Wonders in Australia to encourage digital filmmaking in the music video format.

The project criteria were a strong narrative, the use of digital media and collaboration between professional and emerging animators and filmmakers. The emphasis on digital and new media extended throughout the process, from development (the music tracks were downloaded and treatments submitted online) through production (digital production techniques were requisite) to multi-platform exhibition. The clips were released on DVD, screened on ABC TV and at festivals such as the Adelaide Fringe and Edinburgh Film Festival, but were primarily intended for showcasing online at www.abc.net.au/4minutewonders.

Daryl Watson and I applied successfully to make a video for the hip hop track Beats is a Drug by Adelaide Unearthed winners Snap 2 Zero. This song is a dark, choppy and evocative piece. We pitched a noir/horror/sci-fi/romance story in which ‘the beats’ are literally a drug, in the form of a glowing red mini-disc designed by a beautiful woman for her cyber-junkie lover. In order to ingest this drug, her lover undertakes extensive surgery to transform his tongue and jaw into a monstrous manga-inspired arachnid mini-disc player.

The mutating jaw was the major digital component of our video. Given the budget and time constraints, our approach was to concentrate the majority of our resources on this effect, with most of the remaining clip directed as live action. Thanks largely to the combined talents of seasoned cinematographer Ian Jones A.C.S. (The Tracker) and emerging local animation house PRA (People’s Republic of Animation), this 3D jaw effect is near seamless. As a director of drama my primary concern is telling stories entertainingly, without succumbing to the siren call of spectacle. It is gratifying, however, to hear a whole cinema gasp in unison at the sight of a man’s mouth doing what it shouldn’t do!

As a ‘traditional’ filmmaker with little experience in the fashionable but ill-defined world of ‘new media’, I was drawn to the 4 Minute Wonders initiative by a desire to expand my digital horizons. My problems with the specious categorisation of media aside, I am always keen to equip myself with new knowledge and tools that will help me tell screen stories to greater effect.

4 Minute Wonders provided many other emerging creative teams with the opportunity to express themselves digitally. The Bumblebeez’ Step Back was transformed into a Spike Jonze-style video in which a tacky cult leader and his 1980s-style brethren hole up in a Waco-esque retreat to await the coming of a UFO. Matt Bate and Martin Potter’s use of grainy verite-style footage shot on a single chip mini-DV camera works well with the lo-fi production of the Bumblebeez’ song.

Another clip which takes its cue from the 80s is Red Rocket, Amy Gebhardt and Jain Moralee’s clip for the group Fast Trains. Here, teenage fad culture is epitomised in the attire of a gang of kids wearing 80s costumes. In this clip and Liz and Kath Dooley’s Sunshine for Amber Suite, an outsider liberates himself from conformity through his colourful imaginings. Gebhardt’s protagonist brightens his world with Flash-animated animals, whereas the Dooleys’ drag-queen office worker transforms his parents’ house into a 2D aeroplane that flies through Dali and Magritte-inspired clouds.

Other clips of note include PRA’s The Bomb for The Fuzz, which cleverly uses ‘2 and-a-half-D’ animation to render Betty Boop-style strippers bursting open to reveal giant killer bugs that eat male patrons. Luke Gibbs’ You Are Expendable for Yunyu features a teddy bear violently destroyed by his fickle mistress, rendered in Waking Life-style sketchy animation. Both clips play upon male fear of the Other.

Credit must go to the SAFC and the ABC for investing in digital music video production. A liberated former film snob, I’m now itching for the chance to utilise my knowledge of digital techniques on my next production.

4 Minute Wonders, various filmmakers, FringeHUB, Adelaide Fringe 2004, March 1-3

Trying to analyse Matthew Barney’s 5 film, 7 hour Cremaster Cycle is a messy, thankless task not unlike the solipsistic rituals regularly carried out by Barney’s characters: scaling the lift-shaft of a skyscraper, smearing fuel-caps with cement and throwing Vaseline against a wall. As a mediocre artist but an undeniably gifted hustler, Barney’s basic strategy is to assemble freakishly elaborate objects which announce themselves as sui generis, leaving baffled critics to cast around for relevant terms of evaluation. By design, there’s no way to label the Cycle as cinema or sculpture, narrative or non-narrative. Still less are viewers seriously expected to decode the nebulous allegory that binds the whole saga together, which according to the website is something to do with “the process of sexual differentiation.”

Trained as a sculptor, Barney approaches cinema from the perspective of a galaxy far, far away. He isn’t really interested in storytelling, but he’s equally distant from the traditions of the medium’s avant-garde. Outside the gallery, his nearest relatives are purveyors of arthouse weirdness like Peter Greenaway and David Lynch (at his worst), fellow specialists in overripe calendar imagery punctuated by gross-out effects. Some typical scenes here involve celebrity model Aimee Mullins lounging next to a huge mound of grubby potatoes, gelatinous slugs oozing from the shiny uniforms of racing car drivers and Barney himself, as a character called the Entered Apprentice, being kidnapped, stripped and sexually assaulted by a group of gangsters. Though Jonathan Bepler’s modernist music supplies an atmosphere of sorts, Barney carefully avoids realising the comic or dramatic potential of these lurid scenarios. Like a fashion photographer, he fixes his mute performers in static poses which the camera circles or, more typically, zooms away from: a conjuror’s flourish cueing the audience to gape at each newly revealed ‘jaw-dropping’ image.

Beyond a desire to dazzle and baffle the viewer, what is the Cremaster Cycle really about? My short answer would be not much, but if the allegorical machinery underlying the films is too blatantly piecemeal to function as a resonant personal myth, nor is it simply an arbitrary system of aesthetic constraints. No doubt specific esoteric principles have been used to determine the disparate elements brought together in each installment: Masonic rituals, the life stories of Gary Gilmore and Harry Houdini, red-haired giants stomping around the Isle of Man. But in practice the forced connections between these elements serve less to generate unexpected meanings than to sharpen the impression of incongruity. The central tableau of Cremaster 1 supplies a paradigmatic example: crouched under a white tablecloth, a creature identified in the credits as Goodyear (Marti Domination) arranges grapes in patterns that diagram the choreography of a Busby Berkeley dance sequence, which in turn “delineates the contours of a still androgynous gonadal structure” (to quote the website again).

Without underestimating Barney’s capacity for humorless pretension, it seems likely that up to a point these proliferating, arbitrary correspondences are meant to be parodies of significance. Similarly, it’s likely that the grandiose scale of the Cycle parodies claims of monumentality in general, placing the notion of ‘masterpiece’ in ironic quotes. Appearing in various guises in 4 of the 5 films, Barney himself seems to be enacting a mocking, reductive version of the myth of the heroic artist. Like a postmodern Buster Keaton, he’s obliged to perform a series of impossible tasks that develop into ostentatious Freudian fantasy scenarios, such as plunging into water and crawling though cramped uterine tunnels in part 4, or slaying his artistic ‘father’ (sculptor Richard Serra) in combat near the end of part 3. Yet far from having been retrieved from the depths of the unconscious, Barney’s images and ideas are self-conscious to the point of suffocation. They are rarely seriously disturbing or erotic. In this regard, he’s very different from David Lynch, who despite some accidentally fashionable traits is ultimately a ‘naïve’ artist in the noblest sense.

Still, for all its archness, the Cycle can’t be called a spoof or a hoax: again, there’s a strategic indeterminacy in play. Barney’s exaggerated concern with literal masculinity is presumably satiric on some level, and his predictable obsessions with androgyny and prosthetic devices paraphrase a standard post-feminist view of gender and sexuality as constructed rather than natural. However, our understanding of all this has to change slightly once it’s recognised that the Cycle is above all a self-reflexive work, concerned with dramatising its own processes of articulation and gradual evolution towards the possibility of ‘significance’. In other words, Barney presents himself, through his onscreen avatars, as engaged in a quest for a hegemonic masculinity that’s also a quest for aesthetic success. This equation is not ironic at all, or at least is no obstacle to the kind of epic self-aggrandisement required to consolidate a reputation as a Major Artist Of Our Time. Then again, given the futility of Barney’s fictional labours, maybe the real point is art’s impossibility except as a cynical shell game, where the counters are fictitious but the prizes of wealth, fame and kudos are very real.

Or maybe the paradox is illusory. Just as beauty and ugliness co-exist and change places in Barney’s universe, he’s well aware that art is not just a matter of disciplined erections, so to speak, but also of decadence and waste. I suspect the real secret of the Cremaster Cycle’s relative popular success is simply the thrill of irresponsibility; the chance to marvel at the time, effort and resources squandered on this vaguely kinky nonsense. Admittedly, the budget for the whole seven hours probably wouldn’t cover catering on one of the Matrix sequels, but then the Wachowski Brothers are also obliged to entertain (whether they succeed is another question). Barney, on the other hand, has the advantage of an audience who are quite willing to be bored out of their skulls, provided he manages to flatter both their feelings of superiority and impotence. You pays your money and you takes your choice.

The Cremaster Cycle, director Matthew Barney, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, February 8-22, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, March 6-20

It’s 2pm. I’m late. The summer sun is burning my skin and millions of little clocks around the city are eating up the few minutes I have to locate the rendezvous point for uninitiated players in the WP Workroom. I’m having strange feelings of paranoia and self doubt. Who’s in on this game? Have the vendors at the FringeTix office already notified my game-hosts that I’ve arrived? Will it matter that I’m somewhat challenged in the spatial skills department? That I’m not a hard-core gamer? If only I’d played more SimCity, taken up orienteering, or knew how to use a Palm Pilot.

Several minutes and a few micro pep-talks later, I stumble into the waiting room for I Like Frank in Adelaide, a game connecting online participants and players on the street. This remarkable interactive performance event has been developed in the lead up to Adelaide Fringe 2004 by visiting UK artists’ collective Blast Theory, in collaboration with Nottingham University’s Mixed Reality Lab (MRL). Matt Adams, Ju Farr and Nick Tandavanitj are Blast Theory’s core members. They’re in Adelaide as part of the “Adelaide Thinkers in Residence” program, along with Professor Steve Benford, Martin Flintham, Jan Humble and Ian Taylor from the MRL.

Sitting in the waiting room is like sitting in a reality airlock that quarantines uninitiated gamers from the trappings and distractions of the outside world. The familiar face of a woman dressed in prison-warden-cum- street-ware garb emerges from the game’s ‘briefing room’ with a clip-board: “Please place your name here.” Smiling enigmatically, she takes our signatures and returns to the darkened room. Living in Adelaide, you tend to know just about everybody, so of course I know this woman. I decide to remain silent, lest I shatter the fragile beginnings of an altered experience.

Chatting pleasantly with a curator from Yogjakarta, Indonesia and an arts-worker visiting from Darwin, I became curious about what micro-mythologies may have been established about the game. There’s lots of talk about experimental mobile networks and references to Mission: Impossible but no dirt on our target, Frank.

I notice a single hydrangea has been plucked and left on a small corner table. A clue? I know where they grow around the University and the Botanic Gardens and make a mental file of this visual cryptogram for future reference.

“Follow me please.” Following my guide into the small dark room, I was given game instructions in a friendly yet officious manner and asked to hand over all my belongings except water, sunscreen and medication. In return I was handed a 3G mobile phone. By ritualistically handing over personal belongings that define us as material entities, players are given the opportunity to connect within a much broader network of identities.

Heading down to the SA Museum on North Terrace, I receive a poetic text message, presumably from Frank. I’m not sure whether we are supposed to be old friends or lovers. Perhaps Frank is a ghost who needs me to remember him in order to be released from haunting the coded labyrinths of these city streets.: “…Remember when I pushed you into the fountain and you gave chase…”

No, I don’t remember that Frank, but I can imagine it. Having an idea of the fountain Frank might be reminiscing about, I go there and punch in my coordinates. Upon doing so I receive instructions to walk south into the city.

I became confused at times, trying to decide whether the messages I was receiving were coming from Frank, online players, or the game’s hosts, whom I imagined must be exasperated with my cloddishness.

Okay. I’m going to pick one of those options. I see a familiar sticker on the bicycle seat and retrieve a postcard from a small bag beneath it. On it is a man walking towards his friend or lover on a snow-cleared path in a park full of conifers, behind a block of apartments. Printed on the back are the words: “Who are you responsible for?”

The interface on my phone rattles with a hubbub of text: “No! Over here, over here!”

Arrrggghh!!! Yes I’ve got the postcard! What do I do with it?! I’m a bit exasperated, but I am having fun.

Having participated as an online player, I now realise that it’s a good idea to develop a rapport with your street-player early in the piece. Each online player is assigned a task or series of tasks that will bring that player closer to Frank. To do this an online player needs to team up with someone on the street, a mutually beneficial relationship for both parties. Some street-players may need to pick up a postcard for their online companions, or walk into a pool hall on Rundle Street with a handwritten message, or perhaps stride into a pub and yell out “I Like Frank” to the bar staff. As an online player, I tried to guide a street-player into a bar on Rundle Street, realising as I did so that more than one of my online companions was giving this poor street-runner different instructions.

Over the course of an hour I chased the elusive Frank down backstreets sprayed with stencil art. I pretended not to notice the shoes stepping behind a phone-box and out of my line of sight when I phoned in for technical assistance. I waited for Frank in a cinema foyer and was stood up by him at our favourite bar.

Finally the phone rang. It was nice to hear a voice again. My telephonic siren safely navigated me across a busy road and through a subterranean car park, from which I emerged into an intimate sunlit courtyard. I sat on a bench, listening to the measured and friendly human on the other end of the line.

“Congratulations, you’ve finished the game. Do you feel any closer to the people on the street around you?”

Truthfully, I had felt frantic and somewhat disconnected until the moment he asked the question. It was then that a transcendent affection for the people in this city gently drifted back into view. I quickly penned an answer on the back of the postcard I had collected and moved to return the handset to base.

My short walk back to the university grounds was unhurried and contemplative. I didn’t find Frank in any kind of embodied sense, but his trace encouraged me to be a tourist in my own city and to keep seeking out those individual and uncommon details that struggle for recognition within the everyday experience of public life.

The Boxed Set

Hinting at residues of human cargo and mysterious ocean traffic, a converted shipping container worked as provocative metaphor and sculptural performance space for the diverse sequence of works that comprised Live Bait festival’s Boxed Set program (RT58, p36). At once an ominous capsule incinerating its freight, a house of feminist horrors, a monster’s home and a satirically-sweet motherly dwelling, the container became an expression of the theatrical imaginative, prompting explorations of the invisible cultural and political boxes that we covet, ignore, repress and escape.

First to emerge amidst the buzz of Bondi’s open amphitheatre are 5 destitute figures, landed from some other dreadful place in time or history. Their faces are stretched in torment, their bodies harrowed and gaunt. One tows a large, heavy tabernacle. One pulls a barrow heaped with crumpled suit jackets. One stalks ahead and purposefully—urgently—climbs a ladder and begins clanging it, and his bucketed-head, violently against a brick wall. This is Gravity Feed, and from the moment their presence is felt in the arena, frivolous evening becomes ritualised chaos, secure crowds become scattered, immaterial bodies.

The Gravity of the Situation works to generate unfamiliar zones, to desensitise the audience to the calm balminess of a summer’s night and surround them with harbingers of…death, nightmare, apocalypse, underworld? Propelled by the sonic thuds and gurglings of a world aching to split open, the performers band and discharge, carry fire, throw coats, grip to the edges of walls in shafts of light. People are pushed into corners or the centre of the courtyard, made to assume and surrender territories or dodge spinning cardboard flanks.

This movement plays out a kind of compulsive nihilism, a frustrated and repeated logic of anarchy clamouring to access a blip or glitch in the seamless running of things and push any moment to its inevitable point of rupture. And the thrill of this perforation is compounded by the fact that the audience not only witnesses, but completes the experiential exchange. It suddenly becomes part of something bigger than itself—a frightening yet scarily enticing modality that is part ritual, part performance, part yearning for something other than what we know and have.

Notions of feminine fear, gothic horror and female representation (depicted as its own type of horror story) are all given a comic bite in Frumpus’ Ripper 2004 (director Cheryle Moore, video Sam James). Transforming Gravity Feed’s smoking tabernacle into a house of horrors, Frumpus emerge ridiculously red-tracksuited with torchlights and begin running (and dropping) pac-man style in a pantomime of fear and dodgem’ bullets. In front of a projected sequence of blonde women (again) running (presumably excerpts from various slasher films), enter the Frumpus women newly dressed in the archetypal white nighties and blonde wigs requisite of any truly gruesome horror flick. They “want water” they tell us, “water to drink”, in a peculiar moment of mimicry and satire that mirrors their thirst-crazed ‘feminine’ counterparts on screen. And then they are running again, this time their nighties becoming those in the projection, whilst a miniature ‘evil’ Frumpus doll is bloodily birthed from a backpack serving as a prosthetic womb.

Frumpus are masters at clinching just the right edge between comic artistry and ridiculous silliness. Ripper 2004 explores connections between mythologies of fear (especially a ‘feminine’ fear) of unknown territory and of femininity replayed on the omnipotent boxes of popular visual culture. Hence, later in the piece they construct a curious juxtaposition of sleeping Red Riding Hoods set against a video of buxom naked women teaching Tai Chi. At times these textual collisions can be oblique or alternately too obvious, but the skit-like quality and general buffoonery Frumpus employs suggest that not only are they running from the horror of their own representation, they are running because they just do it so well.
Julie-Anne Long, Boxing Baby Jane

Womanhood is given a different telling in Julie-Anne Long’s subtly satirical meditation on motherhood, Boxing Baby Jane. In collaboration with video artist Samuel James, Long constructs a “duet for live mother and projected child” in which the figure of saintly mother is placed against footage of a very sickly-sweet disembodied girl child. In a series of projected sequences, Long interacts with the ‘fictitious’ child through a combination of abstract and literal choreographies, building a progressive antagonism that stems as much from the implied mother/daughter relationship as from the compositional difference their live and filmic bodies erect.

James’ video montage merges realtime footage, still shots, film intertexts and animated sequences to form a suspended limbo of part-image, part-performance that creates a skewed multi-dimensionality, particularly in moments where mother and daughter ‘enter’ excerpts from 1960s psychological thrillers that recall haunted suburbia and sinister veneers of smiles and propriety. Yet it seems that these canonical films and James’ playful interventions are intended to work more suggestively than literally. As the house of their pas de deux erupts into flames, both mother and daughter remain caught in past ideals of role and gender, living the frustrations and complexities of an obsessive relationship that has its cinematic boxing incinerate around them.

The past is met again with the entry of the 3 Patricias. Poised at the edge of the theatre space, they move in slow motion: a glance aside, a wave into the distance. Their faces are stiff with genteel smiles. As they begin to work slowly repeated choreographies of dainty running, anxious searching and signals afar, their focus carries us into the historical mise-en-scène of Dear Pat and compels us to attempt to make sense of their world.

The oddity and charge of Dear Pat stems from its orchestration of disparate elements. Calculated, choreographed bodies skilfully enact and lightly satirise mannerisms and ladylike gestures, while the sound design oscillates between the suggestive evocation of historical place, operatic lament, and the repetition of a mysterious love letter. And finally the enormous and otherworldly many-teeted puppet that explodes from within the box proper.

Holding these elements together is the steady tension of the performance company My Darling Patricia (Bridget Dolan, Clare Britton, Halcyon Macleod, Katrina Gill) whose collective force charts a trajectory towards the implied narrative of the box and builds with the promise of its climatic revelation. As we witness these wartime women being slowly swallowed by the inflatable monstrosity held inside the container’s jaws, and as we attempt to draw connections between hinted at moments of arrival and farewell, love affairs and train stations, it rather seems as if they are confronting, and submitting to, the monstrosity of imagination itself.

Threaded through the diversity of The Boxed Set performances were Theatre Kantanka’s jaw-wobbling, leg-tottering sheep (director Michael Cohen). Dressed luxuriously in faux sheepskin coats and black suspenders, the sheep canoodled and schmoozed their way through the evening, merging the potent ideas and summer frivolity the works offered to make for an event that both tackled monsters and ended with laughs. They entered on kiddie bikes, cooked their fellow animals as snags on a Weber, got caught in a moment of Frumpus horror, lapped themselves into a martini stupor and taught the audience to munch ovine style on grass. The delightful blankness and stupidity with which they undertook their humanoid tasks made for a drollness perfectly pitched to counter some of the more obscure artistry on show. Their play with the audience was particularly deviant, as in the cheeky cabaret number sung by one slinky ewe who plonked herself rudely on numerous gentlemen’s laps. In a titillating grand finale, they treated us all to a raunchy striptease complete with opportunistic mating and the flashing of their fleecy ‘bits’ to close.
Better than a Blow-Up Doll

Installations

Two installation works in the Live Bait Pavilion also made use of the box motif, inviting spectators to physically interact with the configuration of the contained space and the very different worlds that each space generated.

Nik Wishart and Miles van Dorssen’s sound installation Cell definitely arrested the sonic equilibrium of the Live Bait open arena, conjuring a mad construction site pounding away on an early Sunday morning. Like a factory pissing steam and guttural engine-hammer, or like a rapid-fire army of machine guns pelleting out spray, Cell is an industrial orchestra, housed and outfitted in a 6m shipping container, and not accidentally making use of the voluminous acoustic boom such a metal structure can generate. Comprising bells, horns, xylophones and other less conventional percussive objects (I was sure there must be a jackhammer in there somewhere), Cell operates as a self-generating symphony that converts programmed data into spontaneous rhythmic sequences; at times an accelerated rat-a-tat spatter of body shuddering thuds, at others a dissonant chorus of tinny jangling chimes.

Painted with motifs of clouds and sky, the box is closed off by prison bars running across its front, a frustrating prohibition between bodies and the thunderous noise-machine. As loud as Cell is at its peak, there is something about the quality of this loudness that presses you to want to get right inside of it, so its rhythms can really vibrate your bones. There is a comic element to Cell too in the unexpected shifts and clashes of tempo, in the way it becomes an organism with its own pulsing personality, oscillating curiously between mechanical steelworks and shantytown one-man band—minus the one man.

While Cell resonates its industrial discord into the surrounding atmosphere, the spectators/clientele of Shagging Julie’s Better than a Blow-Up Doll! are invited to step inside the sealed confines of a protective caravan and experience imaginings of an outside post-apocalyptic world. Shagging Julie are the buff and spritely representatives of the Apoca Lifestyle Corporation, posted to give us a tour-cum-salespitch of what should be expected of life and lifestyle after the imminent nuclear holocaust has hit. Lined with tins of powdered orange drink, aluminium recycling signs and remnants galore, the Apoca Lifestyle Capsule creates an intimate performance space in which a handful of audience members are given expert instruction on how to comfortably and affordably “ride out Armageddon” in a pod that comes complete in a “range of fashion exteriors.”

The opening ramble is dry and tongue-in-cheek, taking on the language and tone of gameshows and cheesy mobile home racketeers. The performers aptly suggest we try a roleplay package that enables us to keep feeling useful as an ‘officeworker’ even though there is no work to be done. Or we might try the simulated cold-calling device from their ‘Sanity Guard System’ that makes us feel part of a larger world, when one doesn’t exist. Or, in moments of anxiety, we might try pressing one of the coloured alert buttons fitted inside the capsule to release tension. Of course, no emergency crews exist to be contacted. Shagging Julie’s attire is inspired by 1950s future-chic, with a one-piece wide-legged suit and convincing ‘spaceage’ hair design suggesting that the version of the future we are being given has been strangely exhumed from the past. The imagination behind the doomful product being sold, however, is painfully striking in the context of current world events, and in the face of an American superpower whose sentiments are sadly too archaic to bear contemplation.

The Boxed Set, curators Michael Cohen (Live Bait), Fiona Winning (Performance Space), Bondi Pavilion Amphitheatre, January 16-21;Cell, Miles van Dorssen, Nik Wishart, Bondi Pavilion, Jan 24-31; Better than a Blow-Up Doll! Shagging Julie, January 15-31, Bondi Pavilion; Live Bait Festival, Jan 14-31

Anne Marsh, The Darkroom: Photography and the Theatre of Desire, Pan Macmillan, Melbourne, 2003 ISBN 1 876832 78 9.

Those 19th century photographs in which the dearly departed seem to hover translucent and spectral beside the living are wonderful examples of the link between photography, desire and performance. While the living sought to souvenir one final glimpse of their dead, the spirit photographers who ‘staged’ such portraits profited from the huge popularity of an industry featuring “death and its accoutrements.” The popularity of Victorian funeral and spirit photography was part of a widespread “reaction against a rational modernity,” writes Anne Marsh in her new book The Darkroom.

Photography, Marsh writes, “is a performative representational practice that has aspects in common with theatre.” This approach is at the centre of her discussion of a range of historical and contemporary photographs and re-readings of some key critiques of photography. A senior lecturer in Visual Culture at Monash University, Melbourne, Marsh’s approach is heavily theoretical and most engaging and lively when specific photographs are used to bear out the critical concepts with which she is concerned. In a chapter on spirit photography, she describes how theatrical techniques, ritual and artifice are used in particular images which often mobilised dramatic swathes of light and darkness to symbolise the movement from one world to the next. While it’s not hard to detect the theatrical in the ethereal poses and framing of Julia Margaret Cameron’s otherworldly portraits, in the composite spirit shots of William Mumler or the dramatic snaps of mediums oozing white ectoplasmic emissions mid-séance, Marsh is also interested in teasing out the complex operations of desire in “the operator, the subject being photographed and the viewer looking on.”

While Muybridge and Marey’s movement studies were perhaps the first form of performance documentation, Marsh traces the performative aspects of photography back to the camera obscura and other 18th century optical devices which staged an experience like a private theatre. She writes:

One imagines the eighteenth century viewer, alone or in a small party, standing about in his or her darkened room trying to see the picture from nature in much the same way as people gathered at shop windows displaying the latest three dimensional computer enhanced puzzle picture in the late twentieth century. People move back and forth, trying to adjust their eyes, trying to get the best optical location…Then, as now, the body is the flexible seeing apparatus, the thing that moves about and alters the image, enhancing the body’s experience.

Theatrical effects are also evident in the supposedly factual realm of early documentary photography. Marsh details how American photographer Jacob Riis manufactured dramas to intensify the action in his 19th century New York slum photographs. In establishing photography’s essentially performative nature, Marsh writes, we can “acknowledge that the subject/object of the photograph can perform as a way of un-forming or de-forming the would be truth and objectivity of the photographic process.”

The Darkroom is primarily concerned with this issue of ‘staging’ in both contemporary and historical photographs and in the key critical discourses produced around photography from Benjamin and Barthes to Foucault and Lacan. Marsh argues against a reductive reading of Foucault’s theory of the panopticon that has at times produced a “paranoid discourse” on power relations and ignores the complex interrelationship between desire, seduction, fantasy and performance involved in the taking, posing for and viewing of a photograph. Arguing against a structuralist approach to photography, she maintains that the practice is not “exclusively the tool of any given dominant ideology” but ultimately democratic.

This mode of inquiry allows for a greater scope, depth and breadth in interpreting the photograph, and effectively avoids the kind of limiting moral positioning that occurred for example in Susan Sontag’s famous critique of Diane Arbus’ ‘freaks’ series. Instead of reading photography as an act of violence on its unwitting subjects, Marsh suggests we “focus on the subject or the photograph, rather than the violent action”; thus photography could also be considered a fetishistic activity. Her readings of a range of photographs (by Cindy Sherman, Joel-Peter Witkin and Australians Linda Sproul, Anne Ferran, Deborah Pauwe, Pat Brassington and others) offer multiple positions and interpretations that do not privilege one perspective over another, yet Marsh also avoids an eternal relativism by commenting on the vicissitudes of certain photographers’ approaches. When looking at Australian Polixeni Papapetrou’s restaging of Lewis Carroll’s famous child portraits using her young daughter as subject (Olympia from the Lewis Carroll Series, 2002) Marsh notes the series’ liberating possibilities in providing both the photographer and her subject “opportunities for…childish play acting.” Yet, while Papapetrou is not unaware of the criticisms of Carroll’s work and debates about representing the child in photography, there remains a potentially problematic imbalance in power relations between mother and daughter in her work. Olympia “is still a child and her knowledge of the way in which her own image fits into the history of photography would be limited,” Marsh writes.

Perhaps of particular interest to RealTime readers, The Darkroom includes a substantial section on “Body art and Performative Photography” focusing on the role of masochism, narcissism and fetishism in performance work. In this section Marsh describes Mike Parr’s “obsessive and compulsive investigations of pain and endurance” and the role of autobiography and self therapy in his performances. Like Parr, performer Jill Orr “sustained a relationship with her self-image through photographic and video representations” and both artists mobilised the camera as a “critical or conceptual tool” within their performances, thus consolidating “the relationship between performative art and photography.”

In the final section Marsh examines the photographs of postcolonial Australian artists which engage with “the text of the racial body.” She explores the crucial role of photography in identity politics, where the camera is used to document the fragmentation of identities and “embraced by artists as a critical weapon that could foreclose on authenticity and essentialist representations”; thus the camera is used “as part of an assault on humanism.” Included here are Tracey Moffatt, Leah King-Smith and Gordon Bennett whose Mirrorama (1993), a “psychoanalytic interpretation of aboriginality seen in the context of Australian history” stages a fractured subjectivity. For these artists “[t]he camera becomes a weapon in [the] scheme of misrecognition and dis-identity…[a] tool that can fracture and deconstruct subjecthood…creating a multi-dimensional view.”

By becoming a “performative machine” and an “instrument of destabilisation”, the camera, Marsh shows us, has operated as a “virus within modernism”, a tool for deconstructing those master narratives that privilege certain ways of seeing the world, while simultaneously negating others. Marsh’s work deftly shows how the camera can function as a “prosthesis for the operator”, as well as an instrument of fantasy, enabling the artist to extend the limits of his or her work in real space and in psychological terms. The Darkroom provides a rich history of how photography’s theatrical roots have remained evident in international and Australian work and how considering the complex functions of desire might broaden the ways we have previously read such work.

Anne Marsh is the author of Body and Self: Performance Art in Australia, 1969-1992.

Destination: the budget motel. Transitory spaces filled with unfamiliar comforts, motels signify an arrival, a break in a journey. A motel offers temporary sanctuary; a place for respite, sex, sleep and shifting restlessness. With these ingredients of road movie consciousness in mind, 9 Adelaide artists invaded Motel 277 in Glenunga to stage No Vacancy, an exhibition of site-specific installation and performance art.

In Map Reference 201 D6, curator Honor Freeman delicately stitched beads around the perimeters of stains on bath towels, permanently and beautifully containing the area where each mark resides. Casually hung over a bathroom door and across the floor, the work sat harmoniously with Steven Carson’s I Know You’re In There. Brightly coloured buttons were methodically arranged, stacked and dispersed, growing like mould across the tiles, infesting the shower recess.

The wood veneer paneling and patterned textiles in Room 50 resonated with the luscious, tactile surface qualities of Sarah CrowEST’s 3 ‘objects.’ Ominously sitting in and around the bed, her comical blobs—oversized cakes or edible cushions—greeted the astonished visitor. In the next room, Tiffany Parbs’ carefully placed pools of transparent resin, disguised as water and urine, lay in the sink and on the floor as the trace of departed guests.

Bianca Barling approached American motel fiction with filmic humour and excess. Her Slasher Slutz was a combination of performance, installation and digital imagery, conveying the spectacle of messy death. Peering in through the window as if onto a stage, viewers saw 2 young female victims lying on a bloodied bed in their blood-soaked slips. Next door, in Room 49, Greg Fullerton’s Blue and White created a police crime scene, the unmade bed cordoned off, an abandoned cup of coffee on the kitchen bench, sugar scattered as if someone had left in a hurry. Part of Fullerton’s Bloodlines series, photographs of the participating artists, blood oozing theatrically from their faces, were placed along the breakfast bar in a line-up of likely suspects.

Transforming private, unseen acts, illicit relations and anonymous violent crime into a public acts, No Vacancy was a spectacle of intimacy, staged melodrama and lighthearted conspiracy. And perhaps a parody of those temporary habitations frequented by Adelaide Festival visitors.

No Vacancy, Bianca Barling, Steven Carson, Sarah CrowEST, Bridget Currie, Rachel McElwee, Honor Freeman, Greg Fullerton, Mimi Kelly, Tiffany Parbs, Motel 277, Glenunga, SA, Adelaide Fringe, Feb 22-24

At a time of year when Adelaide is filled with all things artistic shouting for attention, something very quiet is going on in the Hughes Plaza at Adelaide University. Jena Woodburn and Ben Howard’s video projection [site-works], occupies a smallish window of the Barr-Smith Library. The window forms the screen for the projector inside, the projection blending with the architectural environment. At first glance it could almost be an advertisement or poster.

We all know well the immersive sensation of being lost in a library, a world of information without time and physical space. The Barr-Smith is an august institution filled with level after level of narrow mission brown stacks. As a building it is hermetic in the extreme, much of it shut off from natural light and containing many levels of labyrinthine stairwells and corridors. It is the home of the book, the first virtual space.

In this building there is a window, a space for dreaming, for escaping. It can act as a porthole for physical and mental worlds to meet—the outside and the inside, the cerebral world of books and the world we physically negotiate.

window breaches the stronghold of the library’s body
usually it holds tight to its knowledge-store, only allowing out book-sized chunks
we’ve pierced it
inside pours out (is visible)
window is/was empty, transparent.

[site-works], Jena Woodburn and Ben Howard, Barr-Smith Library, Adelaide University, Adelaide Fringe, Feb 25-March 13

Three years ago, French artist Laurent Mulot took a train to Cook on the Nullarbor Plain. During a rest stop, he and the other passengers were drawn into the abandoned ‘ghost town’ experience maintained by Great Southern Railways and the town managers, Ivor and Janet Holberton. They explored deserted buildings, the abandoned shop and hospital, the golf course and a school where Mulot found some children’s drawings illustrating the habits of local fauna and, underneath, the sentence, “They come out at night” which he has used as the title for his multimedia installation exhibited as part of this year’s Adelaide Fringe.

Inspired by the strange initial experience, Mulot returned to Cook in 2003 for a 10 day visit. Using still photographs, video and sound, he documented the visitors who arrive by train and explore the small isolated town during the 90 minute stopover as well as the few remaining locals who receive them.

The central focus of the installation is a large-scale projection of the train’s visit accompanied by a soundtrack in which Mulot musically arranges the various comments on the town that he’s collected. While the name of the town is repeated rhythmically to echo the sound of the train, someone says that in Cook; “there’s no life, there’s no laughter.” Meanwhile, across 10 monitors to the side of the projection, we are shown Mulot’s images of Cook, revealing a certain beauty in their geometric composition. These are repeated in the form of photocopies strewn across the floor. Striking as some of these images are, this presentation does them no justice. The audience is left to step around them while being careful to avoid the dead trees suspended from the ceiling. These ‘found objects’ overstate the point and would probably have been best left in the ground.

The various components of the installation struggle to come together in a resolved manner and seem clumsy when viewed as a whole. The ‘ghost portraits’ (double-images of the tourists) that line the wall upon entry are interesting and the video is strangely engaging. In slow motion and other manipulations it captures the anticipation of the train’s arrival and the stillness once it’s departed, conveying Mulot’s theme in one frame, without distractions.

They Come Out At Night, Step One is a work-in-progress. Step Two will be exhibited at Fremantle Arts Centre, Steps Three and Four in Lyon and Paris. To watch the work unfold go to www.theycomeoutatnight.org.

Laurent Mulot, They Come Out at Night, Step One, Light Square Gallery, Adelaide, Adelaide Fringe, Feb 18-March 24, Fremantle Arts Centre, May 22-June 20

Tasmanian Indigenous artist Lola Greeno is making her mark on the Australian art world, acclaimed for her tradition-based, finely crafted shell necklaces and bracelets, as well as the splendid fibre water containers and other objects that she makes from bull kelp. This large brown seaweed is found washed up on coastal Tasmania’s beaches at certain times of the year. The fibrous material has been collected on a seasonal basis by Indigenous Tasmanians for a very long time and is well suited to making objects of both utilitarian and artistic significance.

Born in 1946, Lola acknowledges her mother, the late Val MacSween, as teaching her the closely guarded secret methods and relevant cultural knowledge of the Tasmanian Indigenous people associated with making these gracile necklaces and bracelets. There are strict rules associated with this pre-contact Tasmanian artistic practice and Greeno is observant of these, while at the same time showing a willingness to innovate within the parameters permitted: “Families usually design the shell necklaces and one must closely follow these [designs]. In my case, I re-create my mother’s patterns. Today I am developing new designs to tell a story…for instance I have just finished a shell necklace that relates to the Cape Barren Goose, an original bird from my birth island. The water carriers have been a revival that I learned from a cultural workshop on the East Coast of Tasmania with a large group of women.”

Today, Lola Greeno actively mentors the younger generation to ensure the continuation of this demanding artistic practice, where preparation of materials and fastidious attention to detail is paramount. Greeno’s approach to her artistic practice is both visionary and generous. With characteristic altruism and humility, she sees herself as predominantly “…a Tasmanian Aboriginal woman interested in developing contemporary Aboriginal arts in Tasmania and providing opportunities for emerging artists to advance their skills and talent to assist them to another level or to be recognised nationally so they can become involved with Indigenous brothers and sisters across the land…I am also highly focussed on my cultural relaying of stories of importance to my daughter and grand children so that my heritage is recorded.”

Part and parcel of Lola Greeno’s approach is her emphasis on promoting greater awareness in the wider community about Indigenous intellectual and artistic copyright issues “…mainly to prevent people from making the shell necklaces who are not entitled to do so.”

From her beautiful island home, Lola Greeno creates luminous shell necklaces in much the same way her ancestors did. The very names of these shells, the raw materials of Greeno’s art, are immensely seductive and suggestive of an under-watery world of voluptuous otherness: stripey buttons, cats’ teeth, toothies, rice shells and maireeners—little bluish-green pearl-like shells that are of great cultural significance for Aboriginal Tasmanians.

In all, Greeno makes use of 11 types of shell in her work. She says, “…the labour is all in the preparation. The maireener shells take up to 8 weeks preparation prior to threading. The few makers return to the islands at least once a year to collect maireeners. This takes a good 2 to 4 weeks, although some people can only go for a few days. You may need to spend 2 to 3 hours just collecting one type of shell…”

Citing her career mentors as Gail Greenwood, Glenda King, Doreen Mellor, Brenda Croft and Julie Gough, Lola Greeno also acknowledges the inspiration of her mother, Judy Watson, Yvonne Koolmatrie, Brenda Croft, Julie Gough and Greg Leong.

Fellow Tasmanian Julie Gough, an admirer of Greeno’s work, writes: “…Lola’s shell necklaces are intricate responses to place. They reflect where, when and with whom shells are collected. They are often made in memory of her mother and of other co-inhabitants of her island homelands, such as the Cape Barren Goose. These relationships are reflected in the patterning of the strung shell lengths.”

Lola Greeno’s work constitutes a unique historically and aesthetically important form of cultural expression that is increasingly and deservedly achieving significance in the art market. Greeno makes stunning contemporary jewellery. At the same time she brings real cultural and historical depth to her work, contributing to an authentically Tasmanian cultural future.

Lola Greeno is showing with other contemporary Tasmanian artists in Design Island: Contemporary Design from Tasmania, Sydney Opera House, March 23-May 16

Once upon a time Tony Bennett coined the term ‘exhibitionary complex’ to characterise the institutional shift of objects and bodies from the purview of the sovereign prince or lord into the public gaze. According to Bennett (following Foucault), the emergent 18th and 19th century museums and galleries performed the function of allowing people, “en masse, rather than individually, to know rather than be known; to be the subjects rather than the object of power; interiorising its gaze as a principle of self-surveillance, hence self-regulation.” One of the things we learn from our galleries, museums and zoos is nothing less than the order of things, ourselves included.

Don’t get depressed. Things can change. Take zoos: nowadays we construct simulated rain forests for the gorillas, a savanna for the African beasts, rocky pools for the turtles. We ask that our zoos in some way resemble the imaginary origins of our captive species (never mind most have never seen these far-away first homes). We tolerate enclosure as long as the frame is obscured, blended, masked by fake boulders and clumping bamboo. We continue to travel through gates and doors to see our wild things, but we can no longer ignore the subjectivity of our objects; hence, we tolerate the odd glimpse of the meerkat and suppress our frustration at animal-centred timetables (What? The tiger is sleeping again?).

But what about the gallery? Is it still a concrete cage for art and its objects?

Such questions arose as I traversed the exemplary space of the Lawrence Wilson Gallery in search of Lisa Roet’s exhibition Pri-mates, fantasising, like a latter-day Jane Goodall or Dianne Fossey, an encounter. Is there anything more tremulous, poignant, more poetic and dramatic, more beloved of Hollywood anthropology? It appears that our imagination—damp domesticated cliché that it is—still requires pockets of virgin forest and impenetrable wilderness, where we can meet the unseen and the unknown. The essence of ‘the encounter’ is that it be unexpected and in many ways unrepeatable. Though increasingly rare (I hesitate to say endangered) art can be such an encounter, as when, at a young age I saw the Bridget Riley exhibition at the Art Gallery of Western Australia: you mean, that’s what art looks like?

When it comes to encounters with the Other, we try to be alert to the fluidity of boundaries, the violent history of frontiers, and we prefer to use words like dialogue and exchange. And if we are not yet vegetarian, we are definitely thinking about it.

At the doors of Lawrence Wilson I am greeted by a video monitor showing an image of a human hand reaching through a cage bar towards an ape’s hand (or is it a monkey?). The reference is obvious. I am annoyed. I want an encounter, not an art-historical moment; I want a disturbance at the edge of the frame, a fracas, a disordering of subject and object, not an easy key to reading the work.

I pick up a sheet at the desk and read; “Pri-mates deals with investigations into the genetic similarities that exist between humans and primates, issues of language and communication and the point at which humankind is both alienated from and joined to the animal kingdom.”

Roet is fascinated by primates. Fascination is dialogic; to ‘fascinate’ is to ‘cast a spell over by a look.’ Her process is exemplary; residencies in zoos, visits to Borneo, long periods of study, interaction and engagement.

I linger at the works on paper—the feet and hands of chimpanzees. There is an essay here: on monkeys, mimicry, finger-puppets mark-making, creativity, but I am not equipped to write it. Perhaps Roet’s attraction to charcoal lies in the fantasy of recuperating primal creative drives (the child learning to grasp and strike the paper, the history of mark-making in art.) The huge drawings of fingers/toes are at once grotesque and beautiful. They conjure the whole history of things; the bleak scientific study of the fragmented ‘primitive body’, the anthropological and scientific scalpel cutting and bottling and labelling, the gaze of the student studying classical form (the hand of David). I move on. The bronze casts of chimpanzee’s heads recall photographic studies of babies attempting verbal communication. These works fascinate me. They are profoundly ambivalent; at once a study of a nameless other whose individual subjectivity has been subsumed in the name of genus and species, and an indictment of the anthropocentric limits of post-human portraiture.

In Kate McMillan’s Disaster Narratives there is no fantasy of mutual recognition. Vision is not privileged in this exhibition, because on one level there is nothing to see. Superficially epic and classical in its aesthetic, Disaster Narratives draws attention to the ways we have encountered the art frame, and the potential emptiness of that encounter if the surface image or content is the organising or dominating principle. The huge central photographic image conjures a particular painting (Dejeuner sur l’herbe), but it also references the enormous history paintings found in some museums. The shell wedged high up in the wall exemplifies the exotica illuminated in a table case in a natural history exhibit. Yet the huge photographic image is also wallpaper—a billboard, and the single shell excised from taxonomic security is surely a private mnemonic, a reminder that outside of the cage, the images roam free. Hence the small static video image is both avant-garde and banal; on the one hand a refusal to reward the viewer with a ‘feed’, on the other an invocation of the endless tedium of domestic television. The ominous interiority of the large video projections of tunnels belongs just as well to a contemporary art space as to a late-night offering of Hollywood gothic-horror.

So what is the real story here? Who would know? A local viewer might confirm that the distant island in the video is Rottnest, formerly a prison for Aborigines, now a holiday destination. A well-travelled member of the audience might recognize the photographic wallpaper as Rubble Hill, a park built upon the destruction of Berlin. Someone else might know that Mao secretly built tunnels beneath Beijing, just in case of an emergency. In its very inability to narrate, this work enacts ‘the disaster’, which in Blanchot’s writings is that which is outside of the human, that which by being outside cannot be represented.

Meaning here lies beneath the surface, but it cannot be exhumed. Postmodernism eschews depth, yet this work is not about mere juxtaposition. It is not playing with us. The tone is serious. Mournful. Disaster Narratives reads like a very private, very formal essay on grief and mourning written through the formal hieroglyphics of art history. A disaster takes the subject to the edge of experience and abandons them there. Rather than being wilfully obscure, ironic, or “leaflet-dependent”, as one reviewer put it, I think of this work as leading the animal right to the door of the cage and opening it. Where, upon looking out, the terrified animal realises it is incapable of crossing the threshold.

Perth International Arts Festival: Lisa Roet, Pri-mates, Lawrence Wilson Gallery, University of Western Australia, Feb 13-April 20; Kate McMillan, Disaster Narratives, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Feb 12-March 21

Fresh Cut is the Institute of Modern Art’s (IMA) annual exhibition of South-East Queensland’s recent art school graduates. Rather than selecting works according to a ‘best of’ criteria, Fresh Cut is a curated exhibition. This presents a challenge, since the art school is an environment where art making is compulsory and diversity accentuated. Attempting to find and articulate any prevailing theme for an exhibition under such conditions is fraught with problems, and the quality of work in any graduating year can never be assured. Too often over the last 8 years, Fresh Cut curators have presented us with a group of highly disparate works strung together by a tenuous rationale.

This year’s exhibition, curated by Chris Handran, was not entirely exempt from these problems though it did offer a slightly different curatorial approach. Rather than searching for a grand link between all 12 artists, Handran selected works which provoked a personal response. The result was a diverse collection featuring video, ceramics, interactive technologies, paintings and installation.

In his catalogue essay Handran noted, “No single theme or style characterises these works, though a number of affinities have come to light.” Wonderlands, private rooms, untold tales and natural selection are the terms through which Handran spoke of such affinities. The dividing of the exhibition into separate rooms under each term created a focus on linking clusters of works rather than a singular overarching rationale.

In gallery 1 visitors were welcomed by an infestation of curious creatures in David Spooner’s Mantle. Reminiscent of a domestic interior, yet given over to fabric fancies and plastic excess, Spooner’s work was appropriately lit by warm artificial and natural light. Accompanying this work was Kate Dickson’s Wallflower series, a suite of large-scale documentary photographs of posters which Dickson had installed across Brisbane’s cityscape. The posters took the form of a female figure, depicted in a cartoon style, usually close to life size and wearing colourful, fashionable clothing.

In gallery 2, the lighting was more subdued, and this darkening trend continued in galleries 3 and 4. Catherine Chui’s standout work, Betweeness, is composed of walking sticks recast from various media including noodles, newspaper, maps, dictionaries, coins, beer caps and koala fur. Hung like ladders and bridges across one corner and consuming almost a quarter of the room, the soft shadows of walking sticks cast against the walls was quietly arresting. Chui’s work lends itself to reflective moments, as it references the artist’s personal relationship with her walking stick, which both frees her from immobility and signifies her disability. The media Chui selects also references her journey from Hong Kong to Australia and her continual crossing between cultures.

Gallery 3 is the largest and is often an awkward space. Handran overcame any difficulties by installing works using very little light. Except for spots on oil paintings by Sonya G Peters, the only light in this gallery was emitted by the works themselves. Ben Murrell’s luminous architectural sculptures were beautifully placed, their fluorescent light enveloping the viewer. Adjacent to these shining installations was the glow of Alice Lang’s video projection and fabric installation. Avoiding a conventional square frame, Lang projected her video at an acute angle to the wall so that the frame became a morphed elongated quadrilateral. This suited the monster-like imagery from sessions recorded in cheap hotel rooms, in which Lang moves in and out of frame wrapped in satin sewed into bulbous and irregular shapes. Beyond Lang’s projection, 3 monitors sat on low pedestals replaying surveillance camera footage of Katherine Taube’s opening night performance, depicting her dressing and undressing in an interior lit box.

The increasingly dark journey continued in gallery 4, with a display of Julia Dowe’s slowly evolving video work and Svenja Kratz’s installation using interactive technologies.

This year’s Fresh Cut did not completely do away with the curatorial challenge but rather pared it back to the achievable and consumable. The exhibition is driven by the desire to provide positive outcomes for local emerging artists, but as Timothy Morrell stated at the end of his 1999 catalogue, Fresh Cut is also “a snapshot of a slightly shaking moment that makes focusing difficult. What matters is what happens next.”

Fresh Cut, curated by Chris Handran, artists Megan Bennett, Catherine Chui, Kate Dickson, Julia Dowe, Joshua Feros, Krystal Ingle, Svenja Kratz, Alice Lang, Ben Murrell, Sonya G Peters, David Spooner, Katherine Taube, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Feb 6-March 13

Like much new German writing, Roland Schimmelpfennig’s Arabian Night resembles a prose poem or instruction text more than a conventional playscript. Actions are related to the audience by characters who perform them, as are settings and scenographic details. This serves Schimmelpfennig and director Chris Bendall well in creating a dreamlike atmosphere as the characters go about their lives in distracted fashion, imbuing everything with the sense that this might be a seductive, poetic illusion.

This also presents Bendall with the challenge of animating what is essentially a series of inter-cutting monologues. Director and performers skirt such performative tautologies as having the actor begin to run while saying: “I began to run.” Performance is rather gently embodied through minimal movement, easy posture and well supported voice.

The relationship between design, vocal work, Kelly Ryall’s lovely soundscape and the performance is slight, but on fortyfivedownstairs’ intimate stage, this matters little. Bendall is most adept at manipulating space and rhythm. The movement is shaped according to 2 main patterns. The first is a whorl about the iron post that permanently occupies the centre in this venue, becoming both a resting place and a pivot about which the increasingly disorientated characters spin. The second is a series of left/right corridors parallel to the seating, which turn the characters’ musings and personal journeys into something akin to slats glancing off each other on a venetian blind.

Although exquisite to experience, the dominant motifs of Schimmelpfennig’s script are not especially sophisticated or novel. The tale is set, for example, within a block of flats, constructed as a village unto itself or a microcosmic city, with its inhabitants coming close to each other but never really touching. As in the films of Altman and Tarantino (as well as much contemporary fiction), the play draws a web of connections between disparate figures, with the overlap of their lives producing an inter-woven narrative. This becomes the poetic motif in Schimmelpfennig’s work, as the surreal link between these characters is eventually revealed to be their having fallen into the dreams of the central protagonist, Francizka (Josephine Keen). She is cursed to forget her life nightly as she falls into slumber and to bring misfortune to all who kiss her.

Schimmelpfennig also employs the motif of the long, hot night as a catalyst for change and unusual behaviour, an idea which recurs in many plays, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to the 2002 fortyfivedownstairs production Sailing on a Sea of Tears (also set in a European apartment block). Schimmelpfennig skilfully uses this familiar concept to introduce a metaphoric interplay between desert and river dreamscapes. The water supply has stopped on Francizka’s floor, where the building attendant and others alternately experience dry, sandy winds or the frightening yet euphoric sensation of water coursing through the walls.

Arabian Night is a highly evocative production which, despite initial appearances, relies upon its performative realisation to render this beautiful if somewhat derivative text as something more distinctive than a mere theatrical sketch. In this sense, Theatre@Risk’s staging represents a triumph for Bendall and the actors, particularly Josephine Keen as Francizka and stalwart Robert Meldrum as the attendant.

Theatre@Risk, Arabian Night, writer Roland Schimmelpfennig, translation David Tushingham, director Chris Bendall, performers Josephine Keen, Robert Meldrum, David Michel, Odette Joannidis, Joshua Hewitt, sound Kelly Ryall, lighting Marco Respondeck, design Danielle Harrison; fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne, Feb 10-22

What are the emotional and social effects of naming? What is closed off and what is revealed or liberated? The latest project from Alison Halit and Ross Mueller is an attempt to coax out of the darkness of depression and introversion a representation of post-natal depression (PND). Speaking that which resists being spoken is central to both the creation of Sensitive to Noise and its performance. Within scenarios collaboratively devised by choreographer Halit and playwright Mueller, the characters struggle to speak, communicate and find peace. The very structure of the work emphasises the power of naming, with the characters’ confusion being (partially?) resolved by a penultimate scene in which a clinical diagnosis of PND is literally spoken on stage.

The use of the term PND brought legitimacy, validation and relief to women (and men) previously ignored as simply “down” or “oversensitive”, making sense of confusing behaviours and mood swings. One should not forget the negative effects of naming however. The kaleidoscopic vignettes and monologues of Sensitive to Noise superbly depict a spiral into intra-familial dysfunction. The partner becomes an enemy or irritant whom one nevertheless depends upon and the house a claustrophobic jumble of domestic detritus (beautifully rendered by designer Kathryn Sproul through literal and symbolic objects). The relationship between the couple becomes a theatre in which the sins of their parents are replayed as they neurotically reflect the discontent of their own childhoods. But is this PND? Or more significantly, if this typically occurs with PND, does it mean that every domestic drama involving these elements is also a representation of PND? And if PND is such a protean, wide-ranging collection of symptoms, what, precisely, is achieved by naming and depicting it on stage?

In a sense, one of the most compelling yet ambiguous aspects of this production is the way it replays the very contradictions it is designed to make sense of. The doubling of text with movement, of physical action reinforcing and adding an unbearable texture to mental disassociation, renders the show itself as an extended stutter. Scenes heave one to another, as an armchair wheels about to catch characters fleeing one scenario, before vomiting them up into another equally disorientating situation. As in the symptomatology of PND, the show repeatedly asks: “How did we get here?”

Perhaps the most ambivalent element of the production is the unresolved gendering of the work. It is no accident that the most potent symbol is the increasingly mute dancer, Trudy Radburn, looking out wide-eyed at an environment that seems unfamiliar, dreamlike and daunting. Despite the introduction of men’s stories, the asymmetry between the depth of dance experience embodied by the unspeaking Radburn and the men’s greater reliance upon spoken performance replays the model of PND as women’s business (which it surely is) and a disorder in which an unreasoning female body replaces the reasoning mind. The shadow of hysteria and the awkward histories of medicine, gender and science fall heavily across the performance.

Sensitive to Noise is most impressive for its final paradoxical sleight of hand. This is the closing dance sequence involving Radburn and the tragically adorable Adrian Nunes, in which PND is reinscribed as that which forever eludes full representation in all its chameleon-like social manifestations.

Sensitive to Noise, devisors/directors Alison Halit, Ross Mueller, performers Fiona Macleod, Scott Gooding, Trudy Radburn, Adrian Nunes, design Kathryn Sproul, sound David Franzke, lighting Jen Hector, North Melbourne Town Hall, Feb 18-29, Geelong Performing Arts Centre, March 6

Entering a Frumpus performance is like pushing through to some much-needed Buffy dimension where the demons are actually you, in disguise, in some nightmarish cinematic loop, but with matching red tracksuits and sinister grins. Crazed is a new work by this dedicated ensemble of shape-shifters and Adelaide seems like the perfect place to unleash it, especially as a late night horror feature in the biennial Fringe Festival. In fact, their venue choice was only a matter of metres from dark, historical Adelaide-terror central: the Torrens River. Bodies dragged, bodies dumped.

Crazed is a manic composition, variations on a theme of slasher/horror genre (filmic references aplenty, some recognised, others not, me being the squeamish type who always looks away when the guts are spilled, the head cut from the body, the limbs severed…). Crazed takes me anywhere from the Chainsaw Massacre-type hopeless chase in the woods (there’s no escape! you’ll never get away this time!); to the Blair-Witchefied surrounds of the sleeping-bag-cum-tent with a camera shoved in your face, tears streaming; to the Hanging Rock zombie drawn to the abyss of pan-piped hell; to the begging for water, to drink (not even a sip!); to the petite rituals of mad fireside needlework in some Victorian gothic, storm-ravished mansion, disturbed by the incessant ringing of a telephone (dare not answer for fear of the terrifying voice of a Telstra answering service); to the abandoned country house with only the killer for company; to Cronenbergesque mutations, visceral, oozing. Sigourney Weaver would fall so deeply in love with the alien glove puppets whose seedy obsession with porn, sauna orgies, car hoonin’ and chain smokin’ would endear anyone’s tender (soon to be torn open) stomachs for a spot of sci-fi bio-tech co-habitation. Not even your washing basket is safe from bad planet creature invasion.

Framed in a polystyrene horror house with filmic windows, flames mediated via projected image, Frumpus bodies dressed in Super-8 screams and psychotic struggles for help, help, the performance space is a kind of eternal movie set silhouette, a malleable site in which to enact the inevitable death scenes, the sort that seem to just fill with blood until the next big baddie moves in for the kill. These demons have taken the form of some other Frumpus frightener: scary nurse-vamps with cigarette holes for mouths. Red worms from the planet Camp. An action flick duo who punch-glove martial art their way to the knife point of death. Did I mention Buffy?

Enter a Twin Peaks procession of bloodied feet wigged-out morphed heads who will take the applause anyhow. Cos they’ve walked so far. In heels, no less. Probably across some desolate bridges. Their deaths and lynchings were staged over at least 20-odd takes. It’s about getting that right expression. That perfect look of fear.

Crazed is an audio-bite cut-up live show of blood-curdling screams, breathless voices pleading to the insane one to please stop knocking, even though we all know what’s gonna happen next…but Frumpus has gotta run, over the moors, into the dark night.

Frumpus, Crazed, director Cheryle Moore, performers/devisors Janine Garrier, Lauri Kilfoyle, Lenny Ann Low, Cheryle Moore, Julie Vulcan; video & video Samuel James, sound, Gail Priest & Cheryle Moore; presented by Vitalsatistix Theatre Company, Adelaide University, Adelaide Fringe, Feb 21-March 7

If visibility and inclusion are a measure of success, Strut’s dance program Two Way—featuring new works from Jo Pollitt and Sue Peacock—in the Perth International Arts Festival was an occasion for celebration. Since its inception, Strut Inc. has provided a site for dialogue and development of contemporary dance.

Room is choreographed and performed by Jo Pollitt, its 3 sections directed by Paige Gordon, Felicity Bott and Bill Handley in turn, signalling that dialogue and collaboration were important to the works, if leaving the audience mystified as to the role of the director in relation to the choreography. In conceptualising her works around the idea of 3 rooms—’inside’, ‘outside’ and ‘waiting’— Pollitt underlined her intention to explore relationships of exclusion, inclusion, and adjacency. However, the works failed to resonate with each other, either stylistically or conceptually.

If the opening image of an elongated and elevated Pollit set upon some kind of hidden plinth, adorned in a swathe of white was intended to strike the audience, it missed its target. As a study of minimalist articulation—of arms, back, neck, head—Room 1-Inside had difficulty projecting its subtleties within the space of the Playhouse. More troubling was its failure to acknowledge its kinship with living statues that function well on the street, sustaining the glance, the stare, the gathering of a small crowd that assembles briefly only to break up—but not the seated paying audience. Drawing upon a vocabulary of slapstick and mime, Room 3-Outside amused without truly engaging. What was missing was the very idea of being outside.

Room 2-Waiting, directed by Bill Handley, was the most successful section. Largely autobiographical, its tone was tragicomic, the narrative qualities enhanced by Pollitt’s spoken text. Here was a piece that acknowledged the breadth of the festival audience, that was generous and open in its revelations, and which touched me in its delicate handling of personal tragedy. Here Pollitt as performer was able to tell us of death in the family, of car accidents, of the loss of opportunity, and in the very telling of that story through the body enact an overcoming.

Sue Peacock is an accomplished choreographer and performer, most recently seen in the finesse and precision of her marvellous solo Swallow in PICA’s Dancers Are Space Eaters. Give up the Ghost was a shambolic affair. It begged for dramaturgical input, particularly since this was a piece for 7 performers negotiating shifting relationships across at least an hour of dance time. All of the dancers are fabulous performers, yet they were terribly let down by the basic concept and its failure to develop. Is there no other subject for an ensemble of men and women than ‘relationships’? Not that there is anything wrong with relationships but the problem is the focus on the cliché of ‘relationships’ at the expense of a particular relationship.

An insurmountable problem for me was the staging of the piece within a squat/inner city/loft adrift with bare mattresses and graffiti—all very New York/Lower East Side circa 1989, except that in real life slumming is not a style but an absence of choice. There was none of desperation, the poverty, the tragedy of real life. Yes, I know it was dance, that it was a representation, and where is my sense of humour?

Well I didn’t find it funny, but pompous and self-important, and at times plain tedious. Couples coupled, fought, made up, made love, fought again, found themselves, lost themselves and occasionally were allowed to demonstrate the inventive exuberance that audiences love—only to have the music cut off their legs. There were plenty of moments that were almost marvellous—and then the music changed and the dance stopped. Peacock drew upon a marvellous set of extant music, and the projections were great, but the unrelenting and unmotivated disc-changing came to dominate and determine the movement, adding to the sense that the work was conceived on the run. A sense of breathlessness and desperation dominated Ghost, evident in the inability of the choreography to settle upon a phrase and explore it, in the unmotivated shifts in mood and music, in the lack of thought given to audience response. (And why was the text in French—is there something inherently urbane and ghetto-chic about French?)

No doubt there is another story here, of lack of resources and lack of time but not of lack of talent. Perth choreographers have demonstrated their talent over and over. But a full program in a festival requires more than potential. Choreographers must rise to the event, or I fear that the event will not again arise for them.

Two Way: Room, concept, choreography, performer Jo Pollitt; Give up the Ghost, choreography, direction Sue Peacock; Strut Dance, UWA Perth International Arts Festival 2004, Playhouse Theatre, Feb 11-28

The Dance Card mixed bill premiered in 2003, featuring musicians and lighting designers improvising with a changing selection of dancers over a 3 week period. Solos from the first 2 weeks returned for the final week to be re-scored and re-lit. The diversity of styles and relationships sketched through music, illumination and physique meant that one’s reaction to a particular designer or dancer was beside the point: the program was about audiences and artists evaluating each formulation of elements. This year, however, Monique Aucher lit all 3 weeks while Tamil Rogeon was composer for both weeks 1 and 2. This made Dance Card 2004 less invigorating, but it still contained many moments of quicksilver magic.

Aucher’s design consisted of a selection of warm colours: bare, yellowing globes and pinkish-red lights contrasted with blues and greens. These washes were complemented by central highlights and bright white axial corridors. The mixing was beautiful, echoing John Ford’s highly diffuse, colour-based design for Dance Card 2003. However, Aucher’s use of these options was less assured, employing flashes and chases that were not only distracting but often highlighted areas where nothing was happening. I had similar quibbles with Rogeon’s coordination of virtuosic violin highlights, lingering extended playing, dance music-like chordal beats and glitchie or static-like atmospheres. Although seductively insubstantial, the wafting music was often hard to hold onto, or too musically didactic to support the improvisation. Nevertheless, Rogeon’s use of a deliberately circumscribed musical palette established a pleasing sonic cohesion to each night, even if the nature of the solos didn’t altogether merit such consistency.

David Franzke re-scored the solos in week 3 and mastered best the challenges of the program. While some of his sci-fi, low-key soundscapes derived from materials similar to Rogeon’s, Franzke skilfully suggested particular readings. Rogeon’s scoring relied primarily on a paralleling or guiding of tempo, rhythm and texture in performance, carrying elements across the solos. Franzke’s contributions functioned according to an essentially dramaturgical logic, while enhancing the interpretative dissonance and uniqueness of each dance piece by allowing only hints or slight layers to be reworked sequence to sequence.

This difference was exemplified in Kristine Nilsen Oma’s performance. Unlike the other dancers, Nilsen Oma’s movement was predetermined right down to the text she recited and the point at which this was offered to the audience. The movement was essentially Graham-based, consisting of forceful, jerky variations on melodramatic Expressionist tropes, such as an emotional pushing through the chest with the back and head arching behind, or a weaving of arms into and out of the body to represent emotional pain and release. In week 2, Rogeon followed tradition by providing her with emotionally laden strings, enhancing the performance’s neo-Romantic ambience and power. In the last week however, Franzke replaced this with a series of musical cut-ups, including recorded text, music and radio fragments coming in over each other in an electric pastiche. Rather than the cliched model of the angst-ridden artist offering us her suffering, Franzke’s provocative style recontextualised Nilsen Oma’s body as one racked by the infection of multiple languages, sound bytes and cultural references. Instead of the classic, modernist dancing body, Franzke repositioned Nilsen Oma within a postmodernist framework. Even so, he was sensitive enough to drop his contribution to nothing to allow Nilsen Oma’s voice to come out for the scripted finale. Franzke’s work thus combined modesty with highly active musical interactions.

Those dancers working from formal or emotional concerns had largely devised in advance their basic poses and choreographic palette. It was the sequencing of these elements and their nuanced execution which was developed live in performance. It was therefore amongst the jesters that the principles of improvisation were most fully embraced; every element was generated in the moment with typically uneven results. Dianne Reid and Shaun McLeod were superb, employing a soft, elegant take on improvised comedic text and performative pathos. It was their seesawing between unaffected, dancerly turns of beautiful fluidity and more pedestrian movements and banal scenarios which made their nightly performances so affecting.

On the other hand, Michaela Pegum and Siobhan Murphy presented essentially formalistic, semi-choreographed studies given a seductive lilt through touches of emotional execution. With a highly mannered use of self-caresses and a kilt, Nick Sommerville danced a great solo echoing some of Phillip Adams’ concerns in balancing moments of muscularity and energetic bounce with an interesting play of gender.

Pegum’s was the most technical and austere solo, sharply danced in a plain, white costume and energised through particularly measured, often geometric shifts of movement and exchanges of momentum. Her right forearm carved out lines on the floor as her body crouched above, before the obtuse angle of the left leg was echoed and its shape erased by lifting the entire body up and out in a diagonal line, via a transition which was led and articulated through the point of the elbow. Responding to the rising beat of Rogeon’s music or Franzke’s open, charged static, Pegum increased the extent of these movements, while allowing the transitions between them and the falls of the body to linger longer and longer, imparting a palpable sense of sexuality and ecstasy into her open-mouthed performance.

In contrast, Murphy danced from a more impressive, physically subtle space, beginning with irregular crossings of legs and feet, before these absent-minded jumps in concentration and velocity progressed into hands and arms, finally causing the body itself to whirl or half-fold irregularly upon itself. Between these frequent yet essentially discontinuous spikes of activity, the dancer’s eyes flickered and mouth trembled, as hands moved across, in, and above each other, in small, retreating jabs, as though trying to feel out a gesture or a cognitive phrase which would make sense of these impulses. This constant searching for and locating places in movement and expression resembled a fractal version of the thinking body dramatised within the more precise choreography of Rosalind Crisp.

Alongside these promising explorations from relative newcomers sat Deanne Butterworth’s wonderful, effortlessly massive performance. Frequently featured in projects from Dance Works and Shelley Lasica, Butterworth is a master of seductive lyricism. For all the elegant beauty of the choreographic palette she has enjoyed, there is nevertheless a danger that she might simply echo that highly attractive, sparse lyricism in her own work. By dressing herself in what appeared to be a gorilla suit without a head, Butterworth undercut expectations. Floppy ripples of black fur drew attention to the dance’s focus on unforced manipulations of weight through the hips. The fur also highlighted the lethargic beauty of Butterworth’s softly moving form, as she gently released into the ground and then lightly returned to stand using only a few well-chosen, yet unassuming movements. It was the gentle undulation of hairy cloth and inertia that gave this work its ambiguous drama.

Dance Card may have already run its course as an innovative way of dramatising the exchanges generated in theatrically-framed dance, but the plethora of fantastic relationships contained in its 2 year run has been well worthwhile.

Dance Card 2004, curator Helen Herbertson, various performers and sound artists, Dancehouse, Feb 11-28

A new work by Tess de Quincey is always a red letter event in the performance year and already there’s a buzz about De Quincey Co’s …an immodest green, the first in a series entitled Embrace inspired by the company’s 3-month residency in India last year to be presented at Performance Space in May.

Tess de Quincey has a longstanding connection with the sub-continent dating back to her meeting in the 80s with dance ethnologist Ranjita Karleka and, later, documentary filmmaker JoJo Karlekar. Ranjita introduced her to The Natyashastra, a fundamental text in Indian artistic tradition. Meeting up with these two in Kolkata last year, De Quincey was interested to explore further the text’s parallels with the Body Weather discipline which informs her company’s work. At the same time she began to conceive an intercultural performance exchange which would bring together Indian and Australian artists in a series of workshops and performances culminating in 2005/06 in an all-night installation event reminiscent of some of the ancient Kathakali performances that mark the passage of time from dusk to dawn.

When asked by Erin Brannigan what we might expect of Embrace in Sydney, De Quincey replied from Kolkata where she was about to embark on a 10-day workshop with Indian participants at the School of Music, “Well, given that … every day is an intense onslaught of colour and texture and smell amidst a wild anarchic bustle and passionate thriving humour in a deeply black, polluted city, we’re running constantly on the spot just to keep up. It’s the magnificent discordance and defiant skirmishing which imbue every level of life here that are soliciting and formatting our bodies and our thoughts.” (Read the full interview in Ausdance’s Dance NSW, Jan-Feb 2004)

The irrepressibly energetic and adroit programmer Virginia Hyam is running her 5th 6-monthly season for The Studio at the Sydney Opera House. Hyam has carved out a space for idiosyncratic, often cutting edge entertainments from around Australia and created new audiences to match them. As just one dimension of the Sydney Opera House’s expanded vision of the art it presents and the audiences it needs to develop, The Studio is a key player.

The 24 shows in the program to July are indicative of Hyam’s eclectic taste as well as that of her largely young audiences. Not surprisingly then music in one form or another is to be found throughout a program which includes Pianissimo from the wonderfully eccentric and innovative talents of Brisbane artists Christine Johnson and Lisa O’Neill; hip hop comedy in Inna Thigh by dynamic rappers Sista She; virtuoso percussionist Ben Walsh in his one man, many drums show First Sound; the Ennio Morricone Experience’s instrumental extravaganza of spaghetti western music; Morgan Lewis in the see it-and-DIY hip hop theatre show, Crouching B-Boy Hidden Dragon (RT 54, p38); and there are dance works from leading choreographers Russell Dumas and Sue Healey. Other shows and events in the program—the recent Global Beats mini-music festival, the Message Sticks Indigenous arts celebration, a smattering of comics, The Song Company doing a not-to-be-missed reading of The Song of Songs, new media screenings, exhibits and performances in Scope (as part of the Sydney Film Festival) and, for something completely different in an already headspinning lineup, the popular Scratch Nights. The first of these is Embalmer! The Musical, the second the immersive and interactive Sprocket from Sydney’s new media outfit, Tesseract Research Laboratories. I asked Hyam if her approach to programming had changed over the last 3 years.

I think it’s coming from the same basis, the core being that there’s no particular formula as to what shape it should take. It’s not all theatre, not all dance, and has a completely eclectic feel. It’s responsive to what contemporary work is out there, around Australia and what is in the process of creation, so that we’re involved in the making of new performances. It’s about supporting emerging artists and established artists involved in small scale work and talking to both niche and broader public audiences. Balancing all of these is what I’m still trying to do with the program.

At your launch for the first program for 2004 there were very few of the usual arts suspects, and you said proudly, there’s probably quite a few hairdressers here.

What we’re really on about is trying to attract people to come to the theatre who otherwise wouldn’t. I know everyone talks about developing new audiences but I think The Studio program is an avenue where we can. Purposefully it’s been made accessible both price-wise and with a lot of the content. I think [the British show] Duckie was a good example, attracting a queer audience from across Sydney who might be clubbers who wouldn’t necessarily think of coming to live performance. I’m hoping that they’ll be intrigued to want to come back and see something else.

Certainly over the last few years we’ve noticed there are crowds that regularly come back. When we do our data collection to send out the program, there are very large numbers of people who’ll come and see 3 and 4 shows across the year. It’s not a subscription series because we don’t want subscribers to then be dictating what the program will be. Every year I set out to cater for certain groups and their tastes. People pick up the program and see 2 or 3 things in a 6 month program of particular interest to them. Consequently we talk to a whole range of audiences.

The average season is 2 weeks or one, or one nighters. I’ve tried longer seasons but, to be quite honest, some of the work we bring in attracts only a certain number of people and if you spread it over 3 weeks, you’re only diluting the size of your audience. Often we’re introducing new artists into Sydney and I tend to reintroduce them back into The Studio once they’ve developed a name here. Christine Johnson from Brisbane is a good example. She’ll be coming back this year with Pianissimo, her show with Lisa O’Neill, The audience for Johnson’s Decent Spinster last year built up well over the 10 performances of a 2 week season. And we offer a broad range of choice. You’ll see the same sort of fields repeated across the program. It’s a bit like a festival. If you miss one thing you know there’ll be something else interesting coming up.

The program reflects the changing nature of the arts field in your hook up with Sydney Film Festival and various new media arts organisations.

The film festival came to us, seeing The Studio as a good venue to present their new media work because of the sort of audiences we have already been attracting. I saw it as a really positive relationship. The other element that came into it was the Ennio Morricone Experience doing spaghetti western film music. I asked the festival if they wanted to have them as an umbrella event. It’s a perfect partnership. Those sorts of relationships are crucial.

Your program, as ever, looks very entertaining, full of laughs, campery and satire. That’s not to say that it’s not serious fun, as in the work of hip hop artist Morgan Lewis.

I think I like politics presented that way. And you’re right, there’s a lot of that throughout the program and that’s the contrast I’m trying to find with other work that’s already happening around Sydney. I know people want to profile their work at the Opera House but not everything can be or is necessarily appropriate or indeed best shown here.

Everything that goes into The Studio has to be supported. And that’s what I love about the program. I love building it and it’s always done in collaboration with independent artists who are all coming from the same place of being under-funded or unfunded and working out ways that we can make it work between the two of us. When I started there was a certain contract you’d have with the artists and now we have many versions of that contract. You’re thinking there can’t possibly be another kind of relationship and then it’s oh, I think I’ve just come up with another one! The core factor is that it’s a shared relationship. It’s very rare that The Studio is just paying out the money, putting the show on and going forward. More often, we’re all working together to ensure the success of shows. That’s what’s exciting about it.

Exactly. There are not a lot of commissions in the first part of 2004. We’re developing some new work in the second part of the year. Certainly, it depends what’s on the table and what’s already out there and who’s coming to me. It’s fluid but every 6 months there’s money going towards development of something. And it’s often on a smaller scale. In the next 6 months we’re developing a relationship with the independent radio station, FBI, doing plays that will go live to air from The Studio. We can do small things which can have quite a vast effect on the people involved. I’m really interested in commissioning emerging artists and bringing them into the venue working within a different framework. The Dance Tracks program has been a great model for that and an opportunity for commissioning artists to do short works.

We’re looking at establishing a jazz festival working with Jazz Groove and SIMA [Sydney Improvised Music Association]. What’s going on in Sydney is constantly changing…our program has no fixed formula. It has to be fluid, it needs to remain current.

Across 4 Friday nights in February, if you shot down to Acton Peninsula, site of the National Museum on Canberra’s Lake Burley Griffin, you’d be among some of the funkiest new media worlds in The Garden of Australian Dreams. Sky Lounge 2004 was the third in a series of February multimedia mini-festivals. After heat-wave late summer days edged with gold-rimmed mountain lines, you could sit back beneath luminous skies, chill out, eat, drink and get into the slow-lane groove. Alternative, surfy, homie, artsy, under-age, over-age; in the lights we’re all green, all red and we all get along. There’s nothing to really compare.

Listen to electronic artists and DJs making music. Experience visual and music installations in The Tunnel. Watch animated flicks from the hill, plopped on beanbags (if you’re lucky), in between dingo, cyclone and backyard fences. Short films curated by Malcolm Turner (Animation Posse), projected onto a white box known as The House of Australian Dreams, framed by palm tree fronds in the middle of the garden. Or make little sorties to K-Space, featuring the best of interactive and linear new media. The open-air acoustics were surprisingly good and everyone could talk as well. Your own pace was the right pace.

The highlights of the two final nights? Hard to pick, but here goes. Green Night: the HyperSense Complex in The Tunnel, an intoxicating mix of predetermined, programmed music and finger-puppet, gestural movement (or not), an experience of art-as-it-happens, with random events including people unintentionally wandering into the generated space. Hallucinatory choreography on the go. And a couple of animations: Grey Avenue (Eugene Foo, Australia), in which buildings morph into creatures (you want to take them home), and Ward 13 (Peter Cornwell, Australia), an hilarious projection of all-out hospital fear with a faux ‘wheelchair’ chase par excellence.

Red Night: watch Red Thread (Jo Lawrence, England) a can-opener ties up a woman with red string. Then an animation closer to home: It’s Like That (Southern Ladies Animations Group, Australia) features the voices of children in immigration detention camps, showing us their world. The animations come to an end and we’re told to move back so we’re not skipped on…

Ladiez of the Jump Rope are hop-hop hip-hop with smiles, clever rhymes, sexy legs. Juxtaposing rhyme, dance, singing, skipping, hopping and break-dancing, the Ladiez play out a fight between ‘Asians’ and ‘Whities’ at a school camp, concluding with a skip-out battle. Pony M of the Ladiez says: “We don’t take ourselves too seriously.” This attitude shines in their playful rhymes and sing-song taunts. The Ladiez are innovative hip-hoppers, dealing with contemporary themes with an ease and confidence that charms the audience.

Somebody whispers: “You light up a dark room.” And we smile. Time to go home.

Sky Lounge: the future friday 2004, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, Feb 6, 13, 20, 27

In the shape of the innovative sensor-based Diem Dance System, technology is at the forefront of contemporary dance performance in The Obcell. Created at the Danish Institute of Electro-acoustic Music, the system has been designed to give the dancer optimal movement range and creative control with two sensors/cameras being worn on the body. The apparatus is hidden in athlete’s strapping, suggesting injury or restraints.

This work integrates the capabilities and limitations of the cable-free camera/sound system, informing the performance’s concept and physical content. For example the 0.42 second delay between a movement trigger and the sensor response alters the performer’s natural body timing while tripping the audience’s perception of the real and the imagined. The tightly woven interplay between subject matter, choreography and technological device invites the audience to keenly observe the initiating source, making us both voyeurs and laboratory assistants.

A triptych relationship between the live body and 2 video mirror images acting as observational agents draws our eye to detail that would otherwise go unnoticed. A dialogue evolves between the body as subject and the camera as ‘tester’, representing the interdependent narrative of man and technology. We observe the physical and psychological journey of performer Ninian Donald as he grapples with solitary confinement and electric shocks unrelentingly administered to modify his behavior. He is reduced to a raw animal physicality of strained sinews, body arching in electrically-fired neural synaptic pain. He regresses into childlike states with repetitious pacing and body inversions as he attempts to deal with the inhumanity of his sterile environment. Escapist behavior emerges as creativity in the face of deprivation. These flights into altered states of consciousness invite retribution, testing his endurance. A night vision camera duplicates his presence 10 fold. Multiple images stare back at us. Uncomfortably we recognise the paradoxical question: who is watching who?

Ambiguity purposefully surrounds the location of The Obcell, suggesting a place of deleted identity, somewhere between penitentiary and psychiatric ward. The test is dubiously positioned between punishment and treatment. As witnesses we begin to feel complicit, due to our internalised discomfort and obedience to the authority of performance. Does anyone ask for it to stop? The performance reminds me of Stanley Milgrim’s 1963 psychological experiment which studied the human tendency to obey authority. A test subject was asked to administer electric shocks to another person (unbeknownst to the subject the shocks were not real): 65% of the subjects obeyed.

Informed by research conducted by director Fiona Malone at Long Bay Jail, this interactive multi-media dance work addresses multiple issues. Although choreographically thin in places, its depth may be fully realised with finer tuning or as a longer work. What makes The Obcell so unnerving is that the hypothesis for the experiment is never revealed. The calculated persecution so powerfully embodied by Ninian Donald is theatrically converted and refracted through projected real time images. He has no choice and we do not set him free. The immersive theatrical environment neither discloses his identity or the reason for his incarceration. This in turn creates a strange lack of empathy for the subject, bringing sharply into focus current issues surrounding all forms of detainment.

The Obcell, director-choreographer Fiona Malone, performer Ninian Donald, State Theatre Rehearsal Room, Adelaide Fringe Festival, Feb 19-28

We’re stuck on the twelfth floor, somewhere, nobody knows. What’s going on? Does it matter? From the second the lights go down, as sound score and movement begin, we are caught, arrested, transfixed. Choreographer, Tanja Liedtke, doesn’t let us go until she decides to. Soft-footed, funny, athletic, delicate, violent in places, and violating, Liedtke knows how to pull us every which way: and it works, although we hold our breath, suck in air, so close does the performance come to very nearly imploding, with us, the audience, as co-conspirators.

There is so much to say about this 50 minute dance work. This is a choreography about loss (being lost) and being found (finding); about desire and wanting (not wanting), not having; about fear (those shakes, that scream) and joy (yes, laughter); about togetherness, being together, and the anguish that accompanies a crashing alone-ness.

We watch every move, we want to watch (are watched): it fascinates, repulses, evokes. Liedtke knows how to make good use of bodies, the size and physicality of them (and not just the small), to take us from excruciatingly funny sequences of bouncing in and out of doors, playing Follow the Leader (the space itself comes alive); to a character squealing like a pig that chills. From a crude sexual ‘game’ with a figure drawn on a wall that turns terrifyingly into a simulated (real?) gang rape; to a flight of escape and possible redemption.

The choreography is character driven; and the 5 performers work beautifully alone and as a tight ensemble.

Take a most poignant sequence when ‘the big boy’ (Joshua Tyler) draws all over the walls (painted green and black as chalkboards) the words ‘sleep’, ‘dark’, ‘hole’, ‘her skin felt’, sometimes back-to-front, then draws/writes in chalk all over the girl in the yellow dress (Kristina Chan). This is a deft use of bodies as writing spaces: how we write ourselves (our bodies; our walls); how we are written up by others, by society—by us. Later, the boy follows the girl from chalk-footprint to chalk-footprint, carries her almost as though she is weightless—like a bird—a dance for just the 2 of them. He is fascinated by the movement of her body, its physicality; we are seduced.

Timing is impeccable; voice and sound (newly composed for Twelfth Floor by DJTr!p) just so; light folds back to reveal, or hide.

The denouement is worth the terrible weight of what goes on just before, to see the same girl dance her way to escape, drawing as she goes in red chalk, in a language that becomes gobbledygook, a mad scribble, emblematic of the emotion felt, inside out; to the point of departure. There: her face at the window, her drawing of a little chalk girl, in red. STOP IT STOP IT folds into CRY LIKE A BIRD into W E E P. And I think we do.

But is it enough? Aren’t we stuck in this mess? And why 12? In Twelfth Floor things aren’t always as they appear, or as we desire.

Twelfth Floor, The Australian Choreographic Centre, choreographer/ director Tanja Liedtke, performers Anton, Sascha Budimski, Kristina Chan, Amelia McQueen , Joshua Tyler, creative coordinator Solon Ulbrich, sound design and composition DJTr!p; Australian Choreographic Centre Performing Space, Canberra, March 16-20

(From top left) Sohlange Casimiro-Gil, Vanessa Gordon, Monique Moffat, Katherine Whitfield, Helen Whitfield, Cherrelle Chan, Vavine

Long ago the temptress Vavine tricked the mighty hunter Alule into revealing all his dances and abandoning all his costumes to her. From these dances sprang the rich culture of the Mekeo people of Papua New Guinea.

The Pacific Island performance group Sunameke created a contemporary dance, Vavine, around this narrative and performed it recently to packed houses at Browns Mart Theatre in Darwin. Sunameke’s director and principal choreographer, Julia Gray, used the production to explore how cultures shift and change over time. How these changes have played out in her own life and the lives of others caught “between 2 shores”, is one of the major narrative strands of this multi-faceted production.

For some of the dancers in Sunameke this was their first performance in a theatre. Others have much wider experience. Together they produced a performance that resonated strongly with the multicultural Darwin audience. For many in Darwin, especially those from the South Pacific and Asia Pacific regions, dance is a key cultural activity practiced with respect for each dance’s particular essence and reason for existence.

In this performance a hypnotic voice-over narration echoed and re-iterated fragments of the Vavine story, interwoven with contemporary text from the distinguished Pacific poet Teresia Teaiwa. Drama and melancholy were added through a soundtrack comprising mostly traditional island guitar and ukulele music, but also including some original tracks from Airileke Ingram of the Drum Drum group. The narrator’s voice added a heightened significance to the dance and immersed the audience in the power that emanates from myth.

The dramatic tension was alleviated by more light-hearted episodes such as a group of young girls sweeping the stage with straw brooms and competing to grate coconut for the prize of a Cherry Ripe. There was humour too in the raw energy of Teaiwa’s text: “This is just the husk of the coconut, baby—wait till you reach the shell!”

Darwin has as many as 50 cultural dance groups who maintain their culture and traditions through performance. The particular significance of Vavine has been the creation of a contemporary performance based on traditional dance movement. This process both questions and reaffirms the relevance of dance traditions in the changing post-colonial space “between 2 shores.”

Sunameke, Vavine, director Julia Gray, performers Yola Gray, Richard Broughton, Darrin McNally, Julia Quinn, text written and spoken by Teresia Teaiwa, choreographers Julia Gray, Yola Gray, Pamela Cameron, Richard Broughton, Vanessa Gordon, lighting and design Elka Kerkhofs, Neil McKnight, Browns Mart Theatre, Darwin, Feb13-14

Kate Neal’s production house for new music, Dead Horse, premiered with a recital counter-posing neo-Dadaist/Fluxus event-style work with Neal’s own textural, jazz-influenced compositions. Action-based works were performed by Dutch musician Mayke Nas, while David Young screened graphic notation in a digital projection positioned between audience and performer.

The easy, visible logic and sense of fun in Nas’ performances made them crowd pleasers. First was an amusing study adapted from the writings of Peter Handke. The performers wrote on 4 chalkboards hanging in a row, each word making up an ironic phrase of a misdeed or failure (“I found complexity in artists / I found banality in artists / etc”). Substitutions transformed sentences until each performer was left alone, scrawling their own list. An equally engaging seesawing between comic game-play and po-faced seriousness saw Nas and William Poskitt at a piano, swinging from side to side, playing heavy, open-handed strikes, interposing knee-slaps and handclaps, finally crossing each other’s arms to slap the other’s upright palms as in a schoolyard round, producing a tightly scored version of child’s play. The best work in this tradition though was composer Thierry de Mey’s Table Music, in which Nas and 2 others sat at tables sharply isolated from the gloom by crisp squares of overhead light. They executed double-handed finger rubs across the surface of a smoothly planed wooden resonating box, as well as bony finger flicks, stabs of the fingers which kept the hands and arms elevated, flat hand slaps across the undressed top and horizontal flip-flops of the palms. These pieces from Nas and de Mey focused on rhythm and were not especially musically complex, but Table Music was so tightly choreographed, executed and framed that it resembled dance. The performance was also lent a palpable sensuality by the aural materiality of the amplified sound of flesh and bone on softwood.

Young’s Val Camonica series used materials derived from transcriptions of prehistoric rock art in Italy’s Camonica Valley. Though exhibiting a spiky, aggressive timbre typical of Young’s work, the latest composition had a seductiveness which was hard to isolate, but was nevertheless firmly embedded within its open gaps, extended one note gestures (signified in the projected score by a lengthy downward arc) and juxtapositions of small masses of noisy atonalism. Young’s graphic notation directed jagged, highly textural playing, which included using crushed, dried leaves as percussion instruments. Nevertheless, only parts of the more aggressive interpretation offered by pianist Michael Kieran-Harvey touched upon the ambience of atonalist fury or abstruse serialism. Moreover, the invitation for the audience to join in the game of reading the quite precise, coloured pictographs and lines from the score rendered Roccia an accessible yet satisfyingly abstract contemporary composition.

If Nas and de Mey provided the performative highlight of the evening, Neal’s were the most musically satisfying works. Two related suites concluded the recital, separated by a pleasant if somewhat unnecessary projection of a night time drive through Canberra. Little Fury constantly rested on the edges of things, falling into small motifs and resemblances which only lasted for short periods. It opened with thick, sustained notes and chords across the whole ensemble, which were then passed around without leading to a distinct lead instrument or ensemble section. Materials ebbed, flowed and peaked with fragility, without actually decaying in depth or evolving into a strong focus on any single instrument or rhythmic line. From within this crackling mass emerged jazzy accents, moments of Steve Reich-like throb, and almost Baroque or Nyman-esque ascents and descents over the staves. The overall effect was one of dense shimmering, of internal transfers within a thick musical system.

With Rabid Bay, however, the jazz-like intonations of the preceding work emerged as the dominant theme. In an ensemble rearranged to feature brass instruments supporting Kieran-Harvey on piano, Neal’s music took on a propulsive urban modernity recalling the marriage in US cinema of post-1960s jazz and atonal music, as in Bernard Herrmann’s scores. This gave Rabid Bay a satisfying sense of musical aggression and drama.

Such a varied program could never satisfy on all levels, and some of the simple or naive video fared poorly in comparison with the accompanying music. However, the program established Dead Horse as an exciting vehicle not only for Neal, but a wide range of new music.

New Music Works From Australian, Belgian and Dutch Composers, Dead Horse Productions, World Wide Warehouse, Feb 13

Not all those attending The opera Project’s The Audience and Other Psychopaths get to realise the promise of the production’s title, but one of their number does get to play murderer. This act is perpetrated in an upside down world where the theatre becomes frantic film set, the audience transformed into extras, Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train is invoked in drag and some murky sub-romantic business transpires between a manic Italian female film director and an off-stage diva. It all ends badly with only the audience member (cast as the film’s lead) surviving the climactic off-stage mayhem.

This aesthetic mix and moral carnage is further complicated by a beautiful score from composer Stephen Adams, setting Amanda Stewart’s wild grab-the-world-by-the-throat text for the diva, and instant cinema-scale images of the live performance from video-maker Peter Oldham. The work’s furious dynamic means that on occasion the score is drowned by stage action, the soprano’s delivery of the sung text sometimes less than intelligible (surtitles, please) and some apparently key moments make little sense. As well, Nigel Kellaway’s chainsmoking, tottering blonde is out to have Kellaway the performer (seen on screen) murdered. For those who know the artist’s ouevre, this doubling took them back to his acclaimed durational work, This Most Wicked Body (1994). For everyone else there was little time to reflect on reflexivity as the show fairly belted along and moments of opacity were tolerated and soon forgotten as hysteria mounted.

The Audience and Other Psychopaths is primarily and wildly comic. Kellaway is at his funniest in the recorded scene in which, looming against the Sydney Opera House, he catches the ferry and then clumsily pedals a bicycle to the Lane Cove murder site. Elsewhere he has the right kind of droll obtuseness that echoes Robert Walker’s villain in the Hitchcock film, both funny and frightening. The moment when he cracks with a shriek is chilling, pushing past melodrama. Katia Molina is the whirlwind director, issuing orders in a flood of Italian and English, performing mourning, outrage and death in her own film in an endless rush of hilarious and inexplicable costume changes, and quarrelling via mobile phone with the diva—Kellaway muttering derisive asides about “lesbos-ism.”

The Audience and Other Psychopaths is a wild ride, a little uneven (the off-stage diva device never quite gels despite fine singing, hauntingly layered and textured in the recording) but endearingly lunatic, a fantasia of inversions, reversals and, as always with The opera Project, assaults on the artforms and genres we love but must not let rest. The play of light (designer Simon Wise) and projected image is particularly potent here, cutting across forms to yield a convincing cinematic theatricality with some eerie, memorable images conjured with the flick of a cigarette lighter or the alternation of screen and scrim. And it is striking how an audience member projected onto a huge screen is given unexpected presence, when the slightest movement of lip or eye is magnified to suggest meaning.

The opera Project, The Audience and Other Psychopaths, performers Nigel Kellaway, Katia Molino, soprano Karen Cummings, director Nigel Kellaway, composer Stephen Adams, co-writer Amanda Stewart, video artist Peter Oldham, lighting Simon Wise; Performance Space, Feb 10-21

Kathleen Ferrier: A Time of Kings and Queens is a concert performance built around a recital of songs mostly from the repertoire of the great British lyric contralto. Annette Tesoriero (an integral part of Sydney’s performance scene and co-founder of The opera Project with Nigel Kellaway) stays clear of mimickry; there is sufficient affinity in her dark, chocolatey lower register and the capacity to soar to make the connection. As if sharing morning and then afternoon tea with us, Tesoriero and accompanist Heinz Schweers chat about Ferrier’s life and sadly short career with a blend of introductions, anecodotes, gossipy banter and readings with dashes of witty theatricality. The focus is largely on adapted folk songs and art songs often influenced by folk, alongside an aria from Gluck’s Orfeo e Euridice and a superb rendition of Britten’s remarkable cabaret song, O Tell me the truth about love. In braving Brahms’ Sapphische Ode and Der Tod das ist die Kuhle Nacht , Tesoriero captured something of Ferrier’s capacity for the transcendent, dark notes of the soul soaring high into the world of the spirit. Ferrier’s gay associations, her pleasure in the occasional ‘trouser role’, an unconsummated marriage and the intimacy of her relationship with her female carer provide the substance for a theme of generalised queerness if not of lesbianism. Surprisingly though, the performers omitted Ferrier’s well-documented delight in dirty jokes, limericks and crude drawings. At times the show seemed a touch twee for Ferrier’s earthiness and un-diva-ish homeliness, elsewhere it was spot on. A similar unevenness was felt in the telling of the life, a more thorough through-writing is needed, particularly in the second half where some songs went curiously unintroduced and too many years of Ferrier’s career were neglected. Significant encounters with conductors Barbirolli, Klemperer and Walter and opera performances, including, early on, the premiere of Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, could have provided a more significant sketch of the artist without dampening the performers’ playfulness. Perhaps, too, there were too many songs after interval, fascinating as it was to be introduced to 4 songs by Roger Quilter (another tragic figure who died in 1953, the same year as Ferrier) whose reputation is enjoying a quiet revival. I hope that Tesoriero and Schweers keep Kathleen Ferrier: A Time of Kings and Queens in repertoire: it’s an intriguing and engaging fusion of recital and theatre and would make ideal festival fare. KG

Kathleen Ferrier: A Time of Kings and Queens, directed and performed by Annette Tesoriero and Heinz Schweers, Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras, Seymour Centre, Feb 27

An early gig and packed out. Three performances on the one bill, all of them involving improvisation with a more or less traditional instrument used as a noise source–outside conventional playing technique. Performance danger, music at the threshold of organisation and perception.

Opening the show is Clayton Thomas, a double bass player working in Sydney who co-runs the NOW now improvisation festival. He comes on stage very down home, says ‘this is the first time I’ve ever entered to applause’–this really is a surprisingly large and enthusiastic audience. On the floor stage front is a double bass lying on its side, bubble wrap stuck under the strings. There’s a few bits and pieces on a mat, a bell, paper clips etc, a couple of bows: normal size and chubby. Thomas whips out the chubby bow and starts playing the leg of the bass, slowly builds up to a rhythm and drone. There’s some new sounds for old, quiet bits and loud bits, but no particular structure emerges. Every so often I hear something that I wish was played by an ensemble in a more organised arrangement. Some good textural moments, but the general effect is of a Foley artist picking up and putting down the quirky tools of the trade, setting up for the next effect.

Annette Krebs and Andrea Neumann enter next to the sound of mains hum–techs confer for about 10 minutes but the hum remains, disconcerting to performers who move subtle textures in and out of silence. Krebs performs sitting down, her flat down guitar scraped, squeezed, coaxed and fanned with various preparations. Neumann stands to play a purpose built ‘inside piano’–dump the walnut case, just use the strings, resonance board and metal frame. Together they use mixer feedback, contact mics and amplification to extract the tiniest of sounds and draw out sympathetic resonances–flabby strings cry out for some of the other guy’s action. Noises crawl in with no physical analog, but sounding as if they should. Krebs and Neumann spatialise the sound across 4 speakers, but I don’t notice it that much.

Werner Dafeldecker studied double bass at the Konservatorium in Vienna. He comes to the front of the stage and gently bows the bass. Scratchy harmonics, ultra quiet, working in, out, and against the CD backing track. Dafeldecker has an assured technique, confident and musical. His restrained set of gestures creates a delicate music for intensely personal, focussed listening. But I’ve never known a concert for so many creaking bumshifts and people stomping about. Perhaps next time they could announce “Please turn off all mobiles. If you haven’t been to the toilet please go now.”

After the concert Michael Graeve, a sound/visual artist from Melbourne, set up an installation in the middle of the Powerhouse’s open concrete performance platform. Working mainly with old record players and speakers — veneer on chipboard, sunrooms circa 1970–Graeve likes to plonk his machines down so they work their sounds in space and volume. Tonight they are in a circle with Graeve in the middle, adjusting things. No records, just the players playing themselves, a bit of rubber matting, an aluminium platter. Microphonic feedback from the needle being stuck close to the speakers and the gain shoved up high. Most people stand back, give the guy some room, but some wander in pretty close to see as well as hear. Working this way is a bit unpredictable–within the general boundaries of bump and grind noise music — but one can overstate the possibilities for novelty: harmonic progressions aren’t going to suddenly dominate proceedings.

Noise/experimental/microsound improvisation has a long enough history to have developed its own clichés. Crackles, hisses, sub-sub groans, picking things up and putting them down. Soft and slow, loud and busy: the formal structures to organise the sound stream are still in short supply. Sometimes it’s a bit like the one-man-band thing: tootling that whistle, plinking that banjo, crashing those cymbals, pumping the footpedal for a bass drum thump. Except nowdays it’s shaving a whale in a cardboard box and every time you hit the footpedal it vomits. Not everything works, exploration is not yet exhausted. The most successful performances, Dafeldecker in particular, bring the audience into the sound like a lens and listening is transformed into a series of exclusive moments where sounds fill perception with detail and meaning.

What is Music?, Michael Graeve, Clayton Thomas, Werner Dafeldecker, Annette Krebs and Andrea Neumann, Brisbane Powerhouse, Feb 6

Both wearing black and conjuring chimerical presences in their mesmeric sound performances at the What is Music? festival at Brisbane’s Powerhouse in February, Keiji Haino and Masami Akita affirmed their joint status as icons of the Japanese noise underground. Beyond the spectral noise merchant image, however, lie differences of ideology and approach embodied in their performances.

Haino took the stage first, billed under his band name Fushitsusha (“The Unlost”), despite the fact this was a solo performance (bassist Yasushi Ozawa was ill). Though Haino apparently loathes the categorisation of their style as ‘improvised’, his performances with Fushitsusha (often labelled “the heaviest rock band on planet earth”) have come to signify a critical peak for free rock.

Without the other members, though, Haino was reduced to playing with a drum machine and loops created from his own guitar and a theremin-like device. Despite this, the solo performance was still an extraordinary event. Cutting a numinous figure in his trademark black leather pants, billowing black shirt and dark sunglasses, surrounded by a thin haze of incense smoke, Haino unleashed an unearthly aural assault that ranged from tiny jagged echoes to an almost overwhelming electric cacophony of guitar wails, potent feedback and roaring distortion.

During the performance Haino’s face, framed by long black hair and a thick fringe, was a picture of intensity. Hurling his body, dervish-like, across the stage, he assailed both guitar and microphone with ferocity, producing a turbulent, driving din. At one point his body was propelled backwards into the speakers, recoiling from the force of his attack on his visibly scarred guitar. Later he lurched dangerously close to the edge of the stage. Haino’s convulsive thrashing lead to a trail of dropped picks across the stage, patches of abrupt silence (filled with cheers and applause) as he became unplugged and, by the end, a guitar bereft of most of its strings.

In between violent guitar flagellation and anguished screams came small moments of quiet, as Haino whispered, hissed and gagged on agonised lyrics. It’s this mix of ear-splitting tone and volume with soft, textured sounds for which Fushitsusha is famous and which demonstrates Haino’s incredible noise-making range.

In contrast to the maniacal, ostentatious sensuality of Haino’s performance, Masami Akita (Merzbow) presented a more introverted, almost wraithlike image. His method revolved around the meticulous addition and layering of sounds. Where Haino screamed, stalked the stage and stamped on pedals, Merzbow barely moved. Framed behind a pair of laptop screens casting a ghostly blue glow on his pale face and glasses, the only movement was the occasional twitch of an index finger on the mouse or mixer and his eyes flicking between screens.

Layer on layer, Merzbow created a soundscape that began with faint twittering and fluttering and rain-like static, joined by a swelling bassline and samples of chains and other metallic scrapings. The sounds accreted over time, swirling and shifting, pulsing louder and softer. Harsh, grinding crunches were counterpointed with delicate tinkles, until the final buffeting climax. An oceanic mix of soaring and dipping sounds, the performance was notably quieter than some of his more violent pieces, but no less complex.

The differences between the 2 performers embody the cleavage between rock, with its emphasis on liveness and authenticity, and the related but very different sound-art world, which usually eschews drama and staging in favour of restrained, anti-spectacular delivery. These discursive differences in performance are deeply imbricated with the production of the music itself. Haino’s demented energy, frenzied strumming and throat-tearing howls perfectly enact rock’s myth of authenticity. His spasmodic convulsions are the result of total surrender to the power of the unmediated, pure, raw sound. In contrast, Merzbow’s rejection of ‘performance’ and careful accretions typify sound art’s minimalist syncretic-assemblage approach.

Romanticism emphatically informs Haino’s performance, where the music offers immediate, unmediated access to the artist’s genius-soul, while Merzbow’s approach is rooted in Surrealism. Taking his name from a Kurt Schwitters painting (The Cathedral of Erotic Misery), his music-making and artistic persona is constructed around Surrealism’s obsession with the unconscious. Merzbow sees his sonic collages, with their approximation of the dream state, as a form of automatic writing.

Coming together for What is Music?, these performers’ differences synthesized into a deafening, caterwauling crescendo. The resulting industrial collage of electronic noises, distortions and unearthly vocals provided a fitting end to 2 consummate performances from exemplars of interlocking but distinct modes of experimental music making.

What is Music? Haino Keiji (as Fushitsusha) and Masami Akita (as Merzbow), Brisbane Powerhouse, Feb 7

Mitchell Whitelaw, Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life, MIT Press, Mass, 2004 ISBN 0-262-23234-0

Mitchell Whitelaw has produced a detailed and wide ranging review of artificial life (a-life) in art. Clear descriptions and analyses are presented of many major works in the field, which are divided into “breeders”, “cybernatures” (where “breeder” programs are placed in a more complex ecology), hardware (which overlaps considerably with conventional robotics) and abstract machines or cellular automata. These make interesting and contestable groupings in themselves.

Both “breeder” and “cybernature” programs often draw on evolutionary theory and language. Attempts are made to produce “small worlds” where a-life breeds and competes for resources, but all too often the basic algorithm is that of conventional Darwinian selection. As humans inevitably select interactively or provide the program’s simple rules for selection, these pressures are far less complex and subtle than those found in true ecosystems. When copies of life’s rules are written in, is it any surprise that life-like work results? The predictable outcome is all too often a trivial attempt to make pale, albeit aesthetically pleasing, imitations of the real world.

The major omission in Metacreation is any real coverage of biological works, with Jeremijenko’s One Trees one of the few examples described. In contrast, while little attempt is made to integrate artistic a-life work with the larger fields of biological science, computer engineering and gaming, Whitelaw does acknowledge the overlap. As a biologist I felt the relationship to current debates in evolutionary theory could have been better explored. Much of the artistic a-life work which produces aesthetic outcomes involves little critical evaluation of the science on which its theory is founded.

There has been an odd transposition occurring in the last few decades, with science leading debate while art avoids or ignores the wider implications of a-life work. Is it time for art to regain its creative and pioneering leadership rather than shrinking from confrontation? It would have been interesting to compare a-life art with the politically loaded and controversial work of a biologist like Richard Dawkins, who has also dabbled in the production of a-life.

As Whitelaw notes, “a-life art is under theorised”, a criticism often aimed at many branches of emerging ‘sci-art’, but one that many traditional art practices might pray for! This left me frustrated as I read account after account of works described in isolation, often with no analysis beyond that of the artists themselves. However it is worth the wait as the deeper analysis of works in 2 chapters towards the end of the book covers the relationships between a-life art and society, science and other art practices.

Whitelaw really gets into his stride when discussing the artistic context of a-life. He addresses the essential tension between those who see a-life as rich with creative potential and those who see it as a “value laden technoscientific practice” embedded in conventional scientific and information technology practice. Why is there a need in these artificial worlds to stick to a conventional view of competition based on the macho struggle to breed, kill or be killed? Whitelaw describes the gender issues involved in a-life creation, including womb envy and virgin birth. Does the competitive nature of these artificial worlds have any relationship to the fact that computer programming and robotic engineering are still bastions of male dominance in research and artistic practice?

In his final chapter Whitelaw tackles the issue of ‘emergence’ as related to a-life, asking whether such art works can actually produce effects unforeseen by the author and not determined directly by the computer code. All too often a-life works seem little more than toys; are the “breeders” actually as complex or socially interactive as Tamagotchi? Do the hardware “robots” truly have any emergent properties? Can a-life really be the “life of the future” when so much of it simply mimics the living world? I have to declare a vested interest but I do think a comparison with the cyborgs of Fish and Chips or MEART (www.fishandchips.uwa.edu.au/) would have been worthwhile, since in these works biological material not under complete human control has a major effect on the output. Works where humans interact with living organisms, such as Eduardo Kac’s Genesis, or where tissues are left to their own “creative-semi-living” devices, such as the Worry Dolls of the Tissue Culture and Art group, are serious omissions from Whitelaw’s review.
Kenneth Rinaldo, Autopoiesis, 2000, Ars Electronica-Cyberarts

Kenneth Rinaldo, Autopoiesis, 2000, Ars Electronica-Cyberarts

When Ken Rinaldo says he is waiting for the day when one of his art pieces greets him with a spontaneous “hello!”, is he talking about robotics rather than art? Are these works just an extension of the programmer and engineer’s skill? If the creators are more interested in results and discovery than creation, are they more engineers than artists? Whitelaw worries that in many cases a-life may be nothing more than a fancy spirograph reflecting, as suggested by Cariani, the skills and rules introduced by the programmer.

While Whitelaw describes Adrian Thompson’s production by artificial evolution of mysterious, incomprehensible, functional electronic circuits, he does not describe similar work in neural network studies, where due to the almost infinite possibilities, the way the final program operates may be impossible to predict.

Can these works of a-life truly show us “life as it could be”, given that many employ complex culturally and biologically contextualised algorithms? With the exception of bio-art, Mitchell Whitelaw has provided an excellent review of attempts at a-life, enabling the interested reader to decide for themselves.

Although documentary film is increasing in popularity, it’s still fairly rare to see it on the big screen. More feature length documentaries are achieving commercial release; Spellbound, Capturing the Friedmans and The Fog of War, all American, are currently screening in Australia. However, the scale of the field is vast (see Tom Zubrycki’s account of The International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam on page 15), and we encounter little of it here. Thankfully, REAL: Life on Film documentary festival is touring 5 Australian cities this year, giving audiences around the country a substantial experience of the latest in local and international documentary film in a cinema setting.

REAL: Life on Film aims to stimulate, celebrate and educate through the documentary form. This year’s festival has a strong focus on the political, religious and social divisions running through Australian society and the broader global community. All the Ladies (director Mary Quinsacara) looks at the burgeoning culture of female hip hop MCs in Australia, while Trevor Graham’s Lonely Boy Richard (RT58, p17) tells the wrenching tale of Richard Wanambi from north east Arnhem Land, who spends most of his life drinking alone and then imprisoned to escape the trauma of a community torn apart by violence and alcohol. Australian refugee policy is the focus of the opening-night short It’s Like That (Southern Ladies Animation Group), while Pip Starr’s short Through the Wire provides a revealing view of the Woomera break-out.

Many international titles will have their Australian premiere at the festival, including the opening-night feature Angels of Brooklyn (Camilla Hjelm, Martin Zandvliet). Against a sultry jazz score, Angels is an intimate portrait of 3 Puerto Rican girls living in one of New York’s most impoverished areas. Tokyo Noise (Kristian Petri, Jan Roed and Johan Soderberg) looks at life in the ultra-modern Japanese metropolis, while in contrast, Riles: Life on the Tracks (Ditsi Carolino) take us into the distinctly un-modern slums of Manila.

The festival’s wide selection of shorts and features will also include filmmaker, writer and curator Ross Gibson presenting a very different approach to documentary, the interactive work Life After Wartime (Gibson, Kate Richards), comprising an intriguing mix of crime scene photographs from 1945 to 1950, haiku-like text and a haunting soundtrack.

REAL: Life on Film provides a big screen window on the world through documentaries that are investigative, poetic and innovative, many of which we will never encounter on our television screens. RT

REAL: Life on Film , Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, April 29-May 5, other states to follow; details at www.acmi.net.au/reallifeonfilm.jsp

Simon Penny’s major new work Fugitive II engages participants through an elaborate interactive system. A circular room features a 360 degree screen. As you enter, a number of sensors read and respond to your movements and gestures, triggering images on screen. This creates an uncanny sense of being ‘read’ by the room.

At any one time, only a small section of the 360 degree screen is in use. The rules of the interaction are disappointingly straightforward: move closer to the screen and the footage zooms in, walk around the room and the image follows you, get too close and it disappears, only to reappear behind you. Thus, while you and your movements are inextricably linked to the location and contents of the picture, the installation also works to keep participant and image at a distance, rendering the work’s interface something of an impenetrable surface. Windows seen in the film are zoomed in on as you approach them, but remain opaque and vanish if you get too close. A title screen announcing the name of the work appears seemingly at random, amplifying the disjointed feel of the interaction. The footage itself is of various suburban, industrial and recreational landscapes, devoid of human presence or signs of life. This emptiness deepens the sense of dislocation established by the image’s elusive movements.

The focus on the disembodying, elusive aspects of technology seems a curious choice considering the mode of close interactivity Simon Penny has developed for the installation. The simultaneous complicity and distance between participant and screen provides some interesting food for thought vis-a-vis technology’s “user-friendly” aspirations and the associated connotations of complicity and mutual understanding between human and machine. The experience of the work, however, is ultimately unsatisfying, a feeling enhanced by the jerky pans and zooms triggered by the more fluid movements of the participating body. The focus on the technology itself, both as a material and conceptual focal point of the work, ultimately makes for a limited and rather dry participatory experience.

Perhaps this dissatisfaction is heightened by the presence of Char Davies’ monumental Osmose and Ephèmére downstairs in the screen gallery as part of Transfigure (RT58; RT59). Despite the somewhat cumbersome equipment involved in their interactive systems, Davies’ works transcend their technology while using it to create a powerful connection between the participant’s physical presence, the moving imagery (also generated in response to the viewer’s movements) and a transformed sense of space. This anchor in lived, embodied experience, existing outside the mechanical framework of the work itself, provides a sense of engagement and discovery lacking in Fugitive II.

Limitations aside, Fugitive II is an interesting component in what has been a diverse program of work at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image exploring the multifarious applications and possibilities of interactive technology. It is especially encouraging, in the face of recent criticism and close scrutiny of ACMI as an institution, that the organisation continues to deliver a balanced and diverse program which intrigues, inspires and creates new possibilities for the viewing experience.

From original sketches and hand-coloured cells to printed publications and animation, The Dark Woods brings together works from emerging and established comic artists from around Australia. These have been hand-picked by curators Sarah Howell and Leigh Rigozzi from the recent Supernova comics convention, the National Young Writers’ Festival and the Braddock Coalition’s City Lights show.

As its fairytale title suggests, The Dark Woods is a foray into relatively uncharted territory. While there have been a number of notable exhibitions showcasing comic art over the last decade (ACE Australian Comic Exhibition, Cut’n’Paste and Comic Book Lifestyle), exhibitions in contemporary art spaces are few and far between. In an effort to expose this artform to new audiences and exploit the versatility of the medium, the curators chose the sleek space of Hobart’s Carnegie Gallery. “As a comics creator, preaching to the converted didn’t feel so challenging”, Howell admits. And as Rigozzi asserts: “comics are conceptually interesting enough to hold their own in a contemporary visual art context.” Rejecting the common misconception of comics as strictly “pulpy kiddy fare”, Howell and Rigozzi have chosen artists who explore emotionally challenging themes. Alienation, depression and economic disadvantage form the exhibition’s core. Most works reflect the journey of the loner and each pictorial narrative, be it autobiographical or fictional, is fleshed out with extra detail in the accompanying catalogue. With an essay on the zine scene by Edward Colless, this newsprint style publication is an essential addition to the exhibition and an inspiration for any comics fan.

The youthful audacity of The Dark Woods lends the show an intoxicating energy. Simon James’ Country Flux (2003) tucks its strange, blotchy tale of mutated sexual desire into a snug corner next to a series of water colour panels by Michael Hawkins whose double chinned, long-necked waifs go through their lonely existence in the midst of a world that looks as though it might melt away at any second.

In comics, place can become a major character. Painstaking effort can be put into reproducing the exact slogan on a poster hanging in the doorway of an obscure shop in order to make a certain street easily recognisable. Mandy Ord embraces this technique with skill. Printed to an impressive billboard size is a panel from one of the best works in the exhibition, the strikingly individual Undergrowth (2003). Ord’s thick black lines echo the contrasting surfaces of a woodcut. The images follow the meanderings of a Cyclopean protagonist literally entering dark woods. Undergrowth is a unique portrayal of the urban jungle and isolation in the midst of a crowd. Thematically similar are Ord’s equally intriguing animated shorts Suit Yourself (2002) and Perfectly Alright (2002).

Breaking up the empty floor space are several cases displaying self-published comics. Tim Danko’s print-making is easily spotted in the diminutively sized Francois (2002). The delicately rendered pages of his books are enticing in their patterned complexity. It is a shame we can’t get a closer look, although the artist does have a large-scale printed work on the wall and a smaller edition in the catalogue.

Some of the more ambitious artists made the most of the white washed walls and spread their images like Vegemite on toast from ceiling to floor. Kieran Mangan painted his Restoration directly onto the gallery wall: a balding man deep in thought is oblivious to the chunky beetle whirring above him. This abstract vision forms the foundation of Mangan’s nightmarish and overtly surreal plot. Here past, present and future exist on the same layout. Time as we know it has dissolved.

Comics are a poignant blend of literature and fine art and can be hard hitting. The power of comics and their weightier siblings, graphic novels, is steadily growing as is their place in contemporary art. Art Spiegelman’s Maus, a haunting account of his father’s imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp, won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize and is still highly regarded in literary circles. The acclaimed movies Ghostworld (Terry Zwigoff, 2000) and American Splendor (Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, 2003) were originally presented in comic book form by Daniel Clowes and Harvey Pekar respectively. Comics theoretician and guru Scott McCloud sees the art form continuing to build on its notoriety: “If comics’ spectacularly varied past is any indication, comics’ future will be virtually impossible to predict using the standards of the present.” (Understanding Comics, HarperPerennial, New York, 1994).

The Dark Woods is a worthy, if small, affirmation of the Australian comics scene. It is not hard to believe Edward Colless’ claim that comics “may well be part of an exciting new mutation of literacy.”

The Dark Woods, various artists, Carnegie Gallery, Hobart, Feb 12-March 14; Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery, Boorugal, May 28-July 11; Port Pirie Regional Art Gallery, Port Pirie, Aug 8-Sept 19; New Land Gallery, Port Adelaide, Sept 29-Nov 14; Fountain Gallery, Port Augusta, Nov 18-Dec 19; Millicent Art Gallery, Millicent, Jan 3-Feb 6, 2005

An eternal present, an absence of memory and a dissociation of words, symbols and images from meaning: these are the symptoms of the ‘schizophrenic’ social condition diagnosed by Frederic Jameson in his 1983 essay “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” (Hal Foster ed, The Anti-Aesthetic, Bay Press, Seattle, 1983). Twenty years on Jameson’s diagnosis has even more credence, so it is no surprise to find 2 recent installations at the Art Gallery of New South Wales responding to this aspect of contemporary experience, albeit in very different ways.

Sound artist, filmmaker and writer Philip Brophy pays homage to the androgynous theatricality of early 70s glam rock with Fluorescent, comprising a circle of 5 speakers in front of 3 simultaneous video projections. Ever-changing lines of colour play across the screens, bringing to mind the video clip for Plastic Bertrand’s 1978 pop classic Ca plane pour moi. Brophy periodically appears out of this swirling matrix sporting spiked hair, thigh-high shiny vinyl boots and a ball-hugging leotard. He mouths a few risque lines before disappearing, until the backing band kicks in on his fourth appearance and he performs a specially-penned glam rock anthem.

The various tracks that comprise the song are separated across the ring of 5 highly directional speakers, which means the song sounds quite different depending on where you stand in the circle. The extreme separation between the sonic components of the soundtrack highlights the self-consciously manufactured nature of Brophy’s “Fluorescent” persona. The overall effect is of loud, vulgar, theatrical fun, and many viewers burst into spontaneous laughter at the sight of Brophy’s gyrating, larger than life form.

Glam was always about celebrating the brash disposability of pop culture and the performative aspects of identity. In this sense, Brophy’s work doesn’t do anything that glam itself didn’t do in the early 70s. But he takes familiar iconography and places it in a gallery setting, creating resonances beyond the world of popular music. Glam here is no longer a knowing reconfiguration of existing images from the realm of popular culture, but rather a trope unto itself that has entered the infinite matrix of images comprising contemporary experience. Brophy’s joyful performance celebrates the arbitrary recycling of the past and the freedom of employing symbols and icons divorced from their original context and meaning.

Across the gallery, an installation by Mike Parr and Adam Geczy takes a darker look at this culture of free-floating signifiers. The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, Zip-a-dee-ay comprises 2 screens at right angles to each other. Loud guitar chords pound out of one speaker, a cacophony of incomprehensible voices from the other. Against the opposite wall is an immense pile of newspapers. On one screen we see Parr projected upside down, sitting limply holding an Australian flag, his face criss-crossed with thread sewn into his flesh. On the other screen we see footage of the sewing itself in lurid red close up. Fear passes over Parr’s features as the needle approaches and blood splatters onto his shirt as it punctures his flesh. The footage is from Aussie Aussie Aussie Oi Oi Oi (Democratic Torture), a performance from May 2003 at Sydney’s Performance Space.

Like Brophy’s piece, the work references popular music, this time through the Zip-a-dee-doo-dah sub-title taken from Walt Disney’s Song of the South: “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay / My, oh my, what a wonderful day/ Plenty of sunshine headin’ my way…

The inane sentiments of the 1940s pop song provide a stark contrast with the installation’s graphic imagery. The dissonance reflects the nature of a country that likes to think of itself as happy-go-lucky while coolly perpetrating state-sanctioned violence on some of the planet’s most vulnerable people. The Mass Psychology of Fascism is a confronting intervention in the deadening profusion of mediated images and obfuscating political discourse that has helped create an Australian electorate who not only willingly accept the subjugation of others, but willingly embrace their own subjugation before the Howard government’s constant re-writing of the recent and distant past.

Fluorescent and The Mass Psychology of Fascism are 2 sides of the postmodern coin. Brophy’s work celebrates the notion of self as nothing but the endless recycling of symbols and styles already in circulation. In contrast, Geczy and Parr’s visceral installation highlights the fact that in such a media-saturated environment it has never been easier for ideologically-driven politicians to dictate the words, images and symbols through which the contemporary subject makes meaning.

Fluorescent, Philip Brophy, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Feb 15-April 18, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, Zip-a-dee-ay, Mike Parr and Adam Geczy, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Feb 8-March 7

Symposium On Drawing
Louis Laybourne-Smith School Of Architecture and Design
University of South Australia, March 2 & 5

… read or listen to this paper sitting at one of many cafes scattered along the Zattere waterfront in Venice, during a pleasantly warm mid-summer night enjoying a few multicoloured Popsicles and listening to a CD playing Luigi Nono’s A Carlo

Marco Frascari was invited to Australia to be the guest speaker at the Adelaide Festival Artists’ Week day-long Architecture Symposium (on relationships between architecture and gastronomy), curated by Rachel Hurst.

Frascari is an architect, theorist and Professor of Architecture at the Polytechnic and State University, Virginia, USA. His well-known essay The Tell-The-Tale Detail continues to be influential. The work and teaching of the Italian architect Carlo Scarpa is the touchstone for much of Frascari’s own teaching and research.

As well as his role in Artists’ Week, he also participated in the Symposium On Drawing, giving lectures and leading workshops on drawing and humour.

Frascari is a story-teller, and what his stories tell (in being spun from the intrigues of architecture’s cultural and social webs) is that the making-process is one of knowing stories, working over stories, relaying stories. In other words, putting one’s ears, eyes and hands to the gritty ground. He says that drawing is both a thinking and a telling and that these are matters of deliberately gathering (like a scavenger) ideas and ‘affects’ from all possible sources—times, disciplines, places, persons—and that this ‘mix’ is potentially funny, mad, strange, sad, political, mischievous, awkward and impossible. Architecture needs this complex composing of a continuous unfolding/unwinding attention to the extraordinary ordinary wonder of the world-at-hand. This is then transformed by slow (and by ‘slow’ he means a kind of practice more attuned to daily dedicated work, like playing music or rehearsing dance or ‘writing 20 lines a day’) pleasure, a sort of action which is ‘caring.’

This idea of care—toward the appearance of the world (in architecture’s context, the literal surface of the earth)—is of the same ilk as that evoked by such philosophers as Brian Massumi, Gilles Deleuze and Elizabeth Grosz. Grosz in her work on the ‘virtual’ of the past, which is a caring for memory, writes: “The virtual is the realm of productivity, of functioning otherwise than its plan or blueprint, functioning in excess of design or intention (Cynthia C Davidson ed. “The Future of Space, Towards an Architecture of Invention”, Anyhow, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1998). This relation of drawing (which is a movement of virtuality) to care (which is activated by a love of the virtuality of memory) is crucial (and potent) to/for practices of design, and underpins Frascari’s teachings. ‘Lightness’, for example, isn’t the opposite of ‘heavy’, and is a form of light-heartedness (with the heart-fullness of care). “Lightness becomes a real condition in architectural construction, which then becomes a poetic dimension of any human endeavour. These thoughts/objects echo along the path of affinities and resemblances, connecting the expression of contemporary experience with the past of the world, and demonstrating that intellectual edification takes place in the act of dwelling in building” (“A Light, Six-Sided, Paradoxical Fight”, Nexus Network Journal, http://www.nexusjournal.com/Frascari_v4n2.html).

Perhaps the greatest gift of Frascari’s visit was his advocacy of a light, humorous, ‘gravitas’ approach to the design of/thinking toward architecture. This welcome and nourishing attitude demonstrates perfectly, and obliquely, his motif/message: that architecture, this multifaceted, polymorphous, persuasive/pervasive, giving and taking of space, is an intensely human and tale-driven negotiation with physical/emotional/psychological surfaces—and precisely, relentlessly, because of this engages all the dimensions of being human, from seeing the minutest mark to hearing the bleakest sound, to imagining fantastic creatures. And drawing is the initialising/generating machine; a delicate line and a tentative word can begin a process, indeterminate and provisional, that may lead to the becoming of something else (music, garden, house, novel, city).

Frascari though is ‘drawing’ into drawing a complicating and vibrational view of process which, far from unifying a practice of ‘drafting’ for architectural ‘communication’, advocates a synesthetic methodology—a multimedia perceiving of the world; a story-telling/making working style which is attuned to ‘all’ the sensory events which move us as living beings—dispersing the privilege of sight that subordinates other fleeting, virtual, imperceptible, transitory, transformational qualities known by taste, smell, hearing, touch. One of Scarpa’s instructions to students was: “make architectural ideas visible, tainted with non-visible phenomena and tinted with meanings” (Frascari, “Architectural Synaesthesia”). And it is this methodology that Frascari put into practice in the forum of lectures/workshops by using the cartoons of Saul Steinberg as explications of slowness, of accretion, of how being ‘attuned’ can manifest (lightly and critically).

And, in a Steinbergian way Frascari was present within a particular Adelaidean atmosphere where he was surrounded by artists, musicians, writers, and performers from around the world who were in their own way providing the exact (albeit concentrated and limited) chances for a rich gathering of bits-and-pieces of the just-out-there (and yet sophisticated, experimental and diverse forms and materials)—an exaggerated ambience of the more modest sense of Frascari’s “weaving of thoughts into images.” If a mapping was made of/between events, objects, sightings, disasters, disagreements and so on within this context it would yield an incredibly dense drawing of tonalities, intensities and tensions. A drawing that could show a momentary synesthetic (personal) city. Frascari ‘happened’ amidst an infinity of ‘happenings’, each of which could be seen as ‘drawings’ in themselves; for example, passing the side gate of Government House on Sunday morning heading for the talk by Dave Hickey and seeing dotted on the green lawn dozens of white plastic chairs and a woman in a pale crinoline pushing what looked like a shopping trolley. And afterwards watching/not watching Mike Parr having his face stitched-up on video (a drawing through the flesh of thread, pulling the face into a terrifying contortion of pain and policy); then passing the side gate again where the chairs had been arranged in small groups under the shade of the trees and a game of croquet was underway (crinolines galore). Then later seeing the brown cardboard models (story-boards) of Roy Ananda and Julia Robinson’s exhibition Thousand Fold, in an unused shop on Hindley Street and noting the title of the accompanying essay: “magical architecture” (Heather Butterworth, exhibition essay) and that night watching the dance performance by the Emio Greco/PC Company, Conjunto di Nero, where bodies present themselves as living/dying compositions immersed in scores of light and sound, ‘drawn’ irrevocably by the ‘fact’ of their own mingling flesh.

Positioning Marco Frascari within the realm just beyond the university, momentarily, sort of hints at his ‘becoming synesthetic’ (“joining the information received by one sense to a perception in another sense”). In Frascari’s terms ‘wonder’ might be wonderfully restless and restful, sensuous and brutal, accidental and interfering, tactful and tactless, in isolation or all at once. Linda Marie Walker

Unless otherwise indicated, Marco Frascari quotations are from, “Architectural Synaesthesia: a hypothesis on the makeup of Scarpa’s modernist architectural drawings”, http://art3idea.psu.edu

“Tradition with Future” was the catchcry of the 2003 Zuercher Theater Spektakel held amidst the heady heat and electrical storms of summer at Lake Zurich. It is a treasure-trove of the avant-garde and the contemporary in an old-world, carnival set-up.

Outdoor stages, buskers, boaters and bathers, big tops, multi-culti gastronomic stalls and wooden box-like theatres join a complex of permanent venues. Lift the top off any of the magical performing spaces and you might find, for instance, the frenetic activities of Richard Foreman’s ‘brain’, Ong Keng Sen’s sonic global travellers, the drag-singer of Rina Yerushalmi’s take on the Oresteia, or the unrelenting cries of Michael Laub’s naked, shivering little match girl. It’s a strange, rarefied art world, yet simultaneously accessible and community-based.

Artistic Director Maria Magdalena Schwaegermann sees the divisions theatre/music, theatre/dance as no longer valid, and has focussed this year on “Performance Art; the Mediterranean” (enticingly subtitled “blood-revenge, exodus and erotic”) and Australia. She has also included Swiss and youth theatre, local and world music in the Club and the Alpentöne festival. “We do not choose a theme,” she says, “we choose artists, and let the theme reveal itself.

“I want to introduce people to the Old Masters (such as Foreman and Mexican Guillermo Gómez-Peña) before they’re not there anymore. They have been so formative for so many contemporary artists.” Naturally, the political comes into the equation. “The fact that we have companies from Israel, Turkey, Italy, Algeria, Palestine [shows] that there is an intense movement of intellectuals and artists [who] work even in a situation of intense political problems…I think culture and the arts is our platform to create something better. And cultural identification is the beginning of tolerance.”

The Australian presence was well-received—I didn’t get to see Back to Back’s Soft, but it reviewed very well—“poetic and touching” (Musik & Theater)—while Acrobat, wild and wiry on the lake stage (Zurich’s spires and mountains formed an extraordinary night backdrop) received roaring crowds and rave reviews for their explosive “stripping back” to the “essentials” (Neue Zürcher Zeitung) in a highly charged performance of artistry and energy. Sans glitter, sans forced smiles, Acrobat’s is a strong Australian aesthetic—beards and bodyhair and not much else, sunburnt, springy ‘outback’ forms and the nasal tones of the vernacular whirling around the soundscape. One Zurich critic wrote that Tim Barrass’ intense guitar and sample score of “noise, nonsense phrases and trashrock” was worthy of a separate review, another that “this is Circus in the time of Acceleration…a one hour hellride through the centre of the earth to the end of the world.”

From this ‘outback’ realm of simple body and little language to the multifarious MoMO, Neil Thomas and Katy Bowman’s Museum of Modern Oddities. Obscure and perfect at the end of a long wooden walkway, Odd Hours—an ‘installation bar’ created with Andrew Morrish and Zurich artists—was billed to run “from midnight to 7 in the morning of the night before.” ‘Time’ was its broad conceit, and it was a haven for festival guests and for the locally found objects fantastically explained. MoMO became a hub of hilarity—the curator/performers allowing an easy mix of their own brand of infotainment and crowd mayhem. The night I attended, Thomas massaged feet with a vintage contraption, a pickpocket tried his luck, Bowman told a story of a little boy who tried to dig his way to Australia with a spoon, a hillbilly band wandered in, dancing erupted, and Morrish was expert on a vast collection of “CG Jung’s trouser buttons.”

Time was also of the essence in Richard Foreman’s theatre. In sweltering heat, the New Yorker prefaced his latest work Panic! (How to be Happy) by announcing that art is important, but that you don’t have to die for it, and placed a clock facing the audience so that we could monitor the seconds spent sweating. There were many walkouts that night—whether because of the heat or the idiosyncratic nature of Foreman’s work was unclear—but stayers were treated to what the papers dubbed a “search for sense by eccentric desperadoes” (Tages Anzeiger, Zurich) or in Foreman’s words, “a mirror” in which to observe him. “Let’s all join…the misfit club,” said the rosy-cheeked, falsetto trilling pirate…and so we did.

Trademark voiceover loops with a jumpcut score of Schönberg, Mahler and punkrock, crashing glass, sirens, pings, and telephones. An intricate, dissected set of strings and seesaws, spheres and feathers, cabbalistic symbols, magicians’ tools, Egyptian eyes, unwieldy phallic constructs, a giant vagina with hovering bee, a cardboard magic-mountain, and ornate dolls costumed perhaps to echo the performers (a pirate? a highland hell’s angel? a Lolita? a gypsy vamp?). We are in familiar, but endlessly inventive Foreman territory.

This is a landscape of permanent, almost automaton activity and frustration, “Not Yet!” was the most frequent voiceover interrupting the actors’ frenzied rituals of pleasure/death/meaning-seeking. “This is my ticket to a much better life,” says one of the women, and her intermittent hope and resignation in the chaotic circumstances is unusually touching. “Most of my art/life is about wanting grace, transcendence, and the constant failure to achieve this,” said Foreman in a fascinating workshop for actors run concurrently with the festival. “I get irritated with art that doesn’t show this.”

Foreman’s world is unrepentantly his own. It goes nowhere and everywhere. “This is my private collection of lost ideas and the whole world feeds itself with my vanity. Okay?” booms the voiceover (God or Foreman?). “This is the paraphernalia of my youth,” and “this play is like the sacred text of a forgotten people.” ‘Old master’ he may be, but the machinations of his Panic! are as intriguing as ever.

Michael Laub’s The HC Andersen Project had great reviews in Zurich, and I caught it in Berlin. Laub melds snippets of the contiguous kitsch and tragedy of Andersen’s fairytales, artwork, diary entries and Hollywood portrayals with his more perverse predilections and the private stories of his performers. The show begins with Hildigunn Eydfinsdottir’s simple story of her “favourite dress” (in which she received her first kiss) and segues into Andersen’s story of the little match girl. Laub pushes his artists to their extremes. He says he knew in rehearsal that asking Eydfinsdottir to take off her dress and recite the fairytale would make her cry (Taz, Berlin). The images of Astrid Endruweit’s manic red shoe dance, Stephanie Weyman’s contortion from beauty to frothing-faced masturbator (taunting Andersen and us) and the little mermaid’s non-dancerly feet simply crossed to form ungainly, joli-laide flippers pounding helplessly on the floor, will remain poignant and stark in my vision of the Zurich idyll.

Responding ineptly and naively to the 2004 Sydney Festival, The Sydney Morning Herald editorial of January 26 (“A city in search of a festival”) worried that “So much of what was offered seemed bleak. So many events were about darkness, death or despair. In short, it was a festival strangely unfestive…Art’s short answer—that its role is to challenge and confront—will usually suffice. It is also true, however, that even if dark realism is in artistic terms a good thing, a festival can still have too much of it.” Two pages on, arts reviewer Bryce Hallett enthused over the critical and popular success of the festival program, finding its suburban expansion westward “was heartening and put store in the notion that the people of Sydney do own the festival.” The fact is the 2004 program featured numerous works that entertained and amused, but it also presented a quotient of major works that were collectively more provocative than in any previous Sydney Festival. That their darkness yielded light, that their craft exhilarated, that they responded acutely to the historical moment escaped the attention of the SMH editor. What can an arts festival do first of all but celebrate art and the best of it? In Sydney there is a ceaseless, massive outpouring of happy entertainments and conventional art that doesn’t stop for the festival. Brett Sheehy’s 2004 festival offered some rich alternatives, exemplars of the new extremes of art that resonate with the world of the early 21st century.

Alibi

Meg Stuart, Damaged Goods
Town Hall, Jan 19-22
In a vast concrete-walled bunker fitted with video monitors, a basketball net, a viewing room, loudspeakers, desks, chairs and a mattress, 7 actors and dancers perpetrate casual acts of violence on each other and sometimes themselves. The precise nature of the space is elusive—a schoolyard, a prison, a psychiatric hospital exercise room, a big city public playspace…? There’s more than a passing resemblance to the shifting meanings offered by the respective terminus and rooftop settings of Les Ballet C de la B’s La Tristeza and lets Op Bach. These works and Alibi share violence, ritualistic behaviour and moments of compassion and redemption, though the latter are fleeting indeed in the Stuart vision, much darker than in her 1996 Adelaide Festival showings, No Longer Readymade and No One is Watching. There is a kind of empathy in the Alibi community, but it is of bodies apart sharing a wracking cold turkey shivering or a viral neck jolt that spreads from one man to all the others as they watch him from the viewing room.

Alibi is a meticulously staged, engrossing 2-hour performance created by choreographer Meg Stuart and her Switzerland-based Damaged Goods company. Apparently random behaviour soon reveals itself to be tautly patterned, but because it is so determinedly un-dancerly it remains suspensefully unpredictable. Sustained episodes of physical interaction (bodies tripped and dragged, pulled 2 or 3 ways at once, flung, trapped in headlocks) are interpolated with solo passages. A man accompanies a film of himself (glowing out of the concrete wall) with a reverie of anonymity (“It’s not me, it just looks like it”); a woman repeatedly and meaninglessy signals to the audience; a man delivers a litany of banal confessions; a woman abjectly offers anything for love (“If you don’t want children I can get my uterus removed”); and a young man goes looking for a fight, prowling, provoking, spitting. But, in the end, no one will play. Instead, isolated bodies shake in collective waves for a small eternity…into the dark that ends the performance.

It’s the physical reality of Alibi that grips. The texts sit poorly amidst the action and for the most part suffer from an actorly delivery at odds with the super-realism of the movement. The notable exception is the aggro young man whose barely audible utterances emerge from the very state of almost animal being we are witnessing.

The power of Alibi resides not only in its viscerality and the grim empathy of feeling the body of suffering, but in grasping the world of these people. The action is invaded by cameras that peer at those in withdrawal. Voiceovers direct actions and deliver intimidating queries: “Why are you a winner?” they ask a man who can only walk, totter and fall. But you soon notice that this is a self-contained world: the participants themselves take turns at wielding the microphones, cameras and instructions as if playing at power and surveillance. There is no sense of an external, manipulative force. Only the film images that emerge on the walls and monitors seem to have their own authority: unwatched pictures of war and prejudice or, more dominant, recurrent shots of a vibrating corridor. But even these suggest the subjective state of the players. Their lives are a tedium of assault, struggle and self-abnegation, but these people are not victims in any simple sense. They are perpetrators, observers and documentors of their own brutal condition. We recognise ourselves in them, or not.

What is striking, and what surely worried those of the audience who walked out, is the extremity of Stuart’s vision, first experienced in the sheer violence of its action and apparent pointlessnesss. The world of Alibi is one of play—dangerous play. No one is wounded or killed and after a while you can see the pattern of the play and the exhaustion of it in the aggro young man. But it still looks risky and unbearably hostile. The deeply textured soundtrack amplifies this uneasiness with a machinic hum and electrical surges bordering on the explosive: something to vibrate to, if relieved here and there by melancholic strings. Paul Lemp’s score suggests a sadness rarely shown on stage.

Dance, like so many other forms of play, has recently taken to extremes, as with extreme sports, extreme circus (Acrobat, The Jim Rose Circus, The Happy Sideshow) and the outer limits of reality TV. Choreographer Garry Stewart comments in this edition (interview p30): “My works aim at a kind of poetics of extremity arranged through a formal structure. For the viewer, I think there is a vicarious thrill in witnessing extreme athletic dance, giving relief to our subconscious desires for flight. I guess some people see my work as a form of organised violence toward (and with) the body.” The body for Meg Stuart is even more basic, far from athletic, consuming its owner in uncontrollable spasms, quick to violence, resting only in exhaustion. What game can these people possibly be playing? Tim Etchells, artistic director of Forced Entertainment, a guest of the 2004 Adelaide Festival (p14) and advisor on Alibi, has spoken of the versions of ourselves we construct in order to survive structures and games “as a way to survive in this world, or that world.” In Alibi this is a world short of rules, full of failures to construct selves but in which the most basic of games are being played: surviving violence, meeting violence with violence, living with a body off the leash.

Tulp, the Body Public

Elision Ensemble
Art Gallery of NSW, Jan 15-17
Tulp is another work of extremes, again about the body and our ambivalent relationship to it, but the dynamic between pain and release, despair and hope is this time delicately balanced. In its most accessible work to date, the Elision new music ensemble has created a wonderful hybrid, fusing documentary, new music and digital art into a vibrant new form of music theatre. Composer John Rogers and interdisciplinary artist Justine Cooper come together to realise a sustained reverie on the body, from birth to death, with many remarkable tales told by volunteers.

On its first outing, Tulp occasionally suffered a superfluity of images, vagueness in the deployment of the soprano performer early on, insufficient camera or projection power to make good use of images of the audience (the soprano has a tiny camera bandaged to a hand) and some imbalance between the onscreen voices and the music. These challenges will doubtless be addressed as the work develops.

The musical frame oscillates between beautiful early Baroque admonitions against vanity with reminders of mortality and a pervasive electronic score (Anthony Burr, Michael Hewes) with the live saxophones of Timothy O’Dwyer providing darker textures as well as orchestra-power hellish groans and blasts. In the course of the performance, Deborah Kayser’s elegant soprano and the Baroque instruments (conductor Simon Hewett) supporting her dramatically merge with these subterranean sonic forces. Tulp is driven by this kind of dialectic: live performer/filmed subjects; live music/electronics; Baroque imagery/technological body imaging, and, within its screen narratives an unresolvable tension between the body as material and the body as spirit and the strange interplay between art and science.

Kayser, in a fine latex gown is a deathly figure, at first laid out on a gurney, her magnified eye flickering hugely on a screen above. Screens either side of her scroll the lyrics she sings, in Italian on one and English on the other. These soon reveal anatomical drawings of the period and later dynamic animated, tormented figures suspended upside down like spectres from Dante’s Inferno. The outer screens are latex, bodies and instruments push against them from behind like eruptions of the skin. One slices open to reveal the soprano, attached with a glowing umbilical cord bowed by a musician.

Shot in tight close-up, in what appears to be black and white with the faintest touches of radiant colour, the interviewees, American and Australian, tell fascinating tales and offer surprising opinions about the body. A doctor opines, “Nobody is fascinating when sick. The disease is fascinating.” A girl confides, “My puberty was clinically induced.” A woman in her 50s becomes the surrogate body for the birth of her granddaughter. Another woman recounts the mediaeval conditions of her treatment for scoliosis, hanging in a hospital basement. The faces from Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicholas Tulp look on from the side screens. A man cheerfully recounts a home operation on his anus with gear borrowed from a vet and a doctor who runs out of anaesthetic. The pair agree to forge ahead, the pain is horrific, much whisky is consumed. The man tells us that the pain was not as bad as severe depression. A woman talks about her transformation from male to female: she enjoyed being a man for 30 years and saw the transition not as change but “more like evolution.” The complexities of the operations sound truly daunting, especially when she experienced it alone: “Nobody knew about it.” In the final stages of Tulp the focus is on the body in decay, of patients whose bodies are there, but whose minds no longer function or whose personalities have departed. The most affecting tale is told by a nurse who sees her craft as spiritual training. The eyes of an elderly man whose frail body can no longer support him meet hers and she knows that he is still someone special with whom she will briefly bond: “Death is to do with the body.”

In this post-Cartesian era where we claim to ‘be’ bodies rather than to ‘have’ them, Tulp is a reminder that the body-psyche relationship is in fact a dialectical one—the body can elevate or abandon us, just as we can nourish or neglect it; we are at one with it, apart from it. It is also tells us how much and how little has changed since the Renaissance went looking for the body with a scientific eye and a scalpel. Attitudes and operations can still be ‘mediaeval’; imaging, endoscopy and microsurgery ‘miraculous.’ Tulp ends with a mother’s lullaby to her baby, the words dancing, folding into each other on the screens, an expression of affection and hope after a gruelling foray into the complexities of what it means to be a body.

Hashirigaki

Conception, music, direction Heiner Goebbels
Parade Theatre, NIDA, Jan 9-12
Hashirigaki is a work of gentle extremes, a magical undoing of language a la Gertrude Stein, so that we learn to listen to ourselves anew. The Stein recitations—droll litanies of anxieties of being and identity—mesh with wonderland imagery and the music of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds as presented by 3 engaging singer-dancer-musicians on samisen, theremin and organ (Yumiko Tanaka, Charlotte Engelkes, Marie Goyette). The outcome is a lyrical, pop-existentialism where our heroines build a cardboard city, play bells descended from the heavens and transform into turntable statuettes, a dancing ball of light, an over-the-top Kabuki musician and an elegant pop trio. Goebbels’ arrangements of songs from Pet Sounds are both true to themselves and to the originals, creeping up on you sometimes like the ghosts of forgotten melodies, at other times awaited and yearned for. The all too brief sell-out season of Hashirigaki left its audiences dazzled and happy, bemused by the work’s reminders of the spiralling relativities of the self—if you dare attend to them—and the peculiar pleasures of art that is never literal, never real. [“‘Hashirigaki’ is Japanese for ‘rushing’, ‘writing’, ‘running’ and refers both to a flowing script and to the idea of talking while walking.” Program note.]

Phobia

Chamber Made Opera
Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, Jan 15-17
Another fascinating new music theatre experience was Gerard Brophy’s Phobia for Chamber Made Opera, in which there was a lot of music but no singing. A bit extreme, some would think, but in fact utterly magical. The ‘theatre’ bit comes from the way the music is created. The set is nothing more than a finely lit, dense assemblage of instruments for making music, noise and special effects, as you would for a film or a radio play. The 6 sound artists and musicians on stage create a soundtrack for an unseen version of Hitchcock’s Vertigo with frantic vigour and precision. It’s a bit non-plussing if you don’t know the film or at least its plot, but pleasure is still to be had moment by moment in the sheer inventiveness and multi-skilled talents of the performers. Structurally the tension dips away too towards the end, nothing that a bit of reworking couldn’t solve. Brophy’s score has a fluidity that can percussively yield both tension and release as well as, more lyrically, an apt period feel, all amplified by the performers’ investment in their art. Phobia is a unique creation opening up possibilities for Australian music theatre.

The Transmigration of Souls

Sydney Symphony Orchestra
Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, Jan 22-23
American composer John Adams’ memorial for the New York dead of September 11, 2001 is an elegantly constructed musical palindrome, beginning quietly with a litany of the names of the dead and ending with the same, but rising in the middle to huge enveloping, elegaic passion. The structure is unexpected but rewarding. So is the sound design. Street noises of New York wrap around the audience in the Opera House’s huge Concert Hall. Lone voices of the bereaved speak from behind you, to your right, from somewhere beyond the orchestra. Visually, this is one of a handful of occasions in the festival when projections worked effectively rather than becoming mere ‘background media.’ Australian photographer Greg Barrett’s images were projected onto a screen suspended over the orchestra. Their power resided in Barrett’s restraint. His black and white shots of New York gutters, pavements, grilles and walls all evoke the act of looking down while walking. And in most of the images there is a human shadow, symbolic of those people lost but also resonant of the radioactive shadow traces of the victims of Hiroshima. The exception is a mid-piece, slow long shot of a corridor, the camera moving towards a curtain gently wafting in the breeze, eerily reminiscent of a similar shot in Meg Stuart’s Alibi in a very different scenario.

While not on first hearing the most memorable of the Adams’ repertoire, the synthesis of orchestra and image worked unusually well and conductor Antonino Fogliani kept the pulse and the sheer scale of the work’s power in discrete check. The projections in the same concert accompanying Ross Edwards’ Symphony no 4 (a choral work peculiarly lacking the composer’s facility for memorable motifs) were in surplus and poorly integrated with the composition, while the video works supporting Maya Beiser’s multi-track cello concert at Angel Place (Jan 21, 23) were very ordinary. The huge images of water, nature and moonlight added little to David Lang’s impassioned, reiterative response to September 11, World to Come.

Tense Dave

Chunky Move
Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, Jan 20-24
Gideon Obarzanek was the choreographer who introduced Australian audiences to hard-edged, fast, pop culture-inspired dance with his Chunky Move company. The company has long since diversified, though the inspirations of popular culture are still in evidence. Tense Dave, however, represents a great leap forward for Chunky Move in working the dance theatre terrain with an expert ensemble, great design and powerfully consistent inventiveness.

Obarzanek invited fellow choreographer Lucy Guerin, innovative theatre director Michael Kantor, dramaturg Tom Wright and designer Jodie Fried to work with him on realising his vision and it’s paid off. The non-stop stage revolve as theatrical device transforms from mere conceit to metaphor to total embodiment: the performers are seemlessly integrated with its world of endless mutations. Dave (played with great aplomb by Brian Lucas) wanders into the lives and fantasies of his neighbors and the walls come down (literally). He is subject to their desires—romantic, sexual, murderous and paranoid—to the point of near extermination. But Dave gets up and struggles on, a rather trite conclusion after the magic of the preceding hour but not diminishing too much the power of a very singular work. Once again, violence is the modus vivendi and the relentlessness of the revolve evokes a kind of helplessness beneath the work’s comic veneer.

The packed-out series of showings of Through the Wire (writer-director Ros Horin; Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, Jan 22-24), a verbatim theatre work-in-progress account of the lives of asylum seekers and their relationships with people visiting them at detention centres, revealed the extremes of cruelty that we as a nation have perpetrated against fellow human beings, but also a great need for audiences to be told the story. The appearance of Shahin Shafaei, one of the refugees playing himself (and as the least theatrical of the performers, the most effective), and the presence of the other subjects of the story onstage for the curtain call added power to a simply told but crucial tale.

Def Poetry Jam from New York featured American performance poets from Afro-American, Hispanic and Arabic backgrounds in a celebratory, often comic, sometimes bitterly angry account of their lives in a slick, quick-fire show that lacked the incisiveness and anger of some of their pop contemporaries. Young audiences, especially in Parramatta, were totally and loudly engaged.

The Glass Garden (GoD BE IN MY MouTH productions, Jan 14-17) was staged in a secret location which turned out to be the old armoury on the edge of Olympic Park, an evocative choice of site. However, once we were in the hall the connections quickly slipped away in the conventional end-on staging of this pop-opera of a young man’s decline into madness, murder and a subterranean Planet of the Apes ruled by a Fu Manchu figure. The trigger for this descent in the Glass Garden is the young man’s discovery that he has breast cancer. He encounters various female figures on his journey, including the raunchy dancing apes (who emerge from a huge toilet bowl), but resolved love or redemption are not in sight and electrocution is. Brennan’s quiet, nervy characterisation of the young man and Brian Lipson’s over-the-top baddies made for an odd dynamic. The writing is excellent at first but subsequently uneven and the overall structure unwieldy, none of which seemed to bother the young audience enjoying the extravagance of Brennan’s narcissistic vision. I confess I couldn’t get any perspective on this work—I felt time-warped back into the 1970s—a Jungian trip demanding Freudian attention.

Sydney multimedia whizzes, The Brothers Gruchy, turned on a very different dream. For their Museum of Dreams they built The Pod, a kind of mini-Imax wide-screen kiosk for 3 or 4 viewers with movies of dream-tellers accompanied by excellent sound. From one part of the screen, someone tells you a dream as they’re superimposed over its visual approximation. It’s a logical step on from Playback theatre where performers act out the audience’s dreams. But the aim here is more magical and archival than therapeutic and is not concerned with literal interpretation. These brief works are beautifully filmed with framing that evokes dreams—as an older woman speaks, the screen is dominated to the right by a close up of a child bicyclist’s hair in the wind. We can’t see her face, but the pleasure of movement is palpable. The Pod was busy when I visited it (Riverside Theatres, Parramatta), so my glimpses of other’s dreams were few, but their impact was strong. The pod also has a facility for recording your own dreams, addressed to a camera in the booth and later collected by the Brothers Gruchy for their archive. Let’s hope this idiosyncratic museum soon finds a permanent home.

Last word

The 2004 Sydney Festival yielded dreams, visions and extremes true to the uncertain and exploratory nature of the times. The dialogue with our bodies intensifies and our awareness of and responsibility towards others are writ large.

A report on the Breaking the Cycle music theatre event at the Parramatta Riverside Theatres will appear in RT 60.

In Japanese, wataboshi means seed of the dandelion flower. The image of the wind scattering these seeds across the world inspired the vision of the Asia-Pacific Wataboshi Music Festival. Hosted by Access Arts, the first Australian manifestation of this festival, Living the Dream was presented at Brisbane Powerhouse in November 2003. Retaining its original focus on music, Wataboshi has expanded its vision to include theatre, visual art, literature, comedy, cabaret and workshops.

Founded in Japan in 1975, Wataboshi was conceived as an educational festival focused on realising and harnessing the creative potential of people with disabilities, primarily through musical expression and performance. Promoted as a multi-layered cultural experience celebrating the lives and experiences of people with a disability, audiences are invited to celebrate art by “doing.”

The usual festival hustle and bustle was largely absent at Wataboshi, although the audience increased and the energy intensified as the week progressed. This was a deliberate strategy—the 8-day program was designed to progress from the local to the global, culminating in a traditional gala concert showcasing the musical talents of 14 Asia-Pacific countries. An unfortunate consequence of this programming, however, was that many international participants did not get to see the work of local performers. With its meagre budget, festival funding rarely extended to supporting the artists, thus some of the more prominent companies and artists may not have attended. Nevertheless it had the look and feel of a generous festival with all the trimmings.

In keeping with community development principles, the festival allowed all those expressing an interest to perform. Primarily motivated by a concern with identity, self-expression, participation and community development, the festival’s strength lies in the process of participation and in the subjective experiences of participants.

Wataboshi 2003 was the largest disability arts festival in the world, according to its public relations director, John Michael Swinbank. The public program included 81 events, varying in maturity and stage of development. More than 40 Indigenous participants were among the 420 artists performing at the festival (240 of these from Queensland). Many shows, activities and exhibitions were free to the public in the open spaces of the Powerhouse while the ticketed events were usually reserved for theatre spaces, loosely reflecting the distinction between professional and community based work. An unexpected treat was the post-gala performance in the Spark Bar by the festival’s international ambassador, well-known pianist David Helfgott. Workshops included The Tutti Ensemble from South Australia, storytelling with Aunty Maureen Watson, Delmae Barton and Vi McDermott, members of the Butterflies Theatre Group including directors Wolfgang Stange and Rohana Deva Perera from Sri Lanka, musicians from WA band LooseTooth and Melbourne rock and blues group the BiPolar Bears.

Theatre-based events included Mouse Matters, David Shortland’s musical dealing with visual impairment issues and The Unknown Sister by Brisbane stand-up comedian and performer Liz Navratil, a work-in-progress exploring her fascination with Elizabeth, the unknown sister of Marlene Dietrich. In Confessions of a Trainspotter, local jazz musician Jeff Usher wove a tale about his passion for trains and their sounds in a work using narrative, video-sound recordings and live piano. Usher’s use of visual material left many perplexed because it didn’t seem to fit within the context of a work by a blind artist demonstrating an embodied account of senses that excluded sight. New Zealand comedian Philip Patston entertained with his usual captivating charm, beginning his show by translating Wataboshi into the “wash your bottie” festival and asking us to imagine what such a performance might entail. Also from New Zealand was the young concert pianist Zeb Wulff.

Music theatre included Horse to Water by Gold Coast’s PAKTI (Power of Art: Key to Inclusion) and A Garden on the Moon by Brisbane’s Cascade Place. Both made use of the mediums of facilitated voice communication. In fact, the development of live improvised prose, communicated through interpreters was an interesting feature of the festival and a communication innovation within the theatre setting.

In A Garden on the Moon, written primarily from the ideas of Shane Macfarlane (known in character as Finbar) we get a slice of real life intermingled with musings and imaginings about the moon from someone whose world transforms once given access to communication. The fast and furious narrative spills out throughout the production, countering the pejorative labels and assumptions so readily applied to people like Finbar in certain discourses. Although the multimedia techniques were simple, the lighting, music and puppetry maintained integrity and offered many moments of seditious humor and sensory stimulation. A Garden on the Moon is a work with enormous potential if allowed the space and time to develop further.

Horse to Water is similarly evocative in terms of new communication techniques but with a serious tone. Combining improvised narratives derived through facilitated communication from poet Glen Sheppard and Peter Rose, translated by song through the voices of Terri Delany and Florence Teillet and brought to life by the music of Linsey Pollak, Horse to Water is both intelligent and emotionally engaging.

While the profundity of the stories evoked in A Garden on the Moon and Horse to Water cannot be denied, there is a tendency to draw from disability experience and deploy it as core subject matter. This kind of work is intriguing in the first instance but risks distancing its audience if the focus remains quasi-didactic. Moving beyond the personal narrative to more fully use the nuances and alternate tropes of meaning that disability can generate demonstrates artistic maturity.

Wataboshi 2003 continued the healthy debate amongst artists attending disability art festivals over whether to set boundaries between professional and community arts or to eclipse the notion of disability and be absorbed into the mainstream. The debate will no doubt continue at the next international Wataboshi festival in Shanghai in 2005.

Asia Pacific Wataboshi Music Festival, executive producer Neal Price, executive director Lesley McLennan, festival director Ludmila Doneman, executive committee Vaughn Bennison, Michael Pini, Ken Stegeman, production manager Malcolm Prendeville; Nov 16-23, 2003

He was raised in Canberra, lived a long time in Sydney, then in Berlin for 5 years before returning to Australia last May. On October 2, he went missing. His body was found on November 14 at Manly. He was buried in Canberra in December, at a ceremony attended by his partner Martin Del Amo, his family and friends. Nobody knows of his last hours. We do know he’s gone.

Ben was an actor, dancer, performance maker, musician, singer, writer and thinker. All these skills coalesced in an idiosyncratic and utterly memorable marriage of physicality, musicality and intellect. It made him a wonderful artist. In performance, Ben was electric, elastic, alert. He had a kind of jerky elegance, an ability to move in multiple directions simultaneously, unwinding minute gestures to reveal an endless array of tiny narratives across his body.

Ben began training and performing in Canberra in 1983 with Canberra Youth Theatre’s Troupe. He went on to perform with the Ensemble Theatre Project, Fortune Theatre and People Next Door. In the late 1980s and early 90s he worked with an incredible range of artists and performance makers, including Sydney-based companies Death Defying Theatre, Entr’acte, One Extra, Stalker and Nikki Heywood. He performed at Performance Space, in schools and outdoors, in international festivals, in Europe and with his band, The Blue Crush Club, in pubs, clubs and at parties.

In the late 90s Ben’s desire to train, rethink his practice and broaden his professional horizons took him to Europe. He freelanced in Germany, Belgium and Holland with small ensembles and premier companies such as Schauspielhaus Hamburg and Company Felix Ruckert.

Most recently, in Sydney, Ben performed exquisitely in Rosalind Crisp’s tread at Performance Space, reminding Australian audiences of what we had missed during his 5 years away. He also worked as the physical trainer on The Living Museum of Fetish-Ized Identities, generously offering his skills and encouragement to his peers. Around this time he also worked as a community carer.

I’m lucky to have worked with Ben in the early 90s. As with many of his colleagues, we became friends. We’d spend intense times together, then stay in irregular contact, but were always able to pick up where we left off, with one intimate detail or another, sitting in the kitchen chatting, gossiping, giggling into the night about recent exploits and dilemmas—personal and professional. We’d compare work experiences and aspirations, our states of hair, insomnia and relationships.

Ben was unencumbered by worldly possessions—though he was in his own way extremely stylish in his endless collection of midriff tops. He was encumbered with enormous desire. Desire to participate in our world meaningfully but lightly. Desire to make great work. Desire to critically unpick his surroundings, himself, and all that makes up this complex culture.

He interrogated life in general through his performance work and learnt much about his own life through performing. He was always interested in work with political and emotional depth. Making work was serious business for Ben. He gave it a lot. He was wickedly funny and could make tragedy, confusion or loss seem hilarious on stage, in the dressing room, at the after party, even at 6am boarding the minibus as it began its trip to Penrith for an 8.30am school show.

He was simultaneously generous and demanding of his collaborators. Demanding in the sense that he wanted to collectively crack it, to break through a work to create heart and intellect. He wasn’t petty or sycophantic. He wasn’t interested in industry success or recognition or a cosy career path. He was driven to make great, urgent and beautiful work. And he often did.

Many of his collaborators and friends gathered at Performance Space at the end of last year to farewell Ben and engage in a collective act of remembering. While mostly Sydney-based people were able to attend, the event reminded us of how many worlds Ben inhabited over time. He passed through many people’s lives but always with an intensity that was unforgettable. Perhaps Clare Grant put her finger on it when she described the effect of Ben’s reflexivity on his collaborators/ mates: “He watched what he made through a lens that was so complex you found ways of seeing you didn’t know you had.” There’s no doubt this was hard work for him.

A few days before he disappeared, Ben joined the closing night party of The Living Museum. He was elated and as usual, wickedly funny. He was wearing a pink wig, dancing around the space, giggling as he sang cheesy pop songs. He said goodbye at least 17 times.

When I spoke recently with Jane Packham, a very old friend of Ben’s, I asked her the name of a show that she and Ben were making in the late 80s which I never saw but heard so much about at the time. She laughed and said, “I don’t remember, and if you’d asked Ben he probably wouldn’t have remembered. All I know is that I loved him with all my heart.” For many of us whose relationships with Ben began through making work but extended into intense and enduring friendships, this is our experience also—we know we loved him and we know we miss him.

The photograph of Benjamin Grieve by Heidrun Löhr was taken at Rosalind Crisp’s tread, Performance Space in May 2003, his final performance.

After a noticeable absence in 2003, What Is Music? returns to its former time slot, allowing the summer festival frenzy to stretch through February. The 2004 festival driven by Oren Ambarchi, Robbie Avenaim and caleb~k, has benefited from the year of quiet consolidation (which included incorporation and key organisation funding from the Australia Council) to re-emerge as an east coast extravaganza with the addition of a weekend of events at the Brisbane Powerhouse for Live Arts, as well as 5 nights in Sydney and 6 nights in Melbourne showcasing the work of more than 60 Australian and international artists.

The festival began in 1994 when Oren Ambarchi and Robbie Avenaim returned from an international tour. Inspired by the work of John Zorn, they were interested in mounting an Australian version of his musical game Cobra. Glenn Wright from the Harbourside Brasserie encouraged them to present a week’s worth of performances. Ambarchi recalls the first festival as including “really high-brow and low-brow stuff. For example, Machine for Making Sense and then the MuMesons. We just had things we liked. We didn’t really differentiate…we just threw them together. In the beginning there was more of a [pressing] reason because there were so few gigs in Sydney for experimental artists. So it was a way for us to play, try different things out and get different people to play together. We were interested in digging people out of the woodwork… presenting work that was really important but that no one knew about—bedroom musicians and strange people who have been doing stuff for years [like] Daevid Allen from Gong. He’s an Australian artist in his 60s and plays in Europe 3 or 4 times a year and we put on his first Sydney show in his whole career.”

Ten years on, the guiding principle is the same, but over the last 6 years the introduction of key international artists has heightened the festival’s profile. The curatorial directive is to expose Australian audiences to artists who have played revolutionary roles in international music culture. “For example, we’re presenting Merzbow (Japan) and Whitehouse (England) who are probably the top noise practitioners in the world, heavy historical figures in that genre…At the same time there are artists like Annette Krebs and Andrea Neuman (Germany) who are amongst the most interesting improvisers working today.”

The Japanese contingent is particularly strong. Along with Merzbow, the festival will also feature Keiji Haino, a key historical figure in the Japanese avant-garde scene who has been involved in psychedelic free jazz projects since the late 60s. Ambarchi enthuses, “He completely revolutionised avant-pysch music in Japan and around the world…he’s in his own realm, a guitar player and vocalist unlike any other. Unbelievably personal and intense music, quite transcendental. Also quite draining and heavy going but in a beautiful way.” On the lighter side is Noriko Tujiko who performs quirky electronic pop with digital textures.
Merzbow

What Is Music? has had a reputation for wild performative events and it looks as though this tradition will be upheld by Whitehouse. The program tells us to “expect rock noise on the edge of aural damage and extreme adrenalin rush…testing the artistic and aesthetic limits of even the greatest connoisseurs of avant-garde sound.” In the Sydney show at Candy’s Apartment, Whitehouse will be supported by a little known sound artist from Uzbekistan, Fahalim Ooshcasky, feedback artist Mattin from the Basque Country and locals Dead Man Eating and Rizili. In Melbourne they will be joined by Neil Hamburger from the USA, Mark Harwood and the intriguing Von Crapp Family featuring guitarist Gary Butler, his wife and 2 children. Keeping things in the family, there will also be performances by Avenaim and his nephew Michael, and as part of the Brisbane shows, Clocked Out Duo’s Vanessa Tomlinson will perform with her 19 month-old son George Griswold. There are too many local artists to mention, but emphasis is on collaborative improvisations between local and international artists with some fantastic combinations set for the Sydney Conservatorium shows and the Melbourne Iwaki Auditorium nights supported by ABC Classic FM.

What Is Music? 2004 has also expanded to include some free events as part of the Melbourne program. From Monday 16 to Friday 20 at the Kaliede Theatre there’ll be a cinema series co-presented with Transmit Collective and RMIT Union Arts that includes Fassbinder’s Satin’s Brew, Sun City Girls’ Cloaven Theatre and Take Me By The Throat’s Satan Rides the Media. Miles van Dorssen and Nick Wishart’s soundscultpture CELL—a shipping container fitted with MIDI-activated pneumatic devices—will be located in the City Square. And for the first time there will be a festival club for late night revellings in Sydney at the Frequency Lab, and in Melbourne at BUS Gallery which will also feature a photographic and video exhibition curated by Lisa Campbell-Smith and Robbie Avenaim.

So now that the festival has survived for a decade, what’s the future for What Is Music? caleb~k believes that there needs to be period of consolidation. Expanding to a fully national tour is possibly not financially feasible for a festival that offers up to 6 nights in each city (although there are some events this year presented in association with South Australian and Western Australian promoters following the festival). The push now is on developing audiences, particularly in the newest leg of the tour, Brisbane. Other plans include setting up a recording label, a series of presentations across the year outside of festival time and some potential tours internationally. With the increasingly healthy audio culture in Australia, caleb~k would like to see What Is Music? operating as a support and informational hub for the innovative music community. In the meantime, audiences will have to be content with 12 days of some of the newest, wildest, loudest, quietest, messiest and rigorous sonic offerings this summer.

What Is Music?, directors Oren Ambarchi, Robbie Avenaim, caleb~k, Brisbane co-ordinator Lawrence English; Brisbane Powerhouse for the Live Arts, Feb 6-8, Sydney, various venues, Feb 10-14, Melbourne,various venues, Feb 15-20

Over the last decade the Adelaide Festival has developed something more than the bold programming which has been its inheritance. It is a thematic acuity which in the hands of artistic directors Barrie Kosky and Robyn Archer yielded events that systematically provoked the intelligence as well as the senses. The performance program for Stephen Page’s 2004 festival has a number of intriguing elements, but what does it add up to?

If contemporary performance is your thing then you can comfortably program yourself for the festival, or not so comfortably if some of these companies live up to their rhetoric. There’s UK premiere performance ensemble, Forced Entertainment, making their long-awaited first visit to Australia. With 22 performers Canada’s Canstage is presenting its award-winning, wordless account of Gogol’s The Overcoat and Diary of a Madman to a Shostakovitch score. Madrid’s La Carniceria Teatro (“the butchery of theatre”) explores the underside of leisure time in the everyday with 3 performers in I Bought a Spade at IKEA to Dig My Own Grave.

The affinity between performance and contemporary dance is strong these days, so you could certainly add to your selections from the dance program—Emio Greco and PC’s Conjunto di Nero, ADT’s Held (see p30) and Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Triple Bill (with Indonesian performer and choreographer Mugiyono Kasido). You could also add contemporary music to the mix with Elena Kats-Chernin’s new opera, Undertow (director/creator Vanhakartano; lyricist Andrea Rienets; State Opera of South Australia/ Finnish National Opera) and the concerts Absolute Zappa (the Absolute Ensemble play Frank Zappa) and Blood on the Floor (Absolute with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra), UK composer Mark-Anthony Turnage’s bracing fusion of classical and jazz forms. The great John Scofield is the guitarist on the recorded version (Mark-Anthony Turnage, British Music Collection, DECCA CD 468 814-2), so it’ll be interesting to see how Absolute’s guitarist measures up.

There’s one other vital ingredient for your programming, something to take you back to the roots of performance in the living tradition of the Dhuwa and Yirritja clans of the Yirrkala peoples in Body Dreaming, directed by Banduk Marika and Djakapurra Munyarrun (ex-Bangarra).

If you want more body in your festival choices, Circus Oz will be in town with The Big, Big Top Show in their tent and The Blue Show at Universal Playground (a welcome reprise of the Red Square format of 1996). New York’s Daredevil Opera Company promises “pyro-rock-stunt-clown” mayhem in another Edinburgh Fringe sell-out success.

Plays usually don’t figure strongly in Adelaide Festivals, but there are some distinctive ones in the 2004 program. Guy Masterson and the Assembly Theatre interpret 12 Angry Men, the stage and film courtroom drama classic, with 12 standup comics—a big hit at the 2003 Edinburgh Fringe. Also from the UK comes 100, The Imaginary Body, about 4 people in limbo faced with choosing the one memory they will each live with for eternity. Company B is presenting Gulpilil, with the film actor and dancer David Gulpilil directed by Neil Armfield. The State Theatre Company of South Australia has adapted Robert Dessaix’s novel Night Letters for the stage. Wesley Enoch directs RiverlanD for Windmill Performing Arts with Indigenous performers and children from Kuarna Plains School. Inspired by the art of Ian W Abdullah, RiverlanD is written by Scott Rankin and draws on the spirit of place and the impact of the great River Murray Flood of 1956.

The rest of the program is pretty much straight festival fare and should keep conservative Adelaide Festival-goers happy, something of a return to the mixed bag of yore. However, the festival’s best, combined with the pull of the Adelaide Biennial, the Adelaide Fringe and the inevitable influx of artists for the Performing Arts Market, the Fringe and the Artists and Writers Weeks should make for a strong turnout. Bookings are reputedly already heavy.

So what does the 2004 festival add up to? There’s a welcome commitment to contemporary art practices, including some bold choices, especially Forced Entertainment. The Indigenous arts strand is the festival’s great strength, with Gulpilil, RiverlanD, Body Dreaming, Bangarra’s Triple Bill, Peter Sculthorpe’s Requiem (with the Pitjanjatjara Choir and William Barton on didjeridu) and Talk’n Up Country, a collection of exhibitions, talks, screenings and events centred around Tandanya Cultural Institute and including a Sacred Symposium at Elder Hall, February 29, featuring leading Aboriginal artists and thinkers. In total it’s a modest representation of what Indigenous art adds up to in this country, but it does make it an integral part of the festival, certainly a more restrained vision than Peter Sellars’, but a significant one.

Forced Entertainment

Forced Entertainment has been a collaborative, cross-artform ensemble since 1984 in theatre, performance, digital media, video and installation, creating work that “asks questions and fuels dreams…Our long-term commitment is not to specific formal strategies, but simply to challenging and provocative art…” (www.forced.co.uk).

What Forced Entertainment has to say about their work reveals parallels with their Australian peers in contemporary performance. They share an ongoing concern with the possibilities of performance, often by abandoning the usual rules and forms of theatre. They address their audience directly and insist on “being with the audience in real time.” They have gone beyond acting—”we made versions of ourselves.”

In his talk, “A six thousand one hundred and twenty seven word manifesto on liveness in three parts with three interludes” at the Live Culture forum (Tate Modern, London 2003, www.tate.org.uk/audiovideo/ live_culture_conference.htm), artistic director Tim Etchells details the company’s vision and its dialogue with its audience. Our capacity to generate versions of the self is, for Etchells, what enables us to survive as we encounter the various sets of rules, games and structures that comprise our reality. Not surprisingly he sees this as operating on the border between reality and fiction.

Forced Entertainment is offering 2 works for Adelaide festival audiences, First Night and And on the Thousandth Night…, each demonstrating the company’s preoccupations. First Night is very much about performance (of all kinds), while the epic And on the Thousandth Night… is about story-telling, another aspect of performance and, as in its inspiration One Thousand and One Nights, on occasion a matter of survival—the lie that saves or a culture preserved in its stories.

First Night (2001) was commissioned by the Rotterdamse Schouwburg (Rotterdam), the SpielArt Festival (Munich) and Festival Theaterformen (Hanover). The company describes it as “a kind of disastrous vaudeville” with a sparkling lineup of 8 performers opening “with a grand welcome, but soon disintegrat[ing] into dark predictions of the future, psychotic escapology acts, unexpected dances and unhinged show-biz anecdotes.” True to the company’s mission First Night “concerns itself with the nature of the theatrical event itself, exploring what happens when it all goes wrong and when audience expectations are challenged or toyed with.” Historically, Adelaide audiences have been more tolerant of such challenges than their Melbourne and Sydney counterparts (where the respective festivals have been less provocatively programmed), but Forced Entertainment could provide a new level of testing given First Night’s reputation as the company’s most confronting work.

And on the Thousandth Night… (originally for Festival Ayloul, Beirut 2002) is a 6-hour durational performance. The audience can come and go as they wish during this epic of interrupted storytelling which “explores the live relationship between a story and its public, a story and its teller…A story is told, made up live, dragged from memory by a line of 8 performers dressed as Kings and Queens, wearing cheap red cloaks and cardboard crowns. It is a long, mutating and endlessly self-cancelling story. It is a story which somehow, in its many dips and turns, seems to include many—if not all—of the stories in the world. Moving from the extraordinary to the banal, it mixes everything from film plots, religious stories, children’s stories, traditional tales, jokes and modern myths, to scary stories, love stories and sex stories” (www.forced.co.uk).

For those of us waiting many years for Forced Entertainment to visit Australia, this is a rare opportunity, one made doubly valuable by having 2 of the company’s recent major works on the festival program—grounds enough to be in Adelaide in March.

Cathy Naden, a founding member of Forced Entertainment, will speak at Performance Space, Sydney, March 6, 3pm. Free. Members of the company will speak in the Adelaide Festival’s Knowledge Ground program.

See RT 58, p 14 or go to www.realtimearts.net for a preview of the Adelaide Biennial visual arts exhibition.

Despite shifting cultural and political sentiments over Australia’s relationship with Asia, cinematic reflections of the state of play have barely gone beyond deploying entrenched stereotypes. Sue Brooks’ recent Japanese Story joins an array of prominent Australian films from the last 3 decades in which Asian characters are ‘sacrificed’ for the sake of the white protagonists’ emotional fulfillment.

Believe me, I wanted to like Japanese Story. The idea of exploring the relationship between a white Australian woman and a Japanese man in the harsh Australian outback seemed rich with possibility, if not entirely new (Clara Law attempted something similar with The Goddess of 1967 in 2000). However, the film does very little to shift prevailing cultural stereotypes about the Japanese. The character Hiro (Gotaro Tsunashima) functions merely as a cipher for Sandy’s (Toni Collette) own process of self-discovery, and he is conveniently eliminated once he has served his purpose. The film continues a long tradition in Australian cinema whereby Asian characters are denied autonomy as characters.

Japanese Story elicits audience identification with Sandy; we are invited to join her emotional journey and to experience our own ‘Japanese story.’ However, the fact that this journey is predicated on an affective relationship with 2 stereotypes seriously undercuts this cause.

Imagine, if you will, a Japanese film called Australian Story about a Japanese girl stuck with a boorish Australian in the middle of the Okinawan countryside. Perhaps it would have been more accurate to call Brooks’ film Australian Story, since it uses an ‘Asian’ element—a stereotypical Japanese businessman and tourist—to define Australian self-identity. ‘Journey films’, where a character attempts to find him or herself by meeting an ‘Other’ along the way, can only be as interesting as that ‘Other’ is allowed to be. In this sense the shallow, fetishised representation offered by the character of Hiro does not aid what we might understand to be Sandy’s journey of self-discovery.

Throughout most of the film, Hiro’s only line is a conciliatory “Hai” (“yes”), unless he is commenting on how much space there is in Australia. At moments where the film attempts to be self-reflexive, by deriding Sandy’s attempts at cultural or linguistic translation, it again falls into old traps. When Sandy is told that she has to accompany Hiro into the desert, she implores her best friend for advice: “So, tell me about the Japs.” Unbelievable as her total ignorance may seem in a contemporary, educated Australian woman living in a major metropolitan city in Australia (and working as a geologist in the Japanese-dominated mining industry), Sandy endeavours to find out more about “the Japs” through her intimate engagement with one of them.

I found the first sex scene in Japanese Story completely unerotic, and worse, almost laughable. Hiro lies naked (presumably) under the bed sheets while Sandy puts on his pants and gets on top of him. The scene is yet another example of the Australian cinema’s feminisation of the Asian man, so painfully obvious that I began to wonder whether I was missing some more complex form of gender play.

Many critics have drawn parallels between Japanese Story and Clara Law’s The Goddess of 1967, and indeed structurally they are very similar. In Law’s film, Rose Byrne plays a blind Australian girl who convinces an eccentric Japanese man to travel across the country with her in search of her father. He agrees because he wants to buy the 1967 Citroen DS in the girl’s possession, which is his reason for travelling to Australia. Again, the sex scene between the 2 characters is rendered as a site of ‘connection’, with Byrne ‘on top.’ Cross-cultural exchange and understanding is made to be heterosexually resolvable, but only through a reconfiguration of gender relations applied to a hierarchy of race.

One recuperative scene in Japanese Story shows Sandy’s attempt to haul Hiro’s body into the back of the truck before driving back into town. Only then is the materiality of his body, as something physical and palpable, portrayed. For once, he becomes a ‘real’ body, not just a fetishised representation, and we are made to feel the weight of that implication. Too bad he has to be dead for that to happen. At the end of the film, we see Sandy crying in the airport lounge as she watches a casket-shaped package being loaded onto the plane; Hiro is being returned to Japan like a faulty item or a bad import that was never welcome in the first place. The film speaks of a utopian vision for Asian-Australian relations, where Asia is ‘in’ Australia, but Asians are not of Australia.

Of course, this treatment of the Asian ‘Other’ is hardly a new phenomenon in Australian cinema. In Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), Mel Gibson plays Guy Hamilton, a journalist covering the dying days of Sukarno’s rule in Indonesia during 1965. His cameraman is Billy Kwan (described as “a Chinese-Australian dwarf with a giant-sized heart”), played by American Linda Hunt. Kwan is one of the most pernicious portrayals of an Asian character in Australian cinema, particularly in the use of a white woman to represent an Asian man. Naturally, after teaching Hamilton some lessons about commitment, an ‘aberration’ such as Billy must be killed off, before Hamilton returns home to a white(r) Australia.

A decade after Weir’s film, Stephen Wallace’s Turtle Beach (1992) engages with the enduring antipodean concern with refugees and detention centres, but it again does this safely off-shore, in Malaysia. Joan Chen plays Minou, a Vietnamese woman married to an Australian ambassador. She befriends a journalist from Sydney, Judith Wilkes (Greta Scacchi). After watching Minou sacrifice herself for her children on Turtle Beach, Wilkes is able to return to Australia with a better understanding of motherhood and an affirmed sense of Asian women as self-sacrificing creatures.

More recently, Craig Lahiff’s Heaven’s Burning (1997) gives us a strong character in Midori (Youki Kudoh), although she too is sacrificed at the end of the film. So many of these films seem unable to offer any workable vision for the future of Asian/Australian relations, besides a (metaphoric) death that eliminates the figure of difference. Disappointingly, Japanese Story also takes the easy way out, implying that even today any other kind of relationship is untenable. Asian characters are simply not allowed to ‘live’ in the sense of being fully-formed, autonomous characters.

Counter-representations are beginning to emerge as Asian-Australian filmmakers begin making films about their own experiences, attending more to the specificities of what it means to be ‘Asian’ and the constituencies that comprise it. For example, there is Clara Law’s Floating Life (1996), Tony Ayres’ documentaries Sadness (1999) and China Dolls (1997) and most recently, Khoa Do’s remarkable The Finished People. At a time of rampant fear and panic, and increased border control against the threat of ‘foreign invaders’, the release of more ‘Australian stories’—of all kinds—is not only welcome but vital.

Khoa Do’s ultra low-budget digital feature The Finished People is everything that most contemporary Australian cinema is not: politically charged, socially engaged and stylistically brazen. It has one foot in the traditions of Italian Neo-Realism and the other in the kitchen-sink dramas of British directors like Ken Loach.

It’s often said that the digital revolution in filmmaking will democratise the image and allow previously unseen stories to burst onto the screen, but so far in Australia we have seen little evidence of this. Although digital tape formats have allowed several genre films of the sort normally disdained by government funding bodies to be made and released, until now nothing produced locally has matched the stylistic and thematic audaciousness of Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten, or the Dogma films of Denmark. It has taken a young first-time filmmaker like Do, working outside the usual funding structures, to produce a local feature that responds to this pioneering trend.

In RealTime 58 (p19), I described the lack of a concrete sense of place and cultural specificity that plagues most recent Australian films. In contrast, Do’s direct and unrelenting engagement with the harsh environment of Sydney’s Cabramatta is striking. Disdaining the glossy cinematography that characterises most local product, cinematographers Oliver Lawrence and Murray Lui capture Cabramatta’s flat, concrete landscape in a washed-out image that highlights the grey glare of Sydney’s south west suburbs. The film’s prosaic appearance, produced by a semi-professional mini-DV camera, allows the lives of the protagonists to be mirrored in the very texture of the images on screen.

The use of a small, lightweight digital camera allowed Do to capture the performers moving through the streets of Cabramatta as the life of the suburb went on uninterrupted around them. The impression of life caught “on the fly” as it played out around the drama greatly enhances the powerful sense of a very specific time and place that permeates the film.

The potent sense of a particular milieu is also intensified by the presence of the performers. Much has been made of Do’s use of ‘real’ street kids, and it’s true that the performers are all untrained actors who met the director while he was teaching a film course at Cabramatta’s Open Family Welfare Centre. But it’s an oversimplification to say these people are just playing themselves. Do generated the film’s script with the performers during workshops in which the cast drew upon incidents and stories from their own lives and those of their acquaintances and friends. Rather than being autobiographical, the stories in the film are an amalgam of the cast’s collective experiences.

In bringing these stories to the screen, Do sails against the prevailing wind in Australian film acting and employs a resolutely non-naturalistic mode of performance, tapping into a rich tradition of filmic performance that stretches back at least as far as the Italian Neo-Realist films of the 1940s. At one level we regard Do’s cast as characters in a fiction, but their rough-hewn performances also constantly remind us of another reality informing the drama and shadowing the bodies on screen. We never forget that these kids and young adults are playing parts, enacting a distillation of their lives and experiences drawn from the environment around them. They don’t use their lives to neatly inform their portrayals the way a method actor seamlessly incorporates his or her emotional memories into a role. These actors’ personalities, emotions and experiences are unconsciously inscribed into their every movement and gesture, and Do harnesses their lack of formal training to allow these traces of their off-screen lives to constantly encroach on their acting. During Tommy’s (Jason McGoldrick) conversations with Sara (Mylinh Dinh) for example, we can see a lifetime of hurt and repressed emotion expressed in his nervous stance and constantly shifting gaze. Joe Lee as Van moves through the environs of Cabramatta with the ease of someone who has spent a lot of time on the street. And when Simon (Shane MacDonald) flatly tells his friend Des (Rodney Anderson) that he has no dreams, we can hear the resigned fatalism of someone who knows that for some Australians having hope implies unrealistic expectations about the future.

The result is an unpredictable and fascinating set of performances, informing a film that resonates with more emotional and social truth than any other recent Australian feature. Not because it depicts “reality” in any unmediated, transparent or naive sense, but because it shows a group of young Australians in their everyday surrounds, self-consciously enacting a representation of their own reality. Do’s approach means that we never forget there are real people behind these characters, and the story doesn’t end for them when the lights come up. The Finished People may be a fiction, but it is a fiction entwined with a reality much of Cabramatta’s youth lives every day.

Australian feature films seem determined to avoid any kind of engagement with the rapidly widening fault lines running through Australia’s social landscape. For those who have been waiting for a film that not only speaks of our contemporary context but responds to the potential offered by digital video technology, Khoa Do’s The Finished People may be the harbinger of the revolution we’ve been waiting for.

The Finished People, director-producer Khoa Do, cinematographers Oliver Lawrence, Murray Lui; actors Rodney Anderson, Joe Le, Jason McGoldrick, Shane MacDonald, Daniela Italiano, Mylinh Dinh, Sarah Vongmany; distributor Dendy Cinemas.

Korean cinema’s rapid ascension to international attention over the past decade has been paralleled by the rise of the Pusan International Film Festival (PIFF) as Asia’s leading festival. In only its 8th year, Pusan is an inspiration to those of us who see festivals playing a vital role in screen culture.

This year PIFF moved to Pusan’s beachfront area where the accompanying film market events have established themselves. Opening night was a huge affair replete with fireworks, fanfares and schoolgirls screaming as cool stars sauntered into the open-air arena. The festival draws an astonishingly young audience from all over the country. You have to envy the Koreans the genuine popularity of their national cinema.

One of the tropes that spanned films from several countries this year was that of mirrored relations between characters. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s opening night Doppelganger was built explicitly around this conceit. Japanese cinema has always contained a strain in which deep structures are laid on the surface. Here a repressed workaholic splits, generating a double who does everything his original self fears.

After the successes of Cure and Bright Future, Kiyoshi Kurosawa is invoked in the same breath as Takashi Miike and Takeshi Kitano, though this film plays out the doppelganger motif in a rather tedious fashion. Its major interest is the means employed to show the split in the protagonist. Digital effects are downplayed in favour of old-fashioned solutions such as montage and split screen opticals.

Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai’s take on the double was played out through the romantic comedy Turn Left, Turn Right. To has always shown an interest in abstraction and this tendency is growing stronger. The premise here is that 2 lovers are destined for each other, but they have a hard time meeting because their lives are so symmetrical. Mirroring here is a way of keeping people apart. As in Kleist’s story The Earthquake in Chile, the earth has to open to produce the asymmetry necessary for narrative closure.

The third mirroring story was perhaps the highlight of the festival. We’re due for a big evaluation of Thai cinema pretty soon. Pen-ek Ratanaruang works a variation on his 1999 film 6ixtnin9 with Last Life in the Universe, which deals with a relationship between opposites whose difference brings them together. The film takes its stylistic cues from its obsessively neat Japanese librarian who meets a messy Thai bar girl when they are both involved in the death of a sibling. Filmed by Christopher Doyle, whose reputation is associated with his hot, handheld style for Wong Kar-wai, this is a beautifully controlled meditation on the balance between the needs to create order and disorder. In examining this balance, Last Life in the Universe traces a movement from an empty, fatalistic freedom to a hopeful state of unfreedom.

Speaking of empty freedom, Tsai Ming-liang’s new film Goodbye, Dragon Inn is indeed another Tsai Ming-liang film. This means that we get some brilliantly conceived long takes which foreground long moments of stillness, and a subtly complex sound mix built around ringing silences. We also have characters who interest the director for their pathologies, highlighting the gulfs within his yawning spaces.

The film is set in a cavernous old movie theatre screening King Hu’s great martial arts movie Dragon Inn to a small crowd whose primary interest is extremely repressed homosexual cruising. In one of the few lines of dialogue, someone observes that the theatre is haunted and it’s a small interpretive leap to see the characters as ghosts, with the spectacle on the screen having a greater purchase on human passion. Films such as King Hu’s translate desire into action, a transaction impossible in Tsai’s world.

The 2 big auteur-driven successes this year will surely be the new films by Takeshi Kitano and Kim Ki-duk, though both are calculated in their appeals to international art cinema. When Kim was in Australia in 2002, his only English was “I make dangerous films.” His new film Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter…and Spring deals with the art cinema trifecta of tranquil landscapes, Buddhist philosophising and cute children. The director himself has a sizeable role, stripped to the waist and showing off his martial arts moves in freeze frame.

While Spring… is a bit too beautiful for its own good, there’s still a lot here for those interested in Kim’s career. It is clearly the reverse image of The Isle as both films deal with marginalised characters who seek refuge in the middle of a lake.

Zatoichi will undoubtedly return Takeshi Kitano to international favour after the fiasco of his US crossover attempt with Brother. Kitano has learned the lesson of Akira Kurosawa’s international success—namely that the jidai-geki (the period action film) is a version of Japaneseness that travels. Reinventing the Zatoichi franchise, Kitano spices up the character of the blind master swordsman with his characteristic alternation between bloody violence and whimsical humour. Perhaps the only way you can get away with a tap dance in a movie these days is when it follows some spectacular blood-letting. There is a thematic celebration here of the hero and the artist as frauds, but there isn’t the rich stylistic play with space that constitutes the most interesting aspect of Kitano’s filmmaking.

The Korean cinema has enjoyed a huge expansion over the past year and the price has been several large budget films falling flat. After last year’s Resurrection of the Little Match Girl, this year’s sci-fi fiascos have included Natural City and the animated Wonderful Days.

The strongest Korean genre is the psychological horror film, with Tale of Two Sisters as this year’s prime example. It manages to combine art cinema introspection with a commercial storytelling that appeals to both genders. As the Korean industry grows to a point where larger budget spectacles become feasible, filmmakers have to become more conscious of the need to foreground narratives that appeal to multiple audiences.

Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder is deservedly the break-out hit this year, pulling off the combination of police procedural and social allegory. Based on a true story of unsolved murders from the 1980s, the film suggests that the viciousness of Korea’s recent history still hangs in the air, as the murderous violence the police chase is within themselves. Coming after the revelation of his debut feature, Barking Dogs Never Bite, Bong may indeed be the major auteur around whom international interest in the Korean cinema coalesces.

India, with its huge domestic audience, has long had the world’s most prolific film industry. The recent international prominence of Bollywood films signifies the country’s rising influence in world cinema.

In Australia we’ve seen Bollywood films, with their flamboyant mixture of music and melodrama, begin to cross over from diasporic audiences into arthouses. Recent successes include the Beginners’ Guide to Bollywood series which showed at various cinemas in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth late last year. This is a reflection of the situation in the UK and America, where Indian films consistently feature in box office charts.

From Australia’s point of view, there are significant advantages in exploring regional connections with the emergent Indian powerhouse. To foster these links, the Australia-India Film, Arts, Media and Entertainment Council was formed in Sydney at the end of 2003, under the umbrella of the Australia-India Business Council. The Council is headed by Anupam Sharma, and enjoys significant co-operation from AusFilm and several state film agencies.

An increasing number of Indian films are now being shot offshore. This allows productions to contain costs as crews of 35 can be substituted for the 140 typically employed on a shoot in Mumbai. Stars are more likely to be available to work uninterrupted on offshore shoots. Foreign locations add to the cosmopolitanism of the films while also appealing to diasporic audiences.

Australia is a prominent location with over 80 projects shooting here in the past 5 years. Sharma attributes this to a combination of varied locations, skilled crews and lower costs relative to Britain or North America. Many of these projects have been TV commercials, though the list includes several feature films, most notably Dil Chahta Hai (Heart’s Desire) from 2001, which was partly shot in Sydney.

Sharma line produced another major feature, Janasheen, in Australia last year. He believes that the Australian film industry must develop a global perspective: “It has been proven again and again that as the world becomes more global so does cinema. Imagine all the film professionals in Australia working on at least one Australian story related to their culture/origin (for example Ireland, Greece, India, or Korea).”

One of the Council’s goals will be a co-production treaty between Australia and India, so that Australian filmmakers can take advantage of tax concessions when working in India. Sharma also wants Australian immigration and trade authorities to be more welcoming to Indian filmmakers and encourage the use of Australian locations. He is organising an Australian delegation to the Frames film market in Mumbai in March, and promises Australian audiences a “comprehensive, official, and spectacular festival of Indian cinema” during the year.

This last aim is one to savour. The debate over the effects of a Free Trade Agreement on Australian film tends to revolve around the polarised alternatives of Hollywood dominance or maintaining an exclusionary national identity. There is an important third way—regional cinema alliances. The profusion of Indian cinema we’ve seen here in the past year demonstrates the richness of Indian film culture and the benefits Australians have to gain from engaging with it.

A land of documentary fodder, scenic locations, tourist icons and a very long shiny rail line, the Northern Territory is populated by just 200,000 people of whom around 110,000 live in and around Darwin. Another 50,000 Aboriginal residents live mostly in remote outposts. The young, extremely multicultural population and the amazing landscape make the NT totally different from the rest of Australia in character and culture.

The Territory’s film and television industry employs about 200 people. Although 3 NT-based broadcasters have their own production facilities (the ABC, Channel Nine and the Indigenous-owned Imparja Television), they produce little more than a smattering of local origin news, sports and current affairs. Seven, without production facilities, tends to be supportive of local independent production.

Those 100 or so in private enterprise work hard to win and create work, surviving on an eclectic mix of TV commercials, corporate videos and whatever jobs large or small pass through. Possessive of their hard-earned market, these multi-skilled practitioners are not happy when interstate production companies take jobs. Indigenous education and training in radio and television broadcasting and organisations, like CAAMA (Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association) and BRACS (Broadcasting for Remote Aboriginal Communities Scheme), have given the NT numerous emerging filmmakers in remote communities, producing for remote broadcasts but with little opportunity for further training and work experience in the industry.

The NT arts community is strong and the current government has begun cultivating the talents of their constituents in all fields of the arts. The absence of any substantial training or education and massive skill gaps in the arts sector have also been acknowledged, with practitioner needs just starting to be explored. The long forgotten and neglected film and television industry, for example, has toiled away for years with little or no assistance or intervention. The small rogue industry is extremely active, with a conservatively estimated annual turnover of $30 million including broadcasting, production-related activities and the new media sector. After much consultation with smaller stakeholders, the Northern Territory Film, Television and New Media Office (the name may change) will open its doors in Alice Springs in late February 2004.

Much humbug concerning the location of the office and available grants followed the announcement of its creation. Alice Springs was chosen, as it is located closer to the rest of Australia’s capitals and is better known in the film world. Time will tell if Alice Springs is a more advantageous location than the more populous Darwin.

Only $300,000 has been allocated in grants for projects and production over the next 3 years. The first round of grants was announced in late January, with 22 applications for the available $30,000 and another $20,000 to be allocated to skills development and special projects, both using the existing Arts NT grants administration system. Given such a meagre starting point, stakeholders are hoping that the Director’s priorities will include finding investment and funding avenues. Arts NT is about to announce the Director for the Office who will work with one staff member.

FATANT (Film and Television Association Northern Territory), a mob of industry professionals, was also recently established to help local players catch up with the rest of Australia. With government assistance, FATANT will eventually create a network via a directory web site, lobby for industry needs like professional development and training opportunities and guide government and the Office in their decisions.

Held in early August as part of the Darwin Fringe Festival, Fist Full of Films, the Territory’s growing annual short film festival, is a true representation of the eclectic lifestyle and character of the NT. The second Down Under International Film Festival in Darwin in April will bring together the many emerging filmmakers and industry professionals for workshops, production and a hoot of an awards night. With the lack of training and the few jobs available in the industry, film festivals have been essential in cultivating local talent.

Territorians have waited eons for the train to arrive for film and new media industry support. Hopefully establishing an effective and responsive Film, TV and New Media Office will take much less time to set up. Increased funding and support for the rich potential in Territorian screen arts can only enrich the entire nation’s film and new media culture.

With the exception of Khoa Do’s The Finished People, (see p16) the 2003 crop of Australian features seemed like forlorn cultural objects, hopelessly isolated both from the challenging trends in global cinema and the audience they purport to represent. I approached the Flickerfest International Short Film Festival this year wondering if our shorts would be as uninspired as our features. The generally high standard of the Australian programs came as a pleasant surprise, although interestingly the short films often reflected the same strengths and weaknesses of the broader Australian industry.

Most of the dramas, for instance, continued Australian film’s obsession with rural settings. This is possibly a product of the high cost of permits for filming in urban areas, especially in Sydney, which is always going to be a serious issue for cash-strapped emergent filmmakers. But the result is a highly de-urbanised cinematic world which is utterly foreign to the majority of Australians. This sense of disconnectedness from actual experience is a phenomenon I’ve written about previously and to my mind is one of the major weaknesses of contemporary Australian cinema.

Furthermore, most of the Australian dramas were very much in a conventional naturalistic vein. Which is not to say they didn’t succeed on their own terms. The Rouseabout featured an impressive performance from its young lead Tom Budge and a strong script by writer/director Scott Pickett. There was, however, little at Flickerfest to indicate anything new on the horizon for Australian drama in terms of subject or style.

Similarly, the comic shorts generally worked well and raised laughs, but past experience has clearly demonstrated that our flair for snappy, sharp amusing shorts does not necessarily translate into an ability to produce substantial features, be they comic or otherwise.

So while the dramas provided some strong, if conventional, entries Flickerfest confirmed that the most interesting innovations in Australian cinema are currently occurring in documentary and animation. Australian animators are taking off on surreal, imaginative flights of fancy while our dramatic filmmakers stay close to the ground. The lovesick character of the AFI Award-nominee Hello (RT 58, p.21) with a tape deck for a head is hardly your typical Australian protagonist. Nor was the naked purple claymation man of The Diamond Cutter (directors Dominique O’Leary and Darren Hughes). Although the film’s story couldn’t quite justify its 19 minute length, The Diamond Cutter featured some beautifully crafted scenes devoid of dialogue, as the central character moved through his town on a nocturnal quest for warmth.

It was the documentary programs, however, that showcased the best in emerging Australian filmmaking talent. Although both of Flickerfest’s documentary programs were international, they featured several outstanding Australian works which illustrated the diverse approaches that now characterise the form. Out of Fear (director Bettina Frankham) featured the voices of 5 refugees who have endured time in Australian detention centres. Although we hear the refugees’ voices and see them engaged in various activities around their homes, we never see their faces. We are so used to a physiognomic accompaniment to the sound of human speech that initially this device made the film quite difficult to watch. But over time a complex relationship developed between image and sound that reflected the twofold experience most of us have of refugees: on the one hand asylum seekers represent a largely faceless social and political phenomenon; on an individual level these people have horrific stories that would leave most of us open-mouthed with disbelief. Out of Fear not only gave voice to some of these stories, but in its form subtly reflected the relationship between the audience and the film’s human subjects.

In contrast, David Vadiveloo’s Bush Bikes employed no dialogue at all to portray the extraordinary lengths a group of young Aboriginal boys go to in order to build and maintain their bikes. The film relied on the camera’s rendering of these boys’ faces and their physical interactions with their environment and each other. Bush Bikes illustrates how documentary, perhaps more than any other form, is able to play upon film’s dual status as a record of people and places and a means of creative expression, opening the viewer to whole new ways of seeing.

More conventional in style, Rebecca Barry’s The McDonagh Sisters used a mixture of archival footage and re-creations to excavate a story from Australia’s filmmaking past. The McDonagh sisters made a series of successful features in Sydney during the 1920s only to have their careers curtailed by a financially overwhelming Hollywood film machine. Films like The McDonagh Sisters play an important rehabilitative function in rescuing forgotten historical episodes from oblivion, but like all effective historical documentaries, the film also managed to blast a piece of history out of the past and make it a relevant part of the living present. Barry’s film does this by demonstrating that the difficulties faced by contemporary Australian filmmakers are far from new, and that without an awareness of this fact we are destined to constantly repeat our history of wasting our best artistic talent.

This year’s crop of Australian films at Flickerfest indicated that there is plenty of talent and originality in the local filmmaking community. If we can bring the imaginative flights of our animators and our documentary makers’ willingness to push the boundaries of subject and form into the realm of feature filmmaking, we might once again have a local cinema of which we can truly be proud.

The 13th Flickerfest International Short Film Festival, Bondi Pavilion, Sydney, Jan 3-11

Interdisciplinary artist Keith Armstrong has been building a body of impressive work in new media arts over the past decade. This has been largely in collaboration with performer Lisa O’Neill and other members of his Transmute Collective. Armstrong’s attention in new media installations and performance is on the performativity of the artist but also of the audience member as interactor or participant. Currently a post-doctoral new media fellow at the Creative Industries Research and Application Centre, QUT (Queensland University of Technology), Armstrong is critical of new media art where the purpose of interactivity is either unfocussed or pointlessly literal and he is committed to thinking beyond technology to situate his work in an ecology of survival.

Armstrong came from England 14 years ago with a Masters Degree in Electronic Engineering and Information Technology, backpacked around and became an Australian citizen. He’d always dreamed of being an artist, did a TAFE course in Fine Art and Design to get a folio up, a visual arts degree at QUT and later a PhD (“Towards an Ecosophical Praxis of New-Media Space Design”).

I decided right from the beginning that I would call myself an artist and I would canvas for work. So I just started to do it in earnest and I worked very hard. I never stopped working. And I would like to acknowledge QUT as having supported mostly everything I’ve done in the last decade in terms of equipment, resources, people and time. With this sort of work, the number of people you need and the technology is not easy to sustain without a generous benefactor.

I’m very interested in performance and in the performing body. I suppose it’s what marks my work as somewhat different from many other new media practitioners. I started as a performance artist, then worked with interactive technology and really have incorporated ideas of performance in almost everything that we’ve done since. I’m very interested in how people like Lisa O’Neill or Tess De Quincey, who we worked with recently, have a strong understanding of the body. I’m very engaged in how that knowledge can be used as a means for the choreographing and navigation of virtual space and what we can understand about interactivity from it. I’ve just instigated a project, an arts/science collaboration, working with a human movement scientist, a ‘tangible interface’ designer and performers to actually look in much more depth at new ways of interfacing.

Beyond new media

I’ve always been extremely engaged with ideas of ecology, particularly ecological philosophies and an understanding of the self in dialogue with the world. Ultimately that’s what drives me. It’s not new media really. It’s not even performance. It’s the discussion of those ideas which I see as central to survival. Tony Fry calls humanity “a de-futuring force” (New Design Philosophy: An Introduction To Defuturing, UNSW Press, 1999). We’re taking away our future day by day and he asks how we might be able to re-future.

Fry is a design theorist who talks about many of the choices we’re making inadvertently that take away the future. For example, when Henry Ford designed his motor car he didn’t think about how it would re-design the city. As an artist, you do what you can do to add to that conversation and attempt to generate a place for discussion and reflection. One can’t change the world through art but one can tickle people’s imaginations to re-think.

Securing our future means re-thinking our selves and our relationships to others and how we act. Fundamentally, my works are about interconnection, communication and a way of understanding the implications of action and choosing forms that are co-creative and collaborative.

Intimate Transactions

The participant reclines on an abstract form of furniture with embedded sensors, smart materials and computer vision recognition. It becomes a tangible interface device for detecting subtle bodily movements and gestures. These generate responses in the body and text projected on the screen. In its final form participants in different networked locations will simultaneously interact with the work, generating an evolving, flowing combination of ghostly bodies, dynamic texts and spatial sound.

Performer Lisa O’Neill, sound designer Guy Webster and Canberra-based visual artist, sculptor and conceptual furniture designer Zeljko Markov are Keith Armstrong’s key collaborators on Intimate Transactions (for other collaborators and project details go to http://embodiedmedia.com/ ).

Each of the collaborators came to the body shelf with a different critical perspective. My interest was to generate different types of movements with different kinds of conceptual focii. With my interest in ecological subjectivity I was exploring ideas of things that are close to what I understand as ‘me’ and then moving towards things that appear to be ‘separate from’ or ‘unknown to me’, yet that I understand my body is undivided from. Lisa’s idea as a performer was about a changing state of tension. So she interpreted that idea of the me-zone [as being] very much about tension moving into the stomach area—a key principle of the Suzuki method where stomach tension relates to a strong holding of the floor and a sense of grounding. The next position is to lean out from that centredness.

You really feel like you are leaning out into the void, a black void because it’s in a black theatre with a huge screen sweeping up in front of you. At that point, your hands become part of the interface. It’s very gestural and the energy is moving out. Zeljko Markov, the furniture designer, was interested in creating an object that didn’t have a strong presence but put the body in an unusual position. You’re very stable but as you move out there’s only so far you can actually move. And sonically, Guy interpreted those ideas as sounds that are familiar or sounds that are unknown or hard to pin down. He had a graduated database and the program Max running, spinning in 4 or 5 samples at once, mixing them in real time. It’s impressionistic, but very fluid, very effective.

As you move you’re going through the ‘me’, ‘us’ and ‘other’ zones. If there are 2 scenes side by side and one is the body and one the Calvino text, you can navigate your way through the body, through the text and back around. You’re in a fluid space. It was actually possible to fall off the top and into a holding space. This is something we really want to work on because what we were trying to do was to generate a 2-dimensional abstract map and it’s very difficult to follow when your body’s moving in 3 dimensions. Our new script design will work in 3 dimensions.

You want to network Intimate Transactions rather than it being only an on-the-spot interactive work. Why?

It’s been designed as a multi-locational work, a bit like Jeffrey Shaw’s Web of Life. You can add nodes to the network and a node can log in and off and increase the scope of the work. We’re interested in this idea of presence within a network and what that might mean. We would like people to engage in intimate transactions with other people in other sites whom they don’t know, whom they won’t be able to see or hear—only sense their effect.

A way of seeing it might be as an ecological footprint, the sense of the effect that your actions have in other spaces that you may not consider. Each person will engage with this work within the network—there’ll be physical and online spaces—and they will always be transmitting.

We’ve started to build the idea through a sense of a shared body we’re imagining. We’re now thinking about a thematic of pain. Physical pain is incredibly hard to share in discrete bodies, but if those bodies were shared and we could choose to take on each other’s pain at a certain level, what could that mean, pain flowing through a network of bodies…?

I’m not interested in actually hurting people, but I don’t think there are many examples of long meditations on pain. Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers comes to mind. Emotional pain is dealt with in just about any artwork you can imagine but physical pain…it’s beyond words.

Re-working

We’re happy with the form of the body shelf but we’re going to change it to a much more bodily sensitive interface. So rather than the hard surface with the small sensoring faces, we think we’ll change the rear body shape to a sprung surface so you can actually match your spine and your body into it. We’re going to drop the hand movements because the whole hand gesturing thing loses meaning. It becomes too much like every other interactive we’ve become frustrated by. It’s really important to me that you ask people to do something which has a meaningfulness in terms of physical response. So we’ve got the back support and we’ve also got a kind of harness system that you move into.

We’re working towards this for the residency Fiona Winning has asked us to do at Time_Place_Space 3 at AIT Arts in Adelaide. To do anything networked requires a server to handle all the intercommunications. To place more than one person within an environment conceptually requires a whole reorganisation of the script. So that has to be re-thought. And the notion of collaboration within that zone has to be re-thought too. So it’s quite large.

Plus an online ability. It feels to me that every project we’ve ever done is always working in a place that we don’t yet quite know how to get to. We always set ourselves challenges which we’re not really sure how to achieve but we do make it. We never seem to go to a safe place.

Testing

The responses to Intimate Transcations were incredibly varied, as you’d imagine. In general everybody found the experience strong, but there were real differences. It was quite daunting, set up in the Powerhouse with small groups and with [an intense] level of vision and sound. Some people were very self-conscious and tense, and froze. Some wanted to control it, to go everywhere and sense a bit of everything. And there were those who were happy just to get on it and start to drift, or to play without attempting to do everything. Those people seemed to have the strongest experiences.

Did you have Lisa there talking to people about how they were using their bodies?

Absolutely. It was very much a team. Lisa, Zeljko, Guy and myself. I talked about the structure of the work, then Lisa and Guy took the participants onto the machine and through the different phases of body shapes that were required. And we were on hand in case they needed us. As much as we could, we let them drift into it.

The performativity you’re interested in is about how people behave on this device?

It’s also about shaping the whole theatrical experience. There was a waiting room as they arrived and a ritual dressing in white suits. There were technical reasons for the suits and the red and yellow gloves in terms of colour recognition for the motion tracking. The system knew where your right and left hands were and the white suit kept the rest of you neutral. But of course, the white suits became a big thing—you know, the space metaphor, biogenetics, the nuclear thing. Not exactly intimate.

What we discovered was that some people found a very strong connection between themselves and the body on the screen. Others felt remote and I believe these were mostly the ones who were looking for control.

The bodies were originally conceived in a blue screen studio with the camera pointing down on Lisa O’Neill performing on a gym horse. She’s on her back performing upwards or on her stomach performing downwards. So the centre of her body never moves…The problem is that people expect an avatar, to see something that represents them because that’s the standard thing. So some people wanted to know if it was them, why wasn’t it always doing what they were doing? We were thinking more of an indirect relationship.

Not directly. There is a matrix of computation you’re travelling through, but it’s how you get there. Where you’ve come from and where you’re heading and the velocity at which you’re choosing to move through the system depends on whether you pause and you spend time in an area or you whiz around.

Unlike a video arcade game, a work like this is more analogous to listening to music or looking at a painting. The responses and processes are open-ended.

A sense of agency in interactive work is important—the need to see something of yourself within the interface. But to my mind, if you overdo that you actually lose the power of it.

Grounded Light

We may say “But we walk on the ground”, yet we should be aware of an ambiguity. For we walk on the ground as we drive on the road: that is, we move over and above the ground. Many layers come between us and the granular earth…Let the ground rise up to resist us, let it prove spongy, porous, rough, irregular—let it assert its native title, its right to maintain its traditional surfaces.
Paul Carter, The Lie of the Land

Grounded Light was a collaboration between myself and O’Neill working with trombonist Ben Marks from the Elision new music ensemble. It was part of Floating Land, a festival convened by Noosa Regional Gallery and directed by Kevin Wilson. This is the second year he’s done it and it’s a 5-year project—very ambitious. This one was a national project and future ones will be international. We worked on a piece on Mount Tinbeerwah, a well-known lookout on the way to Noosa which gives you a 360-degree panorama of the town, lakes and national park. A very nice place to spend time.

We decided to make a work that would take people from the car park to the top of the mountain. A half-hour walk on a moonless night. There were certain places where Lisa stopped and performed. I’d built a costume with controllable lights in it. She carried the sound in her parasol which also had lights. So you’d see this figure in the pitch black, self-lit, moving up the mountain.

At the summit we built an installation of tiny white lights and a video projection on one of the display boards in the lookout. Grounded Light is based around ideas from Paul Carter’s Lie of the Land. He says at one point in his book, “Many layers come between us and the granular earth.” One of the many theses in that work is our inability to touch the land, the Australian landscape. He writes about Colonel Light and Ted Strehlow as characters who were of their time but who were transgressional, who were able to touch the earth conceptually or practically in a different way. So Lisa was dressed in a turn of the century costume as a transgressive character—the grounding of the light was literalised by the lights in her dress that allowed her to press her body down into the landscape. We were making parallels between light and campfires and that different sense of floating and groundedness between the two.

You also see floating lights [on stalks], ungrounded lights, if you like, in the black sea floating round you of Noosa and the hinterland. These completed a net of lights over the mountain. So when you stood in the lookout, you could see them and the lights in the valley and imply a connectivity…a net of human civilisation on the landscape that’s pushing up. Lisa walks through the light field, fading herself out—she had dimmers and switches she could control so she could dissolve into the landscape.

People made their way through the light field and up to the lookout to a display panel of the area. You could point out dots of light: “that’s this mountain; that’s that one.” We also had a crew on Mt Cooroy 3 and a half kilometres away signalling with morse code. Imagine a mountain you can only just see in the darkness and, right at the very top point, a light comes shining out. There was a collective “Aaaah.” Kids loved it. The whole thing had a magical-real feel. And then they saw an animated view of the landscape projected on the display board with quotations from Carter. It was a quiet installation, a wind-down, a 5 minute looping animation with a video projector powered by a solar battery rig.

Absolutely. Although it was a site-specific work it could be re-contextualised relatively easily to a range of other mountains: sites where you’ve got a good view of the city lights below and some sense of a traverse and a place to build an installation.

Grounded Light, Transmute Collective, interdisciplinary artist Keith Armstrong, performer Lisa O’Neill, musician Ben Marks, Esther Cole (QUT design student), production James Muller, Earthbase Productions; Floating Land, presented by Noosa Regional Gallery, Oct 17-18, 2003

Intimate Transactions, Transmute Collective, artistic/visual director Keith Armstrong, performance director Lisa O’Neill, sound Guy Webster, systems designer/programmer Glen Wetherall, electronic sound designer Greg Jenkins, Max programmer/sound system design Benn Woods, 3D Artist Chris Barker, furniture design Zelgko Markov; test showing, Brisbane Powerhouse, August 19-21, 2003

Futurotic manifests Ian Haig’s ongoing interest in the strange relations between the body and technology and, in particular, the peculiar and often disturbing uses people find for the gadgets that increasingly surround us at home and work. While the impetus for Futurotic arose from this interest in “looking at everyday technological items and re-thinking them, transforming them”, the specific preoccupation of this work involved the perverse sexual uses of domestic appliances. In the context of the trajectory of Haig’s work, there is something appropriate in this conjunction of, for example, vacuum cleaners and masturbation. But there is actually a vast literature devoted to the history of domestic appliances as sex devices and Haig has clearly done his homework.

Futurotic takes this inquiry further by defamiliarising the very idea of prosthetic sex. Haig’s preposterous yet vaguely functional assemblages cleverly reinterpret the idea of the sex toy as a slightly bizarre concept. The care with which he has made these objects draws attention to the artifice and craft at the heart of the sex industry. Just think of the verisimilitude of dildos—you know what I’m talking about—fake vaginas, ‘signature’ penises, prosthetic anuses and the like, their deft simulation of human anatomy, abstracted from the body and endowed with the portability of any other object. The titles of Haig’s works—Afternoon Delight, Perfect Day, The Things I Love About You—are ingenious overtures to commercial erotica and their invocation of intimacy and pleasure. But you won’t find anything like The Mole, I Feel Much Better Now or No Place Like Home in Sexyland, Club X or even the Toolshed. In Haig’s hands, the conjunction of machinery and gratification brings with it extreme scenarios, as in Over the Rainbow, a “preparatory sex change device” in which the utilitarian Bamix becomes the basis of a sinister looking instrument, the sex toy of choice for the transgendered individual.

The plausibility and stylised functionality of Haig’s futurotic devices astutely draws attention to the strange, obsessive nature of the sex industry. “I consciously drew on this reservoir of ideas…from the sex industry to do with links between sex and technology. The things that you can actually buy in sex shops are strange things in themselves; so I was conscious with my works that they had to be even stranger than that, more extreme. A lot of popular culture is actually more interesting than a lot of art, and art needs to be aware of things that are visible in popular culture and take them somewhere else.”

Somewhere else for Haig is an imaginary future, though still grounded in actuality, in which the technology of sex, sex itself as technology, dismantles any remaining boundaries between the human body and machinery. “I wanted to make these modified household devices, which have actually been used for different kinds of masturbation, such as the vacuum cleaner, and turn them into sex toys for some kind of super evolved human, or…alien species.” In this sense Futurotic is a complex mix of satire, irony and play and, at a much more profound level, dread. Haig’s work brings us back again and again to the conviction that our interfaces with technology transform us in ways that are not always positive, nor always foreseeable. Not that he is especially po-faced on this point, nor in any way moralistic. On the contrary, Haig is interested in the deeper, psychic dimension of what it means to be technologised.

“One of the other big references here was [filmmaker] David Cronenberg and his investigation into the psychopathology of sex and technology, especially [in] Dead Ringers with its instruments for operating on mutant women. One of the punters who came to the stall said if Cronenberg was here he would probably whip out his gold American Express card and buy the whole lot.”

The most dramatic aspect of Futurotic was not so much its content but its context. Why exhibit at Sexpo? “Let’s be honest, a regular gallery is going to attract the regular punters, pretty much, I’m kind of exhibiting to the same crowd. I wanted to avoid that and take the work to a whole other audience, take it back into the context from which it came.” Haig is quick to point out that Futurotic is in no way a critique of the porn industry, but rather a temporary engagement with it, an active participation in order to connect with a different context for his work. Given the usual ways of curating and installing new media art Futurotic was a distinctive event. It inventively found a new, site-specific context for the exhibition of works that admittedly suited the venue, but which, nonetheless, were also out of place because they were not really functioning sex toys. (Experimenta Media Arts’ Altered States exhibition of 1997 did something similar, locating itself within the corporate context of the Interact Multimedia trade fair.) However for Haig, this blurring of work and context created an unexpected and pleasing confusion that actively engaged people with the art, because the site-specific aspect of Sexpo was “as much a part of the art itself…Sexpo went off. It was the most surreal experience I’ve ever had exhibiting work. After doing this kind of work for years, Sexpo was the most intense response I’ve ever had…”

The overtly playful, reflexive element of Futurotic seems to have prompted people to take the time to stop and look, ask questions and relate to the work as a kind of dialogue with sex toy erotica. “Absolutely,” Haig says, “in fact there was a lot of confusion there as well because the works do look vaguely realistic and I ended up explaining quite a lot to people that they were art pieces and not functioning sex toys. But that didn’t change the situation. They still really responded to that, to the idea that they were art about sex toys…I tried to create tensions between fictional and non-fictional scenarios that people could actually have a stake in, like the works were props from some soon-to-be-seen science fiction film, or things that have been used in some pre-existing context, which I really liked.”

The success of Futurotic at Sexpo has opened up a number of international exhibition opportunities. In June 2004, Haig will take Futurotic to the mecca of the sex industry, Los Angeles, for LA Erotica and in January 2005 to Las Vegas for the Adult Entertainment Exhibition. Potential buyers of the work, including the LA Museum of Erotica, have also encouraged Ian Haig that the project has been worthwhile and successful. “Well you can’t go wrong with sex. It’s the great equaliser. In some respects it does make sense that art can also deal with that as an everyday kind of thing that we experience.”

The wall between science lab and art gallery is coming down in Spikes, a multimedia exhibition examining the science/art interface at the University of Technology Sydney gallery. Featuring work by 6 internationally recognised multimedia artists, Spikes will interrogate the social and ethical concerns thrown up by the accelerating pace of technological and environmental change that characterises 21st century life.

“The project takes the possibility of technological and population spikes within the next 50 years as a conceptual starting point,” says curator Jacqueline Bosscher, “a spike being a period involving change of immense speed and scale that could end in human obsolescence or transformation.”

Examining future trajectories of human and animal species and visions for a sustainable future, Spikes will feature video, sculpture, new media and living biological material in the form of tissue cultures and plants. At a forum during the exhibition, the artists, curator and UTS staff will discuss ‘next’ media art—’next media’ being a term for biological or living material.

Artists featured in Spikes are Rod Berry, Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr, Joerg Hubmann, Andrew Smith and Astrid Spielman. RT

Spikes, curator Jacqueline Bosscher, UTS Gallery, Sydney, Feb 24-March 20; forum Feb 26, 6pm

In November 2003, ABC TV’s publicity department proclaimed more Australian content, more primetime Australian programs, 31 new Australian shows and 20 returning Australian programs and series. Does this mean 2004 will see “innovative programming reflecting the cultural diversity of the Australian community”, intended to “encourage and promote the musical, dramatic and performing arts in Australia”, as per the ABC Charter?

In the past 15 years the ABC has been through enormous changes, including numerous restructures, none of which has masked cutbacks in funding, staff and local programming. Since the 2001 appointment of the widely respected Sandra Levy as Head of Television, the ABC has achieved higher ratings and broadened its audience demographic.

Under Levy, Head of Programming Marena Manzoufas has built a regular schedule for audiences. In primetime, we expect murder and mayhem on Friday, comedy on Thursday and quality drama and cultural programming on Sunday. The programs have been of a high standard and included some strong locally produced shows. But something has been missing.

Despite the new dramas, excellent current affairs and comedy, there is no hiding the overall erosion in the quantity and breadth of Australian content on our screens. The ABC’s 2002 Editorial Policies state: “Experimenting with new ideas also means accepting that some programs may not succeed. By pushing the boundaries, the ABC stimulates and develops creative new program genres and styles. This may result in programming which challenges some community sensibilities but also contributes to the diversity of content in the media.” But in-house ABC TV programs that push style and content boundaries have been rare, making challenges to community sensibilities or the development of new genres unlikely.

For some time the ABC has been commissioning independent producers to make much of its leading edge Australian content. However, it seems goodwill is not particularly high since producers find themselves barely breaking even on work they produce for the national broadcaster. At the SPAA (Screen Producer’s Association of Australia) Fringe 2003, respected documentary maker Michael Cordell (A Case for the Coroner) commented on increasingly tight margins. Many other program makers have made similar remarks.

The ABC’s editorial guidelines encourage arts coverage, take pride in the ABC’s place in Australia’s cultural life and clearly state that experimental programming is one way to meet the requirements of its charter. Changes are afoot in the newly merged Arts and Entertainment department under the management of Courtney Gibson. The extension of Gibson’s portfolio in late 2003 was interpreted by many, including RealTime (Editorial, RT58), as indicative of the arts’ diminishing importance at the ABC. Gibson argues that the merging of departments gives the arts more muscle, much needed stability and her own fierce commitment. Many of the new Australian shows for 2004 have been generated by her department. Several are studio-based, making them cost effective because they use existing ABC resources. These include Strictly Dancing (Come Dancing meets Strictly Ballroom, hosted by Paul McDermott), a new version of The Inventors and Amanda Keller’s Mondo Thingo.

Cost is often cited by ABC executives and staff as a major barrier to increasing Australian programming. While budget limitations are real, Gibson is very approachable and interested in new ideas: “I want us to speak directly to program makers and not hide behind another layer of bureaucracy. That way you can know in 2 weeks rather than 2 years if we are interested. We need to make quick but considered decisions, and not be paralysed by the amount of work under consideration.”

Gibson is equally refreshing on the subject of her role as Head of Department: “At SBSi [SBS Independent] I learned how to treat people, how to be of service to the industry. That’s what you’re doing in these jobs. You’re trying to support work and provide a means by which emerging filmmakers and arts practitioners can have their work explored on television. It’s a service orientation. I’ve tried to bring that to the ABC.” She is also adamant that senior management supports her endeavours: “Any idea that arts programming is not fully supported is not borne out by the fact that I asked for extra resources for 2004 and got them.”

Given her short time on the job, Gibson and her newly appointed Executive Producer Amanda Duthie have taken some bold steps in reshaping arts programming in 2004. With Deputy Programmer Ian Taylor they’ve developed a more coherent approach to Sunday afternoons. Gibson notes: “Sunday afternoon has treble the resources it had last year, treble the shooting and edit days, the addition of 2 full time producers plus the commissioning of packages and interviews from all over the country, breaking that Melbourne-Sydney nexus that’s formerly held sway.”

Sunday afternoons have been programmed in a series of themed seasons beginning with photography. As acquired shows differ in length, there is room in the schedule for purpose-made programs about Australian artists and relevant short films. Across the year the department will also produce a series of ‘in conversation’ style interviews. New faces can be expected in the interviewer’s seat, including Bec Smith (ex-IF magazine) on film and Sherre Delys (ex-The Listening Room) on contemporary classical music, and Gibson says they will be looking outside the ‘usual subjects’ for interviewees. The material garnered from these interviews can be packaged to fit available slots but will also form an important archival resource.

Expect changes to Critical Mass, with Gibson clear about directions the panel show might take: “I am as interested in what a geneticist thinks about the work of Patricia Piccinini as I am in what a photographer thinks. That is a program where we can, and should, have different perspectives.” Critical Mass will be broadcast on Sunday night following Compass and be repeated the following Sunday afternoon.

But what of Australian arts in primetime?
While Amanda Keller’s Mondo Thingo is billed as an entertainment show it will be covering popular culture, including film. The New Inventors features a rotating panel of designers interrogating work and inventors.

There is an enormous amount of production on Gibson’s shoulders and reason for caution about the likely success of so many new programs. Fortunately, Gibson does not work in isolation. She has the support of management, as well as a skilled staff and an external network of program makers and artistic practitioners.

Somewhat in the background is a discrete enclave known as the ABC Arts Advisory Group. Chaired by the formidable Margaret Seares (former Chair of the Australia Council), the public hears little of their deliberations but the following exchange between Seares and Tony Jones on Lateline in 2001 gives an idea of her position:

Jones Do you hold the view that at the present moment the ABC is failing to deliver its charter?

Seares: I think a lot of us were quite taken aback…when on the Littlemore program [Mediawatch] we had a retrospective of arts…on the ABC going back to the 70s and 80s, and I think a lot of people realised then what the cuts in funding have done in terms of depleting that sort of representation on our television screens today. So that’s why I think it is an important issue to have some debate around.

The equally important matter of the coverage of Australia’s unique and invaluable indigenous art remains unexamined. If the arts should be everywhere across the ABC schedule, surely Indigenous issues and perspectives should be treated just as seriously.

While funding cuts have undoubtedly contributed to the decline in the depth and diversity of ABC local programming, senior management also bears responsibility for embracing strategies that do not effectively meet the requirements of the charter. Ratings are often used by the ABC as a key indicator of success, undermining the notion of developing challenging works and diminishing the immense value of arts programming that documents and furthers the evolution of Australia’s rich creative and cultural life.

Lisa French ed, Womenvision: Women and the Moving Image in Australia, Damned Publishing, Melbourne, 2003

When Japanese Story blitzed the 2003 AFI Awards most of its honours were received by women. Given this, some might think that women have finally achieved equal footing with men in the Australian audiovisual industry. However, this is not quite the reality.

For all the success of female directors such as Gillian Armstrong, Jane Campion and Jocelyn Moorhouse, producers like Jan Chapman, and television executives such as Sandra Levy (head of television at the ABC), inequalities remain. According to the 2001 census, there has been little recent change in the percentage of women working in Australian film: 44% compared to the 43% recorded in the previous census year of 1996. Women represented only 28% of directors. Female producers fared better at 45% but writers fell from 50% to 39%. There are still few women found in technical areas even if there were significant increases in some of these occupations (Australian Film Commission, Get the Picture, www.afc.gov.au/gtp/oeoccupxgender.html Jan 2, 2004). While these numbers suggest many obstacles remain for women entering the industry, there are many remarkable stories of their considerable impact on Australian cinema.

Many of these stories are found in Womenvision, an anthology on women’s participation in the Australian audiovisual industry, edited by Lisa French. By comparing Womenvision to a similar work published 17 years earlier, Don’t Shoot Darling!: Women’s Independent Filmmaking in Australia (Annette Blonski, Barbara Creed, Freda Freiberg, Greenhouse Publications, Melbourne, 1987), we develop a comprehensive understanding of important gains and contributions in different areas of the industry during this period. These achievements have taken place in a continually shrinking funding environment. Specific programs like the Women’s Film Fund ended and funds for experimental and independent films, in which women filmmakers are still most likely to participate, diminished. The lack of funding for childcare is still one of the biggest barriers to many women remaining in the industry.

Womenvision is divided into 5 parts, bringing together perspectives on the historical, industrial, economic and social factors influencing women’s input to the industry and how their works are critically received at the beginning of this new century. It includes personal essays from practitioners in technical occupations, ranging from director of photography Jane Castle’s reflections on being behind the camera on mainstream productions, to the musings of Fiona Kerr, a 3D artist working for computer games companies. Also included are accounts from an animator, an editor and short, art, documentary and experimental filmmakers. These essays are mixed with scholarly texts on the history of women’s involvement in the industry, the representation of gender and identity, the development of particular female character types, and discussions of the work of directors such as Monica Pellizari, Clara Law, Tracey Moffat and Jane Campion. There are also interviews with Ann Turner, director of Hammers over the Anvil (1991) and Dallas Doll (1994), and the successful team behind Japanese Story and Road to Nhill (1997), Sue Brooks, Sue Maslin and Alison Tilson.

All these entries are framed by a ‘postfeminist’ point of view. A difficult term to pinpoint, French defines postfeminism in her chapter “Short Circuit: Shorts and Australian Women Film-Makers” as a position that “essentially describes…re-engaging with feminisms to see how relevant they are.” Postfeminism can be understood as a position that offers a more fluid vision of gender and identity (sexual and/or otherwise) than that proposed by second wave feminisms.

Certain entries in Womenvision, particularly those written by older practitioners, are nostalgic for the sense of community and sisterhood that characterised groups like the Sydney Film-Makers Co-op in the 1970s. One of the main goals of second wave feminism at that time was to raise women’s political consciousness and actions under one uniform opposition to the patriarchal order.

A major omission in both Womenvision and Don’t Shoot Darling! is any discussion of actors. Why don’t the female faces that represent the Australian moving image industry in the global market merit attention? Why isn’t there any discussion of the global attraction of celebrated and multi-award winning performers such as Nicole Kidman, or the multi-Emmied Judy Davis, Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette, Naomi Watts, Rachel Griffiths and Frances O’Connor? Why are Australian women performers so sought after? Does it have anything to do with how we nurture and develop their talents through our professional schools and how these link to the national audio-visual industry? What marks these actors as different? Do they have an impact on shifts in the representation of women and the roles available to them? These questions deserve consideration.

Like other anthologies, there is a certain unevenness in the quality of the writing in Womenvision, yet together the contributors strongly convey the diversity, creativity and dynamism of the Australian women involved in one of the most successful national audiovisual industries. Womenvision testifies to the fact that women have always and will continue to surmount obstacles to equality. As Lisa French notes: “the success of women in Australian moving image industries is attributable to hard work and talent; they have done it on their own merits—which are considerable.”

A distinctive feature of the Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC) is its confluence of craft and commerce. It is a place for practitioners to pitch new ideas, find out what people are buying and selling and participate in the DocuMart sessions with international buyers. The conference is also a forum for discussing ideas about documentary making from various perspectives (technical, textual, visual, ideological). This year’s theme, “The Journey”, asks where we are literally and figuratively coming from and challenges delegates to consider where they are headed in the 21st century.

For the first time in its 17 years, AIDC in 2004 will become an annual event. This follows the success of last year’s conference which attracted about 800 delegates. Conference Director John Beaton says the decision indicates the pace of change in the film industry, and is a strategic move to strengthen Australia’s position on the documentary scene internationally. Having just returned from similar conferences in France and the Netherlands, Beaton is mindful of Australia’s standing in the international market as a small but significant supplier with a reputation for high quality product. The purpose of AIDC, he says, is not to put Australia on the map—it’s already there—but rather to confirm that presence.

Beaton’s personal picks for the conference include the opening plenary session “Refugees in the World”, with Julian Burnside QC and noted academic and filmmaker Trinh Minh-ha discussing the portrayal of human rights in documentaries. This will be followed by a session with Tom Zubrycki, Ned Lander and Dennis O’Rourke, entitled “Thinking Inside the Box”, which will look at government interference in documentary filmmaking in the wake of September 11. Another session will examine the success of feature-length documentaries such as Bowling for Columbine and Travelling Birds and ask whether the sudden interest from distributors is driven by box office returns rather than a love for documentary per se. Beaton says this session will also investigate the proposition that Australian filmmakers are ill-equipped to work internationally with feature documentaries because they lack understanding about the theatrical context, or because short-sighted funding bodies provide few opportunities to work on such projects. “Endangered Species—arts programming” features the ABC’s Courtney Gibson.

AIDC is also a chance to screen local documentaries. The only work confirmed as RT goes to print is Fahimeh’s Story (producer Ian Lang, director Faramarz K-Rahber), about an Iranian divorcee who remarries and converts a retired Australian army sergeant to Islam.

There is also the Australian DocuMart, in which documentary filmmakers get their very own Idol moment. Of 60 applicants, 15 are chosen to present their projects and ideas to an international panel, with the prospect of winning valuable funding. This year’s forum will be hosted by Pat Ferns from Canada’s Banff Television Foundation. Several international judges will sit on the panel including Discovery Networks Asia’s Vikram Channa, CBC’s Jerry McIntosh and NDR’s Wolf Lenwenus. Short-listed DocuMart applicants will also join a training session conducted by Christoph Jorg from ARTE France and Barbara Truyen from Films Transit, Netherlands.

Previous DocuMart projects include the now released Dances of Ecstasy (producer Nicole Ma, director Michelle Maher) (RT 58, p.18) and The Real Mary Poppins (producer Ian Collie, director Lisa Matthews). Finance negotiations are almost complete for several documentaries pitched at the 2003 Byron Bay DocuMart. One project, Selling Sickness, produced by Pat Fiske and directed by Cathy Scott, is currently in pre-production.

While the reputation of AIDC may reside in its ability to attract the big names and industry heavyweights, Beaton believes the conference’s greatest value is for industry players with little or no track record. If you don’t go, he asks, how do you know what’s going on? There is nothing like meeting your industry peers and hearing about what people are doing, how they pitch ideas and what people want to watch. There is, says Beaton, a “serendipity” about conferences: that unlikely meeting in the lunch queue can lead to unexpected projects, collaborations and opportunities.

The 9th Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC), Fremantle, Feb 26-28, www.aidc.com.au

Last year, Canada’s federal funding for its domestic television and feature film production was more than double that of Australia. Yet no English-Canadian television dramas made the weekly top 20 rankings, let alone the top 10, while the English-Canadian share of domestic box office in 2002 was less than a third of Australia’s share in its own market. It seems English-Canadian producers have the money, but no audience, while the cash-strapped Australian industry still captures at least some of its domestic audience.

English-speaking Canada is similar in size to Australia and possesses a comparable multi-ethnic population. Both countries have a similar history. The development of their respective feature film industries have also often mirrored each other. Both were once under foreign economic control through American ownership of the distribution and exhibition sectors. At the production level, both countries have developed 2 separate yet interrelated components: a domestic and a runaway side, whereby Hollywood-based producers use local infrastructure to make films at a cheaper rate. Both countries have experienced cycles of boom and bust in local production. Australian and Canadian societies have periodically gone through nationalist phases where the cultural elites pressure their federal, state or provincial governments to revitalise local production. In the 1960s, these pressures finally produced direct government interventions which resulted in the creation of federal agencies supporting national film production. In the 1980s, the Canadian and Australian industries experienced the mediocre output of a tax shelter era where bad quality American clones were produced. After that period, these industries restructured themselves in similar ways.

Same but different

Both national industries possess a federal agency and a national film fund: Telefilm Canada administers the Canada Feature Film Fund (CFFF), while Australia has the Australian Film Commission (AFC) and the Film Finance Corporation (FFC). Other funding sources are available through state or provincial agencies and tax concession schemes which apply at both levels of government. In the 1990s, these industries also became sites of an ever increasing service industry producing runaway films. In both cases, the majority of domestic audiences are more inclined to choose American screen products over domestic ones.

As well as the CFFF, Telefilm Canada oversees the Canadian Television Fund, Canada New Media Fund, the Canada Music Fund and other minor programs. Its overall budget in 2002/3 was CAN$239.3 million (the Australian dollar was at parity with the Canadian dollar in January 2004). Around two thirds of this amount, or CAN$159.5 million, is allocated to English-Canadian projects. For feature films the main federal source is the CFFF, which subsidises development, production and marketing programs, including funding for co-productions. The CFFF also funds a Screenwriting Assistance Program and Low Budget Independent Feature Film Assistance Program. The total for feature film funding comes to CAN$84.4 million. Last year the English-Canadian share was 71% of this.

Although the structure looks similar in Australia, there are important differences. The funding for development is not from the same sources as the funding for production and there are no separate funds for television and film production. Last year, the Australian Film Commission oversaw film, television and new media development with a budget of $19.9 million. The funding of screen production is under the administration of the FFC which oversees the production of feature films, adult television, children’s television and documentary. Last year, its budget was AUD$57.5 million. Comparing the 2 federal funding regimes for screen production (including co-production), Canada spent around CAN$198.7 million last year, while Federal funding in Australia amounted to AUDS$81.4 million.

Canadian solutions

English-Canadian producers may have more money than the Australians but their products have a lot less impact on their domestic audience. According to Richard Stursberg, the executive director of Telefilm, the highest ranked English-Canadian drama in 2002 was Da Vinci Inquest at number 35. The domestic box office share of Canadian films was 1.4% in 2001/02, and 2.6% in 2002/03. The English-Canadian share for the same years yields even lower figures of 0.2% and 1.4% respectively. To give an idea of the difference between the English and French-Canadian share of the domestic market, the French-Canadian box office for the same periods was 10% and 12%. According to the AFC’s reference publication Get the Picture, Australian producers in 2002 had 7 of the top 20 drama series, with All Aussie Adventures (Big Crack Productions, Network Ten and Working Dog) starring Glenn Robbins, the top performer at number 2. Australian feature films performed consistently better at the domestic box office than English-Canadian features, with Australian films taking 7.8% of the box office in 2001 and 4.9% in 2002.

To remedy this sorry state of affairs, Telefilm Canada has come up with 2 main changes in direction in its funding policies. Firstly, preference will be given to more commercial projects linked to audience-friendly genres, like the comedy Men with Brooms (Paul Gross, Alliance Atlantis Communications and Serendipity Point Films, 2002). Secondly, Telefilm has relaxed some of its rules regarding transnational filmic elements, such as accepting the use of foreign actors with marquee potential. In a sense, this new direction imitates some Australian strategies. All these changes are designed to boost the box office take from local films to 5% by 2006.

Funding future?

But what of Australia’s federal government funding future? According to the AFC’s National Survey of Feature Film and TV Drama Production 2002/3, for the first time in 8 years the production of Australian television drama and film has dropped. Only 19 Australian feature films were made in the fiscal year 2002/3, compared with 30 in 2001/2. One reason for this is the stagnation of federal funding under the Coalition government between 1996/7 and 2000/01. There were some slight increases for the fiscal years 2001/02 and 2002/03, and more are set for the AFC and FFC in 2003/04, but it is still unclear how the integration of ScreenSound Australia and the AFC will impact on the AFC’s budget. Brian Rosen, the Film Finance Corporation CEO, has made noises about transforming the FFC into a kind of super-fund, where private sector investors can invest vast sums of money for a set number of years at a fixed interest rate. Rosen foresees that this new scheme could represent over AUD$100 million a year for Australian screen production. If his plan succeeds, it will be wonderful news for Australian producers.

Free trade fear

A huge grey cloud is casting a shadow over the enthusiasm of Australian producers about the future of domestic screen production: the proposed Free Trade Agreement between Australia and the US. In October 1987, Canada signed a Free Trade Agreement with the US, and in 1994, endorsed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the US and Mexico. In both cases, Canada managed to preserve its control over its cultural policies. In particular, the Canadian government kept its quotas for local content and funding programs, as well as introducing new ones. However, if one of the parties involved in NAFTA find that these programs are adversely impacting on their commercial interests they can take action in any economic areas to recover their losses. In the current negotiations between Australia and the US, Australian government representatives have assured the local audiovisual industry that they will be able to keep their quotas and government funding schemes. However, in the push to finalise the Free Trade Agreement and please their US counterparts, the Australian government could jeopardise the future of the audiovisual industry by being soft on questions regarding the regulation of digital modes of distribution (feature films and television drama available via the internet). Australian products may be ousted from this new mode due to the sheer number of American products. There seems little point in producing Australian television drama and feature films if future Australian audiences may not be able to access the finished products.

Queer Screen has revamped Sydney’s Mardi Gras Film Festival for 2004 with a new management team and a massively expanded program. The festival runs across 3 venues and features a record number of Australian films.

New Australian features include Low Fat Elephants (director Phillip Marzella), Prisoner Queen (Timothy Spanos) and Max: A Cautionary Tale (Nicholas Verso). To lend a historical perspective to the proceedings, filmmaker Barry McKay has scoured the ScreenSound archives to compile Imagining Queer, an overview of gay, lesbian, queer, transgender and camp images from Australian film and television from 1910 to 1970.

As well as Australian work, the festival features many movies from countries not known for their visible gay cultures. The award winning documentary Straight Out (directors Hrafnhildur Gunnarsdottir, Thorvaldur Kristinsson), for example, claims to be Iceland’s first gay film. Yossi and Jagger (Eytan Fox) takes a look at Israeli military life through the true story of 2 officers conducting a secret affair while serving in Lebanon. And in keeping with Australia’s growing fascination with Indian popular cinema, The Pink Mirror (Sridhar Rangayan) is a Bollywood-style look at gay culture on the sub-continent.

For the first time this year’s festival will have 4 youth-orientated sessions open to anyone aged 15 and older. These programs feature international and local entries, including Pink Sheep (directors Peta Jane Lenehan, Craig Boreham), a collaboration between Sydney’s Twenty10 Gay and Lesbian Youth Support and Channel Free.

Finally, for cinema lovers there is a documentary trilogy on gay filmmakers Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Rosa von Praunheim.

With such a diverse and extensive program, this year will hopefully see the Mardi Gras Film Festival reclaim its reputation as the home of thought-provoking and provocative queer cinema. RT

11th Mardi Gras Film Festival, State Theatre, Palace Academy Twin, Dendy Newtown, Feb 11-22, www.queerscreen.com.au

The infamous Stelarc has created an interactive head that talks with viewers—type in a question and dread the answer. Canadian Char Davies will take you on a serious trip in her immersive virtual reality environments and if that doesn’t get you going, check out Chris Cunningham’s robot sex, filmed for a music video for Icelandic singer Björk.

Transfigure: Perception, body, space & landscape transformed by the moving image is arguably one of the most ambitious—and successful—new media exhibitions Australia has ever hosted. Curated by Alessio Cavallaro, the senior producer and curator of new media projects at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Transfigure features 15 artists from 6 countries. The show is downright weird, in a wonderful way.

Transfigure is Luna Park for the new millennium. Teenagers interact with acmipark, a 3D game world depicting simulated versions of ACMI and Federation Square which morph into strange fictional spaces. A teenage boy inquires whether you can shoot people in the game.

But Transfigure has much more to offer than a shoot ‘em up video game. Next to Cunningham’s essentially emotive response to robotics, are Paul Brown’s chromos, Ed Burton’s Sodaconstructor and Drew Berry’s body code which play with notions of genetics, chromosome structures and DNA formations, all of which are linked by an almost painterly approach.

Down the hall Justine Cooper is being cut up slice by slice. Her work, Rapt, is the result of the artist undergoing 6 hours of Magnetic Resonance Imaging which uses magnetic fields to map the body for diagnostics. The resulting video is elegant and chilling, a fascinating dissection of the human body. The video finishes with an image of Cooper’s face, which a number of viewers say has a powerfully spiritual impact, a kind of curious analogy to the Shroud of Turin.

The exhibition moves into a realm of powerful video works. Ian Andrew’s Departure comprises found video footage. Grainy and damaged, it evokes a sense of conspiracy a la the famous Zapruder footage of the JFK assassination. The work is presented on 3 tiered high-resolution plasma screens creating a strange contrast between discarded detritus and the hi-tech. The result suggests an obsessive forensic approach to uncovering the unseen.

Similarly surreal, Hungarian artist Tamas Walicky’s Landscape depicts a European village frozen in time, snowflakes suspended as the viewer revolves around the buildings. It is a technique used in the first Matrix film, however Walicky used it 3 years before the Wachowski Brothers.

Transfigure concludes with the stunning immersive works of Char Davies. Not for the faint hearted, Davies world is a spectacular example of the potential of virtual reality. Her installation, Ephémère, is a mind boggling trip into virtual reality. There are 2 very distinct experiences here. The first is that of passive observer, watching a screen version of Davies’ world and the shadow of an individual in full VR gear traversing her strange landscapes. The second is becoming an actual part of Ephémère, donning the VR helmet and flying through Davies’ grainy multi-coloured landscape.

Ephémère and Davies’ other work on show, Osmose, are immersive virtual environments with stereoscopic 3D computer graphics, spatialised sound and real time interaction colouration. Davies’ desire to convey a sense of spatial envelopment is what led her to abandon painting in the mid-1980s and become involved with 3D computer technology. She hoped the new technologies would free her from the limitations of the 2D picture plane, and allow her to effectively work in an enveloping 3D space. “Once I was making images with 3D software, I wanted to bring my audience with me into that space,” she says. “So I turned to the medium of immersive virtual space—or what many people call virtual reality.”

The other work that leaves a lasting impact is Stelarc’s Prosthetic Head. Stelarc stitched together an IBM text speech engine, modified, customised and personalised the Alice Chat Bot Engine and then used a source code for facial animation. “The difficulty really was interfacing bits of software that weren’t actually designed to run with each other,” writes Stelarc. The project was put together over an intensive 8 months with the assistance of 3 programmers in San Francisco. The head had to be constructed as a 3,000 polygon mesh and the digital skin was then wrapped around it, giving it the appearance of the artist.

More than a little unnerving, the huge head dominates a dark room, looming and hovering, deep brown eyes occasionally darting around the space. A visitor sits at a keyboard in the corner. Checking just how self-aware this strange creature is, he types in “What colour are your eyes?” “Blue,” comes the reply in a guttural, almost machine-like voice, “But I’m wearing contact lenses.”

Transfigure: Perception, body, space & landscape transformed by the moving image, curator Alessio Cavallaro, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Federation Square, Melbourne, Dec 8, 2003-May 9, 2004

Canada is home to several internationally renowned institutions and individuals active in interdisciplinary and media arts. The nation’s many similarities to Australia in population, culture and history make it an excellent reference point for our own activities and support mechanisms in this rapidly evolving field.

Arts funding in Canada is provided by well-established infrastructure at all 3 tiers of government (federal, provincial and local) and new media projects are often supported by a combination of these. Related industries such as multimedia production and game development also receive government assistance. As in Australia, there is not a strong history of private or institutional philanthropy for the arts.

At a federal level, funding to new media arts is administered by institutions that reflect technological and disciplinary developments over the past century. Artistic practice is supported by grants to individuals and organisations from the Canada Council under its Media Arts and Inter-Arts programs. Since 1998 production projects (eg multimedia, web and game development) have been assisted by the New Media fund at a current rate of CAN$9 million per annum. This fund is administered by TeleFilm, established in the late 1960s to underpin the local film and television industries. This structure and history bears a strong resemblance our own Australia Council and Australian Film Commission.

Recognition for research practice in new media is well established in Canada. The New Media Initiative from the Canada Council and National Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) provides grants for collaborative research between artists and scientists. This program, introduced in 2002, is mirrored in the joint Australian Research Council (ARC) and Australia Council Synapse program which began disbursing funds in 2003.

While funding for research in the arts is now commonplace, these programs have very successful precedents in Canada. Collaboration between the Canadian National Film Board (NFB) and the NRC in 1960s and 1970s, for example, yielded many innovative computer animation techniques. Installing animators, filmmakers and composers as artists-in-residence led to animations of unprecedented realism, including the first Academy Award winning computer animation in 1974, Hunger. The research work was recognised with an Academy Award for technical achievement in 1996.

Artists and scientists involved in this ongoing collaboration eventually established software companies now important in the computer graphics industry: Alias (Maya), SoftImage (XSI), Discreet (compositing tools) and SideEffects (Houdini). That some of these companies are prominent sponsors of Canadian new media arts institutions and practice illustrates the significance of this creative cluster.

The Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta has also hosted significant interdisciplinary collaboration. In the early 1990s when the centre diversified into media arts, its Art and Virtual Environment project (1991-1994) explored the aesthetics of virtual reality. Participants, including the pioneering artist Char Davies, went on to SoftImage and Discreet. Davies founded SoftImage with Daniel Langlois, where she further developed the Osmose project (completed in 1995). Osmose and Davies’ later work Ephémère (1998) are currently exhibited at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne.

Community-based organisations play an important role in the development and exhibition of new media arts in Canada and in the careers of prominent Canadian artists. In Canada’s 2 biggest cities, Toronto and Montreal, there are well established production and exhibition spaces with high public profiles and levels of accessibility. David Rokeby, winner of the Ars Electronica Golden Nica for Interactive Art in 2002 has had a long-standing involvement with InterAccess in Toronto. Interactive video artist Luc Courchesne is president of Société des arts technologiques (SAT) in Montreal.

The InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre has offered facilities and instruction for electronic arts in Toronto since 1982. They also have a 200 square metre exhibition space. Supported by operating grants from Toronto, Ontario and Canadian arts councils, the Centre relies on a volunteer staff. The collective has regular courses, workshops and discussions as well as undertaking group projects.

SAT provides workshops, residency, exhibition and performance space in Montreal. Formulated in the wake of the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) in Montreal in 1995, SAT has recently moved into a very large permanent location with the support of city, provincial and federal funds, in addition to private sponsorship from companies including Discreet. Incorporating workshops for residencies and a cafe/bar, the SAT’s venue hosts new media development, organised discussions, exhibitions, performance and informal meetings in a community environment.

Montreal is also home to another prominent new media institution, the Daniel Langlois Foundation (DLF). An animator at the NFB during its period of computer animation research, Langlois made his fortune building SoftImage (sold to Microsoft in 1995). In addition to his philanthropic foundation, Langlois has also developed and funded several media operations including a digital cinema facility (Ex-Centris), the Montreal International Festival of New Cinema and New Media (FCMM) and a digital content distribution network (DigiScreen/Pixnet).

The DLF’s mandate is to “further artistic and scientific knowledge by fostering the meeting of art and science in the field of technologies.” It operates an archive of new media documents and artworks (Centre for Research and Documentation) and has provided individual and institutional grants to international recipients to the order of CAN$1.5 million a year. Although its 2 main grant programs have been suspended in 2004 “to assess the impact of its programs and decide on future directions”, the programs have been acclaimed since their inception. Philanthropic funding for the new media arts regardless of where recipients are located is rare.

Canada’s support for new media practice offers some important insights for Australia. Its rich community of new media artists, scientists and researchers have produced internationally recognised artworks, research and institutions. These successful models of interdisciplinary collaboration lend support to similar endeavours such as QUT’s Creative Industries Faculty and programs administered by the Australia Council and ARC.

However, Mike Leggett’s concern about the trend in favour of institutional funding for research in the arts is salient here (RT 57, p26). Accessible new media research environments appear to be missing from Australia’s new media landscape. Where are the artist-run workshops, collectives and collective facilities for new media research and exhibition in Australia? Canada’s experience with InterAccess and SAT indicates that such organisations continue to have a place in new media practice, and can play an important role in their communities and in the artistic development of participants.

“Just do it” was the catch-cry of the Straight Out of Brisbane (SOOB) artists whose work reverberated among locals and visitors from Newcastle, Melbourne and Sydney. The second annual independent and emerging artists’ festival, SOOB 2003, was broader and better this year, characterised by more gaming, tinkering, hacking and awareness of trends in new media. Specific Australian cultures were represented alongside global art/political schisms. The festival had strong curatorial edges and an emphasis in the media arts on new forms and compilations of artists’ work.

Using Newcastle’s This is Not Art model, SOOB is an ambitious 3 days of free panels, exhibits and workshops followed by colourful late night club gigs. Local bands, DJs, VJs and multimedia performers emerge from everywhere. Centred on Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley cultural precinct, the festival began in 2002 amidst a furious buzz about Brisbane’s prolific “bedroom artists”, yet to emerge as worthy of consideration by the Australian cultural intelligentsia. Over 2 years, SOOB has successfully explored and showcased this independent and emerging arts culture. And in a psychogeography of venues which include outdoor, off-limits and illegal spaces as well as parent venues, bright hopefuls from Brisbane’s increasingly wired local scene present themselves in the context of experimental art.

The festival began with a cappella voices from the Turrbal people ringing out over the Brunswick Street pedestrian mall which focused attention on their reclaiming ownership of the area. Land rights, such an important issue all over Australia, has a particularly poignant place in Brisbane, where property development is eating up many of the bohemian and artist-inhabited suburbs and the Turrbal people have recently won a title deed. Incoporating their voices into SOOB acknowledged the city’s past amidst the festival’s themes: art in the city, art’s recombination, re-use and future.

Several ‘independent’ cultures were represented this year. Australian comic book art was explored through panels, with a handout on related websites created by quiz.cat, underground zines curator and prolific poster artist Sean Taylor. There were also stellar sessions on independent television, including screenings, production workshops and panels organised by the Kill Your TV collective (which brought together Access News, Actively Radical TV, Kill Your TV, Undercurrents UK, the Guerilla News Network and the solar-powered Lab Rats). A video competition was sponsored by Kill Your TV, offering thousands of dollars in production support for the socially aware and politicised. Panels challenged the reality TV of Big Brother, the infotainment industry, home renovation and lifestyle programs. Participants included Nathan Mayfield and Tracey Robertson (Fat Cow Motel), Chris Taylor and Charles Firth (CNNNN), Tim Paris (SKA TV) and Jackie Ryan (producer of the pilot, Burger Force). Local filmmaker and activist Belle Budden programmed Indigenous Flix, a collection of activist-related documentary works from Aboriginal communities. All this experimental media was topped off by a screening of the recent video Oceania Indymedia Newsreal.

The interdisciplinary nature of new media art was reflected in the spaces it occupied. A shopfront renamed The Electronode was a hub of activity, featuring carefully selected screen works in several formats and settings. Noteworthy was Fiona Smith’s Flow On, an interactive documentary in which 2 laptop terminals battle for land in the Mekong Delta. Based on the artist’s travels, the work is a CD but not yet online. Sam Whetton’s Gristle Mania, an interactive sound work “meat fantasy” and Ben Ashcroft’s Terror in the (Kitsch)en were quite funny interactive works and a pleasure to play.

Curated by new media artists Thea Baumann and Tara Pattenden, Electronode exhibited about 25 works and several day-long programs of looped films. Other new media installations requiring more room appeared in other shopfronts and were joined at the end of the festival by a screening of the new video compilation, Neopoetry. The new media spaces hinted at more wireless and networked possibilities for exhibition and were a strong component of the festival.

Curator Tim Plaisted’s visual art exhibition, Neocontre, addressed neo-conservative political agendas affecting Australia. Of particular note were works by Brisbane photo-text artist Angel Kosch and James Dodd’s portrait triptych (Gollum from Lord of the Rings, John Howard and the Queen), which was repeated several times on a front wall. These works seemed to encapsulate many concerns debated throughout the festival: street art versus gallery co-option, culture jamming, activism as art and art as activism. How do we brand ourselves? What kind of spaces are we making in the streets and on the walls? For whom or what are we making these spaces? In what kinds of new and old spaces can we intervene? Several feisty discussions were hosted by the underground projection troupe, Pixelbusters, independent media maven Danni Zuvela, Mickie Quick, Emile Zile and others.

Highpoints of SOOB included the sporadic ‘agit-prop’ anarchist pamphleteers and the noisy exclamations of experimental musicians performing at the busy Improv Space. Agit 8, meatwave, unhappy bee person and others played home-made and modified instruments at an excellent closing event, Shit n Stuff.

To paraphrase one of the panels on urban representations, SOOB 2003 “invaded” the space of inner Brisbane with dozens of public projects, defying legal and cultural dictums on what art space is and the definitions of legitimacy and cleanliness that make Brisbane’s public and street life non-existent. Walls, alleyways, empty grass lots and even tabletops were all used as spaces for art as SOOB took culture out of the institutions. Pope Alice Xorporation’s See You No More assured us of a healthy queer presence and the hilarious Clothes Rodeo swapmeet (you had to be there) offset any fashion consciousness. The official space of cyberfeminism was brought to us in a Wired Women panel, and Creative Industries’ “Microbusiness Forum” offered methods and means to young entrepreneurs.

For a few days, the Valley business district was genuinely transformed and Brisbane’s independent arts culture rendered visible as artists partied all night and languished daily in the streets. While sometimes caught in a cultural cringe and driven underground by the crusty old guard, this culture is alive and mutating…and that’s true SOOBin’.

SOOB 2003: Straight Out of Brisbane, festival managers Susan Kukucka, Louise Terry, Ben Eltham; various venues, Brisbane, Dec 3-7, 2003, www.straightoutofbrisbane.com

Cre8ive Challenge is an Awesome Arts initiative designed to bring young people and local artists together. Participating groups engage in an open-ended, process-based exploration of identity by examining the significant and distinctive features of their local community and environment. Groups are organised through schools, youth and arts centres.

Each year Cre8ive Challenge is focused on a different project. In 2003 the project came in 2 parts: the first, a celebration/presentation of each group’s exploration of identity; the second, the collection of significant sound samples for a collaborative project with UK sound artist, Scanner. The latter become a soundscape accompaniment for a journey through the urban environment of Perth as part of the Awesome Festival in November.

A significant part of Cre8ive Challenge involves taking participants out of their comfort zones by exposing them to a range of contemporary arts strategies and processes. This can be a complex operation as it sometimes reveals major disjunctions between creative processes and the participants’ expectations, but on the whole produces highly idiosyncratic and distinctive outcomes.

The focus of the groups’ final celebrations was diverse and embraced several modes of arts practice. My group was Campbell Primary, situated in a recently built area south of Perth comprised of walled estates, each with their own feature lake and landscaped entry. My group of 30 Year 6s (aged 10 to 11) decided to focus on the swampland that had previously existed in the area, with their school’s shiny elevator functioning as a symbol of development and the group’s dreams and aspirations. They opted for a walk-through installation where we would create a fictional history of characters and ghostly presences within ‘the Swamp.’ We created a sensorily saturated space through the use of digital video projections, improvised electronic sounds, kooky plants, tree cuttings, constructed creatures, rich woodchip mulch and a model skeleton with lights kindly lent by an inventive parent.

The school’s celebration night was well attended and the kids threw themselves into the challenge of intimate performance with relish, creating an experience that exceeded all our expectations. The scale and success of our project was in large part due to the school’s support in terms of time and money, as well as the skill and energy of my fabulous collaborating teacher, the music specialist Wendi Horne.

The approach of other group projects was diverse and included several sound-focused works. Mark Cain and Gingin District High year 5 created a soundscape of elements from around Gingin Brook: frogs, jets, rain, thunderstorms, a bird-park and interviews with locals (such as a 4th generation Gingin beekeeper who told stories of catching water rats and selling their pelts during the Depression). Students created their own instruments to play with the collected sounds.

Petro Vouris and Maylands Primary (Perth) explored memory through sound and an installation, creating a horror house and a detective mystery scene complete with interrogations and a survey of the audience at the celebration.

Cat Hope and St Patrick’s Primary (Katanning) created a soundscape from sounds and interviews which explored the impact of natural events such as earthquakes, floods and snow. Assisted by some local Aboriginal women, they situated the sound works in cubbies built from natural elements overlooking the river in a revered Aboriginal site named after the ear of a monster from Dream Time legend.

Sohan Ariel Hayes and Mt. Lawley Primary (Perth) developed a sound project. The group sonically re-created significant events in a tour of 12 sites, with the sound experienced through headphones via a radio transmitter. Sohan also worked with Yerecoin Primary, where the group explored the cycle of life by creating a macabre funereal procession of striking characters, including a 5 metre inflatable which burst from the coffin to fly away, taking several characters with it.

Other groups explored the space of their social and physical environment through mapping. Stuart Clipston’s group in Carnarvon (Carnarvon Primary, St Mary’s Star of the Sea and Burringurrah Community School) mapped their movements through town and explored the relative distance between meaningful sites according to the kids’ awareness of what is significant in their lives. These maps were displayed as part of the celebration, revealing the diversity of cultural backgrounds in the one town.

Annabel Dixon and North Lake Senior College explored mapping with a year 11 group, as well as collecting objects to monochrome in blue and creating a series of photographic portraits with captioned signs.

Tony Nathan and Bolgart Primary experimented with photographic processes such as photograms and documented significant sites in the cultural/physical landscape, culminating with a community portrait to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Town Hall.

Poppy van-Oorde Grainger and the Kambalda Youth House group explored the significance of the bush as a landscape of freedom. They created dummies on BMX bikes in the ‘hands up’ pose of triumph, set aflame on the reflective salt lakes in homage to the recent Antony Gormley WA salt lake art extravaganza. Poppy also worked with Lakewood Primary, exploring multiculturalism and migration by creating a mythological flock of birds as well as developing a special secret language for them. The celebration climaxed with the birds’ release via helium balloons, alongside real homing pigeons.

Kerry Wilkes and Tammin Primary (years 4 to 7) used the highway as a defining element of local identity and explored it by sampling sounds, images and found elements from key sites along the road. They created a large installation in the Town Hall using road signs, tarpaulins and fertilizer tubs.

Shaun Spicer and Marble Bar Primary investigated the importance of the town’s jasper deposits, echoing the textures of the stone through ‘marbling’ the walls of a historical local tin-shed church with 300 litres of paint. This was combined with a large Dream Time snake sculpture and projections of the painting, interspersed with kids improvising dancing shadows on the outside of the church.

Steve Aiton and Perth Montessori decided to explore the group’s diversity via the territory of their school. They built models and employed digital technology to create an 8 minute animation in which the head of Maria Montessori functions as a house for a crazy architecture of spiral elevators and dream bedrooms containing significant objects and fictional alter-egos of the kids.

Simon Perecich and Rockingham Senior High created a series of dolphins with images and symbols featured on the sides of the creatures.

echoricochet, the parallel project of gathering sound samples was an enjoyable process for all the groups. Scanner has a history of working with ‘found’ samples and was interested in distinctive sounds specific to the local area. This focus gave a new awareness of each of the groups’ local environments, especially when their celebration involved a soundscape. The Katanning group were so interested in the field recording process they continued their recording project after the Challenge was completed.

The soundscape collaboration was part of the Awesome Festival in central Perth. While a large, spectacular array of Chinese silk lanterns in the shape of various animals filled the main space of Forrest Chase, echoricochet was presented from an orange transit van with a little cluster of creatures that had evolved from the Challenge. The public borrowed headphones and CD players and embarked on a sound-walk through the city, guided by instructions. Perth ebbed and flowed with its usual rhythms as the soundscape evolved around the listener, offering a relaxed yet heightened awareness of the urban environment’s passing details. The layering of these far-off sounds–animals, machinery, people talking of rural experiences, children laughing and chattering–with the smooth ambient wash of gentle rhythms and pulses created an enjoyable ‘soundbath’.

The presentation of echoricochet left me feeling that the more dynamic and interesting aspects of Cre8ive Challenge remained under-represented in the festival. The absence of visual documentation meant that the raw, energetic and idiosyncratic elements of young creative processes had been largely filtered from the finished product: Scanner’s soundwork was smooth and sophisticated, reflecting the refined sensibility guiding the editing process. Perhaps the final collaboration would have benefited from an accompaniment of images and explanatory material. Nevertheless, Cre8ive Challenge was a rewarding process for all involved–artists, young people and hopefully the audiences who enjoyed the final results.

The Awesome 2003 Cre8ive Challenge, various artists, schools and community groups, May-Nov 2003, Western Australia, The 2003 Awesome Festival, various venues, Perth, WA, Nov 21-30, 2003, www.awesomearts.com

There must have been something in the air at the University of Western Sydney around the turn of the millennium—a wormhole the students fell into so that they emerged from the institution with a distinctive fetish for old and arguably obsolete technology. Or perhaps, as rumour has it, the old equipment was being disposed of and some students discovered strong scavenger instincts. Tim Ryan, Philip Williams, Andrew Gadow and Mel Donat exemplify this phenomenon. Over the last 3 years they have individually and collectively clocked up an impressive list of exhibitions. The latest is Digital Decoupage at First Draft Gallery where they truly revel in technological obsolescence and the endlessly surprising outcomes of analogue and digital interactions.

Tim Ryan’s Future Proof consists of 3 7” LCD monitors placed side by side in an empty room displaying landscapes of light and texture. The development of pattern and tone is subtle, the result of harnessing technology’s mistakes and idiosyncrasies. The images are obliquely related, morphing between screens and the play from right to left provides a disconcerting backwards flow, as the vision disappears into the linear past. Reflecting on in-built obsolescence, Ryan believes that, “As a technology advances, the user becomes further disembodied from their actions, which makes it more difficult to find the source of technological problems” (artist’s statement). The easiest solution is to make replacement technology—Ryan asks can any technology be truly future proof.

From a different perspective, Andrew Gadow’s MoogLighting suggests that no technology is obsolescent, it’s just waiting for a new use. He converts the audio signal of a 1970s Moog synthesiser to video. As he uses a wide range of frequencies some of these signals are almost inaudible, yet still produce visual material. The result is work of clean patterns and lines and a pleasing sparseness and restraint. This is as integrated as the audiovisual relationship gets—a truly synaesthetic experience.

Also manifesting invisible information is Philip Williams’ non-linear feedback. With black leader tape from video, radio static and tape hiss, Williams effects and layers his material using digital processes to draw out the colour, texture and movement hidden in apparent detritus. Most impressive is the elephantine video projector used to show this work that requires 3 people to lift and has separate red/green/blue bulbs that highlight the work’s colour composition. Although as visually and sonically subtle as Gadow’s work, non-linear feedback revels more in grain and texture and often looks reminiscent of astronomic vistas. There is also a monitor piece, with the viewing surface laid horizontal, demonstrating a monochrome investigation of the process. The impact of the work builds with our knowledge of the process behind it.

Williams and Gadow are exhibited in the main room of First Draft, not ideal for displaying works whose audio outputs bleed and whose visuals fade in afternoon light. It would be good to experience these pieces again in a more contemplative environment.

Mel Donat’s Memory Playback takes a more tactile and interactive approach. On a plinth in the centre of the room lies a large floppy stuffed bunny attached to the wall by a mysterious cord. On a screen is projected a 3D animated rabbit. By finding and pressing switches in the toy’s body the animated rabbit responds. These responses are focussed on the corresponding body part but are interestingly free of narrative, generating a strange gestural language. The rabbit’s surface is composed of textured horizontal static and floats in a world of vertical static as if it has grown out of its environment. The work is all the more engaging because it does not fall into cuteness or the Chuckie’s Back toy-turned-sinister theme: Memory Playback has an intriguing obliqueness in its action/interaction. The animated rabbit goes through its motions efficiently and returns to rest, staring at you as if it’s expecting something and no matter how many switches you activate you’re still not quite giving it what it wants. The increased tactility required of the viewer—you have to prod and squish the toy to find the triggers—highlights the transition from real to virtual and the causal relationship between the 2 that is so often elusive and unfulfilling in interactive works.

Digital Decoupage satisfies with its conceptual cohesion and investigative and aesthetic rigour. All the works have a pared back clarity borne of concerted efforts to control unwieldy processes and materials. It will be interesting to follow the development of these 4 artists as they continue to discover and tame the strange mutations that live between old and new technologies, between analogue and digital worlds.

Maria Miranda’s The Museum of Rumour manifested both online and onsite in late 2003 at the Sydney College of the Arts. The college was formerly an institution for the incarceration of the insane, established in 1886 with 630 patients, peaking with over 3000 patients in 1968 and dropping to 579 in 1988 before being closed. You’d at least expect to encounter the ghosts of rumour in this work as you wander about the building where inmates were herded to eat their meals. But there’s very little that’s literal about Miranda’s creation. Even so, associations inevitably spring to mind as you peer into a hole in the floorboards that cannot be accounted for, or at a kneeling stool, a chest of drawers or a view of a nearby spire. A headphone set guides you point to point where a voice gently coaxes your contemplations. Each reverie is followed by an exquisite if all too brief sound composition (Norie Neumark). I would have preferred the sound before the words, to let loose more associations, and then the opportunity to relish the sound again after the delivery of the text. Even so this is an interesting and unusual experience thematically reminiscent of Company in Space’s multimedia performance work The Light Room (2002), also inspired by mediaeval and renaissance mappings of space by associations, metaphor and memnonics rather than literal representation.

The website of the Museum of Rumour offers a very different experience if on a continuum. It uses the great avant-garde writer Gertrude Stein as the primary node for a network of association and influence in six frames, each with a life of its own, aptly titled ‘degrees of separation.’ These include rumours of war, cats (feral, domestic and Tourneur’s Cat People film), the Gene-Hackman French connection, Our Lady of Coogee and a set of Steinian cups that fall and clink and spill the writer’s words. There’s also a Stein page where clicking on scrolling lines of letters triggers an acrobatic dance of words (lesbian, postmodern, writer…) and sounds. There’s also a delightful ‘Interferometer’ with an active grid that responds like an oscilloscope to the speed of rumour at your choice of drift, walk, wander, meander, lurk or float. This is a good-humoured, finely made, altogether eccentric museum that suggests different ways of archiving experience and tracing the lateral paths of memory and association.

At this year’s Adelaide Festival, the Australian Dance Theatre (ADT) will premiere HELD, a collaboration with internationally acclaimed dance photographer Lois Greenfield. Garry Stewart has been Artistic Director at ADT since 1999 and his directorship has seen a huge increase in the company’s popularity both here and in the US, where ADT toured in 2001 and 2002. Stewart discusses the new project via email with Erin Brannigan.

Lois Greenfield is a photographer of the highest calibre. How did this collaboration come about?

I was in New York in January last year as a delegate for the Australia Council at APAP (American Performing Arts Presenters), the largest and most important arts market in North America. ADT had completed a 7-city tour of the US a few months earlier. At the conference the US delegates knew who we were and there seemed to be a great deal of interest. I was introduced to Lois who had heard about the company and after I showed her some images of the ADT dancers—suspended in the air and inverted—she immediately said she would like to photograph them. I suggested that perhaps we could actually extend the collaboration by utilising a live photographic session within the performance itself. Lois was immediately taken with this and so the idea developed from there. This set up had also been partially tested by Lois where, in one instance, she actually did have an audience witness a photo shoot in a theatre. Even in this simple set up she found that the audience seemed fascinated by the images she could extract from the dancing.

The American interest in your work seems natural given the tradition of high-octane work in that country—Stephen Petronio and Elizabeth Streb for example.

I think that the broad interest in ADT in the US is borne out of a cultural connection to the aesthetics of the formalist modern and postmodern dance heritage, which is an American phenomenon. Therefore there is a comfortable context for our work. Moreover, as is the case with Australian audiences or audiences anywhere for that matter, beyond the conceptual concerns I think our work can be received through its visceral immediacy. My works aim at a kind of poetics of extremity arranged through a formal structure. For the viewer, I think there is a vicarious thrill in witnessing extreme athletic dance, giving relief to our subconscious desires for flight. I guess some people see my work as a form of organised violence toward (and with) the body. Whether I agree with this or not, I do find this a much more interesting reading than just seeing it in the ‘joy-of-dance’ context.

Lois’ role in this project is the extraction of seemingly impossible moments that usually remain hidden within a given passage of choreography, images which will be projected instantaneously on a screen during the performance. Her photography allows the viewer to witness relationships between the dancers that are normally so fleeting they are rendered invisible. She takes photos at an incredible 1/2000th of a second. Her work is an assault on time and perception. [These images seem] surreal and magical because they defy our hard-wired comprehension of the physics of the everyday world.

Beyond Lois’ actual role in the work, the project is conceptually centered [on] the broader parameters of photography… I’ve had to embark on a bit of a crash course, reading everything from books on camera technique and the chemistry of film processing to writings on the philosophical and cultural meanings ascribed to photography and the image. I’ve also been looking at the work of other noted contemporary photographers such as Cindy Sherman, Diane Arbus, Tracey Moffat and Wolfgang Tillmans.

In HELD, the stage becomes the photographic studio and in a sense an atelier—a space of work and process. Lights are wheeled around the stage, gaffer tape marks an ‘x’ to position a dancer and in each scene there are observers as well as photographed subjects present. Of course this is a stylised, theatricalised ‘studio’, so the phone isn’t ringing every 5 minutes and people aren’t sitting around eating order-in pizza. But the notion of stage-as-studio is something that drives the set design, lighting and the division of space as well as the demeanor and attitudes of the performers onstage. Other threads are drawn into the work such as framing and partitioning, the manipulation of light and darkness, being ‘in focus’ and ‘out of focus’ etc.

At times the choreography is performed in total darkness…Through the absence of light, the audience is invited to reflect that the act of ‘seeing’ is a result of perceiving light waves reflected off objects. In HELD I’m also using freezes, where the choreography will cease and the dancers remain frozen on the spot—a metaphor for the frozen slice of time that photos represent.

You have referred to the video component of HELD as offering an intimacy with the work through close up and the photographs as emphasising the heroic and virtuosic aspects of the choreography.

Lois’ work is, to a large extent, focused on the heroic, the virtuosic. And to an equal degree so is my choreography. Hence the chemistry between Lois and our dancers in the studio has been immediate. At its best, Lois’ work is primarily centred on the dancers relating to each other within an aerial orientation. Because the ADT dancers train and work regularly within this dimension the choices that are available to them in the air [are] far greater than those available to conventionally trained dancers.

In the last couple of years, I’ve also been developing a kind of sub-set vocabulary, which is antithetical to the virtuosity. I call this vocabulary ‘micro-movements’ where we reduce phrases down to minute physical impulses. I ask the dancers to express phrases through their bodies just beyond the level of the initial thought so that the movement produced is barely perceptible. This is an interesting counterpoint to the gymnastic end of the spectrum more commonly associated with my work. This ‘micro-movement’ also possesses an oblique relationship to ‘popping’ in breakdance, which has at times also formed part of the company’s movement vocabulary….[I]n HELD, the ‘micro-movements’ seemed to offer a powerful physical analogy to animation, so we created a series of projected mini-animations using Lois’ photos that are juxtaposed with the performance of the ‘micro-movements.’

In HELD I’ve also been attempting to give value to the…spaces that fall between the ‘uber’ moments in the air. Part of the video element in the work [includes] images of the dancers in moments of rest, featuring slow-motion close-ups on discreet gestures or simply their faces in a passive moment of listening. The interior world of the performers is referenced and amplified here in order to provide a psychological and emotional balance to their representation. Not all is bravura. Likewise with the movement. Some of the high speed, high powered gymnastic skills are represented in close-up and extreme slow motion in an attempt to shift the perception of the audience to the interior of the body. This stretching in time [through] video is a sort of deconstruction of the ballistic choreography into an experience that is more intimate for the audience.

Still photography is an interesting counterpoint to the speed of your choreography—the challenge it presents to photographic reproduction. Have you come across problems regarding dance and reproduction before this project?

I have never really attempted to represent the dancing body through reproduced body images before, apart from a couple of short films I made when I was a student at the University of Technology in Sydney. In the past it has actually been one of my pet hates to see the choreography reproduced on video in the same space as live dancers as it seems to be used too casually, not being inherent to the work. However, I…loved Ros Warby’s solo Eve which combines live performance with film images of her made by Margie Medlin. This is the most successful use of corporeal reproduction in a live dance piece that I’ve ever seen.

HELD also offers an excellent opportunity for the documentation of our work. As an adjunct to the fleeting emphemerality of dance as live performance, the photos become powerful emblems of our identity as well as the identity of the specific dancers. The David Parsons Company, for instance, are known just as much through Lois’ now iconic images of them as through their live performances. For us this is perhaps one of the very few instances where we may be able to gain some leverage out of mass media reproduction. As you know, this is not something that comes by every day in the marginalised realm of contemporary performance making.

Australian Dance Theatre, HELD, directors Garry Stewart, David Bonney, photography Lois Greenfield; 2004 Adelaide Festival, Her Majesty’s Theatre, March 1-6; www.adelaidefestival.com.au