RTtalk
Business columns and programs are cropping up everywhere, slicing into ABC TV news, offering investment advice and share sale panics, so why not in RealTime.
The Australian Taxation Office provides extra tax information for some occupations. These publications are simple summaries of taxation rulings and they explain claims that you can and cannot make by looking at the common expenses you might claim as a performing artist. You may find this information helpful when completing your tax return. To get a copy, see the ATO website or ring their publications distribution service on 1300 720 092 for the cost of a local call.
Business 2: The Australia Business Arts Foundation
(AbaF) has received increased half a million dollars extra federal funding to a total of $1.6 million. According to AbaF Executive Director, Winsome McCaughey “Australia's growing pool of creative talent can return business, artistic, social and community benefits but neither government support nor box office returns are enough to sustain the arts. With only 1% of business supporting the arts, there is huge potential to grow corporate commercial and private philanthropic support for the arts.” So far some 160 cultural organisations have attended AbaF business case training workshops in all capital cities, part-funded by the Australia Council. Corporations are being assisted to develop and complete their business cases for cultural investment. Information:
Brian Peck, 03 9658 0211 or 0417 587 932
Business 3
Innovative Adelaide cross-cultural performance company doppio-parallelo has linked with global technology giant Motorola in a business-arts partnership “designed to boost the skill sets of both organisations.” Motorola has donated its time and $32,000 worth of computers and related technology to help doppio upgrade its infrastructure for projects and artists working with new media. Richard Burford, Managing Director of Motorola sees the relationship as “based on synergies of creativity, innovation and community access via technology and cultural diversity.”
Business 4
In further trickle-down effects from the collapse of the HIH Insurance Company, Marian Street Theatre has lost its $250,000 sponsorship which theatre director John Krummel describes in SMH (May 30) as “a catastrophic blow”. AbaF's Brian Peck, however, sees this as “a crucial lesson for arts companies to diversify their sponsorship sources … It's imperative they spread their risk, to use an insurance term. Companies should also do plenty of research into their potential partners,” Peck said. Yeh, right.
Business 5
Meanwhile, arts organisations work overtime to invent ever more imaginative services to the corporate sector. Bell Shakespeare has taken some creative steps to extend “the breadth of product offering” (Nugent, 1999:23) organising “Shakespearian leadership workshops in which actors from the company perform a scene from Henry V while actually sitting among participants at the pseudo-board table. Later the scene is analysed, applying a conventional behavioural model to theinteractions…”
And the New Zealand Orchestra with its corporate partners has offered “Music Paradigm” created by American conductor Roger Nierenberg in which corporate executives learn about 4 management principles (communication, co-ordination, team work and leadership) sitting amidst the orchestra performing. This item came to us via www.fuel4arts.com who got it first from the Australian Financial Review. If you join the dots (Telstra Adelaide Festival, Emirates AFI Awards etc) we should perhaps prepare ourselves for the suits as permanent fixtures on our nation's stages. Forget “Is this a dagger I see before me ?” and make way for Macbeth, assailing a staffer clocking up overtime in excess of his workplace agreement with “Aren't you Duncan from Accounts?”
INTERNATIONAL MOVES
Frank in Croatia
And while we're on the Bard: following their participation in 2 previous festivals in Frank Austral Asian Performance Ensemble, directors John Nobbs and Jacqui Carroll return in July to Pula in Croatia for the 6th International Festival of Youth Theatre to conduct another 10-day International Suzuki Actor Training Workshop. This year, as well as the workshop, Frank actors will join Croatian workshop participants (who also come from Czech Republic, London and the US) to present a bi-lingual version of Frank's production The Tale of Macbeth: Crown of Blood in Pula's fully preserved Roman arena. Arena…everywhere
Speaking of which, Arena Theatre Company's multimedia production Eat Your Young which toured the Taipei Arts Festival in May, travels to the Singapore Arts Festival in June while their kids' show Schnorky the Wave Puncher! tours to Vancouver. Arena's General Manager Katherine Crawford-Gray says, “To have 2 productions playing almost simultaneously on opposites sides of the globe is pretty wild…especially when you consider that Arena is a small to medium-sized producer.”
In Moscow…In Repertoire
Simon Barley and Melbourne's well-travelled BAMBUCO are in Moscow this month building a Ship of Fools on the River Moskva. You can check on their progress from around June 18. BAMBUCO, Arena and some 50 other Australian companies of similarly small scale and big international ambition are featured in the forthcoming In Repertoire: Australian Contemporary Performance, another publication (edited and produced by RealTime) from the Australia Council's Audience and Market Development (AMD) division which will be distributed initially at the Singapore Arts Festival's first ever Performing Arts Market.
Breaking into Europe
AMD and the Music Fund of the Australia Council are behind the International Pathways program to assist export-ready contemporary Australian musicians to tour overseas and develop international markets. 5-piece improvised jazz ensemble theak-tet toured Scandinavia, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK during April and May and live electronic music group Rhibosome will tour 9 UK venues in June. “These international sectors are unable to be reached without leaving Australia,” says Fremantle-based band member David McKinney. With a number of Australian jazz festival appearances already under their belt, the long-term goal for theak-tet, says band leader David Theak, is “participation in the European Summer Festival circuit and a recording contract with a European record label.”
WA writer trains with trAce
The trAce Online Writing School has recently opened its doors to students around the globe and, with its history of encouraging web/creative writing of all kinds, it's a good place to start. The tutors include some of the best writers on the web: Talan Memmott (RT#42 p22) on advanced literary hypermedia, Canadian novelist Kate Pullinger on writing short fiction, Alan Sondheim on cyberculture & literature, Liz Swift on writing an online family history, Carolyn Guertin on textual machines, & Peter Howard teaching animated poetry in Flash. Courses in development include screenwriting, becoming a playwright, novel writing & writing for children.
RealTime has selected WA-based writer Jo Gray to do the course in exchange for a detailed report on the experience. She will start in early June. 23-year old Jo has recently commenced her PhD at the University of Western Australia in the department of English. Her work is centred on the use of metaphor as communicative tool on the internet. We wish her luckÉand look forward to her responses.
Australia Council vs Sweeney
Australian audience support for the performing arts is greater than it has ever been according to figures released in April by the Australia Council. So there! The record number of attendances and the healthy rate of growth stand in marked contrast to the grim conclusions of the Sweeney Arts Report which signalled a fall in audience numbers based on a survey of 1500 people. The most significant growth for the major performing arts companies occurred in contemporary dance and ballet. Comparable comprehensive data is currently being gathered for Australia's small and medium-sized performing arts companies as part of an overall examination of the sector. The Chair of the Council's Theatre Board, David Whitney, already reports that of 12 smaller theatre companies across Australia 10 increased audiences in the last year. These include Fremantle's deckchair theatre, Brisbane's La Boite, Adelaide's Vitalstatistix and The Flying Frutifly Circus from Albury-Wodonga. The same was true of dance with Melbourne's Chunky Move doubling its audience and Perth-based Buzz Dance showing a healthy 25% increase.
Full in Melbourne
Full is the new dance performance devised by choreographer Simon Elliswith sound by Jacqueline Grenfell, light by Alicia Hervey and photography and design by Elizabeth Boyce. The work examines the internal world of an 87 year old woman who is uncertain whether she is walking or being pushed. At Glass Street Gallery, North Melbourne,
June 20-30 at 8 pm.
Fierce in Darwin
Tracks Inc premieres Fierce, a new outdoor performance event at this year's Darwin Festival in August. Featuring the Warlpiri Yawalyu women of Lajamanu, local performers Tania Lieman and Nicky Fearn and guest artist Trevor Patrick with other community members, Fierce is an evocation of the eccentric artist, anthropologist and naturalist,
Miss Olive Pink.
Artificial snow
snow.noise is an installation featuring performance, scientific experimentation, electronic music, drawing, photography and video by young German contemporary artist Carsten Nicolai aka noto. This artist's work mixes new technologies with old, recreating in this case the first invention for the production of artificial snow from the 1930s as its centre-piece. “Constructed from metal and glass, this object is slowly surveyed by a camera, against the crackling and buzzing of Carsten's computer generated music. His paintings, drawings and photographs recall images from science manuals or are abstractions suggesting barcodes or angiograms that parallel the looped rhythms of the music.” It opens with a 40-minute performance of Carsten's electronic music based around the theme of snow crystals. It's free at the Art Gallery of NSW,
6 pm, Friday 29 June.
Talan Memmot
If you followed up Tatiana Pentes' review of Talan Memmot's work in RT#42, you might want to check out the new heap of art at Nio featuring some suggestions on new forms of music/multimedia, “hopefully a new, popular alternative to the music video”. Nio is a commission of New Radio and Performing Arts Inc for its Turbulence website.
DVD-ing
SAE International Technology College is taking enrolments for their new Digital Video Director course starting in June, the only course in Australia to teach DVD production. The 9 month DVD Director course will take students through the entire film-making process. Each student will learn to fine tune their skills, producing, directing and editing a number of projects, using the state of the art equipment and technology at SAE. Students will also learn the art of making documentary and music film clips. SAE is a training institutions which combines hands on experience with theoretical training from industry professionals. The DVD Director course starts June 25. For more information contact Lyndall Farley,
02 9212 2444.
Successfully SciFi-ing
It's a rare thing for a sci-fi writer to win a literary award. So nobody can have been more surprised than Adelaide writer Sean Williams when he picked up the 2000 SA Great Award from the SA Writers Centre. Others have seen it coming. This young writer's short stories have been published around the world. All of his novels have been nominated for awards, his collection New Adventures in Sci Fi won the 2000 Ditmar Award for Best Collection and last year he landed a substantial grant from the Literature Fund of the Australia Council to complete 3 young adult fantasy novels to be published in September. And now Sean and co-writer Shane Dix have been contracted to write the next 3
Star Wars novels. The 2 attracted attention in the US after making the sci-fi best seller lists with their Evergence trilogy for Harper Collins. “Every year I think it can't get better than this”, he says to Tim Lloyd of Adelaide's Advertiser, “and every year it does.”
CCP goes German
Continuing their commitment to showcasing and critically engaging with contemporary documentary practice, the Centre for Contemporary Photography is presenting The world as one, an exhibition of 1990s documentary photography in colour featuring 17 groups of works by 19 photographers from Germany born between 1955 and 1971. The exhibition consists almost entirely of independently researched projects devoted to complex themes including the effects of German reunification and the precipitous pace of economic and social change in the Far East . CCP Gallery, June 8 – July 7
Performance Space a Gay winner
In announcing its glittering prizes this year the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras gave a Special Festival Award to Performance Space as “an important space in the Festival for dangerous and innovative work.” The Mardi Gras has had a continuous relationship with P Space since 1995 co-producing works that, according to Festival Director, David Fenton “access an audience that delights in extremely diverse work with a particular commitment to emerging artists.” P Space hosted 4 visual arts exhibitions and 2 performing arts events for Mardi Gras including Queensland artist Stacey Callaghan 's when I was a boy which took out a prize as “a dynamic piece of physical theatre that explored why we separate our bodies, minds and spirits and how we can learn to trust again.” Awards also went to Hey Hetero!, a witty public art work by
Deborah Kelly and Tina Fiveash highlighting the privileges of heterosexuality and to Brian Carbee and Dean Walsh for Stretching it Wider—”a sexy, beautiful and intelligent production.” Festival David Fenton stressed the importance of Performance Space as a resource for artistic communitiesÑ”Mardi Gras would be the poorer without their contribution”. And so say all of us.
Denmark's Hotel Pro Forma, remembered here for their Orfeo, premiered a new work Site Seeing Zoom in March. The work reflects the complex nature of human memory using the digital medium as tool and artistic idiom. “We travel in the landscape of memory, zoom in and out, change angle, speed and height. We map and catalogue human ways of expression. We use the navigation in a virtual architecture as the composition and the narrative style. The movement of the journey is projected on screens as sequences of images that are doubled, reflected and repeated like living memory itself. The audience walks around the cross-structure of the screens and experiences the performance from different angles. A guide finds himself between the physical and virtual worlds. He is seen as movement, as shadow, and as scale in relation to the projected images. Everything is virtual, he says, smiling as the pot plant strikes the skull.”
Hope
How might we think about that fragile but vital idea? In this ABC
Radio Eye 2-part special, writer Mary Zournazi talks with philosophers around the world about their idea of hope and how it can, and must, be sustained in the midst of cynicism and despair. In the program are Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Michel Serres, Chantal Mouffe and Alphonso Lingis. Part 1 is broadcast Sunday June 17 at 8.30 pm, part 2 on
Sunday June 24.
Radio Throughout June
The Listening Room is on the nose beginning with Nostalgia's Nose, Paul Carter's adaptation of the novel Baroque Memories; followed by Schnoz by Natalie Kestecher, featuring readings from Gogol's The Nose and excerpts from the musical version by Shostakovich; Odourama, Robin Ravlich's sonic spectrum of odour in the world and Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered in which Gregory Whitehead navigates among other anatomies, the bloody nose of Casanova. ABC Classic FM Monday 9 pm.
Self-Accusation,Peter Handke's key work in the German speaking anti-Theatre movement of the 60s, has neither character nor scene nor narrative. Instead it is a deconstruction of the societal, political and physical forces that shape the identification of a self. The play is performed by Adelaide's Brink Productions. Music by Christopher Williams, Soundstage, ABC Classic FM, Wednesday June 13 at 8pm.
RealTime issue #43 June-July 2001 pg. 8-11
