Artistic Director David Chisholm’s Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music (BIFEM) again proved itself to be one of Australia’s boldest, intensive arts events. In a mere two and half days, committed audiences, professional, student and community players came together with egalitarian spirit to embrace thrillingly demanding contemporary music, opera, dance and sound art in the city’s centre. The unnervingly brilliant ELISION ensemble, celebrating its 30th birthday, provided three key concerts, two of them involving superb performances from Australian National Academy of Music students, and two with gripping compositions by leading Australian composer Liza Lim, whose 50th birthday was also celebrated. Today, we’re publishing a selection of reviews from the festival’s Music Writers’ Workshop. There’ll be more next week.
In our ongoing Arts Education feature, we focus on acting at the Adelaide College of the Arts and on the educational damage being wrought on the Sydney College of the Arts and the culture of Sydney by the NSW Government.
Keith and Virginia
ADELAIDE COLLEGE OF THE ARTSTerence Crawford, Head of Acting in this highly productive TAFE College, delineates its advantages, successes and strategies for continuity, drawing on the strengths of young teacher graduates who also speak to Ben Brooker in this report.
SYDNEY COLLEGE OF THE ARTS FIGHTS BACK After 10 years of teaching in the UK, Liz Bradshaw warns that the potential “death by asphyxiation” of SCA parallels overseas trends, diminishing not just art schools but Sydney as a city and Australian culture.
BIFEM 2016: HOW FORESTS THINKAaron Cassidy’s The Wreck of Former Boundaries is inspired by Ornette Coleman and Liza Lim’s How Forests Think by the Brazilian rain forest and Eduardo Kohn’s revelations about it. ELISION ensemble does justice to these world premieres, writes Madeline Roycroft.
BIFEM 2016: SPEICHER Bec Scully vigorously applauds the Australian premiere performance by ELISION ensemble and students from the Australian National Academy of Music of Enno Poppe’s Speicher, one of the most praised and demanding works of recent times.
BIFEM 2016: PHO:TON Out of darkness emerge single players and notes, then rows and geometric clusters in Swiss brothers André and Michel Décosterd’s accumulative creation, triggered from a keyboard by Peter Dumsday and ably played by the Bendigo Symphony Orchestra. It’s “a truly egalitarian work,” writes Madeline Roycroft.
BIFEM: 2016: DATA_NOISE Matthew Lorenzon feels “cleansed” after experiencing the hour-long arc of dancer Myriam Gourfink’s extremely slow, small movements which trigger the sounds that composer Kasper T Toeplitz transforms into layers of white noise.
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