June 1994
Keith Gallasch talks with dancer and choreographer Kim Walker about the influx of great choreographers for the festival season
Ten am, Darlinghurst, Sydney, and it feels like one hundred per cent humidity already, but in the pause that refreshes between choreographing the very physical realisation of Tim Winton’s That Eye The Sky, directed by Richard Roxburgh for that actor’s new theatre company, Burning House, in Sydney and the musical Jesus Christ Superstar in New Zealand, Kim Walker beats the heat in his express desire to get to Adelaide to experience the riches offered by William Forsythe and Mark Morris. In Christopher Hunt’s 1994 Adelaide Festival there are two programs by Forsythe, an American directing the Frankfurt Ballet, and three by another American, Mark Morris, with his own company and including a dance-driven version of Purcell’s opera Dido and Aenaes. This is a festival with dance at its centre.
When he first saw Forsythe’s work in the mid-80s, Kim Walker, no stranger to the demands of modern dance in the Sydney Dance Company, was “absolutely astounded and startled at the sheer individuality of the work, at the power of the ideas and imagery, that a ballet company was working like a contemporary dance company.”
I was astounded too. Chance took me to Forsythe’s Slingerland at the Chatelet in Paris, 1990. It was a giant work, a fantastic journey: dancers’ heads sprouting through small holes in the stage floor, a monstrous clawed foot consuming the theatre, lighting that was not afraid of the dark, un-camp dancing across ballet gender lines. It was a night of great theatre, not a soul from four years of age to eighty left before the end, much to the chagrin of the standing-room-only crowd. Forsythe is reputed to have said that the theatre is dead: well, he’s kicking it back into life. Thanks to Leigh Warren, Adelaide got a taste of his work, and, it is to be hoped, a taste for Forsythe in 1992 with his Enemy in the Figure. That work will be seen again, this time as part of Limb’s Theorem, the two-hour work on architecture, light and philosophy to which it belongs.
Walker says dance has changed enormously over the last decade—audiences are now used to responding individually to demanding works and making their own meanings. There are choreographers, including a number of Australians, who are not afraid, who can create huge works and intimate ones, and works like Morris’ version of The Nutcracker that disturbs as much as it entertains.
What Kim Walker likes most is the very idea that a ballet company like Forsythe’s is at the cutting edge of dance, and expects—and gets—a new, wider audience. It’s a visit, he says, that will also confirm just how good Australian dance is. It confirms the capacity for ballet and contemporary dance not to be insular, to give dance a place, for example, in opera (a word changed forever in the late twentieth century) as in Meryl Tankard’s integral participation in the Australian Opera’s Orpheus and Eurydice, and to re-frame the way we see and experience our bodies. Forsythe’s dancers seem to lead from the most unexpected parts of their bodies, inventing new spaces.
Virtuosity is distributed across these ensembles and not safe-guarded for a few stars, generating both a tribal feel in the big works and an acknowledgement of each performer in the collection of curious shapes, skills and ages of idiosyncratic dancers. They create performances for audiences to work at, choosing where to look (you can’t take it all in at once), who to follow, who to desire, and yet, suddenly, pulling you forwards into a powerful central image. You don’t have to like dance or ballet to face the exhilarating demands of Forsythe and Morris; theirs is performance at its most powerful. You’d be mad to miss seeing them. You’ll be a little less sane when you do.
Before Kim Waker heads out into the steam, reflecting on his experiences in Java with traditional dancers and the One Extra Dance Company (and the subsequent Dancing Demons in Sydney), he happily observes that contemporary dance is fuelled by both its latest rapport with Asia (Chrissie Parrott’s Satu Lingat at the Perth Festival being the most recent example) and its own phenomenal energy, a capacity to re-invent itself both as pure dance and as an intensely theatrical experience (lucky Perth also has the remarkable Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker's Rosas Danst Rosas and Achterland). Working in dance, opera and musicals and not feeling a stranger in any, the experiences slowly shape Kim Walker’s own next project as far away as he feels it might be. In the meantime he’s not going to miss out on Morris and Forsythe in Adelaide. We both wish we could afford tickets to Perth.
RealTime issue #1 June-July 1994 pg. 8
Keith Gallasch talks to Julie-Anne Long about workshopping with the internationally renowned french dancer-philosopher
“He has extremely intense, unblinking, blue eyes and an unbelievable memory.”
Julie-Anne Long (Associate Director of The One Extra Dance Company and long time collaborator with the Open City Performance Company) is describing Jean-Claude Gallotta at work with twenty-two choreographers from Australia, New Zealand and Japan.
“In the initial exercise he asked us to read each other’s bodies as maps, looking for detail to spark a memory. The next day he remembered exactly what we’d done. His feedback to us was individual, perceptive and detailed with no throw-away comments.”
I’d seen a piece of Gallotta’s shown on SBS’ Eat Carpet, a group of twelve or so overcoated dancers in a field on a chill, sunny morning stamping the churned earth, momentarily bird-like, horse-like, moving individually and then with a sudden collectivity without any musical prompting, just as suddenly struck, as if by a virus, falling into the earth. Like the best postmodern dance, here was everyday movement made strange by unapparent motives, possession, alternation between individual preoccupation and group forces. It was not surprising then to find that the likes of Long, Cheryl Stock, Chrissie Parrott, Leigh Warren, Sue Healy, Jane Pirani, Maggie Sietsma, Jim Hughes and Paige Gordon signed up to work for two weeks with Gallotta in Melbourne in January.
“His background is in the visual arts and he came to dance late. He’s a philosopher of dance in search of ‘degree zero’, encouraging us to pare down movements to an almost neutral state, free of any embellishment. Even the tiniest everyday gestures”—Long reaches for a cup in progressively simpler moves—“are overlayed by habits and personal style.
“In the mornings we were dancers learning a vocabulary for the afternoon workshops. This was a bit much, but like the rest of the process, people got into it because it was sustained. I liked the afternoons. Gallotta would outline a bizarre story and we’d each have time to choreograph and perform our solo or duo version of it. 1—You arrive in a malicious manner. (I was never quite sure if he was being translated correctly.) 2—You see a book. 3—You eat it. 4—You are in front of the fire curtain. 5—You touch your head to it. 6—The curtain goes up. 7—You enter the stage. 8—Use a phrase from the morning class vocabulary ‘as a memory’. We’d perform and he’d give his response, which, to me, added up to a dramaturgy of movement focused very much on timing and rhythm. You still had your own language of steps and movements but you had new ways of dealing with them.
“We’d absorb his astonishingly detailed comments and take them into our work on a new story the next day. In many ways it was about responding to and understanding rhythms internally. Gallotta’s focus on the interior is something not often offered dancers. I was very attracted to it. It was a good group experience and a great individual one.”
RealTime issue #1 June-July 1994 pg. 8
Norrie Neumark will morph (or at least she’ll talk about it). Allucquere Rosanne Stone will talk of desire, vampirism, memory and multiple entry from the standpoint of cultural and trans-human theory. Linda Dement wants your body bits, and Minski will take you on a mouse-sexy hyperware tech tour. Ready?
The day is February 26; the place: Elder Hall, Adelaide; the event: Future Languages, as curated by VNS Matrix, four cyber-feminists with attitude.
The members of VNS Matrix end Artists’ Week in the future: “from cyborgs to VR, life in the ‘developed’ world is increasingly mediated by technological devices. How will we experience ourselves and others in the future?” they ask. “Who will be in control?”
Future Languages, with the help of a host of international and Australian artists, will investigate the challenges of high technology culture. The first challenge of the day will no doubt be Simon Penney, beamed as a welcoming tele-presence live from his seat as the first Associate Professor in Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. Post-Penney, Future Languages starts talking.
Queenslander Glenda Nader is fascinated by the voices/languages of answering machines and other recorded messages as private/public, differently sexed, tele-presences. During Future Languages, she’ll discuss the techno-anatomical body as aesthetic model. Nader, an artist and writer, says she has a compulsion to seek out the points of rupture in the ‘informatics of domination’ (to quote Donna Harraway). This compulsion has taken the form of research into “how women can/are making themselves in cyberspace rather than see ourselves as we have been seen in the old media.”
One artist who will be remaking women literally, and inviting participation, is Linda Dement. Throughout the day she’ll be co-ordinating the workshop Cyberflesh Girl-monster in the tradition of Mary Shelley, Identikit and Helene Cixous. Dement asks that you “donate your bits—whatever you can scan in will be what she is made of.”
The workshop will be an opportunity for women to put their own flesh and thoughts into cyberspace as a bodily presence, using languages of gesture, skin, muscle, fantasy, flesh and words. Participants will be able to take the bodies of data away on floppy disc for further manipulations.
Dement says that the workshop is to be a women’s representation in the new techno realms: something other than Macplaymate, Virtual Valerie, calendar girl screen-savers and online porn.
Maria Fernandez will discuss technology in the colonial and post-colonial cultural inflection. Sally Prior, an Australian computer artist, will explore the possibilities of interactive multimedia through an artwork set in a Tunisian context and Ken Wark will talk about computer games in techno-speak.
Sadie Plant from the UK will deliver a paper titled “Cybernetic Hookers: Women, drugs and intelligent machines.” From Western Australia, Zoe Sofoulis is on the same panel, titled Cyborg Surgery, and will present a text dealing with women artists and technology, cars and prosthetics.
Ian Howard, an artist and academic from Queensland, has for more than 20 years concentrated on an investigation of the relationship between military and civilian populations. For Future Languages he poses the question, “Wailing over spilt milk: the legacy of the military century, what might have been.”
At the end of the day, we may be in a better position to know what will be.
RealTime issue #1 June-July 1994 pg. 11
The growth industry of the 90s is not multimedia, cyberspace or virtual reality. The growth industry of the 90s is hype about multimedia, cyberspace and virtuality reality. Apart from the video games industry, which took off like a rocket, there are more sound bites and press releases about all this stuff than anything else. Still and all, it’s fun hype. Reading all the hype might not tell you about much, besides the future of hype, but hype may very well be the future of culture.
But let’s turn the hype mode off for a minute and take a look at this new media hype industry itself. New media hype spawned two glossy magazines, which are now infesting the newsagents: Mondo 2000 and WIRED. Both are from San Francisco and combine that city’s liberal intellectual confidence with Silicon Valley info-capital. Being a last, late spin-off from the military industrial complex, new media hype is an odd blend of state-subsidised knowledge-capital and free wheeling small business hucksterism.
Both these magazines are aimed at people who want to scramble to the top of the new middle class of the emergent information economy. Mondo has fringe culture, neo-hippy pretensions, but is not that different from WIRED, which is pretty tight with the heavy industry types. If you want to know who’s most heavily into self-promotion in the info-celeb stakes, read Mondo. If you want to know who’s hawking this week’s hot product data, read WIRED. Or if you’re a serious, aspiring cyberpunk, read both. They may be mostly hype, but they are also guides to the expanded production of hype, which is precisely what the new information economy is all about.
The main thing one can observe about the expanded production of hype is that there are three kinds of info-hacking that cut it in the hype economy. One is hardware hacking—actually having technical skills. This is now pretty much essential. Like the old days of the art academies, you have to be down with some kind of technique. Modernist arm waving is passé. There’s no room any more for amateurs.
Of course, you can specialise in data-hacking. If you can surf the endless wave of raw data pumping out into the info-sphere every nanosecond, there’s a place for you. This is not so much a skill in finding information. Any fool can do that now—the stuff is everywhere. The skill is rather in not getting bogged down in yesterday’s news, in eliminating the inessentials. It is not so much about finding data other people can’t hack, as recognising the significance of something else, right in front of everyone’s nose, that everyone else has ignored. This process even has its own terminology: you can grep, grok or zen information: to ‘grep’ is to recognise patterns; to ‘grok’ is to drink it all in and distil the contours; to ‘zen’ is a far more elusive form of abduction for really hardcore data hackers. These are things they don’t teach you in school.
Then there’s a third option: style-hacking. Every cool info-hacker has her or his limitation, and that limitation is style. But somebody has to form the styles—the look, the package and the concept—for everyone else to wrap their bodgie bundle of skills or good in. So if you know nothing of Unix and can’t find a relevant piece of data in three minutes if your life depends on it, try style- hacking. Mondo 2000 is basically a style-hack mag. WIRED is data-hack. Hardware-hackers pretend not to read either.
Needless to say, all this is somewhat under-developed in Australia, but that will change. The publishers of Rolling Stone can see which way to wind is blowing, and have floated Hyper. It’s a video games magazine with aspirations to something grander—aspirations as yet unfulfilled, but worth keeping an eye on.
The video game culture covered by Hyper matters, because Nintendo and Sega are actually making new media happen. Like much new media, it starts as rudimentary trash aimed at the bottom end of the market. That’s how cinema started. Sega is raising a generation of teenagers acculturated to the post-broadcast age. Whatever form culture takes in the future, this is the audience it will have to understand.
Up the other end of the scale, check out the ‘Art & Cyberculture’ special issue of Media Information Australia. It’s a good collection of articles by and for people trying to put the new hardware tools to creative use. New media are not going to go away. The clumsy goggle and gloves ‘virtual reality’ is neither virtual nor realistic and will probably disappear into the museums alongside the Vita-phone and 3-D movies. Yet ever more abstract, flexible, accessible media will continue to arrive on our doorsteps, whether we like it or not. Whoops, looks like the hype mode is back on again…
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RealTime issue #1 June-July 1994 pg. 22
