Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

April 1996

At edges such as death (illness, vulnerability, humiliation), one can cross a state from life as we know it to what we don’t know. The crossing itself can feel like dying…

Adelaide Festival, 1996. Enter Meg Stuart, who knows about dying: her dance pieces are a long dangling that won’t break. Held within a grid, tailed, snuffled, prodded, faltering, focussed on restriction… Hamstrung, bald, she dances pockets of need, building nothing.

Enter The Burley Griffins, who suffer for their dream of Canberra as they try to construct a city by channelling into the overworld.

Enter Jenny Kemp’s black-sequinned woman who slips in a cocktail bar and di(v)es into her underworld.

And then, Enter Achilles: a spectacular DV8 dance piece by Lloyd Newson about the “labyrinth of male rituals”, set in the ideal location for head (butting), ear (holding), shoulder (shoving), chest (puffing), bellies (sleeking), thighs (crunching, mocking, smooching), knees (jiving), ankles (flicking), soles (crushing). A pub, of course: the terrority of collusion in industry, of post down-the-mine camaraderie. But where’s the heel?

The Greek Achilles could eat a haired horse without indigestion—invulnerable, apart from his heel, where his mother, dipping him in the great river Styx for protection, had to hold him. This is a story of loyalty and betrayal, of a man coming to the revenge of his mate—yet it is still a story of war and action within war. The violable point, which connects him with his mother, is the warrior’s undoing but is also the very sign of his humanity and ungodliness.

Enter Achilles is a sculpted work of incredible and ferocious physical skill. It also exemplifies every reason you might have ever stayed away from the pub. Vomit, brawn, competitiveness, the demeaning of women, hyperbolic Superman fantasies—and just plain showing off. These guys are heroes with great asses, as much as objects of repulsion. We have to watch from the sides of the football field, and cheer on.

The dancers execute everything so well, from punch-ups to push-ups, from piss-ups and pissing in pints to a red-hot rope act and fucking an orgasm-painted plastic doll until the doll is slaughtered and the men shed crocodile tears.

Where is the dealing with failure, the going through failure to find the unknown on the other side?

For all its extraordinary physical skill and truthful observation of certain male rituals, this piece and its world of men remains safe. The audience loves it. “Just like real life,” they say, when the finale is over and they begin their personal replays.

Have they turned, or only mirrored the heel? Nothing is displaced in the realm. Superman’s moments are affectionately satirised but nonetheless survive as a means of protecting male culture from being pierced. Split-stage episodes [yobs on a building-site rig highstage whilst a man fucks a rubber dolly lowstage; pub brawlies soccerrooing lowstage synchronised with Superman spinning a jig highstage] are theatrically effective, but the split does not go deep enough: the staging exemplifies how far men will go to cope and protect each other from being pierced, and changing something of what shows itself to the world.

So many pieces in this Festival reflect a masculine and/or mechanical re-production of cultures that thrive on a given order and don’t want to change. Facade Firm, by Molecular Theatre, is a bizarre and relentless piece about Japanese cultural conformism, with men in suits and women pretending to be men in suits re-arranging view-frames, by order of The Firm. In a Kafkaesque way, The Firm is both an incorporation, and a prescription for behaviour, of what above all costs must be maintained.

The Maly Theatre of St Petersburg demonstrates in Claustrophobia how closely bound are autocracy/oligarchy, conformity and mysogyny across Russian history. It is a madhouse of meals becoming a murder, music leaping through windows. Tubas examine a dead body which begins to sing. Does it matter to be alive? Does it matter that I ever had a soul? I hear your heartbeat march through the curl of a marching band. Keep marching…

This is brutal entrapment. Ruched curtains ascend and descend on something that has always been. Men magically sliding up walls with desire; a rake grows from watering, but love itself does not grow. There is only either Pavlova, Pushkin, or vodka [fights over, after, or between all three].

Maly’s physical work is excellent: all the great skills of Russian method and madness (athleticism, stylistic power that captures the music and undertows of language) are here. This is music-theatre, dance-theatre, theatre-theatre where boundaries and borders, truth and lies become the same dance. But where are the attempts to show how things might be otherwise? Maly is a young company, Russia’s avant-garde: it is bleak of them not to explore the hope for another possible world.

Whilst Claustrophobia shows a pointed understanding of entrapment, Hildegarde of Melbourne (not Bingen) replicates it unwittingly . In Inje, a gaggle of village girls splash and lust and practice hysteria whilst a single male figure holds their attentions to ransom with knife cuts, slashes, whips and bribes. Though inviting us to partake of a sensory world of water, mud, blood, of clogged feet dancing, arguing where they are going, who do they belong to? The piece’s relentless tempo and shrill pickings of language are drowned by overactivity and uncertain focus, leaving the “hero” a thug and his women so ground into their cultural roles that their habits, actions, responses remain pre-ordained.

The difference with Jenny Kemp’s work for example is that the work is crafted with a respect for stillness and the curl and pungency of words, and, whilst remaining within a heterosexually preclusive definition of female-as-object of the gaze, The Black Sequin Dress yet struggles with this and attempts to give voice to the falterings of doubt amidst the quotidian struggle to continue. The ways men miss the point here are poignant, sympathetic, but very clear.

A different eye is exercised in The Ethereal Eye, a multi-levelled collaboration which aims at dancing and sounding an aetheric vision whilst giving strange cues on the physical plane. The Burley Griffins’ struggle is itself remote and removed (as unfortunately are the musical instruments!), and the dancers’ bodies aloof. This is intentional; yet, whilst looking for aether’s “moving and rising, forming, changing”, one also sees a certain uniform erectness of neck and pointing of arms which perhaps impedes the energy flow. I enjoy moments when Byron Perry’s body interrogates the dance, instinctively bringing a sudden muscle into a turn, a whipping fraction of speed through arm or knee. There is also a crucial central segment where one by one the dancers, each describe a circle until another dancer joins, as if shared inspiration multiplies and divides and releases another and another shape that cuts and queries the first. Here lie the possibilities of meeting, of construction (architecture is, after all, not just an idea) both within the performance itself and in relation to its subject.

The idea—as stated in the program—of a focus on spatial rather than political or biographical plane worries me. As Meg Stuart realises, space is political—although certainly it would not appear to be so to Batsheva Dance Company’s artistic director Ohad Nahin, whose glib forum statement—immediately dismissed by himself as a joke, a fabrication—about saving his autistic brother by dancing for him as a child, shows words well-oiled, like his dance, but dubious. Within a few days, the structure, shape and timbre of his Mabul are lost to me beyond the starring hamster and a few smooth turns.

Time and space are marked in different ways by all these works: punctured and lamented in, bogged and bugled in, slipped into and pondered in, oiled and glossed through, spun over and around.

So many maps of so many routes…the body’s presence often missing. Theatre and dance’s bodies ask difficult questions of the relationships between past and contemporary, cultural and emotional histories which are difficult to leave aside in the complex acts of watching. What enters? What exits? What has been the space between?

DV8, Enter Achilles (U.K.); Jenny Kemp, The Black Sequin Dress (Australia); The Maly Theatre of St. Petersburg, Claustrophobia (Russia); Molecular Theatre, Facade Firm (Japan); Ethereal Eye (Australia); Batsheva Dance Company’s Mabul (Israel); Company Hildegarde, Inje (Australia/Bulgaria); Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods, No-One Is Watching (U.S.).

RealTime issue #12 April-May 1996 pg. 6

Batsheva Company, Mabul

In Adfest-foyer-euphoria mode, one struggles with such educated commentary as “God, did you actually like that? I had real problems there”. In the matter of likes and dislikes, it’s unclear whether pleasure is derived from art or society, but buffeted by the social undertow, it occurred to me that it’s the act of satisfying this urgent need to express an opinion which first shapes our perception and the consequent credibility of a work. All of which says a lot about the importance of foyer culture, and the meaning of lots of artists meeting to see who holds sway. It was delightful to find a confusing and properly post-modern diversity of responses in many theatre foyers.

There were evident themes: prying into the cracks of existence, dragging open old wounds, exposing humanity’s sometimes fragile and secret interiors. We get to see hideous, possessed, sad, ugly, violent, obsessive things. If sometimes the violence and obsession is merely cultivated and glamorised, expressing an evolving international aesthetic empty of anything except a formal identification with itself, there are also moments of rich substance.

In Batsheva Dance Company’s Mabul, I was grateful for its wide aesthetic spaces. There was no requirement to submit to the ubiquitous glamour of black frocks and Docs encapsulating the entire aesthetic basis of the work. These apparently negative virtues invited a different awareness; a kind of grainy textured relationship between the performers surfaced. The silence of the dancers’ boots on the floor and the first murmurings of a solo voice engendered a kind of breathless waiting. Vocal material seemed chosen for its particular sexless intensity, the purity, restraint and passion of a single counter-tenor line. But the work was also full of contrasts and counterpoint: a motif of courtly containment and restraint out of which erupted the shrieking protests of women; the dancers’ slightly stilted, overly-placed, hyper-extended gestures together with a different dissolute movement energy; a feeling of calm contrasted with vocal and corporeal dishevelment. It had a raw, complex and articulate flavour.

I can’t forget the famous hamster duet, where the rolling topography of the dancer’s body provides dangerously shifting surfaces for a tiny clinging animal; a densely woven trio, the dancers barely break contact; the counter-tenor who continues to dance while we feel his distorted song, a harsh fight of diaphragm and throat for air, close to uncontrollable sobbing; the moving Nisi Dominus where dancers form a plaintive cantus firmus for the soloist’s exhaustingly percussive rhythmic body slapping.

Good ideas occasionally fall short of being persuasive. One such is Hilton 1109 by Catalan dancer Angels Margarit, who invited a very select audience of ten at a time into her hotel room to watch what I interpreted as the confined ennui of a dancer on tour. A familiar flotsam collects on the floor: postcards, aspirin, maps, empty glasses, biros, the eternal debris rising to the surface of the lives of itinerant performers, confined, waiting and preparing, a condition as much mental as it is physical. Her movement was too contained in place and in time, going over and over itself, drawn out of, but also recreating, that very experience. I wondered how a dancer could ignore the messages in the loaded and codified vocabulary. Even in that intimate setting she became a character rather than herself, as if the language she used protected her from the intimate scrutiny she had invited.

The Slovenian ensemble Betontanc’s second program, Every Word a Gold Coin’s Worth seemed anachronistic, made me ask questions about Slovenia to find out just what psychic space this stuff comes from. The work capitalises heavily, if unintentionally, on its subtext: six dancers ingenuously young, healthy, athletic and alluringly decked out in short red frocks, boots, and jeans for the boys, revealing a narrow identification and exploration of physicality. If the work springs from heartfelt awareness of violent social and political upheaval, an Australian vantage sees only story-board brutality in the several rape scenes, people treated as commodities, the struggle to survive in encroaching confinement, an overly dramatised woman-as-victim interpretation of childbirth. Meanwhile, the set, a high metal wall, is clung to, clambered over, leaned against, pounded on, played around, and used with ingenuity as a backdrop to all the action. Scene changes dissolved one into another with hardly a blink. But moving ‘as if’, the dancers did not seem concerned with developing richer meaning in their work, but with reducing human complexity to a level adequately served by soap opera.

Meg Stuart (via New Orleans, New York and continental Europe), with Damaged Goods’ produced a meticulously developed study of internal emotional conflict with No One is Watching, touching on the allure of what is concealed in the depths of people, their relationships, and their secret lives. An old fat woman sits immobile on a chair as the audience enters. We see her back and the slack hanging folds of flesh. The audience chats over the top of this, and indeed, no-one watched except in brief exploratory glances waiting for another more palatable story to begin. A couple entered. Rather than having a sense of duet, it was like seeing one flailing organism, sustaining hideous internal rifts and injuries in an intense fight with itself. People started watching then.

Ingenuousness, loss of self, brutality and a fight for recognition were played out with an emotional texture of dense, immutable obsession. It is this texture which became the focus, as if human interaction consisted of chaotic undirected eruptions of desire, and taking the line of least resistance, no holds barred, we bind with a suffocating struggle to the nearest human object.

With Enter Archilles Lloyd Newson and DV8 were engaged in just as concentrated a line of investigation, here the not-so-secret filth in the souls of men, and ‘men’ in this case were a culturally fashioned gender, assuaging their fear of ‘female’ characteristics like affection, loyalty, love and softness appearing in themselves and others, with violent abuse. The work spoke (yet again, but with pathos) of the need to become human first, ‘men’ second. While the theme might be overstated with such a non-negotiable view of contemporary male consciousness, there was serious entertainment value in watching the performers construct their gross stereotypes with immaculate humour, profound skill, attention to detail and riveting style. Everyone knew these blokes although, genuinely, I had to make an effort to remember the last time I’d met one.

But the complex construction of Enter Archilles sustained attention with the physical eloquence of the dancers’ actions and interactions, the grand familiarity of the set as bar-room/dance floor/playground/proving-ground, and the strategic appearance of child-like fantasy images. In the night-club of our minds, a pop star hero sings To Dream the Impossible Dream and a man struggles to reach a mountain-top. It has a Dennis Potter-like surreal humour. Its absurdity is surprisingly touching.

The venue for Meryl Tankard’s Rasa created its own strange ambience. The Bullring seemed windy and deserted at first, an isolated collection of earth-floored, dilapidated sheds. But the air under cover gradually thickened with the heavy perfume of smoking incense placed around the stage’s perimeter and later the dust kicked up from the floor by the dancers deposited itself in a gritty film over the entire audience.

Tankard’s treatment of the Indian Rasas risked accusations of facile dabbling in exotica, for this western interpretation may well have remained superficial without the guiding artistry of guest performer, Padma Menon. If Tankard’s dancers showed great affinity for the physical renderings of the Kama Sutra, more subtle emotional expression remained lost to them. Only in the last few minutes, almost as an afterthought, we glimpsed an authentic moment in the dancers’ philosophical encounter with this strange tradition. They all sat facing Padma, their teacher, imitating—as children in class might—her subtle gestures, finely graded shifts of aspect and attitude, and the small flickers of lips, eyelids and fingers.

–

Batsheva Dance Company, Mabul; Angels Margarit, Hilton 1109; Betontac, Every Word a Gold Coin’s Worth; Meg Stuart and Damaged Goods, No One is Watching; DV8, Enter Achilles; Meryl Tankard’s Australian Dance Theatre, Rasa.

RealTime issue #12 April-May 1996 pg. 12

Betontanc

Know Your Enemy is performed within a strict confined space, a line really, with little depth. Mostly it occurs vertically, as if the body must press itself upwards not outwards, as if the longing that brought the characters over the wall, to this place, has instilled a muscular and mental habit that is now relentless. Here, where something else (better) was imagined (greener grass perhaps), they are caught again in the dreams of living that subsume the very (every) moment. And so, what lives is an energy, as waste, desirous, and deadly. Deadly, in body and soul.

Three women and four men, four rooms (one that isn’t quite recognised by the others, that holds their fears even), a few pieces of furniture, lights, and a wall. And a picture on the wall. The image of before or after. Who knows. Either way, it’s central, and already redundant.

The performers move/dance in a solid fluid way, which betrays a kind of fine timing. They mostly climb up the wall, over and through struts, and especially on and around each other (each person a wall too). They literally climb-the-wall, in the sense of a creeping, on-off, madness. Madness which seems reasonable, which weaves a taut thread across beings, binding them together, and snapping them apart. It’s this thread that is the ‘enemy’. As the performance is ‘about’ nothing. A nothing which pulses between lethargy and athleticism. (The Theorist says: “The oscillation of which we have just spoken is not an oscillation among others, an oscillation between two poles. It oscillates between two types of oscillation …”) A strange economy of excess. An exhibition of the convoluted body, as it follows/forms thought’s need to exorcise ghosts and shadows, and to make itself known.

Time, waiting, is filled-in with ‘love’. The antics of courtship and seduction are displayed ritually, each move accented, defined. A competition, almost, of strength and resilience.

The music is melancholic, the choreography sits inside this mood, but actively, like a slow implosion. Know Your Enemy begins with a particular, romantic image, high, a couple quietly dancing, in the light, and ends with it. And between, the sadness of ‘true’ love and ‘lost’ love.

The tight limited/limiting overall style of this work, and its negotiation of flat planes which the body must press/spread against and climb, like beetles, clumsy yet liquid, harsh yet tender, is claustrophobic. Oppression comes from the back and front rather than from above.

This is an operatic struggle upon one word say, or a tiny mark, or a false hope. And it might be just a single night. A sliver of entangled gestures, a remembrance of deliberate and necessary exhaustion/expiation.

Slovenian dance company Betontanc’s Know Your Enemy, Scott Theatre, Adelaide Festival

RealTime issue #12 April-May 1996 pg. 14

Immediately, one’s own body is called by the sound of the dancers in the dark taking their places. Such a small, ordinary, and necessary thing. But this is to be the entire ‘work’, this internal heat, to be the body for another, for oneself. To be another body for me, say. To watch, and watch as it acts alone, always, even when together, being duo. To watch No longer ready made is to watch an unfolding that is, no matter how intense (and wanted) the movement, is unfolding that goes on, relentlessly, as unfolding, not revelation. The physicality of unfolding though and its persistence in the body as a way, a method, is unbearably wishful, desirous, devastating. That is, the body wants to know something, wants to know how to go on, renew itself. Without end.

A man stands alone in a square of light, his head whipping violently side to side. Then his whole body shivering. As if convulsed, repulsed by a memory, a memory cutting loose perhaps, something I can’t know. The other three dancers wait in the background, two women and a man. The single interfering logic, a logic in flux, is ‘unreadyness’, this is a logic of detail. The detail that can never be ‘ready made’, and is never ‘no longer’, but always present. That’s the trouble, that’s the image in the body, of a stillness that creeps out of the pores.

There are moments of extreme passion in this work, of the complete and known separateness of beings, as creatures. As when a couple battle each other. The man, his hands held behind his back, pushes and kicks, and blocks every move the woman makes, yet she will not succumb. The moves are precise. Each body knows just what the other will do, emotionally, I mean. It’s the exhaustion of the body one hears. Then she’s alone, with his coat on, going through the pockets transferring debris from one to the other, finding nothing much. But more desperate for that, emptying ‘his’ life onto the stage. Nothing at all soon, just her, with her clothes. What to do with a coat. How to be watched, to be in the presence of an ‘audience’, with ‘nothing’. And to gradually expose oneself, until overexposed, until as awkward as a coat. Until just a thing to hang other things on.

No longer ready made is shaped by details, some so small and funny they are almost imperceptible. Sometimes so large it takes a while to see them. It’s this attention to detail that keeps one watching, as ‘work’ happens everywhere at once (like on the street). In each life, details congregate, and wait, and return. In the end, one man walks slowly from the back of the stage to the front, over the debris, while the others throw themselves around him (in unison), he doesn’t see them, they don’t see him. Then, with nowhere to go, he falls into the arms of another man, who carries him for some time, in different ways. This is a moving segment, bleak and intimate. Soon he is alone again, shaking and shivering. He is his body. A space.

Somewhere here I’ve lost the sequence, I’m not sure if this is the last image, or this: the two men, each gently scratching on a ‘door’, a surface (the set is minimal, pragmatic and evocative). No urgency, but sound, the sound of a small part of the body (the finger nails) against a border, a kind of recovery, a starting point. And one’s body is called—is remembered again—by the sound of bodies in ‘places’ unfolding.

No longer ready made, Meg Stuart/ Damaged Goods; dancers: Florence Augendre, David Hernandez, Benoit Lachambre, Meg Stuart, The Space, Adelaide Festival.

RealTime issue #12 April-May 1996 pg. 14

There are several days after a grand mal seizure in which you remain within the terrifying aura of the convulsion. During this period it is impossible to distinguish between the inner world emanating from your traumatised temporal lobes and the outer world, from which you can feel an overwhelming energy of aggression and anarchy. I have had to stop driving a car three days after a fit because it is filled with a mixture of shouts I cannot quite decipher and an unbearably loud low-pitched hum. I look out the window and the actions not only of people but of traffic seem fragmented and lacking the comfort of cause and effect.

Meg Stuart and Damaged Goods’ No-One Is Watching takes place in such an epileptic world. The psyche, the society, the civilisation has been seized and is convulsing. Attempts are made by one or occasionally two of the figures within to connect with another, to express an emotion which has something to do with tenderness. Unfortunately, at the time, the intended receiver is not watching, possessed by a force that has little to do with love.

I came to No-One Is Watching with Vertov’s film Man With A Camera and Pierre Henry’s extraordinary musique concrete accompaniment fresh in mind. Like Stuart, Vertov fragmented his world—in his case, in camera and in editing. There feels (and almost is) a century difference between them, however. Vertov’s fragmentation was his way of capturing the sheer energy of the early Soviet state. Stuart’s fragmentation is the condition of a civilisation lying twitching on what Heiner Muller has called “these despoiled shores”. Similarly, Vincent Malstaf’s composition for No-One Is Watching is Pierre Henry forty years down the track—electronic, sampling, looping, nothing ever quite starting, nothing ever quite finishing, nothing distinct, epileptic.

This is what Jenny Kemp described in a forum as the landscape of the psyche. Bleak in its depiction, extraordinary to watch. The tiniest everyday gestures repeated reveal here not the inner resonances of Kemp’s work but become the obsessive ingredients of a diseased state that gradually and always inevitably spreads throughout the entire group. And there is an inexorability to the rhythm. If the group was ever able to find some sense of physical unity (and this was always in pain or obsession and usually without any individual recognising the others) there was always one individual who broke the pattern, who became preoccupied with another state of being. This is nothing new in movement choreography. But here the power lay in the fact that the very actions that the individual was setting up in contradistinction to the group so often became the seeds for the next wave of disease that spread throughout. There is it seems no way out and the entrapment here lies in the very form of group dance structure itself.

The dance for me was at its most powerful either in the fragments of states of being when no complete image was achieved or in the moments of suspension of action when the stage was filled with the memory of past events, or with the threat of what was to come—most of the company standing, sitting or lying, witnessing in the movement of one of them the seeds of their destruction. It was least interesting when dance became representational and traded off the audience’s empathy with what was being represented. It is always hard to watch madness being acted.

This is not dance as we used to know it. It is cruder, less abstract and more directly metaphoric than that. More power to it.

Scene One. Exterior/Day. Canberra skies. 3D Cinema Sequence Five airforce jets. Formation manoeuvres. Inscribing the relentlessly grey skies of the nation’s pre-election capital with the expensively red blaze of technology linked with realtime earsplit audio. Multi-military-media.

Scene Two. Interior/Day. Canberra School of Art. Talking Heads Five artists. Computers, VCR, slides. Tattoos and viscera and the intolerable, elective physiognomies, mid-west bowling alley slide to homeless pages on the web, scanning the global telephone book of consciousness, research art, the owning of culture. Five different takes on the phenomenon of ‘multimedia’.

Hyperlink #5 Wallpaper graphics A forum on Artists and Interactive Multimedia organised by the Australian Network for Art and Technology as an adjunct to its National Summer School. A chance for the 14 students to connect their recently acquired practical skills in interactive mm to current cultural and intellectual debates. An opportunity for other artists, artsworkers and IT types to hear five exceptional creative innovators reveal the how and why wonder of their personal connexions to mm.

Hyperlink #7 The forum. Highly non-interactive. The form bearing the weight of 2000 years of the oratorial tradition. Audience required to be passive, quiet, still, patient. To still the present in order to contemplate the future. And yet there was something compelling about the Bodies with Organs, the experience of fleshmeet however formal, the tensions arising from artists with different cultural agendas, different philosophical bases.

Hyperlink #17 Visceral horizontal wipe. Linda Dement guides us through her dark interactive terrains of Typhoid Mary, CyberfleshGirlMonster and In My Gash, a long term project of a virtual space inside a wound. This artist exercises a fascistic control of technology to create a space where the unbearable can be made bearable. Melding flesh not deemed conventionally pretty to objects and organisms which are sharp, dangerous, perversely beautiful, malevolent, Dement slips through the screen, institutionalising herself, prescribing art as therapy . Hers is a highly blasphemous take on multimedia, defying the legislators who would stamp the future technologies with classifications cloned from The Difference Engine.

Hyperlink #24 Jump cut 3D anim. Enter the software artist, the nocturnal self-governing Aberrant Intelligence system whose various projects may be motivated by the desire to create a visual equivalent of music or an interest in seeing how scientific theories of earlier ages bumpmap onto our millennium-fevered minds. Jon Tonkin’s infinite falling squares streammorphed seamlessly into his interactive Elective Physiognomies. Now a series of pseudo gene portraits, now a gang of pseudo mug shots, challenging the player to contribute character assessments based on the purest of subjective responses to the faces . Then the tricky bit, the smartware adding each player’s ratings to the overall score for each mug on each test, spitting statistical updates politely. An oblique collision of science and art, quietly bent.

Hyperlink #49 http://bowlingalley.walkerart.org Shu Lea Cheang takes the audience on a comedic tour of some of the cyberfringe zones, revealing her current project of digitalising herself. This nomad in spiralspace appears more interested in homeless pages and collaborations with artists and public to explore notions of access, power and infernal desire than pressing CD ROMs to make a million. From coin-operated video installations to her Eco-cybernoia feature film Fresh Kill, from the sophisticated filth of net-grown multi-authored texts triggered by live bowling alley punters to her gender-fuck and justice web project, Cheang constructs contexts for individuals to create their own adventures from elegantly dismembered narratives.

Hyperlink #56 Lyn Tune, digital pioneer, asks “how do we own culture?” She distinguishes between what she terms ‘research art’ and art that feeds into the commercial spheres of activity. Describing mm, Tune’s take is that in a small box an environment is created and people are put there. Her take on mm is also passionate, and pragmatic.

Transition fade to end cinema sequence. It may be more about alchemy and serendipity, than it is about data rates and platform reversioning.

The artist or interface designer who can create an intuitive front end evoking the economic elegance of a haiku to a multi-sensory digitally mediated experience becomes a cultural alchemist, transforming silicon into thought.

Anyone who uses on-line services as part of their daily work routine will understand the recurring tension between the value of patience and the lust for speed. Running a high performance modem with a late model computer is no guarantee that travelling the infobahn will be a smooth, economical and productive experience. More like a stop-start traffic jam than a freeway cruise, the negotiation of virtual space can be frustrating, even infuriating, but there’s the salt in the wound of commercial on-line rates to be endured as well. Touring the web for a day can cost almost as much as taking a guided tour of Sydney in a taxi. At this stage in its development the net, and particularly the web, is a place for people with money (presumably through some kind of employer subsidy in most cases), time, determination and patience and that is likely to be the case for some time to come as the technology struggles to keep pace with the needs and expectations of consumers. For although both Optus and Telstra are currently installing hybrid fibre-coax cabling in areas selected for pay TV delivery it is unlikely that the entire continent will be wired—either via cable or digital satellite delivery systems—before the end of the century.

Once the broadband infrastructure is in place, however, the nation will be overlayed with a sophisticated telecommunications grid which will redefine the nature of space, place, community and identity. William J. Mitchell, for example, in his book City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn (1995) proposes a shift in the function of architecture and urban design to meet the needs of the information age:

In a world of ubiquitous computation and telecommunication, electronically augmented bodies, postinfobahn architecture, and big-time bit business, the very idea of a city is challenged and must eventually be reconceived. Computer networks become as fundamental to urban life as street systems. Memory and screen space become valuable, sought-after real estate. Much of the economic, social, political, and cultural action shifts into cyberspace.

Mitchell, Australian-born, is Professor of Architecture and Media Arts and Sciences and Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Like his colleague, MIT Director Nicholas Negroponte, Mitchell writes in short, sharp grabs which link the historical with the futuristic. He sees architecture as needing to redefine itself as a discipline capable of embracing the reconfigured nature of space, place and time which result from changes in communications technology and which compel society and individuals to negotiate the uncertainties presented by the electronic frontier. In cyberspace, Mitchell argues, the conventional relationship between community and territory is displaced. The notion of a “body of people living in one place, district, or country” becomes a geographically and culturally disparate group inhabiting the “soft city” of common interest defined by access to the virtual space comprised of computer code, software deployment and electronic connectivity.

Although the ‘information superhighway’ metaphor is already rather tired it is useful in considering some of the political implications of scenarios such as those presented by Mitchell, because of the curious relationship between transport and communications which Marcos Novak alludes to in his essay “Transmitting Architecture” in the on-line journal C-Theory.

The history of invention alternates between advances of transport and advances of communication, that is to say from transmitting the subject to transmitting the sign and presence of the subject, establishing a symbiosis of vehicles and media that leads from antiquity all the way to the present.

Just as the promotion of the convenience and status of individual ownership of automobiles belied the consequences for the nature and use of public space, the primacy of a fossil global economy and negative environmental outcomes, so too is the information age being characterised by a muteness in respect to the true value and potential dangers of the communications revolution. The construction of a virtual nation state existing within a corporatised, global superstructure is masked by the lure of by-products like cable television and net surfing. The inevitability and inherent goodness of change is promulgated by the individuals and corporations who have most to benefit from seeing it implemented and there is far too little critical discourse in the public sphere.

It is ironic that the purchase of Telstra as a complete entity is beyond the means of any single Australian owned corporation but within the capacity of the national superannuation fund. In other words, the country’s most valuable, single asset, currently in public ownership, is able, theoretically, to be purchased with the combined savings of the populace. This would appear to be an indication of a relatively healthy economy and society which is why the proposed partial sale of Telstra presents a real dilemma for the nation. There can be little doubt that if the partial sale did go ahead it would be a matter of time before the entire asset was divested of public ownership to pass into the hands of global, corporate interests. Given the compelling arguments of William J. Mitchell and many others assuring that the future is digital, the Australian people need to consider very carefully the degree of political, cultural and economic autonomy which is at stake in the proposed sale of Telstra.

The decision by the Coalition to link the sale with its environmental policy was a cunning political calculation. The launch of the policy was unanimously endorsed by green lobby groups who then, realising the implications of the Telstra link, withdrew their support and made it conditional on the removal of the link. The policy itself, however, remained a winner despite the notable sticking point over uranium policy. The Democrats and Greens in the Senate, although quite rightly standing their ground in the interests of their constituents, may be under considerable moral pressure when comes the time for the big decision.

The Coalition government will be able to level a compelling argument that the minor parties are being dishonest and hypocritical in preventing the delivery of a widely endorsed environmental package by their intransigence on the Telstra question. This could be the midpoint between a rock and a hard place for the minor parties and may result in a double dissolution. If so, the minor parties could be regarded by the electorate as obstructionist and could suffer irreparable damage at the ballot box resulting in a further consolidation of the Coalition’s position. No doubt the Labour Party’s awareness of this will determine their Senate vote on Telstra and could result in a political compromise on their part in which, despite their avowed opposition to the sale, they vote with the Coalition to avoid the long term consequences of a double dissolution.

The cultural implications of the proposed sale need to be carefully considered. The fledgling multimedia industry, stimulated by Keating through the Creative Nation initiatives which have been largely endorsed by the Coalition, is confronted with the kinds of difficulties arising from the imperatives of the global marketplace. In respect of the production of multimedia titles, of which CD ROM is the current delivery system priority, the Australian Multimedia Enterprise (AME) has made it clear that it will only invest in titles with potential on the international market. For this we can read the North American market, meaning that creative material needs to be fashioned first and foremost to the tastes of that constituency at the expense of local cultural and social values. The domestic market then becomes a secondary consideration resulting in a duplication of the case with television in which American product has dominance in the distribution channels despite a clear viewer preference for local product.

Rupert Murdoch would be the first to admit that control of the means of delivery means control of the market and if we, as a nation, surrender that control by selling Telstra at this critical juncture in our history, then we may be signing away the remaining vestiges of our cultural autonomy. As the virtual nation is superimposed on the existing material environment and as “soft cities” become the cyberspace alternatives to transport grids and community space we need to know that whoever owns the ‘streets’ of the future has the best interests of the country and its people at heart. The public ownership of Telstra stands as an important national symbol signifying the resolve of our nation to maintain sovereignty over its culture as we enter the new millennium. The challenge for the Coalition government lies in convincing the electorate that the sale of Telstra is, in the long run, in the public interest and not simply an ideologically driven expediency.

The morning after. After the election. After the Mardi Gras. The news is hang-over stuff. We’re all a bit stupefied, sitting there in the half dark in the Domain Theatre of the Art Gallery of NSW. A constituency, for sure, but of what? The Labor party, having reinvented itself as the Liberal party has lost out to the Liberal party masquerading as the Labor party reinvented as the Liberal party. It’s a day for getting caught in ambiguities: for mixed signals, mediated voices, spluttering, and a kind of deadpan processed gaiety.

On a platform in the auditorium Stevie Wishart lightly torments a violin to get out of it a set of choked bow strokes, spasms and squeals; Amanda Stewart, whose instrument is a mouth, creates accompanying emissions in the form of pops and prolonged limpet kisses. Result is a noise like a radio dial moving across a short wave band, occasionally finding a snatch of voice or music. Barbara Campbell comes in as the voice of Tokyo Rose, presenter of Zero Hour on Radio Tokyo as broadcast on August 14, 1944 to audiences of assembled GIs in military bases all over the Pacific. Campbell’s transcript of the complete original program comes up on screen, marking the time intermittently in minutes and seconds.

The ambiguities are multi-layered and hard to read: ‘Tokyo Rose’ was a generic name given by the troops to all the female announcers on Radio Tokyo and this particular Rose was Iva Toguri, a nisei (Japanese-American) whose dual nationality led to her getting stranded in Tokyo without a valid passport. From here she found her way into a situation of deeper ambiguity: she was picked to be trained as a radio announcer by Major Charles Cousins, a POW with radio experience who was forced to help in the making of propaganda programs on behalf of the Chinese and who proposed to subvert the propaganda effect through an obviously sardonic tone in the announcer’s voice. Toguri had just the raw voice he wanted. She was coached to read his scripts word by word, with every pause and inflection chosen to disrupt the sense that this was a voice which meant what it said. The ambiguity was lost on the American court which tried her for treason in 1948 and found her guilty.

Were the GIs who heard the original programs more discerning than the American jury who convicted her? And how does a present day audience ‘read’ this voice, further mediated by Barbara Campbell? Announcements of soupy songs and general C’mon boys patter are interspersed with news extracts. Some are about Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek. Some are about John Howard and Kim Beazley. Amanda Stewart reads the latter verbatim, unedited, from a bulletin that went to air half an hour before the performance. Campbell says the idea is to evoke in present day audiences some of the discomfort of Tokyo Rose’s original listeners, hanging out for the latest bulletin on the state of the war. It’s accident not design, apparently, that the performances have coincided with an election weekend, and that the twenty four hours between the first and the second performance are right at the high end of the nerve spectrum. People tell me that the mood of the audience in the first performance was in stark contrast to that in the second.

I’m increasingly fascinated by what makes an artist choose something to focus on. Why this episode, this individual voice and its embroiled little history, from amidst the vast array of recorded chattering from the past half century? Campbell has a flair for re-presenting a figure and a history with an intensity of focus that burns into your brain. Selection is so much more direct a challenge than assemblage, which is what happens on the internet. The net is about options, not choices. Nothing is ever selected out; it’s the library of Babel in the making.

The websites featured in Matinaze are called galleries, museums, magazines, systems: they’re places of accumulation, and the net artist is always a curator, if not of other people’s work, then of his or her own. Urban Exile offers the most visually ambitious work in its Temple of the Third Millennium Exhibition, which reflects a tendency to the Gothic and mediaevalism in internet art. Why? Perhaps there’s something about the web page that evokes the illuminated manuscript, and realises the fantasy implicit in books of hours, that you could just fall into the scenes framed on the page and move through them. This is the exhibition technique used by Urban Exile, with each image allowing you to pass through to a selection of others. According to the curatorial statement, “the new age is non-linear, a matrix of infinite combinations and permutations”. System X offer simpler, more targeted projects. It’s a sampler for the work of a wide range of artists, some specialists in electronic media and some not. You can call up images of recent installations by Derek Kreckler, a VNS Matrix anthology, a whole directory of the work of Clan Analogue (and much more). Geekgirl is a rich mix and also offers some great directory services, though I’m a bit resistant to the cultishness they’re so desperately trying to stir up. Try Click for an alternative. The two individual artists featured—Lloyd Sharp and Dennis Wilcox—presented, respectively, fluids and machines. A touch of the obsessive in both, I thought.

The curators’ panel for the film and video program selected 22 pieces from 80 submissions. The selection keyword has changed, apparently, from ‘experimental’ to ‘innovative’, with the implication that film and video artists now can be expected to have absorbed a wide range of experiment by their predecessors and be ready to move into less reactive, more purposeful explorations. Attitude and punchline-oriented work are on the out, it seems, and the quality of commitment to the subject matter is what distinguishes the best work. White (Francesca da Rimini and Josephine Starrs) offers a stark and restrained portrayal of clinical confinement: there are allusions to surgery, to mental illness, with the first person experience recounted in Spanish and translated through two other voices. An anthology of whites—snow, nurses’ shoes, bandaged limbs, a white dress, sheets, toilet bowls and sinks—intercuts images of an angular body with a heavily textured scar down the line of the shoulder blade. Alyson Bell’s work, too, concentrates on a subject for whom images and words diversify and chain themselves without ever moving towards coherence. Here I Sit presents dispersed words travelling across the screen over collaged images whilst the voiceover tries to explain the schizophrenic experience. Bell’s Lexicon, made in collaboration with Chris Newling, is a more contained exercise, based on the simple concept of words chaining associatively across the screen cueing a string of interpretive images. The collage approach quickly leads to overload for the viewer in an anthology program like this (by half way through it was in danger of coming across as just one goddam collage after another) and there’s more impact in pieces that offer continuous footage of a well-chosen subject. Chain of Holes (Alice Kerrison) is a cameo documentary of a country rodeo with the riders of the bucking broncos also offering voiceover accounts of failing crops and bankruptcies. Very memorable. A fly buzzes as the credits roll.

Amsterdam in January. It’s minus 5 degrees, the wind is howling and a homeless black man desperately attempts to grab my attention. He asks me what kind of music I am listening to. I hand him the headphones which are keeping my ears warm and tell him that it is one of the local pirate, or at least semi-legal, public access radio stations. “I used to be a DJ…I love music”, he says, and goes on to tell me his sad recent history. It is at this moment that I realise that for some people, access to communication technologies, even in a wired city like Amsterdam, is less a question of access to the internet than a question of access to even basic technologies such as radio or telephone.

This question of access to old and new technology, for individuals and groups from different economic and cultural circumstances, is one of the central themes of the second Next 5 Minutes: Tactical Media conference and exhibition (the main reason I am in Amsterdam freezing my butt off). The Next 5 Minutes is an ongoing project (the first Next 5 Minutes was held in 1993) which combines grassroots political activism with art practice, and the innovative applications of communications technology, drawing on a diverse series of critical discourses surrounding the new technology. This “proudly” non-academic conference brought together people from over thirty countries providing examples of the way in which different groups and cultures are dealing with various media technologies. Particular emphasis was given to Eastern Europe (where a critical re-evaluation of Marxism is replacing a rejection of Communism), and the former Yugoslavia (where the most important agenda is peace).

The term ‘tactical media’ is probably unfamiliar to most people, or at least those outside of this particular nexus of theories and practices, so I will attempt a definition. Tactical media refers to non-hegemonic media practices performed by a conjunction of media artists and media activists operating on a tactical rather than a strategic level. In short, the aim of tactical media is to achieve creative solutions for specific situations. However, as David Garcia (from the Centre of Tactical Media in Amsterdam, one of the organisers of the Next 5 Minutes) points out, the number of individuals, groups and projects operating along these lines is large enough, and the activity has been going on long enough, to be considered as a distinctive movement within contemporary culture: “a movement which some of us have chosen to call tactical media. Tactical media are works and projects that act out the dream that we are moving from a culture of consumption into a culture of participation and communication”. The tactical media movement is concerned with the democratization of media practice. In this sense, Next 5 Minutes was not just about access and participation, rather it openly encouraged visitors to make their own contributions via a variety of platforms including 24 hour live television and radio, electronic publishing, internet access, an extensive library and media archive, and a ‘temporary autonomous zone’ in which visitors were able to schedule their own presentations. The mainstream of the conference, however, consisted mainly of presentations, performances and installations. Some of the issues and debates which from my perspective were particularly interesting, included the following:

Tactical media as tools or weapons

One of the most fruitful benefits of the new communications technologies seems to be the use of the net as an organising tool, bringing like-minded people together, despite geographical distances, to form temporary alliances over specific actions. In this way, the net is being utilised to empower individuals and groups by creating shared workspaces which cross national boundaries. Examples of this ‘many to many’ communication were provided by DeeDee Halleck (Paper Tiger TV, New York), Rena Tangens (Zerberus, Bielefeld) and Frannie Armstrong (One World of the McLibel Case, London), all of which use the internet along with older technologies to organize resistance, or increase public awareness of the undemocratic and socially harmful activities of specific corporations.

The enforcement of copyright legislation in many cases functions as a form of censorship. This was demonstrated by Bernard Timberg and Sut Jhally, whose particular brand of ‘montage critique’ has in the past drawn threatening responses from certain copyright owners. Both cases were successfully defended under the concept of ‘fair use’, a First Amendment right in the US which is sadly absent from many other national constitutions, including Australia’s. It seems that if an artist wishes to engage in a critique of a media institution (for example, to analyse the depiction of women in the publications of a specific media enterprise) this criticism can be muted by refusing to grant copyright clearance on the reproduction of images in question. Resistance to the limitations imposed by copyright can be witnessed in the proliferation of ‘shareware’ type anti-copyright schemes such as copyleft, MACOS (Musicians Against Copyright of Samples), and the copyright violation squad.

Net criticism

The growing international theoretical practice of ‘net criticism’ involves not only an analysis of the infrastructure and praxis of the internet, but also the critique of net-theories and net-ideologies. On a theoretical level, many of the presenters attempted a critique of cyberculture which they saw as a product of a corporate culture described as the ‘Californian ideology’. The utopian rhetoric which enthusiastically proclaims the internet as a means to an egalitarian and democratic society, where the body gradually drifts into obsolescence, was continually put into question by Mark Dery, Katja Diefenbach and Peter Lamborn Wilson. As Marleen Stikker (Society for Old and New Media, Amsterdam) suggests, “the American Dream version of the technoculture, ‘the desire to be wired’” finds itself brought down to earth by the “cynical European movement of ‘proud to be flesh’”.

On the practical level, it was emphasised that tactics must be developed to fight the commercialization of the net and the large service providers which often suppress free speech by censoring communications between individuals and groups as they see fit. Another less visible threat to public access is the centralization of control of the net via the registration of domain names. Paul Garrin (Mediafilter, New York) has proposed the introduction of a decentralised autonomous network called ‘panet’ (permanent autonomous network) as a concrete strategy enabling media tacticians to escape this unnecessary control.

Do the new media really lead to greater democracy?

Nina Meilof (Digital City, Amsterdam) presented a virtual online city in Amsterdam called ‘Digital City’ in which residents and visitors can be kept informed of the everyday decisions made in local and national government. Check it out on the net. There is a description of the project in English but the rest is in Dutch. To be a resident of the city one must live in the Netherlands. It is hoped that through this level of participation something like direct, as opposed to representational, democracy might be achieved.

But for some people it is still a matter of getting access to the internet at all, as is the case in some Eastern European countries. As Bob Horwitz commented, the right to a postal address exists but the right to a net address does not.

What next?

Will the new media bring about radical social change? At least not by itself, and certainly not with the help of the corporate culture of the ‘Californian ideology’. As Katja Diefenbach rightly stated, “democracy is a social practice”. We must be wary of the technological determinism that infects much of the discourse on and around the internet. Is the concept of copyright becoming obsolete? Do we really want a push-button democracy? And can this question be separated from the question of ‘access for all’? And finally, what are the implications of a fully wired world for oral cultures such as Australia’s indigenous communities?

These questions will not have to wait until the next Next 5 Minutes because many of the debates will continue online. To keep updated with the debates, exchange ideas on these subjects, or access the archive catalogue of the Next 5 Minutes go to the following URL: http://www.dds.nl/~n5m/program/ [expired]

archive.htm

In the meantime, I will leave you to ponder the following question. Throughout the Next 5 Minutes the debate addressed the valorisation of reality over the abstract spaces of the net. Sivam Krishnapillai (Cambridge), who presented a paper on ethno-national cyber-quarrels in Sri Lanka, up-ended this paradigm with the following observation: “in Buddhism the world is Maya (Illusion), so maybe cyberspace is real”.

North American artist Vincent Vincent was in Perth recently (February 28 to March 5) for a series of lectures and performances. I caught up with him following a demonstration of his company’s Mandala Systems technology at the Alexander Library Theatre.

EM Your visit to Perth was organised by Revelation magazine and the Department of Commerce and Trade. What was Revelation’s interest in your work?

VV They probably connected with one of the things we occasionally do and which has become popular—live link-ups in the Rave scene. We have sold Mandala Systems specifically for this. Within the techno community or the Rave community, there’s a real sense of global community. Often organisers will try to link up Raves between two places with teleconferencing or See You See Me or whatever they can basically get hold of. Mandala systems are starting to be used in Raves really as a sort of play-toy in this way.

EM How would you describe the Mandala Systems technology developed by the Vivid group?

VV It’s a new form of interface for the computer, a very hands-off kind of interface because you’re just stepping in front of the video camera and then you’re inside the computer world with which you can interact. The fact that we chroma-key people in means they’re able to put themselves in context with a surrounding world and treat it like a reality in the computer whilst trying to make the interaction as natural and as smooth as possible—whether that’s an art performance, a sports simulation or a business presentation. By allowing the computer to know where the body is and letting the person actually be a part of a live environment, we’re able to allow the person to interact with the graphics, control them and play with them.

EM During your seminar you were saying that you originally devised the technology for use in performance art.

VV My first thoughts of doing something with computers really came about from being involved in dance, music and visual arts and being a psychotherapist in art therapy. I just happened to be lucky enough to be at a university where people were thinking about computers. This was before multimedia computers showed up. The first idea was to be a dancer and create the music from my dancing, because when I was dancing I would hear a lot of additional music in my head and that would make me want to pick up an instrument and play that music out.

I teamed up with my partner Francis McDougal and we came up with a solution that was fairly lightweight in terms of hardware, versus my original ideas which involved huge plates with infra-red beams, light shows and stuff. First we had to get it down into the computer and create graphical worlds that we could step into. That let it be a bridge technology for performance art which involved being a computer artist in the computer while I was performing. I could be a juggler, or a mime artist or an actor or a dancer or a musician just by choosing which environment I wanted to go into. It was the idea of having complete control over the computer’s data base of worlds that would allow it to be a performance medium. Then of course it was a matter of creating all those worlds and then being able to string them together in performance.

VV They will be half hour performances employing the Mandala Systems technology and then a live link up to Toronto where someone there will step into the environment with me and we’ll do stuff together. After that the link up worlds will be there and the public will be invited to play inside them. The performance will be a combination of juggling, stick twirling, dancing and playing guitar, both in the real world and in the virtual world. The main idea behind the performance is to heighten the idea of your own body in a space and to do this by taking you into a virtual world.

EM The worlds we saw were static and two dimensional. Do you have any plans to expand these environments into 3D moving ‘scapes that you can actually go into and explore?

VV The system we have here is Amiga system and its very old and it’s unfortunate that this is the one we were constrained to bring on tour. We actually work on Silicon Graphics machines now which are dramatically different but the Amiga travels better! As the company has evolved the focus has been games and public installations, so we haven’t had the time to build up more sophisticated performance worlds on the PC and SGIs. These new worlds are very much 3-D worlds you can travel into. Part of this work is happening in partnership with Intel and this is the way we are headed now.

VV It’s very much like a dreamscape in that a lot of the imagery evokes this sense. It was one of the original ideas and one that I am sticking with. I like the idea that you can create a dreamscape and have people step into it and use it therapeutically. The metaphorical images and transitions through time and space when you are dreaming are very interesting to me. It’s like travelling from world to world, going through either obvious portals or just quick changes of entire scenes.

VV Yes. Over time there have been other themes, like we do a lot of environmental work in Canada. We run the Earth Day for the City of Toronto where they put on very large concerts and for that we’ll create songs or worlds that have environmental messages in them about solar power or something. For the most part it’s very much a journey through the unconscious and little themes and snippets of time space scenarios appear. For example, the idea of jumping back and forth in time and space or taking imagery from daVinci and then something from Easter Island and then a 2001 theme where we play it out. We emphasise time-space trajectories—when your in this dream world you can be jump between these very quickly. Therefore we have a lot of space imagery, a lot of travelling through corridors where you get the sense of being lost, and then arriving someplace.

EM Some of the new media art’s use of technology is attacked from other areas of art and performance art as being techno gimmickry—techno people playing with toys.

VV It’s true for the most part, but I’ve always been of the view, and this comes from my background as a creative therapist, that everyone is creative and that everybody is an artist. It’s been quite an interesting trip being on a lot of panels with artists and art aficionados who are very much into the idea that the artist must be maintained as a separate entity. The genius notion. To me this is the greatest time we’ve ever had because there is so much opportunity for everyone to find some way to be creative. Multimedia is accessible to more people and especially to technologists who are traditionally not seen as creative but in fact are immensely creative within their own realm. It’s the visualisation of each other’s creativity that’s the important thing. I learned that from my partner Francis who is the brains behind the computer aspect of what we do.

EM Have you had much to do with the Banff New Media Centre which is reasonably well known in Australia?

VV No, not really. In the beginning, yes, but they moved into headset related areas of virtual reality with SGIs and we didn’t have that kind of gear or focus. At the moment they seem to be in a phase of retraction with a withdrawal of a lot of their government support. It’s a good centre and they have done a lot of exploratory work and pieces there. One piece by Brenda Laurel, who works for Intervol but is well known in the virtual reality community as a spokesperson for the social consciousness of technology. She was doing a project creating a world based on the themes of indigenous peoples and animal spirits. It was very much a performance piece where two people travelled through a very large virtual world of low resolution graphics. It was a very good experimental example of the use of head mounted displays in a performance piece. Jargon Lanner is the only other person I’ve seen do a virtual reality based performance piece. He’s like the father of VR and was the big spokesman for it when it started out in 1989/90 through his company PL. He’s a master musician with over one hundred instruments from around the world and plays them all in performance and on albums. He also integrates into his performances SIG head mounted worlds which he enters to play weird virtual instruments he’s also invented.

At the beginning of The Antwatchers rehearsal process, I asked Graeme Watson about both the issues he wanted to deal with and the way he chose to treat them (RT11). The notions of surveillance he addressed then touched on a fundamental debate in a very personal way: Why are we, as individuals living in society, the way we are? Evidently the starting premise in the work is an image of humanity, caged, isolated and distorted, the boundaries we live within only marginally compatible with personal integrity. This distortion shapes the very basis of our interaction, inevitably requiring our sensual selves to compromise on an intensely intimate level: confined, stared at, smelled, watched, touched, held, not held, laughed at, listened to, criticised, bullied and humiliated into becoming beings whose integrity depends on learning to perpetrate these horrors for ourselves.

From birth we are held captive by dual expressions of love and power. A mother is bound to her child in ways she is compelled to acknowledge, whether it’s loving attentiveness or critical scrutiny. A child is likewise bound in confinement or security. How these bonds are lived out shapes self-esteem, aspiration and achievement, from notions of what to wear, what to look like, what to see, hear and feel, to what we take to be the very nature of reality. We are all moulded to the marrow by the seismic strength of both private and public scrutiny.

It’s a big project which Watson has chosen to approach in quite literal, physical terms. The set consists of a series of cages, either babies’ playpens for the dancers or a huge central three storey tower caging the musicians and their electronic equipment. We see the dancers through bars, curled up, embryonic. Crucially, the musicians also see us, as we watch them. An intense wash of sound exerts its impact tangibly, through vibrating floor and seats. A central character sits at the bottom of the tower, spider-like, turning ominously, observing the proceedings. Searchlights and floods pick up selected areas of the cavernous space.

There’s measured success in the story being told. Six women dancers portray horror and confused confinement, reconstruct attitudes of naivete and sophistication in true classical tradition. The movement that unfolds begins tentatively; caged animals discovering their plight. It develops from a gestural basis, an abstracted mimicry, a non-human scale. Their acts of fear and self protection literally become behavioural norms. We see a ballet doll character with huge pink bow and whalebone petticoat, learning her repertoire via imitation and bullying, and we see an ensemble of mothers with prams, bound to their life task with a compliance generated by anxiety. All wear black harnesses suggesting slavery, spiders-web, S & M, sky-diving, or corsets.

As central features of the work, these ideas are not as compelling as some smaller glimpses of subtle insight. At one point we see several dancers lying on the floor, rocking their babies gently on their bellies, an attitude articulating more about maternal bonds than histrionic anxiety ever could. After a fast sequence in which the dancers deliberately use as much effort as they can, the audience is invited to take their pulses. Either they need urgent tangible proof of life, or just another test of their own physical bounds. The closing image is a tortured silhouette lashed with camera flashlight, more like gunshots than snapshots.

Inventive talent and imagination in developing movement vocabulary was evident, but subtlety seemed buried in the huge space, selective lighting and enveloping sound. I wanted to be closer, to see people not “dancers”, meaningful movement not dim, narrowly articulate tableaux. There was a disquieting conflict between the grandness of the sound and visual designs and the intimacy of the human body. Although you could say that’s what it was about, aesthetic intentions seemed sometimes at cross purposes. Perhaps Watson’s vision might have been for something smaller, closer than the other designers had in mind.

The One Extra Company, The Antwatchers; choreography, Graeme Watson; design, Eamon D’Arcy; lighting, Rory Dempster; musical director, Antony Partos; costumes, Jacques Tchong; dancers, Felice Burns, Alison Dredge, Taryn Drummond, Lisa Ffrench, Charlotte Moar, Rachel Roberts

Corporealities: Dancing Knowledge, Culture and Power edited by Susan Leigh Foster, Routledge 1995

As the author of Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Choreography (1986), Susan Leigh Foster established herself as a new voice in dance studies. Now, in Corporealities: Dancing Knowledge, Culture and Power, Foster acknowledges multiple, heterogeneous new voices from her position as editor of this Routledge anthology. This is a mixed bag in the best possible way, but a common grounding for each of the ten chapters is the body as site, or in Foster’s words, “physicality as a site of meaning-making”. For the reader, this is a fluctuating, fragmented journey through history, memory, gender and theory. Moving bodies are everywhere here, reworked and redefined in many different ways and through many different methodologies. Ten individuals have contributed to the collection, seven of whom are Foster’s fellow University of California academics. In this brief ‘tasting’ I examine a selection of the texts; some exist in familiar territory, some are, for me, entirely new experiences.

Foster re-turns to an interpretation and analysis of the ‘gendered bodies’ of the Romantic ballet in her opening essay, “The ballerina’s phallic pointe”. By fixing her understanding of the politics of performing desire in its cultural context—that is, the expansion of Western capitalism and associated marketing strategies—Foster creates ‘corporeal’ connections between history and theory. She contends that even in contemporary avant-garde ballet the female dancer is still inscribed as the subject of the male gaze and male desire; the pointe shoe is the enduring symbol, enacting a particular, imbalanced male-female relationship. I would have been interested in an extension of these ideas to include a focus on artists such as Michael Clark, Karole Armitage or Maurice Bejart. Gender is a more ambiguous, problematised issue in the ‘postmodern ballet’ which these choreographers have inspired.

In another examination of gender—and particularly femaleness—Linda J. Tomko follows the origin and development of park fetes in New York City, events in which fifty thousand girls were involved by 1916. “Gender, ‘folk-dance’, and progressive-era ideals in New York City” is a fascinating analysis of the significance of folk-dancing at those park fetes. The Girls’ Branch, the educational association which initiated the fetes, used folk-dance as a physical embodiment of ideals such as co-operation, female naturalisation, health, and, Tomko posits, American nationalism. Tomko raises the issue of the ‘authenticity’ of the Girls’ Branch folk-dance, and the fact that while the original dances were present in an identifiable form, the Girls’ Branch interpretations also reconstructed those dances, creating new forms.

In Heidi Gilpin’s “Lifelessness in movement, or how do the dead move?”, the ephemeral nature of movement, the inability to grasp it, the mystery of the body “in passage from presence to absence” are the focus. Rather than romanticising the transient quality of performance, Gilpin explores the act of disappearance from an hermeneutic perspective. The body in Gilpin’s analysis is at once real and tangible, and in continual disappearance. Her framework for the question, “How can absence be performed?” is the work of the late Tadeusz Kantor. Because Kantor was usually on-stage with his company, his work Today is my Birthday—performed after his death, even though he had taken part in rehearsals—holds particular significance for Gilpin. The actors and the audience were both intensely aware of Kantor’s absence, so that in effect Kantor, through his death, had actuated a process of performing absence; the concepts of absence and presence were then brought closer together.

Funnily enough, it was Peggy Phelan who discussed the enigma of present absence in her 1993 text, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (Routledge). However in Corporealities Phelan examines “Dance and the History of Hysteria”, discussing the significance of dance and movement in Breuer and Freud’s pivotal psychoanalytic work, Studies on Hysteria (1895). In particular, it is Phelan’s explanation of Anna O.’s condition which is most illuminating, as she identifies connections between psychic health and the body from the notion of “psychoanalysis as a mode of psychic choreography”. So rather than representing psychoanalysis as a concern only of the mind, distinct from the physical, Phelan reconstructs a “psychoanalytic body” while also reconsidering the relationship between femininity, the body, and psychoanalysis.

Marta E. Savigliano’s essay, “Fragments for a story of tango bodies (on Choreocritics and the memory of power)” is probably the most interesting work in the collection structurally. Savigliano moves in and out of history, narrative, song, legend and analysis. The “tango bodies” are ‘latina’, dancing before/for the male gaze and the bourgeois French, British, and American. They dance “Desire, Passion, Fate”, with the female role that of the exotic and ‘la Otra’—Other. Choreography, theory and criticism are interwoven here, with Savigliano interrogating traditional understandings of each by contemplating the tango body as a performance of sociohistorical and cultural specificity.

In “Dancing in the field: notes from memory”, Sally Ann Ness takes a thoroughly different tack on this notion of the cultural specificity of dancing bodies. She begins by describing in detail two experiences—two dance lessons in Bali and the Philippines respectively—and follows these narratives with an ethnographic dialogue between the lived experience, memory, and the “writerly body”. Ness “says ‘no’ to the document”, and yet seems trapped by her own declaration. She proposes a new memory and fieldwork-based document for the text, but ultimately creates another authoritative ‘document’, warning the reader about supposedly complex narrative and advising the reader to re-read the opening statements as concluding ones. Ness does create new spaces though; spaces in which ethnography and the memoir are merged.

Other contributions include Mark Franko’s “History/theory—criticism/practice”, an examination of Graham’s Dark Meadow (1946) and critical responses to the work, particularly those of the “first dance critic”, John Martin. Lena Hammergren embarks on a quest for Swedish body politics of the 1930s in “The re-turn of the flaneuse”, and chooses to centre her investigations around the 1930 Stockholm Exposition of functionalist trends. Randy Martin looks “towards a narrative of context in dance” in “Overreading The Promised Land”. Focusing on the 1990 production by Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company of The Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land, Martin engages in a dialogue between the right and the left, ultimately rewriting the left through bodily practice. In “Antique longings” Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter extends the dance history/theory discussion with reference to Delsartean performance.

With so many diverse and innovative writings on dance, Corporealities propels dance into new domains where the body and theory share conceptual and physical space. Bodies are not just appropriated and interpreted here. Their significance within cultural experience is acknowledged and extended, for as Foster suggests, “bodies always gesture towards other fields of meaning”.

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