Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

June 1996

Digital Aesthetics-One was held at the University of New South Wales in April 1996. The symposium was convened by Contemporary Art and Technology (CAT), an independent Melbourne-based group “dedicated to the promotion of critical inquiry and debate of issues surrounding the shift from analog to digital paradigms”.

If there’s one thing that the cyber-conference circuit can agree on, it’s the urgent need for a critical theory adequate to our new media landscape. If there’s one thing such conferences appear to consistently fall short of, it’s the substantial progression of such a theory. For while speaker after speaker at Digital Aesthetics-One identified the problem, vehemently put by Paul Virilio as the lack of a theory for technological art, few proposed any fleshed-out strategies for tackling it. Moreover, for all the palaver about the fluidity and openness of cyberdebate, the sense of closed circuit was underlined by the continual reappearance of familiar names, familiar arguments, none more in-your-face than Professor Allucquere Rosanne Stone, “performing” the precise same anecdotal musings on liquid identity for the umpteenth time in Australia (the last only nine months ago at the Biennale of Ideas), musings which in any case you can read pretty much word for word in her latest book.

While suffering from some dilemmas common to similar symposia, Digital Aesthetics-One was also saddled with the particular and difficult task of addressing its title. Peter Chamberlain from the University of Hawaii asked at the wrap-up panel, “Did anyone really talk about digital aesthetics?…there ain’t no digital aesthetics, it’s just too complex”, and certainly few speakers actually addressed the notion of aesthetics as such or the impact which digital technologies have had on traditional aesthetics. And this despite a brave attempt by conference organisers CAT to represent both theorists and artists in equal measure at the symposium, let alone in the series of surrounding events including performances at Artspace and an exhibition at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery.

Regardless of these general problems, there were some star turns, the brilliant presentation by American cultural theorist Mark Dery, the indisputable highlight. With a masterful turn of phrase and a relentless stream of pithy and hilarious metaphors, Dery through his language alone was able to evoke a sense of a digital aesthetics, and at the same time further a salient critique of the politics of the new media. Beginning with a colourful description of Wired—”the mighty morphin’ power book with the sheen of a turtlewaxed Formula One roadster”, its day-glo fused photographs like an “irradiated monitor turned up too high”—Dery went on to surgically dissect the magazine’s design and its ideological implications, seducing us first into believing in Wired’s avant-gardism before convincingly undermining this status in the next breath.

For while Wired positions itself at the forefront of a push to crack the US military-industrial-entertainment complex through the democratising gestures of netsurfing and hacking (a “let them eat laptops” mentality), what it really does is provide a safe vehicle for the Silicon Valley establishment to live out its fantasy of rebellion. Wired’s design, steeped in the Uriah Heep iconography of the early 70s, works to affirm the hipness of the magazine’s core demographic (average income $US 81,000 a year, male, white and employed in the communications industry); facilitates the transition of the flat-footed IBM nerd to latter day uberlord prowling the net after hours (in other words, an affirmation that “corporations are cool”); and perpetrates a kind of “info-machismo” whereby one’s worth is judged by the ability to handle information overload (as in Johnny Mnemonic’s directive, “Hit me!”). Dery’s facility to range from popular culture to sociological texts to complex poststructuralist theory with wit, spontaneity and a concern to be understood, made for a most entertaining and edifying session.

Another pertinent contribution was Jane Goodall’s critical consideration of the aesthetic credentials of the digital. Contextualising her analysis in the history of digital programming, with its desire to obliterate human agency, and the late 19th century synaesthetic movement, with its sensorial theatre, Goodall elegantly argued that digital art remains sensorially challenged. For Goodall, “there are more interesting questions to be raised about the limits of digital art than its imagined megalopotentialities…[and] the most significant limitation is the restricted possibilities for sensory engagement. Multimedia is not synaesthetic—it’s bound to an audiovisual axis, and the literally digital aspect of it—fingertip communication by the user—offers a hopelessly reductive approach to accommodating the sense of touch”. Describing her visit to the CD-ROM exhibition Burning the Interface, Goodall observes, “There’s something very unsensory about this activity or interactivity, as you stand there watching it, waiting for a turn with the mouse. And the art, far from liquefying and going global and dissolving and cancelling the social field, is all boxed in its monitors”. Ultimately for Goodall, the only way to create a digital aesthetics—with the emphasis on aesthetics as perception by the senses—is to combine digital media with live performance, as Stelarc and Orlan do.

Stelarc and Orlan certainly came away as the anointed royalty of digital aesthetics from this symposium. Not only Goodall, but other speakers including Nicholas Zurbrugg—whose keynote address was a good opener, its ambit so wide that it prefaced many of the ensuing issues, its emphasis on the traditional genealogy of digital art salutary—found few better exemplars of what the future might look like. Orlan’s agent/publicist/theoretician, former paediatrician Dr Rachel Armstrong, however, added very little to the debate, stringing together a swag of clichés to say nothing more than that Orlan confounds the institutions of art and medicine and evades the strictures of identity by using her body as a canvas. The bodgie ‘live’ link up to Orlan in Paris—which consisted not of video or even net conferencing but simply a trunk call—was only outdone by Dr Armstrong’s tortuous French which frustrated the audience’s attempts to elicit nuanced answers from “the world’s first practitioner of carnal art”.

Stelarc’s contribution was far more substantial. Dismissive of the “outmoded metaphysical yearnings” of some net surfers for a “mind to mind communion”, and disowning the notorious World Art interview in which he asserted the obsolescence of the body (“this does not imply a body loathing, nor the desire for a utopian body that achieves immortality”), Stelarc went on to outline his latest project: the generation of a “fractal flesh” by performing the body stirred and startled by the remote whispers of other bodies—displaced presences on the net—prompting the body to perform actions without previous memory or desire. This loop of stimulus and response becomes for Stelarc a metaphor for awareness, which in the artist’s schema is due to gross and small muscle movements.

The symposium also invited a number of emerging local new media artists to discuss their work, among them Patricia Piccinini and James Verdon whose latest digital art was concurrently exhibited at The Performance Space and Ivan Dougherty Gallery respectively. Also on show at the latter was British artist Graham Harwood’s Rehearsal of Memory, a poignant CD-ROM record of the personal scars and histories of inmates from a high security mental hospital. There is a raw energy about Graham Harwood and his community-oriented projects which is exhilarating, particularly in a cultural climate still hostile to artwork which wears its political heart on its sleeve. Harwood admits that he’s never been interested in technology so much as where technology acts on people. Like Dery, Harwood drags the cyberdebate back to where it counts, to the realm of the social, contextualising his work by reminding us that “while one third of the national income of the UK is generated by culture, there is no cultural voice for people below a certain level of income”.

Considering its lack of heavyweight institutional support—no credits to the Australia Council, nor for that matter the AFC which ran a rather more lavish event across town at the same time—Digital Aesthetics-One did well to attract some leading new media players. Certainly CAT’s attempt to pull together artists, designers and theorists was laudable, even if a more compact program might have separated the chaff from the wheat. However, coming away from the symposium only underlines the still urgent need for cogent theoretical approaches to the new media.

RealTime issue #13 June-July 1996 pg. 22

The Language of Interactivity conference, held at the ABC Ultimo Centre, Sydney, April 9-11, was the third of a series of annual events organised by the Australian Film Commission, designed to ‘bridge the gap’ between the often separated groups of computer specialists, creative ‘talent’ and entrepreneurial risk-takers. The conference chair, Michael Hill, AFC Multimedia Projects Coordinator, one of the few people in Australia with significant experience of a multitude of multimedia production proposals, suggested that this year was the International Year of Multimedia Cliché (following on from last year, the International Year of Multimedia): terms like ‘content’, ‘interface’, ‘prototype’, ‘non-linear’ were up for reconsideration if “we are to make projects which satisfy and challenge an audience hungry for something they haven’t yet seen.”

“Artists often have sudden ideas, want to try different possibilities within the structure of the project, so you have to be flexible and your code needs to be very flexible. You have to be able to adapt and respond to different situations and be very open to changes. Too often in commercial projects I’ve coded, people know what is on the market and they know what they want…and it’s a very limited approach.”

Gideon May was a guest speaker from Amsterdam and one of several within the ‘industry’ who actively pursues the unknown alongside the rent-paying yakka. “As the demand for programmers able to write code for multimedia projects increases over the next few years, their ability to succeed will be related to their ability to work in close collaboration with the full range of other specialists engaged in a project. I don’t think that there will be a place for just one director who is in control and who delegates everything.”

Will the control freaks, artists and moguls back away from so much shared territory?

The conference topic of ‘interaction’ was imaginatively extended from ‘responding to screen prompts’ to focusing as much on the interactions between production teamwork models. Several of the overseas guest speakers, whilst demonstrating the appearance and ‘functionality’ of their works, came from quite distinct production environments.

Glorianna Davenport came from the MIT Media Lab cocoon where, working with in-house staff and students, she has developed story-telling/listening agents with cute names like Lurker and Thinkies. These respond to the choices made during an interactive encounter on a computer by presenting options calculated most likely to be needed next by the individual. (Unfortunately a classic faux pas, with the status of an aphorism, undercut her presentation: “I was shocked when I discovered many of my students barely knew that the Second World War took place. I mean I know that it wasn’t very influential in Australia but it turned out the Second World War really changed the world a lot.”)

A contrast was the artisanal production approach of Chris Hales, whose interactive touch-screen installation was shown for a short time at Artspace. Using Hi8 video and working from his London home when not teaching, whimsical portraits of friends and children are woven together on the computer into an example of ‘interactive cinema’, a ‘genre’ which seems to owe a lot to a history of cinema. Hales avoids the ‘classic narrative’ interactive approach adopted by Graham Weinbren, who spoke at the 1995 conference in Melbourne, revisiting instead the cinema of pathos and slapstick comedy.

Another contrast was the Stevie Wonder of interactive game design, Osamu Sato, head of one of Tokyo’s’ “leading multimedia firms”, who inscrutably demonstrated the intricacies of “the most popular CD-ROM adventure title in Japan, Eastern Mind”. Sato’s presentation highlighted the gap between eastern and western traditions of visual coding and meaning construction.

Jonathon Delacour created the links that he has achieved in previous AFC conferences between different cultural traditions. The negotiation of roles and role play in on-line game environments, he suggested, rehearses personality development and the centring of the self. Richly illustrated with ‘habitats’ populated by ‘avatars’ and other identities, the history of this development went back to the Lucasfilm Habitat established as far back as 1985.

The tension between on-line and off-line delivery and development was present behind most of the papers and panels, in this, the Year of Wwwebness. Also, as John Colette succinctly put it, this tension reflects the distinction “between whether we are seeking information or experience”.

A Sydney team developing an interactive soap opera ‘transformational game’, Strange Fruit, revealed the collaborative workshop approach taken to an ambitious project. The ‘big-picture/little-picture’ relationship and the defining of roles for team members, including the relationship of the writer and performers to the whole, gave an insight into the brave complexities of exporting established narrative traditions into digital environments. This was in contrast to a high point of irony which was reached when ‘interface consultant’ Fiona Ingram gave a flawless presentation of eye-watering bullet points depicting a multimedia-by-numbers approach to the production process, and then used as her example the CD-ROM of the Doors of Perception 1 conference Amsterdam, 1994 (part of the Burning the Interface exhibition, MCA, Sydney). While stuffed with elegant visual approaches to a static documentary (by “cutting a lot of buttons”), it certainly had nothing to do with the production process described.

Tim Gruchy delightfully demonstrated Synthing, the “wetness of interactive experience”, as the outcome of distinctive teamwork flowing from the traditions of the plastic and musical arts. Using modest and dated Amiga technology, the path to “unencumbered interfaces” gave a glimpse of a cultural tool which may become as ubiquitous as the sound synthesiser.

Other inspired individuals like Jon McCormack, Michael Buckley and Graham Harwood seemed much less concerned with the value that can flow from the integrated interactive production team. Can the imagination that such artists deliver ever be attracted to work with others in such a way?

The benefits of such collaborations are two-way according to programmer Gideon May: “It helps me a lot for writing good code because there are many times when you have to come back to correct or amend. And well structured, well laid-out, readable code makes this process easier and more rapid”. Also visual artists have often objected, for instance, to the clean, well-rendered surfaces beloved of games makers. “It takes a lot of computing power to make something dirty,” said May. But clearly such interaction has meant that code is now being written, for a variety of purposes, which will begin to remove some of that surface gloss and glitter.

RealTime issue #13 June-July 1996 pg. 22

Nino Rodriguez, Boy (United States, 1994)

Are galleries quite the right places for exhibitions like Burning the Interface, Cybercultures and the Luc Courchesne contribution to No Exit? You have to ask. At the MCA’s Burning the Interface at 11.30 on Saturday morning the room is already full of people quietly tapping away. What’s the alternative? The private booth? Appointments at your local gallery? Certainly some kind of ticket that allows a couple of visits seems to be indicated. It’s depressing to think the only solution is back home in front of your own computer because there are some pleasures in being with other people in a sea of CD ROMs—though not many. This artform would seem on the one hand to be the least social but, let’s face it, the more adventurous works will always need public space. The answer is some as yet unimagined place.

As with any art you can scan images but here it’s not just seeing that’s at stake but more the time of cinema, the textuality of books, the pleasures of sound and most importantly time to choose from a range of options. You’re likely to spend much longer with an engaging CD-ROM than a painting or a sculpture because it requires you to. And watching over other people’s shoulders is no fun for them or for you. With some, non-interactive works, like Peter de Lorenzo’s Reflections, Abstractions and Memory Structures all you do is watch as frames become flames, images unfold and fragment, transform through twelve minutes that slowly focus and transform and sometimes look like ‘pixelist’ paintings.

A room full of CD-ROMs and similar offerings is like being at a party where every person in the room is talking about something different and everyone is inviting you over to talk. So you move from machine to machine and you know the room is bound to contain a few bores who will never let you go. A couple of women are having trouble exiting from the jaws of the very insistent and confronting seedy-ROM Necro Enema Amalgamated in the corner. They’re trapped until we start to hover and they make their escape.

With Luc Courchesne’s Portrait One you feel you’d like to be alone. A young woman speaks intimately and offers you a set of responses and questions with which to address her. Courchesne’s other work Hall of Shadows for the No Exit exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, is like being in a room full of holograms and you know, because you heard it on the grapevine, that if you push the right buttons, you can get these laser-disc-video images to actually speak to one another. Just like the host at a real party. Somehow, these naturalistic/theatrical works are the most confronting because they are the least like paintings and the most like engaging with real people. And you need to be alone or nearly alone with them. A crowded gallery room reduces Hall of Shadows to four duets.

In another intimate work at the MCA’s Burning the Interface, Nino Rodriguez’ Boy, a woman offers you fragments of memories of her childhood “as a boy”, “as a tomboy”, when “my mother was always throwing picture frames at people”. As she speaks, her words unfold on the screen and you can click on an earlier word and phrase and she’ll repeat that passage. You don’t get into an exchange as you can in the Luc Courchesne, but by using the mouse you can get her to repeat and re-order what she has said. You, in turn, play with what she says, creating an even quirkier poetry of the everyday. There’s no animation, no collage, you simply choose to watch and listen to someone speak. You can even make her disappear and just read or listen to what she’s got to say. All she requires is that you be with her for a time.

There’s quite a lot of reading on offer on these CD-ROMs, though the kinds of reading experiences vary. Something like Jean-Louis Boissier’s exquisite Flora Petrinsularas needs an hour. It’s like reading a precious book in which words become flesh. The text comprises sixteen quotations from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Confessions. You move from sexual encounters between 18th Century characters in Quick Time movies—breasts, faces, delicate clothing in surprisingly fine images—to a catalogue of plants in nature to close up specimens of the same that press against the screen. The urge to touch is irresistible. Who said we were mousebound? This one requires patience and a delicate hand. If you push too hard, you’ll just find yourself back with the relentless lapping of water over pebbles that lies behind every image and you’ll miss the eroticism of the work. Again, the human figures exert a personal directness—gazing into your eyes, flushed with near orgasm in a QuickTime loop of heavy breathing. Only when you think you encounter perhaps too obvious a connection between woman and nature do you feel the pull to another machine.

Eric Lanz, Manuskript (Switzerland/Germany, 1994)

You can read Erik Lanz’ delicate Manuskript like a visual encyclopaedia. It’s a collection of small images of hand tools that first look like rows of words until you move in closer, clicking on each tool to get a small movie with the sound of the object performing its function. That’s it. But what a pleasure as the everyday object and its sound and movement become epiphany

Bill Seaman offers a similar intense proximity to the object, though he also takes in roads, buildings and landscapes (even then miniaturising them). In his The Exquisite Mechanism of Shivers, Seaman hands over the controls to a Chomskyan generator of sentences and a string of objects in shifting juxtaposition, which you in turn can play with.

The word is firmly and playfully with us again in Felix Hude’s Haiku Dada. You conjure up a classical haiku in delicate woodblock print settings by capturing, with a move and click, a dragonfly, a falling leaf, or a passerby. Or you can call up the personal files of the cartoon host, Ichi Ni San, a sumo wrestler (“Rank: Behind the Curtain”), his female friend (“Degree in Education; Degree in French Literature; Wish: White wedding, Sydney Opera House”) and his dog (“Variety: Cute”), or visit them floating around in a spaceship and shooting out haiku doggerel. From a bag of lines, you can make your own haiku. Animation and reading pleasures abound with a choice of interactive experiences.

Information is everywhere if you choose to read it. As well as lots of background from the artists on how and why the work was created, Bill Barminski’s De-Lux ’o gives you a mock training course in advertising. You move through the nostalgia of 40s and 50s products (“SubVert, the fish flavoured cereal”) packaged with surreal images, like the advertiser’s dream—a face with two mouths (“That guy with the two mouths, he would drink a lot of beer”). Brad Miller’s Digital Rhizome wittily extrapolates complex theory with multiple Quick Time movies (which you can stop-start—card shuffling, riots, curious helixes) but you can still have a great time without dipping into the Deleuze and Guattari passages (though the challenge is to do both).

Playfulness is everywhere at the MCA. Anti-Rom is a brisk fun parlour you are seduced to enter. A map of the heavens is home to stars like Jacqueline Onassis and Myra Hindley, the Moors murderer. Here you can get a little girl to pull a face and say something rude at one click and then something poetic like “Time sleeps in thunder”.

Like the Dutch Mediamatic contributions, these works are quick, rude grabs that subvert expectations and stretch the limits of mouse abuse.

Also for the speedy, the afore-mentioned Necro Enema from New York is a fast and insistent prayer for sexual liberation through interactivity: “I love you interactivity, my one and only proclivity.” The crude rhyming argument runs that if interactivity lives up to its promise then the speaker will give up molesting children and other deviant practices. Ironically, though, the work itself is not interactive. Once you’re in you’re in.

One of the demands of an exhibition like Burning the Interface is that as you move from ROM to ROM you have to learn a fresh set of usually simple rules, not hard but requiring some patience, quite a bit of laterality and, again, time. Michael Buckley’s The Swear Club yells, “The way inside a house is usually through the door!” until you click on the door. Once inside, you are in the company of cursing children, old people talking about falling and forgetting. There’s some nice play with silhouettes which reminds you there was a time pre-cinema (engagingly on show in the Phantasmagoriaexhibition in the next room).You work your way in, feel where you connect if you do at all. With the pressures of time, an audience watching you fumble your way in, it’s easy to get impatient with The Swear Club and that’s not the fault of the artist.

Cybercultures at The Performance Space Gallery, is like walking into a Japanese pop playground. At first sight, it’s all primary colours—Troy Innocent’s Jawpan and Techno Digesto Fetishism, created with Elena Poppa, use dense, rich colours and Potato Man graphics. Martine Corompt’s Sorry (part of a larger CD-ROM project called The Cute Machine) offers a fight to the death with four cute cartoon characters on a giant children’s toy. You don’t click, you hit and stomp. Patricia Piccinini’s Your Sperm Our Egg Our Expertise invites you to cost the mutation of your own computer-animated baby and then to take in her fleshy mutant innard images on the wall. In the corner Josephine Starr and Leon Cmielewski’s User Unfriendly Interface pulls the rug on your sensibilities, a very clever relative of some of the speedier CD-ROMs at MCA. Cybercultures is a curious mix of the straight interactive experience, the old gallery pleasure of looking at things on walls, and a bit of real physical engagement. It points towards a multi-experience ‘gallery’ of the future, a rich playground of dark themes and critical ideas behind a techno-pop exterior.

The MCA’s Burning the Interface, on the other hand, although of the sit-down-and-interact variety, poses even more significant questions about interactivity and the future of the gallery experience. Revelations from the CD-ROM experience include the power of the word on the screen, the variety of reading experiences, emerging new forms of the book, a more alarming and seductive intimacy than that offered by the movies, simple interactivity that can be profoundly pleasing, the sheer inventiveness of the artists. Despite impatience in many quarters, the mouse and the CD-ROM (or whatever replaces it) still offer a wealth of experience fast and funny or reflective and deep(in the layering of choice). Interactivity in the form of CD-ROM may only be an interregnum between cinema and something else, but Burning the Interface suggests a rich experimental domain drawing together image, film, video, sound, the word and the book with new ways of reading, scanning and choosing. How best we should enjoy these new pleasures and how galleries will accommodate us as audience and participators is right on the agenda.

Burning the Interface, curated by Mike Leggett and Linda Michael, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, March 27-July 14; Cybercultures, curated by David Cranswick and Kathy Cleland for Street Level, The Performance Space Gallery, Sydney, March 21-April 13; Luc Courchesne, Hall of Shadows, part of No Exit, curated by Victoria Lynn, Art Gallery of NSW, May 22-June 30

RealTime issue #13 June-July 1996 pg. 23

“The differences that count the same—the ones that, in themselves do not add up to, or make, any difference—are a matter of indifference to us. But can the same be said of assertions of indifference?.” Timothy Bahti

In his forum paper Utopia: Coming or Not, John Potts outlined a number of relational scenarios (conceptual, historical and aesthetic) between modernist technological utopias and contemporary administered information culture. The question might be as simple as this: “Compare and contrast the technological utopias of Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Futurist F.T. Marinetti”. Or as complex as: “In what ways did the Utopian Socialism of Fourier, Saint-Simon and Owens influence the will to action and community of the historical avant gardes. How have the concepts of messianic pathos (Benjamin) and heterotopic epistemes (Foucault) changed our attitudes to progress—social, intellectual and technological?”

The Historical avant gardes—blending art, theatre, architecture and music into ‘model’ communities and performances—provided a working model of an aestheticised life-world. Problem is, the National Socialists and also Hollywood stole the blue-print. They made it happen bigger, better and faster.

Potts is certainly correct in drawing a line between Marinetti and Gates on the issue of ownership and copyright. Both travelled the world spreading the good word and their respective claims to authorship and extended franchise. The technological dreams may have changed dramatically, but the “will to dominate” reads as all too familiar, both then and now.

The forum became more fruitful when—leaving aside the ‘bit players’ of speed and hybrid communication, we shifted into discussion about terminology, etymology and history. Utopia—Dystopia? What’s the difference? Nothing. Today, conceptual oppositions dissolve into a relational flux (the affirmative deconstruction of the history of ideas demands it). Good for a moment or two of speaking or writing this or that. Then subject to cancellation. An ideological fix is installed when conceptual dyads are set up, naturalised and given fixed tenure.

A quick example: the Apollonian/Dionysian distinction has been thoroughly abused by those seeking to glorify the ‘participatory’ excesses of certain media while assigning poor Apollo to shifty scientists and technocrats. Problem is, as Nietzsche clearly pointed out in The Birth of Tragedy, we have need of lies, dreams, illusion, Hamlet and delay—lest we perish of Truth (to live life at its ultimate extremity which is, dare I say, a hyperbolic limit).

John Conomos relieved the congestion around the prime word topos by suggesting that a more critical relational matrix—of objects and concepts—requires an engagement with particulars that bypasses the subjugation of conceptual regimes. Utilising a Derridean ‘opposition’ (derived from Aristotle) between topos and chora (logical space versus sacred personal space). Conomos suggested—to me at least—that certain forms of new media work us over faster than we can think—that they are ‘across’ our understanding before we muster the conceptual force to render them ‘aesthetic objects’.

New Media Forum Four coincided with media artist Luc Courchesne’s visit to Australia and the installation of his interactive Hall of Shadows as part of the No Exit exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW. Katherine Byrd—co-producer of the Booth Project (a mutant photo booth), together with Courchesne and artist Rosemary Laing discussed their work on an artists panel as part of the same event.

RealTime issue #13 June-July 1996 pg. 26

At the beginning of our talk, Nikki Heywood shows me a series of photographs of the performers from Burn Sonata, realistically costumed and posed as a family group in front of a fire in a 44 gallon drum in a suburban backyard. The performance looks at the monstrous in us and in domestic violence in particular. I’d just been to see Hilary Bell’s emotionally and morally demanding play Wolf Lullaby at The Stables (Griffin Theatre Company) in which a nine year old murders a younger child.

KG Your work has a rich symbolic power, archetypal female figures and chains of metaphor like the human-insect analogy in Creatures Ourselves. This new work looks like a leap into something more social, more literal.

NH I don’t see it as a departure. I think Creatures grew out of a big question I had about how women use their power and transferred that into looking at insects and at human beings as creatures. Women have occupied a place of no power and, given power, there’s something very terrifying that happens. It’s an area people like Camille Paglia have looked at, and she has proven very unpopular with a lot of feminists. But I think it could bear a lot of further investigation. I was looking at what we consider to be monstrous and how we relate to it, and whether or not we place it inside or outside ourselves. At that time there was a lot in the media about serial killers. Like a lot of people, I am very interested in that impulse to kill.

I’d been thinking about my father and the fact that I’d decided I didn’t want to see him again for quite a long time, if ever. Then I heard that he was in hospital having an operation. Of course, it called on my sense of guilt and of duty as a daughter. I sat thinking, well, if I go to the hospital and visit him, what will happen? I imagined him lying in bed, and I imagined him on a life support system, which of course he wasn’t because it wasn’t that serious. But that was the image I had and I just let the story run. And the story went that I walked into the room, felt nothing for him and switched off his life support system. At that moment, I thought “That’s really satisfying. That would just complete something for me, to do that. Okay, I know I could kill someone”. And I remembered I had dreams about killing my father when I was a child.

NH The actual father. I’m not alone in that. There are a many people who’ve had that difficulty with one or other of their parents. A lot of murders happen in families. But the interesting thing is, it’s very hard to find a case where a daughter murders her father. And that seemed to me to be like a big taboo. Even in Greek mythology, I still haven’t really found the story. The father is God. If the daughter, in terms of hierarchy, was to turn the tables and to kill God, what happens?

NH Well, the inclination’s there and I’m trying to subvert it and find other than naturalistic ways to occupy the performing space that re-create that energy of violence, of dysfunction. When we’re not functioning well as adults we all occupy again the place of the child. There’s a schism created for us through a childhood experience, and that experience will continue to operate out of that fracture, in some way or another, until we find a way of resolving it.

KG When Open City performed Promiscuous Spaces: Table Talk at A Progressive Dinner, (The Performance Space, April) I spoke about my obsessive horror-story-telling behaviour at the dinner table, about how here I am at 50 behaving like someone who was traumatised at an early age. But it wasn’t a big one-off trauma. At one performance, because the work is semi-improvised, I suddenly invoked Sartre’s notion of serial trauma, of recurrent events (like a decade of family rows over meals) that cumulatively shape the psyche.

NH I thought I might look at what happens when a child tells a story or does a drawing, the act of transference where they become another character or an animal. One of the performers, Claire Hague, has worked as a visual artist, so I’ve been talking to her about it especially since in the performance she occupies my place as a child, that place of no power, in a sense, like that of the youngest daughter.

KG In Wolf Lullaby, as soon as you enter the theatre you see the walls that surround you are covered in a dense child’s blackboard scrawl along with the erased shape of a wolf. The child is a murderer. Her parents are not oppressive, they just have no idea what their daughter is, no way of responding to her ‘cries for help’—her nightmares are ‘comfortingly’ dismissed. They haven’t created a monster, they’ve got one. Of course, sooner or later they suspect the ‘monstrous’ is in them, that their daughter has inherited it. But there is no genetic or psychological consolation from the writer for either the parents or the audience. Because the parents share a kind of bland optimism, a belief in childhood innocence, they both figuratively and literally don’t see the writing on the wall. The moment when the child, played by Lucy Bell, furiously draws a wolf on the wall, is truly frightening. I haven’t been frightened by anything in conventional theatre for years.

NH I don’t want the space to be cluttered with drawings. I want it to be meaner than that.

KG It helps the stage play because it’s a real challenge to convey the enormity of the child’s vision, the wolf which she both is and fears, without resorting to too many words or a symbolic poetry. It’s a beautifully spare text.

NH What do you as a child do when you recognise that you’re living with a monster, whether its yourself or a parent? Can you recognise the monstrous for what it is?

KG It’s bound up with affection and the desire to love the parents. When I performed Photoplay in 1988, a work about my relationship with my emotionally tyrannical mother it was a very difficult experience even though she was long dead. The work turned out to be an exorcism-in-progress.

NH Jean/Lucretia (1995), my work about my grandmother was a very private, personal thing, a lament. That’s when I started to recognise that I really don’t feel I can make work until it rises almost like some sort of bubble. The fact that it’s about my family is not pre-determined. It’s just that it’s happening.

KG Your work is very distinctive, it doesn’t read as Butoh even though your training is in that area through the Body Weather ‘school’ of Min Tanaka. Is Burn Sonata going to combine the archetypal power of your work with the everyday? I’m back at the naturalism issue again.

NH What happens in ordinary life is far more extraordinary than what we create as high art. That was what interested me in Meg Stuart’s dance work at the Adelaide Festival.

KG A Sydney choreographer said to me that Stuart’s dancers weren’t sufficiently in their bodies!

NH The total opposite was the case for me. I felt that I was in their bodies half the time. I noticed that one of the dancers had worked with Min Tanaka. I made a decision a couple of years ago that I wasn’t interested in doing Butoh anymore but Body Weather training is based on everyday sensations and movements. It allows you to access conditions and states on a physical level and transfer that into a work where you’re dealing with a sort of realism. It’s like taking a microscope to the real, or accelerating it by using a different speed, or by amplifying it.

KG You have had some classical vocal training on and off for a couple of years, you perform with the Cafe at the Gate of Salvation gospel choir and you work with sound designer Garry Bradbury. Lately in Sydney it’s been exhilarating to hear the voice emerging in performance works you usually expect to be physical and silent. The vocal work in Creatures Ourselves and Jean/Lucretia was both natural and heightened.

NH Body Weather doesn’t really address the voice, but I think it has influenced my approach to the voice. I feel I’m just scratching the surface. Sound is a fundamental part of the way I construct the imagination of the performance. Garry Bradbury is someone I’ve found who I can work with in a very intuitive way. I talk to him about the thematic content of the work and he invariably has a connection with it. We were working on Jean/Lucretia and I was talking about my grandmother’s house and her pianola and my childhood relationship with it. He’s really fascinated with pianolas so he’s looking at ‘deconstructing’ a pianola and making new rolls based on electronic and possibly vocal sound. The performers have great voices and I’ll want to use them too.

NH I’m not sure how much. I’m just beginning to write text, another surprising development, another way of working. The subject matter is such a juicy area: what is the relationship between the archetypal and the real. The older I get, the more fertile that territory becomes. I remember talking to a psychologist years ago, who said your late 30s, early 40s is actually when the unconscious starts to really become…well, no longer so separate. The dreams get stronger, and anything that’s not resolved actually becomes bigger.

Nikki Heywood, Burn Sonata, with Claire Hague, Tony Osborne, Benjamin Grieve, Clare Grant, Dean Walsh, sound design by Garry Bradbury, The Performance Space, July 25-August 4.

At its best, there’s something attractive about American humour. In Baseball and Passion, two works by Moses Pendleton, performed by Momix, there are enough salient cues for events to coincide with personal biases, even if at first glance the images in the program act like warning signs. Clueless gum chewing ball players strike facile poses with bats. Perfectly linear, rigorously symmetrical groups of dancers threaten to paralyse the imagination. Nervousness overtook me until I read a quotation from Woody Allen, also included in the program, “I love baseball, you know it doesn’t have to mean anything, it’s just very beautiful to watch.” I was relieved with this more comfortably oblique perspective.

In both works there’s an unexpectedly rigorous interior texture, a tang of spirituality, a sacredness of sorts. Profuse images cluster, working to create dense, open-ended iconographic histories which speak about the dimensions of a tart spirit manifesting itself in the profane cultures of everyday human endeavour. Take an apparently sweepingly simple and familiar passion for a game of baseball, and if you care to follow this line of thinking, it turns out to be part of the same deep well from which spring other mystical and unfathomable aspects of human civilisation which follow us from the ancient into the contemporary world. In Passion, sexual fervour, death, struggle and ecstatic religious immolation are made of this same stuff.

An important feature of both works is the layering over live performance of projected slow fading images on a scrim which together capture expansive cosmological perspectives. In Baseball, we see ancient, ‘graven’ images and monuments like Stonehenge overlaying the vivid and live spirit of the pitch on stage; corpulent female Venus figures (described sometimes as homo sapiens’ first object of worship); bat and ball images, banal and serious, are conspicuously genital—a girl in a half-shell; a ball nestles egg-like in a baseball glove, simultaneously vulval and phallic. We see performers regress to a 2001 scene, exercising an atavistic pleasure in hitting soft squashy things with long hard things. We see emblematic crossed bats; Moses with his commandments, the set of rules for the game; film star images, Humphrey Bogart, Babe Ruth; American Indian warrior images; beer-can culture; the Stars and Stripes Forever; a dance within pliable and perfectly balanced double arches set to Arvo Pärt’s Stabat Mater (Stood the Mother, full of grief), and militaristic synchronised bat play. One woman’s Sufi-like spinning solo is able, with immaculate simplicity, to draw us into an understanding of that peculiar kind of devotion.

Nations develop civil religions whose liturgy and iconography are capable of sustaining a range of meanings for devotees, because the symbolism, though intensely religious, is not from any orthodox faith, but typically taps primal or ancient sources. Moses Pendleton’s Baseball shows us all the hallmarks. Civil religion in the US is grounded in the Constitution, directed at binding the individual to the state, “One nation under god”. Virtues are civil ones: physical strength, skill, team spirit. No religious spirit celebrates any God Out There, but exultant humanity right here in the world of competition, politics, finance, dirt, fame, greed, sex, beauty, pain, and skill, and the damp meditative autumnal (should that be fall) afternoons spent tossing a ball around in the wet leaves. This, an insipid but perfect closing image of Baseball, brings that spirit home, binding it to a place which is fundamentally American, even in its own self-mockery.

The immediately spiritual images of Passion take us unhesitatingly to Shiva, Indian god of the universe and lord of the dance, a huge branching tree, the teeming ardent struggle of organic life, the passionate attachment of nerve and cell, fierce, microcosmic vortex of pistil and stamen, flower and insect, vultures in a dead tree, ginseng root—a human image—folds of cerebral cortex, decomposing flesh, war, medieval images of flagellation and ecstasy, monastic penance, repetitive, extreme and peculiar. The passion of a bride, whether of Christ or man, comes to us bare breasted, swathed in tulle. There is a profound eroticism in all of this, from the images of Italian renaissance women, tiny winged cupids with dimpled legs, to the huge mechanical clock marking the passage of both cyclic and linear time.

Neither frail, brittle nor pre-pubescent, the women’s bodies have a more flagrant aesthetic independence not so familiar to Australian mainstream dance. An apparent maturity and succulence seems to walk all over quaint narrow female images we have unfortunately come to expect, and embarrassingly, to think of as erotic. These dancers show no signs of physical struggle, they make no slips, they have immense facility, they are perfectly attuned. Meanwhile, the choreographic designs are surprisingly so foursquare, repetitive, turn-taking, linear, and peculiarly literal as to make me wonder why their dimensions do not feel more circumscribed. Such are the illusions, farcical and sophisticated, which are created with meticulous precision. You need a soft focus on these images for them to do their work.

Momix (U.S.), Baseball and Passion, conceived and directed by Moses Pendleton, Sydney Dance Company, Sydney Opera House, May 2-9.

Is it possible to talk about first, second, third generation contemporary choreographers in Australia—what constitutes a generation? At Dancehouse’s Great Escapes—two week-ends of continuous dancing, one event following another for up to four hours—generations came and went. There were the subtly skilled bodies of trained dancers and ex-company dancers—Dianne Reid and Rochelle Carmichael—doing sinuous solos or showing the work of their fledgling companies. There were the frisky bodies of Al Wunder’s studio in Five Square Metres. There were the modern dancers still stretching fabric and making elegant gestures (Arches of Desire and Mind the Gap) and there were the intensely Butoh and psychological, Tony Yap again. Others bordering on the edge between the banal and the truly funny, Suit, and still more.

Dancehouse is meeting a real need for independent dancers, or dancers in general, to have a place to show work and to meet one another in a polyglot and non-judgmental environment. The newly polished jarrah floor of this old building shone more than some of the works but then the mobile crowd came and went with enthusiasm for what they saw. It’s cheap and diverse and the format does allow dancers to tease a little and test a little. I missed Jane Refshauge’s solo but was told it had a focus on inner listening which was quite foreign to the refinements of a younger generation. One of my favourites was Steven Pease’s monologue in the midst of Yap’s A Little Escape into the Subterranean; no dancing, but standing still he took us on a rapid journey from kitchen table to maggots, worms, urethra and Vikings—far more grotesque than the other sweaty bodies around him. Perhaps the ultimate escape was Breaking Free of Human Bondage in which Andrew Casey, pinned to a ganchion on the brick wall, hurled himself at the audience while his dog was tied to a pillar in the yard outside, barking wildly. On the first performance the rope broke, nearly demolishing the front row of spectators wrapped in their blankets. The second night audience missed the return visit.

When over 100 people braved the recent Brisbane downpours and subsequent floods to attend the launch of the Cherry Herring, somehow it wasn’t all that surprising. After the success of the Crab Room last year, the continuation of its spirit of experimentation in a new venue, with a larger group of core artists, was more or less guaranteed to renew the interest of an already supportive community. The new space adjoins the Council Bus Depot in the Valley, which at one time housed a drag racing association. Cherry Heering is one of the many liqueurs depicted in the wallpaper behind the old bar, hence the title Cherry Herring. The potential for such quirky intertextual exploration makes 1062 Ann Street a particularly interesting site for those artists involved—Shaaron Boughen, John Utans, Jean Tally, Avril Huddy, Lisa O’Neill, Julieanne Hansen, Tony Kishawi, Brian Lucas, Gail Hewton, Helen Leeson, Sonia Fletcher and Susan Lewis.

Politically, this may seem like a curatorial nightmare, with all twelve artists sharing the financial responsibilities for the lease of the space. Yet it was the financial burden upon the four artists who initiated and administered the Crab Room that contributed to its eventual dissolution. At the moment though, this group of artists seems to be honeymooning; there’s an atmosphere of harmony and conviviality as they urge each other towards new creative possibilities. Cherry Herring’s manifesto states as one of its objectives: “To encourage and facilitate the creation of an environment which rigorously embraces and embodies risk, experiment, research, discussion, and debate about artistic practice and application”. The artists are more explicitly united in all being quite specifically dance-based. There is a definite openness to other art forms however, as the emphasis is on the more expansive notion of ‘performance’, as opposed to dance as such.

This broader understanding is echoed by Lisa O’Neill, one of the collective. Lisa has two ‘families’ ; the Suzuki-influenced FRANK Productions, under the strong artistic direction of Jacqui Carroll and John Nobbs, and the flexible, democratic Cherry Herring. “My main focus at the moment is evolving as a performer,” she says. “So my pieces are a vehicle for increasing my awareness of my relationship with the audience, which is something that comes out of working with FRANK. And since working with FRANK, I’ve discovered and developed another level of my own solo work. I feel like I work the audience differently. And I suppose it’s the difference of going from ‘dancer’ to ‘performer’. There’s much more to it than dancing in a space.”

Lisa has created her own movement vocabulary out of a self-imposed rule to work away from conventional dance techniques. “It wasn’t a conscious rejection of anything, it was just honest. People say my work is pretty odd, but I get that from trying to find different physical connections,” she reflects. “Through the last few solos I’ve done, I have built up a character, and she’s full of contradictions. And I find that in a lot of ways she reflects who I am, which is a bit scary.” In the forthcoming inaugural season at the Cherry, Tanked, Lisa will be revisiting her performance persona, although in this incarnation the movement will be more aggressive. Yety in e minor is a continuation of sweet yety, the solo Lisa stomped her way through last year at the Crab Room’s first season. It is fitting then, that the work has been extended in a fresh context, while essentially bridging the two performance spaces.

An obvious marine fixation has already bridged the venues with respect to title, and this was playfully celebrated at the opening of the Cherry Herring. Each artist designed a unique fish tank for the event in a comic representation of the group’s name, sushi was served, and the members of the Cherry were wearing cherry red ensembles. There were also snippets of works in the making for the Tanked season. Despite this, there is no definite theme for Tanked. For instance, Shaaron Boughen is reworking a piece she originally choreographed for Wendy Houston when she was completing her Master of Arts in London. Shaaron wanted to return to a work which held creative significance for her in a particular time and place and try to reshape it in a movement conversation with a different performer in this new space.

Not all of the artists involved are presenting work in this season, and because of the size of the collective there is less pressure for them to do so. Jean Tally comments, “Instead of a few artists continually generating work, there is more space for the individual”. Brian Lucas agrees, “I think just the physical fact of having so many people involved means that the work can be spread around, so we will be able to do as many if not more performances”. There is also more space for workshop series, classes and forums, because of the different backgrounds, capacities and interests of the members of the group.

Perhaps the Cherry Herring will prove more difficult to manage than the Crab Room, but the potential for the space is clear. Building on the enthusiasm of the Crab Room but diffusing that enthusiasm through many different courses, the Cherry Herring will be, as it purports, “a major venue for emerging and established artists, offering a local focus for the creation, development, rehearsal and presentation of original performance based work”.

On paper it looks neat—three collaborators, three weeks, three subjects. But the tapestry these three threes weave together is richer than a simple braid. The working process to create No Time Like The Present, a collaboration of dance and design by Ruth Hadlow, Wendy McPhee and Cate O’Brien involved a complicated layering of necessity, risk and ideas, of intuition, structure and invention. Wendy, a feisty, explosive dancer brought an energising serving of necessity and intuition. She works from her kinetic intelligence, responding in movement to deeply felt imperatives. Ruth, ostensibly a “designer” is actually someone who is not afraid to get her hands dirty. She doesn’t decorate the work, she instigates, probes and designs it in the sense of devising. Her contribution to the working process of No Time Like the Present is another vital triple: “structure, hope and faith”. Cate makes the bridge between Ruth’s measured and optimistic approach and Wendy’s rush of expression. Although used to dancing in formalist work, depending on her very reliable and developed technique, Cate says calmly that when asked to do improvisation which may or may not have an outcome and to try a bit of “gush” dancing to Patsy Cline she was “willing to take the risk”. Audacity with equilibrium and a sense of perspective. And so the three were able to work together in a tightly structured and emotionally fraught three weeks to create No Time Like the Present, a work which started with a lot of ideas, developed into even more ideas and then filtered itself down to three: time, speed, and change. And in the end, while the finished work looks at these subjects from the point of view of time passing in decades, of the dizzying speed of the world, of the changes in society, the three collaborators agree, it’s also about their lives, and even about this working process. It’s a piece about time they wanted more time to make. A piece about speed that was made fast enough. And a piece about change that keeps changing. The working process created a finished work, but also the beginning of the performing process in which they have to balance, and wave and risk their way around Tasmania, ever updating their intentions within the piece and bringing it into their own time, which, certainly there is no time quite like.

No Time Like the Present is a dance and design collaboration by Ruth Hadlow, Wendy McPhee, and Cate O’Brien currently touring Tasmania. Karen Pearlman is co-artistic director of Tasdance

In 1994, Jude Walton was invited to develop work as an artist-in-residence at the Queen’s College, University of Melbourne, in the neo-Gothic Tower Studio. In turn, she invited choreographers Sandra Parker and Trevor Patrick, writers Jackie Dunn and Mark Minchinton and cinematographer Brendan Lavelle to work with her around the broad thematic constellation of knowing and bodies. Material generated from that time and space is now being reworked for a week of performances in July, in a very different space: the George Ballroom in St. Kilda, a weathered Neo-Baroque dance hall ghosted by its pasts and possible futures.

Dance:Text:Film emerges from questions that seek to recognise epistemological ‘gaps’, spaces in-between self and other, presence and absence, remembering and forgetting. These spaces in-between are the sites of desire and its corollary, fiction. What follows is a collage of fragments by Jude Walton and Mark Minchinton, written during the development process.

Desire comes as a realisation, a perception, as it were as the result of a mental operation which has now entered into the system of desire. The erotic, one might say, is the intelligence of the body. It is the body become sentient and self-aware by way of the other. Peter Brooks, Body Work

I said, “Who’s missing? Someone’s missing”.
You said, “There’s always someone missing”.

Is it only in absence that we know another? Given that incorporation is both act and condition of experience, how do we know intimately through the ‘body’ through the ‘mind’? The knowing that stems from incorporation is acquired through accretion, translation, accumulation of ‘fact’, evidence observed, experienced, collated, sifted…but in the end what do we know? And what is this inherently insatiable desire to know another—to ‘hold their mind in your hand’? These are some of the questions.

When we speak we communicate more than we can know. But more important is what we seek to omit, to withhold. What are these selves that could have been, and in withholding them what do we gain and lose?

I feel we continually rebuild our reality to suit our wishes and desires. As Leif Finkel says in an article on the construction of perception, “our cortex makes up little stories about the world, and softly hums them to us to keep us from getting scared at night”.

The reflection of the fields in the glass of the train window remind me of another time. A time known only in motion. The sense of going forward to another place, another me, and I invent my life, what it will become.

This project brings together the differing languages of dance, text and film to investigate how knowledge is generated and conveyed from body to body, from soul to soul. I think it creates an unstable patchwork, a shadowy narrative of desire between the performers, a world at the cusp of appearance and disappearance. At various times information is accumulated, concealed, transformed or deleted to reveal relationships that remain forever potential and therefore, in a way, forever unknown.

What is the place of absence? Where is it we are when we’re not (t)here? Who do we become when we are not present? And should a fireman come to us, wearing helmet and boots, would we know how to respond? Would we go with him, accept the state of emergency, or sit dumbfounded and questioning, wondering if we had heard the sirens, and if not, questioning their absence? What is a fireman? And why do fires need to be put out?

The structure of the work is conversational, nomadic, looping back on itself and making tangential excursions. It exists as a collection of small, individual moments which hopefully, as Walter Benjamin suggested, act as “crystals from which can be read or inferred the shape of the total event”. Audiences are invited to participate in an unravelling and understanding of the circumstances, “to grasp the epoch from the small symptoms of the surface”, as Horkheimer has said. To make their own fictions of what real-ly happens.

At sunset, in those moments of fading, when I try to see what I think should be there, where have you gone? And at sunrise when the light slowly reveals you, why don’t I feel surprised?

Jude Walton’s Dance:Text:Film will be performed by Sandra Parker, Trevor Patrick, Jackie Dunn, Mark Minchinton and Jude Walton at the George Ballroom, Fitzroy Street, St. Kilda, 16-21 July, as part of the Green Mill Dance Project 1996.

In 1995 Stefano Tele spent five weeks as a teacher in the Ausdance Outreach program which travelled to the north-west of Australia. He was subsequently asked back to take up week-long residencies at Woodstock (a remote community near Kalumburu) in November 1995 and August 1996. Stefano explains to Tony Osborne how he came to be a dancing success with young people not normally exposed to Western performance dance forms.

TO Ausdance were excited that you’d been invited back after the initial Outreach program because someone in the remote communities—not necessarily involved in the arts—had recognised the value and the benefits of the workshops you gave as a potential catalyst for transformation for some of their people.

ST I only worked with kids and they varied from pre-primary through year seven to high-school. Being there for a whole week as opposed to doing a one-off workshop was important.

TO How do you think your teaching practice and your performance work inform each other?

ST You have to be able to impart the information in a way that is not too esoteric. For instance, if I’m doing a one-off class, if I don’t know the students and I’m not sure how they’re going to take the material, I’ll use my warm-up to gauge what step to take next. I found that the kids in remote communities were so shy at first that I had to coax them to do things. They like to see what you can do first. So I improvised a little show with a talking drum. Once they saw me turning drum rhythms into movement the little kids started copying me. Then the older kids followed as the enthusiasm infected the group. It taught me an invaluable lesson in how to change my teaching style and not allow myself to be too limited by a rigid program. I can use that experience to change the direction of a workshop if I need to.

ST I would say a performer. I studied performance at the Victorian College of the Arts and my teaching skills were acquired at Two Dance Plus, a West Australian dance-in-education company. Since I left Two Dance Plus teaching has provided employment between performances.

TO I’ve noticed a real ease in the way you move in performance as well as the comedic aspect you bring to your work—a strong theatrical element. You seem very comfortable with a sense of the ridiculous and with satirical material such as your collaboration with Jon Burtt during Dancers Are Space Eaters at PICA and In the Blue Room last year.

ST Sometimes people take themselves too seriously. An anatomy teacher once told me that its good to twitch…as an antidote to the highly technical training I was receiving at the time. She saw dance, especially classical, as a form that was detrimental to the body and I believe that there’s got to be a balance.

TO Do you think your ethnic background was an element in the connection you made with the kids up north—not another white-fella coming in to show them how its all done?

ST One foot in the door, so to speak. I was born in Western Samoa and my parents emigrated to New Zealand when I was about three. I came to Australia in 1985.

ST Basically to curb my hyperactivity. But in my culture everybody dances and in a lot of ceremonies as well. If a visiting group comes to the community, then a performance will be staged and the men will be part of it. When my family realised I was doing white-man’s dancing, such as classical and modern, they were really surprised. My cousins have only had a tiny exposure to white-man’s dance.

TO Does white-man’s dance appear to be a career rather than something that you do culturally? Was that the significance of their surprise?

ST They couldn’t understand why I would want to do that. If I had become an actor it would have been quite different. Exposure to TV ensures that they would be quite familiar with what actors do, but not so with dancers.

TO What was the importance of the dance you took to the remote north-west as opposed to the dance people there experience as part of their community activities?

ST What I took to those communities was my ‘zest for life’, trying to impart in different ways that the dance I do is very important to me. I taught some of the kids to play the talking drum or played footy or basketball with them as the only way of connecting them with the group. Rather than just doing the job, I interacted with them and became a small part of the community as well as being their teacher.

TO Do you think it was important for them that you are a ‘success’ in the white-man’s world through dance?

ST Because there is no role model here for Aboriginal kids, like the Bangarra Dance Company, I think it’s important for them to see that there are fields other than sport.

Find

June 1996

realtime