Australian
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exploratory
performance and
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February 2003

Naida Chinner, Once Bitten

photo Heidrun Löhr

Naida Chinner, Once Bitten

Sometimes it’s nice to be seduced. In The Morning After, the Night Before, performer and choreographer Shannon Bott invites the audience to a collective assignation, from a soap box in the foyer of Performance Space—a charming kind of spruik—her body and voice advertising an open ingenuousness with a touch of taut sleaze. She has a remarkable face, dewy and bold, like her initial invitation full of cliché and innuendo and she works with sentiments expressed in the worst women’s magazines which we love to deride but recognise enough to raise an embarrassed giggle. She invites us to meet her inside the theatre, to participate in her illusions of wide-eyed love and naked lust. She tells us stories: The Princess and the Pea, the one about the bartender and several other guys who end up in her living room. The work sets out to illuminate this fusion: a cockeyed sentimentality both mawkish and unavoidably human and Bott’s vocal and facial expressions take us a long way. Her energy is joyful and buoyant like a cocker spaniel puppy, with dance material that is choreographically uncluttered and rhythmically foursquare. Yet I found myself wanting those clichés about relationships to go somewhere really illuminating—but maybe that’s what illusion is about—constant expectation doomed to fall just short of transcendence.

Jane McKernan’s I Was Here takes us to a different place altogether, not quite so amusing, probing a woman’s lapses of consciousness, trying to make visible that moment where awareness slips insensibly into void, a place of simultaneous degradation and release. Under a blue light, she dances, drained of colour, but held fast by a suffocating disco beat. Another figure lies mostly unnoticed, with her back to us, fallen and very still; on the other side of the stage a video shows a perpetually falling man, about to slip out of the screen but never quite disappearing. At times McKernan shifts her weight, totters, slides, falls. On the ground in skirt, stilettos and ankle socks, she is both a hopeless drunk and an unselfconscious child, a helpless scrap of humanity trying feebly to regain her feet, but so unaware of her own struggle she maintains an unexpected kind of dignity.

Nalina Wait’s improvised KYU circumscribes another kind of territory, with a sparkling clarity and complexity that makes the work look simple. She defines her dimensions and trajectories across a progressively illuminated diagonal, a well-used and effective design, an increasing corridor of light lengthening as if she’s pushing its far boundary with her body. After stretching to the farthest point, the energy draws her back like a retreating wave, leaving the wash of light. Her limbs are articulate and neat, the lines of her body sharp and clear, sometimes expressing mere quivers of sensibility, but there is a sense of progression and development which surpasses the simplicity of the score. The rhythms of her movement are complex, unexpected and pleasingly uneven.

Naida Chinner devised and performed Once Bitten (directed by Ingrid Voorendt), a work with a similar theme to Bott’s—a battle between romanticism and cynicism—but the place she takes us is a bit less glitzy, much less glamorous and definitely more squishy. It probably had to go last on the program because of the squashed tomatoes on stage at the end—way too difficult to clean up in a hurry. The movement is chunky and full-bodied. Being succulent and organic rather than textbook material, the choreography serves the dance well. Tomatoes, ripe and juicy but with a soft and easily broken skin, are used as a symbol of all the horrible things that love can do. Does anyone survive intact being stepped over, fallen on repeatedly, chewed up and swallowed, squashed, thrown, picked up and dropped? Chinner’s world becomes progressively littered with broken, leaky flesh to the unforgettable strains of Roy Orbison’s Love Hurts.

Mobile States 2: The Morning After, the Night Before, performer Shannon Bott, choreographers Shannon Bott & Sue Peacock (WA); I Was Here, choreographer and performer Jane McKernan (NSW); KYU, improvisation Nalina Wait (NSW); Once Bitten, choreographer and performer Naida Chinner, director Ingrid Voorendt (SA); producers, PICA & Performance Space; Performance Space, Sydney, Nov 20, 2002

RealTime issue #53 Feb-March 2003 pg. 41

red message service is a Hobart-based improvisation ensemble comprising is theatre ltd director Ryk Goddard and physical theatre performers Martin Coutts and Laura Purcell. The group creates a full-length improvisation performance—not theatre-sports games, but full-on physical theatre. They create lush, absurdist, minimalist performance in a self-organizing space while the ensemble is conversely configured by that space.

On a virtually bare stage 99 white balloons, inflated to the size of light bulbs, pulsate with eerie promise. Cradled in Coutts’ arms the balloon-bulbs are held in an ambivalence of capture, containment and embrace. There are no explanations or revelations. The performers co-exist in the space, insistently building images of association and dissociation through the interplay of movement, text, light and sound.

While running in slow motion the performers register amazement. Their quick-fire-language suggests, yet equally denies, explanation or revelation. Purcell engages in the erotic lunacy of tasting clouds on a rainy day—a movement and message for unstable times. The audience is denied any chance of tying the performers into the tired meaning systems of old codes.

Four strands of illuminated blue and red strips stretch across the space. The challenge for the performers is to find their own footsteps and negotiate the potential of each line. red message service responds by offering a user’s course guide, creating instances of intimate alliance and rupture via a domestic clothesline, a cable car to Mount Wellington and a line for carrying a digital global message.

red message service appropriates elements of life in the digital age, showing alternate possibilities for thought. Paradoxically, each improvised situation requires a semblance of resolution before generating the next response to that resolution, producing a continuous folding of reaction and response.

“Into each life some sweet rain must fall,” sings Billie Holiday while Coutts, Goddard and Purcell explore contemporary addiction to the banal promise of the 7 steps to happiness. The balloon-bulbs invite sensuous contact and the performers oblige, holding them against their lips in a scrabble of lust and squeaking.

The entanglements of human life recur throughout the performance. They erupt in Goddard’s dexterous self-gagging, Coutts’ percussive washing-machine stomp offset by the Washington Machine, Goddard’s self-demeaning inner voice, and Purcell’s ability to extend movement into potent dance statement. The performers cling to each other like static electricity before their 2 against 1 triangular pattern segues into childhood ostracism and bullying. The excluded becomes the excluding. Instantly the energy aligns differently, everything implodes and the configuration changes.

The laundry line is replaced by a folding of cloth. The performers sit with shrouds over their faces, accentuating their visible, yet invisible features. We gaze through the cloth to an outline of promise. red message service ensemble challenges the audience to create different thinking of and for themselves.

red message service, performers Ryk Goddard, Martyn Coutts, Laura Purcell; lighting design Jen Cramer; lighting operator Jody Kingston; sound Sarah Duffus; Backspace, Hobart, Nov 22-23

RealTime issue #53 Feb-March 2003 pg. 32

Listening to the plaudits from participants, the first Time_Place_Space hybrid performance workshop seems to have been a success, so much so that the second is announced to take place from Sept 21 to Oct 5. Time_Place_Space is a unique opportunity for Australia’s contemporary performance makers to test their ideas, visions and plans against those of their peers and mentors from home and abroad. The vital element, says co-curator and Performance Space Artistic Director Fiona Winning, is the 2 weeks of isolation that the workshop provides in a rural setting and without pressures of public showing and fast tracking. “We’ll be in Wagga Wagga again, hermetically sealed, enjoying a very potent time, honoring a precious opportunity but not being too ambitious about what can emerge. The model will be similar to 2002 with some artists overlapping and maybe one of the previous facilitators.” Winning and co-curator Sarah Miller (Artistic Director, PICA) are keen to get more experienced participating artists at all stages in their careers into the mix for 2003, “so that it’s not just the dynamic between facilitators and artists that’s at work but between artist and artist.”

Winning explains that “the focus of Time_Place_Space is on performance—hybrid performance. The live body is an essential part of everybody’s work, but some of the participants aren’t performers or performance makers but have a link with it through installation, film, design…”

The 3 overseas facilitators in the first Time_Place_Space were UK-based. Winning says that was incidental but admits “the appeal is of a strong live art community and practice in the UK. It’s diverse and interesting and has good teachers and facilitators.” She says there’ll be a broader international presence in future. The first to be announced for 2003 is a Time_Place_Space coup: Toronto-based artist Michelle Terran, a leader in collaborative digital performance and installation works with a focus on mediated relationships. As she writes in her artist’s statement this is about “the paradox of amplified intimacy to somebody who is far away, mediating or hybridizing spaces (physical and internet space, physical and screen space, public and private space, local and global space) and experiencing what happens in between.”

A visual artist who has moved into the digital, Terran describes her practice as involving “live performance/installations using technologies that address issues such as social networks, presence and the interplay between (media) spaces. My work covers live installations, online performance, telepresence, live art, video, networked collaboration, lab spaces, art and social play.” Terran’s vivid and playful work is informed, she writes, by gaming since “gaming is less about work as work and more about work as play. The artworks produced are less about physical manifestations and more about the language and rules involved in social interactions. A system is set up which then has the possibility of being activated, or played.” For example, the work titled _interference_interaction entails a game board mapped onto an city zone utilizing wireless cameras, video receivers connected to televisions found in local businesses and bicycles.

For images, yellow bicycles were rigged with wireless cameras and used by anybody entering the play space to record the path they take as they move through the area. Live video from the moving cameras was distributed over several monitors throughout the city zone. Video receivers were attached to television sets at local businesses, making it possible to view the action from inside a bar, gallery, furniture store, bank, coffee shop and/or restaurant. The cameras transmitting on the same frequency interfere with each other, causing live on-the-fly editing of the video on the monitors. Interference in flow between people and hardware and the effect of cross signals resulted in a continuous spatial-temporal state of change.

Another work, AFK was “a series of online performances involving sending a SMS message in front of ‘public’ webcams within the context of the local landscape.” Grrls Meet in Different Ways Now is described as an “ongoing online visual jam using hybrid mixes of ICQ, IVisit, Nato and KeyStroke” with a Norwegian collaborator. Examples of Terran’s works are documented at www.ubermatic.org/misha. The artist has an impressive curriculum vitae of Canadian and international residencies, commissions and collaborators, and has worked on a project similar to Time_Place_Space at Canada’s famous arts hothouse, Banff Centre for the Arts.

Time_Place_Space is an important initiative from Performance Space, PICA and the New Media Arts Board of the Australia Council designed to support hybrid performance artists to develop their practice and particular works. RT

Time_Place_Space 2, curators Sarah Miller PICA, Fiona Winning; Performance Space and Julianne Pierce ANAT with the support of the New Media Arts Board of the Australia Council. Wagga Wagga Sept 21-Oct 5, 2003. Expressions of interests are now being accepted www.performancespace.com.au

RealTime issue #53 Feb-March 2003 pg. 33

Julian Meyrick, See How It Runs

We have 2 companies to thank for giving Australian theatre an Australian accent, the Australian Performing Group (APG), or Pram Factory, in Melbourne and the Nimrod in Sydney. Together, they comprised the ‘New Wave’ of Australian theatre. Though both groups began early in the 70s, they are products of the 60s and share that decade’s concerns for uniting art and life and for pushing the boundaries of what could be said by challenging censorship. The brash and joyous vulgarity for which they are remembered was part of an attempt to define a distinctly Australian performing style.

These companies provided a nursery for many important Australian writers and performers. About 90% of the plays in the early Nimrod and the APG seasons were Australian. David Williamson, Jack Hibberd, John Romeril, Alex Buzo, Alma De Groen, Peter Kenna, Stephen Sewell and Louis Nowra are among the writers whose early careers were encouraged by those companies.

Despite their cultural importance, no substantial history of the APG has been published and only one exists for the Nimrod, Julian Meyrick’s See How It Runs (Currency Press, Sydney, 2002).

The Nimrod and the APG were founded by a generation of clever young guns in conscious opposition to the mainstream and Meyrick begins his history by examining the division between the generations and in their theatrical and wider cultural loyalties. As he tells it, there was an older Anglophile generation and a younger generation more influenced by nationalism and US-influenced youth culture. But, while he defines the lines very clearly, Meyrick is rightly suspicious of too neat a division and discovers blurred areas and crossovers. For instance, the popularity of new wave writers led to their being picked up by mainstream companies and many in the new wave happily accepted government subsidies.

Nimrod grew from Sydney University connections, principally between Ken Horler and John Bell and the availability of a cheap space, an old stable in Nimrod Street, Kings Cross, its first home. Later, the company moved to the old Cerebos salt factory in Surry Hills. (‘See How It Runs’ was the Cerebos motto.) Much larger than the Kings Cross premises, the new space afforded more performing areas, a main theatre, Upstairs, and a smaller space, Downstairs, as well as a foyer. The building is now the Belvoir Street Theatre. Finally, and disastrously, there was the move to the theatre complex at Sydney University, the Seymour Centre, in a misconcieved attempt to attract larger audiences.

Meyrick examines 3 productions to evoke the theatrical and wider cultural milieu at the birth of the Nimrod, Oedipus Rex, Hair and The Legend of King O’Malley. Allegedly epitomising the staid and backward-looking mainstream offerings of the time is the Old Tote’s pompous and ponderous production of Oedipus Rex, directed by the imported English high priest of high art, Sir Tyrone Guthrie. In the opposite corner was another import that demonstrated how theatre could replicate ‘life’ in its style as well as by what it represents. Hair had expressiveness, relevance and, seemingly, spontaneity. Michael Boddy, Bob Ellis and their collaborators took those ingredients and gave it a local, nationalist spin with the Old Tote’s homegrown The Legend of King O’Malley, the brashly confident foundation production of the Australian new wave. Audiences and critics greeted it enthusiastically. Its ‘rough’ staging, loosely structured narrative and presentational acting set the production style most associated with the Nimrod. Though there were darker offerings from directors such as Rex Cramphorn and Jim Sharman and interpretations of serious plays by Shepard, Bentley, Berkhoff and so on, the Nimrod keynote was fun. This is especially true of the 1970s’ productions, the decade bookended by Biggles and a rumbustious treatment of Goldoni’s The Venetian Twins.

Personality is obviously important to a theatre history and especially important to the Nimrod in the early years. In the absence of a guiding manifesto or obligations to subscribers and government agencies, programming was an ad hoc arrangement determined by the enthusiasms and availability of directors and performers. The outcome was eclecticism. Meyrick observes something like a 3-faceted aspect to the early Nimrod seasons at its Kings Cross home, new wave plays in ‘popular’ or realistic interpretations, revisionary interpretations of the classics and productions drawn from the international avant-garde. Under the loosened constraints of censorship, there seems to have been a preoccupation with sex running through the repertoire and a tendency towards breezy good feeling. With the election of the Whitlam Labor government in 1972 and a partially concomitant nationalism, “Nimrod was ready to credit itself with something like the national equivalent of the Midas touch: everything it touched turned Australian.”

A successful combination of government subsidy and business sponsorship, including Rupert Murdoch’s, created sufficient funds for the company to move to bigger premises in Surry Hills. At this stage, there were 3 artistic directors, John Bell, Ken Horler and Richard Wherrett. Lillian Horler served as general manager until her resignation in 1976. Meyrick concludes at the end of a revealing description of the artistic leadership, “Wherrett needed Horler’s spark and Bell’s egotism as much as they needed his craft and diffidence.”

The late 70s and early 80s were not a happy time for the Nimrod. When the Old Tote collapsed in 1978, the Nimrod tried to become the state theatre company for NSW. Instead, the Sydney Theatre Company was created. There was an uncomfortable turnover of artistic directors and general managers, especially the rancorous departure of a founding figure, Ken Horler, at the end of 1979. Perhaps fun was under threat more generally too. In June, 1979, Luna Park was badly damaged in a fire that killed 5 boys.

David Williamson’s Celluloid Heroes opened the Nimrod’s second decade and in its self-absorption and inability to sustain a narrative drive Meyrick suggests a reflection and prognostication of the Nimrod’s troubles. One review of it was headed, “The Fun Just Petered Out” and the play went on to die a lingering death at the box office in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide.

Though Nimrod fun survived in the small-scale shows Downstairs and in the foyer, things were definitely turning dark Upstairs. According to Meyrick’s analysis of the first 3 years of the 1980s, all the plays staged Upstairs, whatever their genre, were concerned with serious aspects of “conflict, breakdown and violence.” He also notes greater sexual modesty and cleaned up language. Pointing out the middle age of the major participants and their audiences, he observes, “Where once they may have sided with embattled, feisty, put-upon youth, they now reserved residual sympathy for guilty, implicated, anxious maturity.”

Meyrick’s story of the bumpy slide of Nimrod towards its folding in the mid ‘80s fuses trading deficits, distrust between management and staff, factionalism, staff control and then board control, rescues from bankruptcy and the disastrous move to the Seymour Centre. Meyrick handles the complexities in the painful dénouement of the Nimrod’s history as well as he depicts the company’s rise to triumph. Throughout, he effectively teases out the many strands that knot around the Nimrod without losing a sense that the intricacies are essential to the telling. The narrative is also well served by photographs, tables and chronologies.

See How It Runs is a disciplined, thorough and canny history, the outcome of assiduous work toward a well-deserved PhD and a very useful foundational treatment of the Nimrod. Now that that has been achieved, a lush and juicy, even gossipy, account would be nice. I hope someone is aiming at that by next Christmas.

Julian Meyrick, See How It Runs, Nimrod and the New Wave, Currency Press, Sydney, 2002.

RealTime issue #53 Feb-March 2003 pg. 34

Behind a duo of classic tiled pools is a backdrop of rolling hills with trees swaying in the breeze like a receptive audience. In the foreground is a kiddy-sized wading pool with a jade seahorse adorning its bottom. Behind is the diving and lap zone. Together, they echo the show’s theme, moving from small to large pool like the transition that underpins Stompin’ Youth’s latest project Joyride, the shift from child to young adult.

It’s dusk and the heady aroma of chlorine gets the memory working overtime—thongs, Speedos, lawns, Zinc, hanging out with nothing to do but preen, look bored, play up. The Launceston Swimming Centre becomes an ambient lounge with dj bluff’s blend of trance, house, hiphop, and something that suggests Olympic heroics. The mix moves from sensual to industrial, reflecting the show’s themes of adrenaline and the ever-present tension between conformity and individuality.

Young dancers evoke a hangin’ out vibe on the lawn. The group thickens and moves, at first minimally and then in slow unison—one or 2 bursting free.

The ensemble disperses, leaving 3 forlorn, ragged figures conjuring wind-up ballerinas in jewellery boxes; later, concentrated hand movements evoke drumming bears; both strong childhood images. Voiceovers hint at self-expression, being brave. The audience is presented with a montage of kids playing up—smoking, a bit of aggro shoving, building to the thrill of the joyride. Sharp, jerky movements; the bip of radar; the sound of something being singed—the atmosphere is edgy with a tinge of sexuality.

Finally in the water, li-los, flashlights, clean, sensual movement and the wondrous Bjork create a lovely sequence of play, swoon, splash and glide (and of course, the mandatory Esther Williams-inspired domino freefall)—the joys of being part of the group.

Each transition: from twilight to night; the group’s sprawling then shrinking into a tighter ensemble; movement from small to large pool; and edgy soundscape becoming soothing, supports the thematic binary between fitting in and the risks of self-expression.

Joyride is the first stage of a show called S.Y.N.C (Stompin’ Youth Nautical Crew) to be presented as part of the forthcoming Ten Days on the Island festival, training 24 young people from all over Tasmania, many of whom were new to performance. Luke George, Stompin’s co-Artistic Director sees S.Y.N.C. as a stand-alone show as well as the natural continuation of Joyride. The former will be more about clashes between the young and old and will feature more synchronized swimming as the show explores an older, more rigid form articulated in a new and funky way. S.Y.N.C. will tour 8 regional towns in Tasmania throughout the festival.

I leave Joyride appreciating a program that encourages young people to use and delight in their bodies so skillfully, the spirit generated by their work still palpable.

Joyride, Stompin’ Youth, choreographers Luke George, Bec Reid and Stompin’ Company, Launceston Swimming Centre, Dec 21-22 2002; S.Y.N.C. as part of Ten Days on the Island (see p44), March 28-Apr 5 www.tendaysontheisland.org

From the centre of a wide screen, images of telephone poles split and flip right to the edges of the performing space, rhythmically evoking the small markers of a long journey. The video invites memories of childhood trips from farm to city while the repeated sequences and the softly pulsing soundtrack echo the flashing centre-lines of the road, drawing the viewer across the distances between the 2 ‘centres’ of the Wide Open Road project.

Outback Theatre from Hay in the far west of NSW and PACT Youth Theatre in inner city Sydney worked together over several months with a strong creative team to make this powerful and elegant performance. The final workshops were held in a woolshed at Tupra station on the Hay Plains where the first presentation took place. Together the 2 groups created an imaginative landscape that encompassed the breadth of both city and country spaces while remaining strongly located in the present performance space. This is one of the few productions I have seen that has managed this difficult transition.

Perhaps some of the incongruities of the creative process helped. One of the participants described making theatre at one end of the woolshed while at the other end a mob of ewes were being artificially inseminated.

The training processes, held separately but at crucial stages together in both Sydney and Hay, produced a steady focus, an easy physical presence and a common sense of place and relationship to the performance material in the widely divergent group of performing personalities. The show’s montage style and intelligent construction accommodated a range of aesthetics within its theme of movement across place and time. The idea of direction, whether towards or away from the country/city or more abstractly into an ambiguous future was heightened by the ‘diary ‘ form of much of the verbal material—we are in someone’s journal, inside both a memory as well as a kind of present experience.

As we enter, a young woman searches the air for mobile phone contact, groups hang out on hay bales and sometimes we hear a voice calling ‘hello, hello’, reaching for an ‘elsewhere’ while the audience is captured very clearly in the here and now. The confident and present bodies of the performers create a milieu that is immediately transporting. Surrounding us are the opening segments of the soundscape of light rhythmic sounds, cut across with mobile interference, and the diverging and melding telephone poles.

A back wall of corrugated iron makes a wide horizon and a long streak of light running diagonally across the stage activates another plane. Seamless shifts of place and delicately orchestrated movement through song, simple actions and clear strong voices harmonising fill the performance area and bring an experience of the bush to the city. Perhaps in Tupra it may have seemed like the city going to the bush. It’s here (and there) in the imagination of the audience and performers. The dissolves are almost filmic as sounds of the wind cut across images of both city and country. The time is the present.

Samuel James’ camera is equally comfortable sweeping through urban space or hovering above some minute detail in a wide, “empty” landscape. The images neither illustrate nor explain the actions on stage but sometimes lead and sometimes follow the stage action. The depth of field in much of the camera work brings the breadth of the geography into the awkward length of The Studio space to help create beautifully seamless and sweeping transitions.

Sound and light echo the movement of the camera and create a space that exists in the sensibilities of the young performers, anchored in place through their lyrics, spoken text, the use of icons of the outback (Akubras, hay bales) along with key objects (mobile phones, handbags). These are almost incidental on stage, products of reverie and contemplation in the space itself, as itself, and not part of a pretend place.

Through collages of imagery, we learn more of the lives of these performers than would be possible in a conventional narrative. The structure of images creates constant movement in the physical staging—there’s a stillness that is never static; voices come from all corners.

While the video images are powerful, we are never allowed to forget the presence of the performers in the space. In one of the strongest transitions, the live voices of the performers ‘hanging out’ on stage evoke the sounds of outback space. An Akubra is discovered on the ‘roadway,’ an ironic light flashing on it. We become slowly aware of a tiny figure far away on the deep-red-to-blue horizon on the screen. He is wearing an Akubra ‘for real,’ walking slowly towards us and growing, like a mirage, becoming the farmer whose slow-mo walk declares his certainty in the place. He moves steadily forward till he walks larger-than-life off the top edge of the screen, leaving only the horizon of red earth against the soft blue of the sky. Maybe it’s my memory of my farmer father, but the image is one of the most evocative I have seen in a while, its effect heightened by the precision and humour of the return to the physical presence of the performers.

Thirty or so disparate personalities working across large distances have found a common performance language and created a dense and vivid work.

Wide Open Road, direction Regina Heilmann, co-direction Alicen Waugh (Outback Theatre), Chris Murphy (PACT), video Samuel James, sound Nik Wishart, lighting Shane Stevens; PACT Youth Theatre and Outback Theatre produced by The Studio, Sydney Opera House, Dec 4-7 2002

Directed by Susie Dee and written by Wayne Macauley, The Teratology Project demonstrates the power of context in presenting complex ideas. Delivered with ease and wit by great performers from the Institute of Complex Entertainment, the work was staged at the former Preston and Northcote Community Hospital. Teratology is the study of monsters, fashionable at the turn of the last century. The Teratology Project reveals science itself to be monstrous and vanity its champion.

After submitting a DNA sample on entering the hospital, the audience is divided into 3 groups. We wait in the ward where The Doctor (Brian Lipson) informally shows us some exhibits—pictures of cloned babies, a life-size cast of a cadaver. Then we are separated and move to the first room where the performer Maria Theodorakis waits. She tells us she is one of 4 sisters, all born to different women; she is the only one to whom their biological mother gave birth. We meet 3 of the sisters in 3 successive rooms, none similar, each reacting differently to their captivity. In the fourth room we encounter a body covered by a bloody sheet. The mother enters and explains that she has bred her ‘children’, 28 in all, to provide a supply of youthful exteriors. She has just lifted the face from the fourth clone and masked herself with it.

The doctor guides us through the corridors stalked by an ambiguous figure in a fashionably retro brown suit carrying a portable record player. We are left to wait in the autoclave room and told not to touch anything. In a fish tank is one dead mouse, which has made the whole room reek. We are then guided to a wardroom with a bed enclosed by curtains. The Doctor reveals an old man (Bruce Kerr), who at 168 years has been kept alive in a hospital bed connected to an external fish tank containing a pig’s heart. The old man tells us that he has lost all his memories. They have tried to implant some pleasant ones but none stick. All he can remember is a field of cows but he doesn’t know if it’s his memory. The man in the brown suit enters and plays a strange waltz on his record player. The old man gets out of bed and dances with Death—but the Doctor drags him back, reviving him again. Death wanders off down the corridors.

The Doctor then reveals a woman (Sally Hildyard) eating bananas and with the most enormously pregnant belly propped up before her. The Doctor inserts a lipstick camera into the belly and we are introduced to the child. Angus Cerrini plays a recalcitrant clone of Jesus Christ, conceived in a test tube from an ancient drop of blood on a sliver of the cross, and who at 32 years old continues to refuse to be born. The symbiotic relationship between mother and child is more erotic than maternal.

The whole audience is then gathered together. We watch Death and the old man waltz off together, Death finally triumphant. But the Doctor has a surprise. He tells us that his life’s work has been to destroy Death. He brings Death in strapped to a wheelchair and is about to kill him with a hypodermic needle when we are interrupted by a man, Etienne Grebot, in full French gumshoe regalia. He demands that the prisoner be read his rights and proceeds to argue the defence, producing pictures of cute babies as evidence that the final removal of Death also removes any hope of new life. Finally Death is released and waltzes with the Doctor in a last macabre number.

Institute of Complex Entertainment, The Teratology Project; writer Wayne Macauley; director Susie Dee; former Preston and Northcote Community Hospital, Melbourne, Nov 26-Dec 7, 2002

This is a show you’ll either love or hate depending on your expectations of physical theatre. There have been a number of subversive moments in the genre over the last decade with some key works by Legs on the Wall, The Party Line and others where physical theatre and contemporary performance merge to produce something beyond a parade of tricks. But there’s always a tendency to go back to circus roots for the sheer fun of it, pleasing the audience or re-energising before tackling the dark stuff once more. Brisbane’s Rock’n’Roll Circus do it both ways in their Rock’n’Roll Circus

Inspired by the Mozart-da Ponte opera, The Marriage of Figaro, an adaptation of Beaumarchais’ original play regarded as revolutionary for its brazenly comic critique of artistocratic power, Figaro Variations is what it says it is, a set of variations responding to themes from the opera and subsequent history. It does not reproduce the plot of the opera to any extent, except quite laterally and, occasionally, musically. Although a physical theatre work with not a little clowning and some striking displays of skill, this is no circus. In fact it shifts with determination from rude comedy to stark symbolism, from lively clowning to the distressed stillness of contemporary performance, from the complex and optimistic gaiety of Mozart to the mournfully ironic portrayal, in the music of Shostakovich, of revolution betrayed, and on to silence and reconciliation.

Act 1 is a world made up of routines and gags, visual piss jokes and of relationships, passions and tensions writ large. Cherubino’s dancerly swooning on a very tall pole is brutally interrupted by the Count, a langorous, red-nosed testicle-fondling clown (plenty of ball jokes and juggling), who brings his servant right down to earth. A sustained sequence where he rides his bicycle in a perpetual circle while his servants leap on to shave and to dress him from top to bottom completes the Act 1 picture of casual power and subordination. The slipping between Mozart and a kind of ragtime in Act 1 gives way, after a protracted stillness and silence, to Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No 2 in Act 2 . Figaro is now a revolutionary hero and comedy gives way to images of increasing oppression—struggles, headlocks, dark feats of strength, of threatening knife juggling and dangerous imbalance. In Act 3, Forgiveness, stark images (a gasping Cherubino descending on a red rope looks like something from Francis Bacon), reversals physical and emotional, and final unions slowly unfold in elegaic elegance—too ponderous and too still at times for the good of the work’s overall dynamic, but you can see what director Yaron Lifschitz is getting at. Such restraint in physical theatre is rare.

The whole concept of Figaro Variations is a bold one and not easy to pull off. It’s not always easy to follow the show even if you know the opera’s characters. Given those physical theatre audience expectations and the movement from fun to increasing abstraction, stillness and seriousness, Rock’n’Roll Circus takes a substantial risk—of being accused of pretentiousness (not helped by the title) and confusing its audience. If the audience were palpably bemused the night I saw the performance at The Powerhouse, they were nonetheless attentive and appreciative. Ably directed and engagingly performed physically and musically, and a confident step forward from the company’s last major work, Tango, Figaro Variations is to be applauded for the risks taken, the seriousness ventured.

Figaro Variations, Rock’n’Roll Circus, director Yaron Liftschitz, musical director Paul Hankinson, music Mozart, Shostakovich and Hankinson, costumes Anna Illic, lighting Jason Organ, choreographer Nathan Tight; Brisbane Powerhouse, Nov 29 – Dec 7

Adopt a codename. Fill out the identification form. Sign the disclaimer. Then get on the bus.

That was the drill for the audience of 22 passengers as they arrived at Artrage’s Breadbox gallery for the PVI Collective’s latest crossover performance extravaganza, TTS: ROUTE 65. And you don’t argue with an enormous, pissed-off looking bouncer named Daddy.

A tour-de-force, TTS: ROUTE 65 was a unique bus tour of Perth, taking the audience to various ‘strategic’ points around the city where they alighted to be confronted with cleverly-layered monologues and performances that were dynamic, absurd, confronting and thought-provoking. TTS furthered the Collective’s continuing investigation into how everyday life is mediated, interrupted, monitored and messed with by technology, surveillance and the mass media, with a new focus on the much-hyped phenomenon of ‘terror.’ As the microcosmic renderings of local spaces and sites in TTS unravelled and Perth was slowly scrutinised and pulled apart, connections to the macrocosm of global Western culture (and paranoia) became evident.

Discourses of terrorism and tourism crashed head on (with some pop history and market research) in the monologues delivered by our deadpan, hilarious and terrifying on-board ‘guides.’ These explications merged mythologies, potentialities and public representations of each site from their strategic weak points and tactical significance to their aesthetic values and visitor statistics. The mixture of meticulously researched fact, outrageous lies and lucidly imagined fiction challenged the audience to unravel an impossibly layered, tangled web of ideas and narratives, revealing the gaps and inconsistencies in the ways we understand and exist in our immediate environment.

Meanwhile, under the cover of night, we were passing through a city growing stranger and less familiar and loaded with shadowy facts and shady figures. Performers chased, serenaded and moved around us, while passers-by looked delighted and confused. By the time we were waved off the bus at Parliament House and herded past a series of wildly gesturing figures with masks and almost-legible profiles attached to their chests, reboarding within a 2 minute time limit, it became even more apparent that PVI is less interested in acts of terror than in the cultural machine that drives our understandings and representations of such phenomena.

The seamless fusion of methodical, astute research and conceptual rigour with equally compelling and challenging performances continues to be PVI’s strength. Core performers Kate Neylon, Chris Williams and James McCluskey as usual delivered intelligent (sometimes literally), commanding and—especially in McCluskey’s case—extraordinarily athletic performances. For TTS, they were joined by Jackson Castiglione (who did a spine-chilling job as our first, ever-so-slightly deranged tour guide—cue nightmares of kindly yet distant men with bloodied teeth) and a strange, chorus-like ensemble of performers who appeared and disappeared in several guises throughout the tour. Melbourne-based electronic outfit Pretty Boy Crossover’s soundtrack was by turns atmospheric and absurd. This expanded line-up and collaborative approach resulted in the most resolved PVI performance in recent memory.

Given the increasing obsession with ‘terror’ in popular Western culture, particularly those strange sound bytes and television commercials which have popped up in the Australian media, hazily warning us to “stay alert” and “look out for anything unusual,” TTS was an intelligent and welcome intervention, delivered to a highly appreciative, if slightly shaken, audience.

TTS: ROUTE 65, PVI Collective, devisors Kelli and James McCluskey, Steve Bull, Chris Williams, Katherine Neylon, Christina Lee, Jackson Castiglione, music and soundscapes Jason Sweeney aka Pretty Boy Crossover, Artrage, Dec 5-8, 10-14, 2002

Once regarded as a short term pop phenomenon, hiphop has multiplied into communities across the world and a multi-million dollar industry that powers on, showing no sign of fading. As with anything on this cultural scale and complexity and its association with race and dignity, power and defiance, controversy is ever present. There are moments however when hiphop opens up to debate and analysis. In Sydney the time is ripe with the Eminem movie 8 Mile currently showing, the imminent release of Mike Broomfield’s documentary, Biggie and Tupac (about the murders of US hiphop rappers Tupac Shakur and Christopher ‘the notorious B.I.G.’ Wallace in 1996), a new show at Performance Space by local exponent and hiphop teacher Morgan Lewis in April, and a season of works by UK break-dancer Benji Reid at the Sydney Opera House’s The Studio in March. Hiphop is a popular artform—in some bodies more artful than others.

The award-winning Reid, who has toured the world with Soul II Soul, will combine his “body-popping, b-boy style and poetic text” in 3 works at The Studio over 5 nights in March after running workshops with young dancers from Sydney’s western suburbs.

After taking up dance to combat school bullies, Reid quickly became skilled at robot dancing and break-dancing, trained at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance then joined a Scottish company and TAG Dance Theatre where he combined text with movement. Later he worked with Soul II Soul, featured in pop videos and studied mime with the David Glass Ensemble. In 1996 he won the European body-popping championship and came second in the World Dance Championships Manchester-based Reid’s current work samples texts from Kung-Fu films and cartoons and features the illusionary movement of body-popping. He will perform The Holiday with Jim Parris on double bass, The Pugilist about a retiring boxer and his ring-side confidante and Style 4 Free, a slapstick, improvised work inspired by jazz with text and muffled beats. RT

The Fondue Set have rocketed to semi-stardom almost overnight in Sydney, moving from small beginnings in local pubs to well received showings in Anstistatic at Performance Space and Dance Tracks#4 with Endorphin at the Opera House Studio and now they’re about to become the glistening stars of their own first full-length show at Sydney’s Seymour Centre. So, who are these 3 young dancers, Elizabeth Ryan, Emma Saunders and Jane McKernan? Are they really just facile twits, heterosexual stereotypes in red tulle and boob-tubes who just want to pick up men and have fun?

Starting out

Emma: Jane and I met at Omeo Dance Studio, and I thought Jane was a bit of alright, I liked her skirt, and her brain too, that was okay. Elizabeth and I were at uni together and I thought she was a bit of alright too, so I put us all in a room together. I thought, if it works it works, and if not, well…After that it became very clear that it was the 3 of us making the work. We’re really fortunate, and I feel privileged that we’re still happy to work together. We try to look after that.

Jane: Firstly we wanted to make dance that all our friends would love to see, which wasn’t about the audience having to be there on time, because my friends never turn up on time. We thought about performing in pubs, and went bar crawling.

Emma: The 3 of us had plenty to deal with, spending a lot of time dancing around, being idiots, having a good time, drinking a lot of beer, actually getting to know each other. That’s a major part of what we do: our work really does reflect our lives, and that is its spirit.

Jane: We have friends in bands, so we thought to use bands as a model: wanting to make something, but you do it with your friends and it’s very local and easy to make and a lot of people come and see it because it’s about socialising. The themes for the shows came out of that.

Emma: What interests us most is when the movement communicates something, where it’s meaningful. That’s what we struggle for. Modelling the group on the bands took the seriousness out of the process—although people see our stuff as not so serious, it was clearly there in our approach to crafting work and it couldn’t have been that funny without that seriousness.

Elizabeth: Yesterday, we had a photo shoot and that became this big performance in itself, being specific about how you’re moving, or how your face is moving. That ‘look’, that discipline about how you’re doing that ‘look’ is much more dancing than acting.

The mini-manifesto

Emma: There’s joy in having our mates enjoy it as well and we clearly began with wanting our audience to have a good time. Now we realise there’s a power in that audience and we can begin to play on it a bit. We deny ourselves nothing really. As long as it has real meaning, then we’re happy. And us being happy is probably the main thing.

Jane: We’re actually much more aware of what we do than we were 2 years ago, so that this new work is coming more out of that awareness.

Elizabeth: We also think more about what the audience might have come to expect, and we want to play with that. If people expect to laugh, do we give them that, or do we give them something that is slightly different, something not so funny?

Blue moves

Emma: The ending of the last show [Blue Moves, Antistatic 2002] was a bit different from what we usually do [“from frenetic comedy…to slow motion ugly humour…to the dark pathos of attempted seemliness”, RT 52, p24], and that reflects where we’re heading. The new one has the same name because we’re working with some of the same material.

Elizabeth: There were lots of ideas that we didn’t get around to performing, that were just on bits of paper. [At Antistatic] it was all pretty fresh, a case of just putting it out there to see what happened. Now we want to expand on that material, to look at the richness that’s there.

Jane: There are also new ideas. Our other shows, Evening Magic and Soft Cheese, were in the same mould: girls on a night out, and Blue Moves still has that element. But now we’re thinking about what happens to the girl on her way home. Lots of people are working in that area—spookiness, horror or thriller—we’ve seen the work of Cindy Sherman and Vanessa Beecroft, the woman alone or woman as object. Almost any B-grade film has an element of sexism there, women being victims. We’ve already set up our characters as fun-loving girls, so we want to look at other facets of that. What’s our responsibility to those girls, what’s their power, their intelligence? And how are people seeing that?

Emma: We’re moving away from our own experience, looking further afield. We’ve set up our own archetypes, a mix of a lot of ideas and now we’re trying to break them open, to see what they are. We’re questioning the idea of a victim, a woman on her own—she’s either a helpless victim, or a helpful victim. She’s not sure. That victim lets us begin to look at who’s in power here, to subvert those roles. She’s on her own journey here and she quite likes it. The woman is more than one archetype.

Jane: What kind of sexuality are we portraying? It’s obvious that we’re heterosexual and that we want to pick up men, but are we talking about this absent man thing all the time, or that girls who are wearing very little are saying fuck me, or just enjoying what they’re wearing?

Emma: We’re also clearing up some archetypes, really focussing on them, taking to an extreme everything that we’ve been setting up, so those archetypes get a bit thicker and a little more artificial. This gives us room to come in as normal individuals, even if we’re dressed up.

Jane: I became uneasy about putting out these crass images of women all the time and also wanted to take more responsibility for who The Fondue Set is by saying, ‘We recognise that you might think these women are foolish, but we’re also saying that we, Emma, Jane and Elizabeth, are women, and these are our experiences.’

The 3-way thing

Jane: As individuals, Elizabeth and I probably aren’t as outgoing as Emma, but the dynamic in the everyday process is much more collaborative.

Elizabeth: Inevitably you get a 3-way thing. One person has an idea, and that gets tried out by all of us, and we each bring whatever we bring to that idea.

Jane: It’s going to be interesting now, because we’ll be working with other people: a set designer, Imogen Ross, and a dramaturg. [The Fondue Set recently did some intensive work with UK dancer-choreographer Wendy Houstoun.] Our ideas need to become stronger so we know what we’re presenting to other people. And I’m not sure how much of a hold we really have on it either. People will see stuff that we don’t see, because we don’t necessarily view ourselves in the same way as others do.

Elizabeth: We’re looking at that in terms of, say, layering up with costumes and makeup. You’ve got all these do-dads and tulle and wigs and necklaces. Is that more revealing or does it hide more?

Eleanor: It sounds likes its all good, all a celebration of women and being who you are, choosing to reveal things or not. Is there anything you wouldn’t care to reveal?

Jane: Actually the construction of The Fondue Set almost protects us from doing bad theatre, because it all gets written into the script and becomes part of the material. Someone described Blue Moves as a reference to all those gang rapes that were occurring. I got worried that people thought that’s what we were saying: women are asking for it if they wear these tiny dresses. So there are always mixed messages. While we’re trying to be empowering, saying you can wear whatever you want, there’s the opposite happening: actually you can’t run very fast if you’re wearing high heels. It’s easy for someone to totally misread what you’re doing. So that makes it scary.

Emma: In Blue Moves there was a section where we struggled about what we meant. Elizabeth had a kind of character, but Jane and I weren’t sure. So we made that uncertainty a part of it. We were quite happy to reveal that we’re not sure, so it’s not so slick, not so tight.

Elizabeth Ryan and Emma Saunders are graduates of the Dance Department at UWS (Nepean) and Jane McKernan of QUT. Elizabeth travelled and performed in Scotland and studied dance as meditation in India. Both Emma and Jane have worked with Rosalind Crisp. All 3 are regular contributors to Sydney’s burgeoning impro scene and have performed in collaborations with other local dance artists. Jane has also been successfully pursuing a solo career (see review of Mobile States, p.41).

Blue Moves, The Fondue Set, One Extra Dance, Seymour Theatre Centre, Mar 6-8, 13-15, 2003 www.oneextra.org.au

Of late we’ve seen a number of interesting projects bringing audiences into closer interaction with artists and at the same time attempt to solve the problem of inadequate support for meaningful development of new work. Australian Dance Theatre’s 2002 IGNITION project was a good example. And in another innovative SA venture, the Adelaide Festival Centre (AFCT) has launched In-Space, a project involving new audiences even more directly in the developing work of contemporary artists.

Unlike current programming structures where audiences only see finished products (and often not so well-finished), In-Space provides opportunities for audiences to communicate with artists through stages of the works in progress. The engagement between artists and audiences is a primary function of the program, not simply an auxiliary ‘value add’ activity. As well as participating in forums and interacting with artists during work in development, participants will also be involved in ongoing dialogue with artists and the AFCT through a website (www.inspace.com.au), interactive online workshops and regular e-newsletters.

The aim is for audiences to share in and contribute to the artistic process. Armed with detailed information on artists’ goals for developing or completing a work, the hope is that a deeper level of understanding of artistic processes, a greater appreciation and connection with the works and with the artists, as well as with the AFCT as a venue will be realised.

The AFCT will provide the structure (through venues, administrative, production and artistic support) for artists to present their work at different stages of its development cycle.

The first In-Space project of the year was Ingrid Voorendt’s Time She Stopped in January performed over 2 nights by the multi-skilled Astrid Pill. In the interview above, Ingrid Voorendt talks about the work whose further development was jointly supported by Arts SA and the AFCT program. Voorendt says, “The In-Space program has given us a rare opportunity to rework, develop and refine Time She Stopped. While retaining the original essence of the work and its raw appeal, the impact of having Zoë Barry on board creating a live and recorded score [was] huge.”

February 8 sees Brink Theatre’s The Rope Project in its first airing in the form of a theatrical seminar. The project takes as its starting point the text of Rope, written as a play by Patrick Hamilton in 1929, and adapted into a screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s film in 1948. The original play tells the story of 2 Manhattan socialites who set themselves the intellectual challenge of committing the perfect murder.

Brink Director, Sam Haren says: “We will splice and juxtapose Adelaide’s dark history with the story of Rope, creating a metaphorically ‘forensic reconstruction’ of those real and fictional events in order to examine the connections, similarities and differences between them. At the same time we will develop a unique performance style for the work, investigating dance and contemporary performance techniques as well as fusing the language of cinema, that has editing and camera movement, with live performance”.

The forum will examine the ideas behind The Rope Project, its themes of masculinity, sexuality and violence as well as the thriller medium and Brink’s ongoing interest in the interconnection between filmed and live performance and the translation from one to the other. RT

Forthcoming In-Space projects include Gorge, 3 nights, 3 new writers, 6 performance companies and a fish tank; a physical theatre event on May 13-17; and Kate Champion’s Face to Face. Read more about In-Space activities in RealTime 54.

Growing up Greek-Australian in the suburbs of Adelaide did not give Christos Linou much social cachet. Never mind that Greece was the cradle of Western civilization, migrants are rarely credited with the achievements of their forebears. Not anticipating the middle-class nature of dance (an irony since most dancers are poor), he was nevertheless impelled to study at the Centre for Performing Arts in Adelaide. It took the encouragement of Jo Scoglio (formerly of Australian Dance Theatre) for Linou to feel entitled to choreograph work. Fifteen years later, he now relishes his role as a director in theatre, opera, performance, film and dance.

In 1989, Constantine Koukias, Artistic Director of IHOS Opera, saw Linou perform a “mad night” of film, spoken text, live music and dance. This led to several collaborations including Days and Nights with Christ (1997), performed in Hobart and Sydney. In that work, a counter-tenor hung upside down on a crucifix, over a mountain of salt. The imagery was not unlike that in Linou’s Fiddle de Die (1998) which had him up a ladder, suspended and slightly unsafe in a work on AIDS and drug addiction. Linou also makes experimental films, sometimes projecting them onto the walls for his performance pieces.

Having spent time at community centres in his youth, Linou insists that the work he has made in such contexts is contemporary art. In 2000 he received Australia Council support for a choreographic residency at Footscray Community Arts Centre. His question, posed through the lens of cross-cultural dance, was whether it was possible to develop a national dance form that Australia could call its own. His short answer—no. Merging Chinese, Greek, Irish and Eastern European circular dance formations within abstracted gestures of contemporary dance, seeded a framework for a possible identifiable Australian dance which Linou imagines is a few generations away.

Linou’s continuing interest in political and social issues is evident in ongoing collaborations with visual artist Robert Mangion. Their work began in 1999 with a life drawing class run by Mangion in which Linou performed slow-motion Butoh, trance and ritual dances with suspended projectors that generated images by Mangion, Man Ray, Picasso, Duchamp and Dubuffet. Their idea was to challenge themselves and the class, educating one another about crossing boundaries between visual art and performance. Their current project, Intertextual Bodies, works with the abrasive possibilities of disruption.

Linou and Mangion have created a number of Melbourne-based city actions. Linou calls this work in public spaces an “aesthetic protest,” though one of its strengths is its inability to be clearly identified. For example, The Act of Being Inside Out was staged on the concrete forecourt of the County Court of Victoria. After establishing a pathway from the court’s front door to the pavement, Mangion wrapped and safety-pinned Linou in a black cloth, rolling him along the ground. Fully expecting to be arrested, Linou was the temporary object of intense security interest. Then he was ignored. A resident alcoholic offered helpful advice throughout, while some passing junkies mimed a kick to his immobile body. Placing himself in a position of abject vulnerability, Linou refers to those bodies most at risk from the administration of justice.

Further actions, planned for the Stock Exchange, the Immigration Museum, the steps of Parliament and Flinders Street station, are variously titled The Act of Site Intervention, The Act of Subversive Ritual, and The Act of Refusing to Dance. Though lacking in obvious entertainment value, such works still need to gain the attention of passers-by. In one event Mangion posed as a decoy, tripping over Linou’s body and dropping a sheaf of papers. People stopped to help, then found that Mangion had disappeared. For Linou and Mangion, these acts take studio space into the public sphere.

Not all city spaces are alike, nor are they constant over time. Public and institutional perceptions of safety, security and threat are currently in flux. It will be interesting to watch these future acts and the kinds of bodies they put under construction. While Christos Linou calls these “social scientific-art experiments,” they are also civic interventions of an uncertain kind. Inasmuch as they are experimental, their outcome is unknown. Linou feels mature enough now to be, in Buddhist terms, empty-minded and open to the possibilities provoked by these works.

We are 19 artists from around the country. We have entered ART CAMP—a hothouse in a cold place, an engagement with strange new processes and eccentric new people, shacking up in buildings so identical that they could only have been built by the military.

We are in Wagga Wagga. (So good they named it twice, a joke Andrew Morrish told at least twice every day. Only he could pull that off and still be funny.) We declare interests in hybridity and collaboration. Aided and abetted by 6 artist/facilitators, several project staff and a regular flow of visitors we pursue the game plan: operate in close quarters, exploit provided equipment and stir like crazy.

There’s a 20-minute walk from the accommodation to the studio spaces. Distance makes surprising things possible. There are conversations to be had, alliances to make, happenings to plot, dinner and drinks to contemplate, hangovers to nurse, people to meet and places to imagine. There wasn’t enough time in today’s workshop to debrief, to regroup, and to imagine beyond the scope of that last exercise. What happens next? Can anyone suggest what can be done with 3 balaclavas, 4 walkie-talkies, a couple of video cameras, and an explicit body or 2? Let’s make a show, quick and dirty. It’s not such a big ask, and there’s no pressure, but as she leant on the bar one night, co-curator Sarah Miller firmly requested a revolution. Our time starts now.

For the first week Melbourne dancer Ivan Thorley and I watch the late news every night, waiting for a declaration of war on Iraq, waiting for World War 3, wondering what will happen here in Wagga Wagga in response. Will this elite artist think-tank come up with an effective intervention strategy—a performative weapon of mass distraction?

Week 1: We get into workshop mode for a few days. Technical and technology workshops (hardware and software) and performance workshops offered in response to our developing interests. A grab bag of ideas, exercises and ordeals, introductions into the aesthetics and personalities of the facilitators—the exquisitely rambling improvisations of Morrish, the laconic wit and DIY approach to projection of Margie Medlin, and the strategically timed eccentric pronouncements and lateral speculations of Derek Kreckler with his ever present camera. In these early days we meet the other artist/inmates on the floor in a controlled environment, steered towards new options to stock up the performative toolbox.

The performance workshops asked difficult questions—interrogate everything you think you know. Why do you do what you do? You have 60 seconds. You’re not convincing enough. Why is what you do important? What would you die for? Face the provocation and terror of the impossible task and HAVE A RESPONSE. Face the fear and make it constructive; turn it into art. Get rid of all of that prepared statement, it’s rubbish. It doesn’t mean anything here and now. Be honest. Be real. What would you die for (how do I address this question in the performance act)? Find a better answer. You have 10 minutes. Your time starts now.

Under the interrogating eyes of Robert Pacitti, Helen Paris and Leslie Hill (RT51, p21) the first week’s workshops weren’t always pretty or fun. It was intense, and sometimes I wasn’t sure it was constructive to face these demons. What sustains us? Are we building a culture of sustainable practice? A different question, equally difficult to answer: are we building alliances here, or are we scoping out the competition?

This intensity needed an outlet. The night of the balaclavas—trouble that was itching to happen. We needed to slip out of the reach of the helpful guiding hands, go crazy and meet in the space that only madness makes possible. It was sweaty, wild and stupid and signalled a turning point in hybrid performance. At least I think that’s what the signal meant—there was no peripheral vision through the balaclava eyeholes, and the walkie-talkie people were speaking in code. Or maybe it was gibberish. There’s a fine line—is this a performance about stupidity, or are we just being stupid? In this late night drunken performance art event gone wrong I gathered a partial view of art making practices across the country. It was exciting, unexpected, and dangerous. This was new territory. The opposition was smart, organised and focused. They obviously know how to secure funding, how to play the game to win. They were up against the drunken individualists, few of whom were playing the same game. The diversion (a beautiful performance by Paul Gazzola) drew us far beyond the point of sense, to the place at the collapse of language; to the question—is this still a game? Meanwhile, saboteurs from the other team rearranged home base—a performance re-installation, an act of domestic deconstruction. An aside—what does it mean that we bonded through enacting a terrorist scenario? What stories were we telling ourselves about ourselves here? Were we filtering the zeitgeist so literally?

Week 2: There’s not much time—make as much as you can. Go crazy. Go beyond what is possible. And we did. This event was not product-orientated, but we had several nights of showings, sometimes 4 or 5 pieces of collaborative work per night. Overload. Breathless debriefs and late night alcohol-fuelled critiques. We needed to stop and reflect. (This was after all, a space outside of the production necessities that destroy the possibilities of reflection, a space for fuelling up, taking stock and projecting into the future, something we didn’t often allow ourselves time for). But with the results of 20 artist collaborations and experiments to experience, time for discussion outside of the informal was impossible. The hybrid practice we stopped talking about after the first few days finally arrived. No one saw it coming, but suddenly it was here—the difference engine was fuelled up and ready for a test drive. Is this hybrid performance—the point at which aesthetic difference is transformed from an obstacle to be surmounted into something important and necessary—difference as a site for investigation, difference as the engine that drives the work, that makes this investigation not just possible but vital? Is hybrid performance always this unexpected, this strange, this unnameable?

Suddenly the last drop of wine has left the bottle and it’s time to hit the long road home. One last shared meal at a restaurant for the condemned and we disperse across the country like a virus, taking with us the seeds for hundreds of potential projects, a network of future collaborators and a support network par excellence. I’m ready. I’m ready like I’ve never been to begin the serious work. We’ve just arrived at the important bit of the conversations. We’ve got past the first names, past the need for politeness. This is the juicy stuff. Something worth fighting for, and yes, if necessary, dying for. We’re still waiting for the war, and we’ll facilitate the revolution slowly. We’re stocking up new ammunition as I write. This is a beginning.

Time_Place_Space 1, Facilitators: curious.com (Leslie Hill and Helen Paris), Derek Kreckler, Margie Medlin, Andrew Morrish, Robert Pacitti; participants: Keith Armstrong, Steve Bull, Mick Byrne, Anna Davis, Leon Ewing, Ruth Fleishman, Brian Fuata, Paul Gazzola, Scott Howie, Catherine Jones, Kelli McCluskey, Russell Milledge, Jason Sweeney, Karen Therese, Ivan Thorley, Chi Vu, Julie Vulcan, David Williams, Rebecca Youdell; co-curators: Sarah Miller (PICA), Julianne Pierce (ANAT), Fiona Winning (Performance Space); Project Manager: Jacqueline Bosscher; Technical support: Simon Wise; Wagga Wagga, September 15-28, 2002 www.performancespace.com.au

It’s hard, amidst the incendiary alarm of Canberra, to settle down to write. I imagine the ceiling catching fire, the intolerable heat, getting the children out in time. Of course, for many, this is not an act of imagination: I feel a strange guilt queuing at the shops beside a couple who have lost everything, their clothes still charred, their bodies carrying the stories of what’s been lost.

To see, to have seen a performance in these circumstances—particularly one about landscape and identity, soil and soul—puts pressure on the work’s tone and meaning; perhaps all theatre events, to be deeply of relevance and value, need to match and meet this pressure, meet circumstance. We are already asked to see more than enough. Sometimes, in performance, we are asked to see too little. The endurance of seeing too little is sometimes as difficult as viewing too much.

In Constructed Realities we are led, ostensibly, inside-out, through the theatre’s back-end and bowels. The question “What is it to be Australian?” is answered in images ranging from mounds of ochred soil, to a tea party, city buildings, squares of grass, an immigrant’s remembered garden. Verbal answers are also given via videoed interviews: young faces cite coast-hugging cities, blank interiors. “My country’s soul is a stranger”, writes the quoted poet. I wish the work that follows would seriously critique the lack of depth in these replies.

This is a work at once so resolutely anthropocentric (consider the 95% of the bush reserve’s animals that died) yet sets up the human subject as mere outline: ballgowns, suitcoats, shadows chalked on the floor. We are not singing up the land here, nor digging into our psyches; we may follow in a dancer’s footprints as we promenade behind her, but the parameters are as strictly drawn as the tidy wooden bevels holding in the sand. A dancer’s grief at the burnt-out shell of her house is played like a model walking benignly through some strange decor. And though we are sprayed with water simulating a rainshower, the timing of our sensory experience is strictly limited and controlled. We walk past, through and around vignettes that are not given the chance to grab us, touch us, envelop or confront; this is landscape, like a zoo, behind bars.

This would not be so troublesome, perhaps, if not for the aspirations indicated by the program quotes by Stephanie Radok, Randolph Stow and most problematically, David Tacey, whose Edge of the Sacred is a highly-regarded tome that pleas for White Australia to stop ignoring both the landscape and its own unconscious. In Constructed Realities ideas of edge and interior are maintained rather than challenged, much as the answers given by interviewees reflect on the fun of the shore and the “too big” question of the inside.

I find another paragraph in Tacey, one not so useful to the choreographer’s goal:

‘Australian settlers have to feel unsettled; that is the beginning of our maturation process and the seed of real cultural wisdom. It is only by feeling unsettled that we begin to feel the psychic gap between society and nature, between our rational conscious attitudes and our more elemental…forces.’

This signals disruption, syncopation, arrhythmia, at the very least, surprise; instead we are given evenness, regulated viewing time and all too often the coy steadiness of a model’s smile.

There is no punctum where the unconscious or landscape really penetrates, activates, transforms (bodies, words), assaults, disappoints. The attractive dancerliness to most of the actions, a consistent separation of voiceover and action and the fact that the landscape is implicitly feminine (an all-female cast, except one male on video) need serious interrogation. I desperately want something fresh in this work: soil-mounds and taped interviews are already well known and indeed superlatively executed in both the National Gallery and the Museum. Of all places, why be imitative of something so well done in the city’s permanent, long-standing exhibits? It doesn’t make sense. What are the real questions being asked here?

That said, the piece is gently, if not deeply, evocative of simpler and more obvious aspects of landscape, with some pleasing and technically skilled sequences that cohere into an even-toned, unified aesthetic. But that is not the cry of my “strange soul” (Stow) trying to know itself anew, particularly not in this city, in these times.

Constructed Realities, New performance work/promenade theatre; concept, choreography and direction Clare Dyson, lighting Mark Dyson, landscape geologist Steve Hill, performers Avril Huddy, Katie Joel, Tammy Meeuwissen, Lisa Faalafi and Fez Faanana, lightbox Susan Lincoln, writer Gordon White, sound Kimmo Vernonnen, costume Bianca Seville & Loraine Meeuwissen; Canberra Theatre Centre, Jan 9-11, 15-18

Take the stairs to the top of the old Salvation Army Citadel. At the third floor, 3 doors open onto a narrow landing. Opposite, a small twisting staircase spirals up into the darkness. Even at midday this passage requires an electric light. At the top is a small square room, your traditional artist’s garret. But the artist in this garret is not struggling to find her muse: Rachael Dease works here.

Dease’ latest work, The Scoundrel Becomes an Outcast, which she performs (piano and vocals) with the Schvendes Ensemble, premiered in the restored finery of the Old Midland Town Hall in October last year for the Artrage festival. The Scoundrel reflects her recent departure from predominantly chamber music oriented work. A “song cycle”, composed of 12 interwoven sections, it illustrates Dease’s recent explorations into jazz, blues and country and western. The slide guitar work of Schvendes Ensemble member Jonathan Brain lent a haunting tenor to the melancholy of the penultimate minutes. Dease says, “You throw something like a slide guitar in and you just can’t escape it. And it was played brilliantly; it certainly wasn’t played in traditional style…There is no way the other performers can escape how they are going to react when there is an explosion of lap steel.”

At 53 minutes this is more than twice the length of her longest piece pseudopop-for-fragile-insomniacs. The creation of The Scoundrel marks a maturing of Dease’ sense of authorship and compositional control. How did this occur? “It’s really hard as a director [of Schvendes Ensemble] and as a composer to work with a group of people and keep giving them what you want them to play when you know that they know their instruments a lot better than you do. Respecting them as musicians is a pretty big thing…I mean it was pretty controlled to a certain extent, what they actually did, but they did have a lot of freedom, more freedom than they would have in another group. I think their playing reflected that.”

Her use of controlled improvisation in The Scoundrel has resulted in “…playing that was a lot more emotive, organic…Quite a lot (of the Ensemble) are jazz musicians…they all received the same sheets so everyone knew what everyone else had…all of a sudden I was using, basically, jazz charts instead of classical scoring…and the Ensemble interpreted that in a completely different way and they played differently.”

When I remark that the second performance, at PICA, was noticeably different from the first, Dease smiles. “I wouldn’t have it any other way…I don’t know if I could get up at the moment and perform the same piece exactly the same way.”

Dease looks about the room, smiles, then laughs, “Maybe I lack discipline. I really like that element of rock music and jazz and blues. It would almost be a disappointment if performers from those genres got up and performed something exactly the same way that you heard them play it last time.” Surprise and spontaneity are part of Dease’ directorship of Schvendes Ensemble. Above the table where we are talking is Club Zho’s annual new music award (a Zhoey Award) to Dease and the Ensemble for “consistently rehearsing for major performances at the last moment.” This is not a lack of professionalism, it’s just logistics. In the case of The Scoundrel Dease says, “It was hard to get 7 musicians in the one place for a 3 hour rehearsal [late in the year].”

Before a full house in the theatrical space of the Old Midland Town Hall, in a glow of sidelight and bathed in the backwash from the video projection behind them, Dease and Schvendes Ensemble constructed The Scoundrel for the first time in its entirety.

“Because I work with Tristen Parr, the cellist…he knew the pieces. We worked together on them beforehand so [his] being in the string section was pretty concrete. He was able to lead. When we were performing I was directing Tristen and he was able to bring the string section in and out. And the string quartet reacted to his playing…Also Jonathan Brain, the guitarist and I had worked through some of the songs before. So it wasn’t completely blind, Definitely the whole show was unfolding before our eyes. It was the most enjoyable show I’ve ever done.”

Two weeks later The Scoundrel was performed at PICA which, she says was “…extremely enjoyable. I think in some ways the music was better. I think in both shows what was really amazing was the way the musicians fed off each other and what they were given. And they were able to explore genres like I had.

“The good thing about the Midland performance, about the Ensemble not really knowing the piece from go to whoa, was that they were really, really on the ball. There was no room for just sitting back and so they were thinking really hard about what they were going to do. The second time they were more relaxed and less worried, they knew how the piece was going to unfold and could therefore experiment a lot more but they were still very much on the ball.”

Dease is so pleased with the PICA performance that she has thrown out months of studio recordings in favour of that performance for the CD release of The Scoundrel.

Given the combination of her compositional talents, working methodology and the diversity and depth of ability of Schvendes Ensemble Dease says, “It’s hard not to get a unique sound.”

The Scoundrel Becomes an Outcast, Rachael Dease and Schvendes Ensemble, Artrage, old Midland Townhall, Perth, Oct 25

Constantine Koukias, composer and Artistic Director of IHOS Music Theatre, has a thing for big sheds. It’s one reason for his repeated staging of epic scale operas. His Hobart based company is currently gearing up for its production of Tesla, Lightning in his Hands, an opera with 51 performers, which opens the Ten Days on the Island festival on March 28. Commissioned by the West Australian Opera the work was originally performed in a developmental stage by IHOS Music Laboratory in Hobart in 2000 (RT 41, Feb-March 2001).

Nikola Tesla, the opera’s protagonist, invented the Alternating Current (AC) electrical system all modern cities use today. On the surface he’s a little known, vastly under-credited figure, though, Koukias has been surprised to learn how many people have come across his brilliant and colourful subject, either through science-based study, practising a trade that evolved from Tesla’s discoveries, or simply through wide reading. Because of this we can expect a fair quota of engineers, science boffins and sparkies in the audience alongside IHOS devotees.

Tasmania’s biennial Ten Days… festival celebrates island cultures from around the world, so audiences attending Tesla will be even more varied than usual. With this in mind, Koukias has tried to create something for everyone while remaining true to his vision. There are what he calls the ‘blockbuster elements’, including an ingenious representation of Niagara Falls using ‘lots of sand’; and the scale of the production, alone, will draw some who might otherwise give opera a miss.

There is plenty to keep them occupied, not least a large Tesla Coil on leave from Scienceworks in Melbourne. This mechanism—or high frequency step-up converter, to be precise—creates voltage that comes off its top as a corona, after striking the Faraday Cage that encloses it. The result is effectively a bolt of lightning.

Organisations such as Telstra have long emulated this model to test their telecommunications systems in the event of actual lightning. The Coil takes 2 people 7 days to set up, and in charge of this highly specialist process will be Telstra’s retired head physicist—the aptly named Dr Lightning.

The potential impact of the lightning generated in the show is widespread and must be regulated closely. The Marine Board will be notified just before the Coil performs its magic, as radars might be sent haywire. It’s not surprising, then, that pacemakers and other internal magnetic devices could be affected. Because of this Tesla is contemporary in more than style—it bears a health warning referring people with any form of electric, mechanical, magnetic or metallic implant or prosthetic to an information line before purchasing tickets. The level of noise or thunder generated by the Tesla Coil alone could interfere with any of these devices, causing medical complications.

When I met Koukias, he spoke with the clarity of a screenwriter who has whittled his story down to its bones and finally to one simple idea: Nikola Tesla dreamed of giving free energy to the world. It is this desire which influences many events in his life: the long-term struggle with Thomas Edison who swindled him out of patents and money; his alliance with George Westinghouse on projects including the Niagara hydroelectric plant and phased AC electricity; and ultimately the seizure of his life’s work by the FBI.

Tesla invented fluorescent bulbs and speedometers for cars. He discovered X-rays and the basis for radios, stereos and computers—in all, the foundations for most of modern industry and technology. Yet some of Tesla’s inventions are wrongly attributed to Edison in the Smithsonian Institute and patents are still being turned over to his estate.

Tesla’s character is as extraordinary as his inventions: more comfortable in the company of pigeons than women, he named his main 2 (of 30) secretaries Miss 1 and Miss 2. His affection for feathered vermin is all the more surprising given his terror of dirt. He was a close friend of Mark Twain and himself a beautiful writer.

The opera’s design is elemental—all sand, (a ream of) paper, (gothic quantities of) dry ice, steel (generators), (a flock of) pigeons and, of course, lightning. Yet for all of its ‘blockbuster’ volume, scale and explosiveness, Tesla has a minimalism about it, reminiscent of Koukias’ first opera Days and Nights with Christ. The music often reflects this simplicity, holding the audience in a loop of one-word choruses; at one point, savouring and playing with the word ‘electricity.’

In a venue the size of a few urban warehouses, the audience’s focus must be deftly managed. This is done via directive lighting and the selective use of speakers—with the audience seated either side of the action, as if at a tennis match.

Clusters of glowing light bulbs held forth like a chalice or host at high mass, cages, typewriters, lockers and lamp-lit desks carrying Van der graff generators recreate an intense and surreal laboratory. Haunting images of Tesla’s inventions, including the electric chair, are projected throughout and the Niagara Falls project becomes a gorgeous conclusion to the first act—with the Falls projected onto a stream of falling sand, through which the chorus exits. In the spirit of Tesla, the work is innovative in both sound and set design.

What Koukias likes about big sheds is that things can seem so close, or really far away—creating a cinematic distance. But most of all, the sound is beautiful. Think of the resonance of a cathedral sermon or hymn, even for the unconverted. Music has to be written specifically for large spaces. Crisp and succinct doesn’t work, so Koukias has gone with a lyrical and melodious approach, wed with a chamber ensemble that includes bassoon, oboe and theremin—a nice counterbalance to the deliberate harshness of other aspects of Tesla’s soundscape. The composer has used Tesla’s own writing for some of the opera’s lyrics, and Dvorak’s New World Symphony is alluded to given the composer’s close friendship with Tesla.

What was it about a mad pigeon-loving inventor that inspired a composer to construct one of his famously big operas? Lightning was probably the starting point, Koukias suggests, and that famous photo of Tesla sitting at his desk, oblivious, while the Tesla Coil sets off its spectacular explosions behind him. These lead Koukias to the sad and heightened story that so lends itself to opera.

Tesla. Lightning in his Hands, IHOS Music Theatre, music & director Constantine Koukias, technical director Werner Ihlenfeld, conductor Jean-Louis Forestier, production design Maria Kunda, sound Greg Gurr, artist in light Hugh McSpedden, lighting Damian Fuller, costumes Feruu Seljuk; Ten Days on the Island, Princes Wharf No. 1 Shed, Castray Esplanade, Hobart, Mar 28-Apr 1 www.tendaysontheisland.org

Adviser to the Artistic Program, Robyn Archer, and Executive Producer, Elizabeth Walsh, have rounded up another bunch of unique and often quirky talents from islands around the world for the second Ten Days on the Islandfestival. Again much of the island, its artists and general populace, will be in reach of the festival as works by locals and internationals are presented in Hobart, Launceston and 36 towns across Tasmania. Islands represented in the 2003 festival include New Zealand, the Faroe Islands, Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia, Re?union Island, Guadeloupe, Cuba, Sicily, the Greek Islands, Manhattan & Staten Islands and Venice.

Tasmanian companies in the festival are IHOS Opera (see above), Stompin Youth Dance Company (see p35) and TasDance, who will premiere new works by Nathalie Weir and Phillip Adams. Terrapin are bringing back their much admired The Dark at the Top of the Stairs puppet show for adults. The Tiny Topfea- tures magic, clowning and eccentric cabaret. Playwright Scott Rankin, like film star Errol Flynn, was born in Tasmania. Rankin’s new one woman, multimedia play, Beasty Grrrlis about a South Sea Island descendant of Flynn played by Paula Arundel. Leading Australian singers and choir directors, Mara and Llew Kiek, will conduct community choirs from across the state with 300 performers in Choral Island. From the big island to the north come Circus Oz with its magnificent new 1400- seat Big Top, playing in Campbell Town, in the heart of the island, and WA’s Deckchair Theatre with a show about a sig- nificant island a little further north again, Mavis Goes to Timor. The Royal New Zealand Ballet will present UK-based cho- reographer, Javier de Frutos’ Milagros, set to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. De Frutos unsettled Sydney locals a few years back at the Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras with some striking work.

From islands much further afield come the Cuban band Los Tres de la Habana, who kick off the festival at free outdoor parties in Hobart and Launceston. Guy Klucevsek, one of the world’s greatest accordion players (a star of Archer’s 1998 Adelaide Festival) will give concerts around the island and also perform with master puppeteer Dan Hurlin in award-winning The Heart of the Andes, a must-see. Also on the impressive program are singer Franc?oise Guimbert from the Re?union islands, the ensemble Al Qantarah performing medieval music from Sicily.

Jacques Martial performs Martinique- born Aimee Cesaire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land. New Zealand’s large scale street puppets, Urban Safari, looking at times like like fun versions of the creations from Walking with Dinosaurs.

There’s much more, of course: exhibi- tions, installations, community and food events, all ensuring that Ten Days on the Islandadds up a thematic and cultural totali- ty that should be the envy of other Australian festivals. RT

In a very brief skip through Berlin a couple of years ago I picked up a postcard for a dance work with this title. The phrase has haunted me ever since. And I’ve been thinking about the temporal a lot lately in the otherworldly post-Christmas zone where time seems to expand with the heat. So the 2nd NOW now festival of spontaneous music was like a sonic manifestation of my present state of mind.

For 6 nights the gloriously dilapidated oversized loungeroom of Space 3 was home to myriad explorations of music composed in the moment, produced by all manner of sources from your more conventional woodwind, piano, double bass and harp to penis gourd, computer, sampler, amplified pane of glass and dead chicken. The results of these explorations ranged from youthful indulgence to mind-expanding brilliance.

The festival opened with an undisputed master of Australian improvisation, Jim Denley. Starting with his bass flute in pieces, he gently ground the bits together, sometimes blowing into the mouth piece. He moved through woodwind instruments filling the transitions with mouthmusic, creating an imitation of digital decimation so faithful that I looked for the hidden computer. Even the squeaky floorboard was integrated. Denley is at the point where he barely needs his tools: alone he is a finely tuned instrument, a kind of sonic chameleon. Drawing all the pieces together (both compositionally and of his bass flute), he concludes with a haunting suite of dual tones and whispers that are so engaging even the traffic racing up Cleveland Street stops to listen.

The second act of the evening introduced some of the New Zealand contingent with Anthony Donaldson on percussion, Darren Hannah on double bass, Maree Thom on accordion and locals Daniel the wizard on violin and Neill Duncan on sax and little instruments. This had more of the sound I expected, a kind of consensual chaos. Waves of impulses flowing through each musician, were interpreted, sent out and reinterpreted, a growing feedback loop. These musicians employed a whole bodied listening, every cell alert to the next possibility, every gesture integral to the sourcing of the sound. This summoning was also evident in the exploration by Melbourne’s David Tolley on double bass and Dur-e Dara on percussion. They seemed to be working in 2 different sonic territories, Tolley utilising sustain and space, Dara filling all the gaps with a seemingly endless collection of percussion, bells, buckets, chains and glockenspiel—looking like she was whipping up a culinary storm (she is in fact a restaurateur). My initial desire was for her to pare back, provide more space and explore things for longer, but her methods were cumulative, so by the time the cymbals tied to a stand crashed to the floor, the 2 approaches had achieved an agitated union.

My desire for space was sated by the combo of Reuben Derrick on woodwind, Richard Johnson (ACT) on gourdophone (more specifically penis gourd) played like a reed instrument, Johnny Marks on a fantastically ancient analogue synth that lit up and Peter Blamey on feedback loop and mixing desk. Beautifully subdued, the sustained electronic ping and crackle and the warmth of the quiet reeds was surprisingly symbiotic. Blamey and Marks provided background texture, underpinning the analogue mobility of reed players. They never managed to move the piece to the next level, but for one sublime moment they all came together in a swathe of sustained tones, where the sense of time was manifest, each molecule of the moment felt fully. That made the evening for me.

This trance like atmosphere was maintained by the final ensemble. Having just met each other when they walked on stage, Belinda Woods (Melbourne) on flute, Chris Burke on tenor sax, Matt Earl on emptied sampler, April Fonti on cello and Amanda Stewart on vocals created a ‘right moody’ piece. With a beautifully layered textural palette it seemed that everyone was making each other’s sounds—the cello breathy like a sax, the sampler scratchy like the cello, guttural barks and hacks providing a baseline. Stewart’s vocal summonings and Fonti’s sparse and sensitive playing wove around each other, thankfully emerging from the sometimes overly fussy flute and sax to float like sonic incantations.

The second evening began with the incredible Chris Abrahams on piano. With phantom fingers he called forth torrents of notes, overtones outringing the fundamentals—was he hammering, plucking, how many hands does he have? An anomaly in the pattern emerges, is integrated and the pattern mutates. Then he stopped dead and it felt like your soul had been ripped out through your ears. Just for a second, and then the cascade continued. It was amazing and frightening in its complexity and beauty.

The evening also featured the masters of electronic improvisation with a set by Torben Tilly, Robbie Avenaim and Oren Ambarchi on multiple electronics. Spacious and subtle, with infinitesimal shifts they created a kind of sonic wormhole: I try to grasp it, but it slides in and around me like air, I can’t pin it down. Ambarchi appeared again in Scott Horscroft’s all-star version of Chug-R-Chug, along with Chris Abrahams, Clayton Thomas, David Aston and Scott Barr. The musicians play one note which Horscroft processes, conducting and moulding the tones into a mesmeric symphony that was almost weepingly gorgeous. Thanks to a computer crash, it ended with a wrench instead of the more predictable denouement.

An earthy contrast was provided by the ensemble of Will Guthrie (Melb) on percussion, Jeff Henderson (NZ) on sax, Tim O’Dwyer (Melb) on clarinet, Clayton Thomas on double bass and Adam Sussman on electronics. No subtle background texture for Sussman (of Stasis Duo), he ripped the time-space continuum with blasts of fuzz and static, mostly pushing the energy for the better, allowing Thomas to go hell-for-leather in praying mantis fashion on bass, all rhythm and percussion. Guthrie’s contribution suffered for the timbral similarity of his miked percussion and Sussman’s electronics, not to mention the sheer volume that actually had the PA speakers glowing with overload. Though loud and chaotic, the players all seemed to be in the same territory, interpreting the same moment, aware of the piece as a whole.

Unfortunately not something that could be said for the earlier ensemble of Matt and Aron Ottignon, Cameron Deyell, Tom Callwood and Felix Bloxsom, relying on more of a jazz sensibility and suffering from a kind of youthful enthusiasm that railroaded awareness. (Just because you have 3 instruments doesn’t mean you have to play them all.)

The only other appearance of exuberance over-riding subtlety was the trio of Matt Clare and Martin Kay on alto sax and Josh Green (Tas) on percussion on Friday 17. The sax players wound themselves so tightly around each other that there was no place for the percussionist, who eventually (though, it seemed, cheerfully) sat down and just watched the boys blow.

Also on the slightly dominant side was Greg Kingston (Tasmania) on guitar with Tim O’Dwyer on woodwinds and Will Guthrie on percussion. Kingston seemed to channel some inner demon, all twitches and agitation. The ultimate showman, he rummaged through his bag of tricks to produce a transistor radio or a Barbie doll which he placed on the pick-ups of the guitar; even towelling himself off became part of the piece. He provided an excellent introduction to the final act of the Friday night, a strictly noise affair including Lucas Abela on his amped and effected pane of glass, and Nylstoch, a mysterious man in a very ugly mask playing a tapeloop through a crucified chicken. The sound, well it was loud enough to make a window leap out of its frame. Not that all of Friday night was show and bluster. There was also a gentle and extensive exploration by Stasis Duo boys gone analogue on well-worn guitar and percussion, Jim Denley and Jeff Henderson on woodwinds and reeds, and festival co-curator Clare Cooper on harp. This was completely absorbing in its thoroughness.

When I interviewed Clayton Thomas about the NOW now (RT51), I was a little sceptical of his almost religious fervour. But immersed in 3 nights of the festival I realise it is hard to avoid. Each night I dreamt the event afterwards—the atmospheres, the processes and tactics. Improvising is a valiant and foolish attempt to capture each moment, feel each slice of time as it passes over and through you. To do it right you have to surrender completely to the whims and vengeance of the temporal as many of the ensembles in the NOW now festival succeeded in doing for, well, fleeting moments, once registered, already gone. So the chase and the mantra goes on—jetz ist jetz ist jetz…

the NOW now festival , curators Clare Cooper, Clayton Thomas, Space 3 Redfern, Jan 13-18

Fortnightly spontaneous music nights continue at Space 3 from Feb 3. www.theNOWnow.net

How old were you when you had your first cup of coffee? This rhetorical question establishes the territory performed by IHOS Opera Laboratory. Five young men walk on stage and sit behind school desks. Sean Bacon’s video images of coffee froth spiraling and melding in a green cup provide a striking visual backdrop. Each performer tastes his cup of coffee—a metaphor for the addiction to lyrics of pop music. Devised by Sally Rees and Matt Warren, Pop explores the potency of seemingly inconsequential pop songs to imbue memory with a snatch of melody or words years after the song’s hit status has passed. “In my head the song goes on forever” exists as a measure of time and a trigger for memory. “Not a trace of doubt in my mind” from Neil Diamond’s I’m a Believer plays on a suspended cassette player. The line is incessantly repeated even after the player is destroyed.

The performers’ incantation of the words “verse” and “chorus” provides a humorous take on the pop song’s formulaic structure and a clock counts down the song’s length. Sound and video operator Stefan Morton screens talking head images of pop stars onto the school desk lids. Their songs leave a residue of pop a-cappella in the mind.

A Lizard Between her Breasts explores fragments of 3 tragedies by Lorca. It is an intense piece of music theatre composed by Raffaele Marcellino, directed by Anna Messariti and designed by Michael Bates. Impressively performed by the IHOS Music Theatre Laboratory, Lizard is set in the archetypal territory of a village community where life is harsh, moral codes are contradictory, and the hour of blood is never far away.

Lizard opens with a wedding procession. Two trumpets sound and the bride enters trailing an avenue of tulle. The deliberate tearing of the bride’s gown dramatically changes the mood. The whispering and hatred commence. This is the province of old, dark bloodlines. We can already anticipate the trials of the human condition—the wife’s barrenness, the husband’s mistress, hypocrisy, misery, rejection and the affirmation of a child. The husband is like a lizard basking in the sun.

Central to the power of this production is Michael Bates’ use of 3 backlit screens where the poses of the main characters are seen in silhouette, visually enhancing the narrative. Video sequences are projected onto the rock wall of the Peacock Theatre. The hem of a bridal gown drags over rock. A man and a woman joyfully run through a forest.

The work of Dmitri Ac on guitar, percussionist Ben Smart and the tight vocal response of the IMTL soloists and chorus are also integral to the power of the production. Despite heavy Catholic imagery such as anguished hand-wringing, the crown of thorns, stigmata on the mistress’s palms and the bride’s entrails drawn from her wedding frock in the final scene, Lizard is accomplished and exciting music theatre.

IHOS Opera Laboratory, Pop, directors Sally Rees, Matt Warren, designer Sally Rees, composer Matt Warren, video production Sean Bacon; A Lizard Between Her Breasts, director Anna Messariti, musicians Dmitri Ac and Ben Smart, composer Raffaele Marcellino, design & production Michael Bates, costume Sandra Alcor. For both productions: lighting Don & Reuben Hopkins, sound & video Stefan Morton, movement Jindra Rosendorf; Peacock Theatre, Hobart, Dec 12-15

Andrée Greenwell occupies a special place in the musical culture of Australia. Her distinctive compositions sit uniquely at the nexus of folk, opera, pop, jazz and avant garde trajectories. Her new show, Dreaming Transportation, Voice Portraits of the First Women of White Settlement at Port Jackson, is an inspired, 16-strong song cycle for 5 singers and 7 musicians. Given that the work is about women living in prisons, in towns and on the land in early 19th century Australia, it’s not surprising that UK folk music in its various modes is the dominant stylistic strand, sometimes plainly so but often more complexly composed as well as counterpointed dramatically by instrumental scoring that is vigorously of our own time.

The songs often work by juxtaposition, a relatively simple, sexy folk-like melody, for example, is followed by David Hewitt’s taut, deep drumming introducing Deborah Conway’s impassioned song to a rapist that swings into cabaret (with accordion accompaniment) without ever losing its folk rock impulse. Text and music offer quite an emotional journey in which women suffer prison (sometimes going mad) and emerge from it seeking livelihoods; an adventurous independent woman fights for and wins land; in a drought, a voice “hope(s) for a less desolate tomorrow”; and in a marvellous diary, a mother of 12 (“members of my little jury”) writes “My heart is a town.” Women write of missing their homes in Britain, their lovers and husbands (with a fine sensuality), and, in a grim litany, of missing their identity.

Just as Greenwell found an ideal writing partner for the earlier Laquiem in Kathleen Mary Fallon, so she has chosen wisely again. Jordie Albiston’s Botany Bay Document-A Poetic History of the Women of Botany Bay (Black Pepper Press 1996 nla) takes the letters and other writings of a range of women from early settlement and arranges them on the page into an embracing poetry, true to the women but also Albiston’s own poetic voice. Greenwell’s settings of a selection of these is achieved with deceptive ease, such is the match of words and music.

Dreaming Transportation is a multimedia work with slide and video projections, documentary touches and bits of acting, but the best thing about it is the music. In this Greenwell is served very well by her singers. Sopranos Christine Douglas and Miriam Allan not only provide an operatic lyricism and intensity (and a sublime duet) but also occasional portraits of the upper classes. Actor-singers Amie McKenna and Justine Clark offer simpler but emotionally rich voices and are especially adroit in the folk idiom. Deborah Conway fuses folk and her own brand of pop-charged energy bringing an extra weight to the show. That such voices can co-exist in the same space is a testament to the totality that Greenwell has created.

Theatrically however Dreaming Transportation is an uneasy totality, held together by the music but otherwise threatening to fragment. Essentially the show is a series of songs in concert format (the composer asks the audience not to applaud until the end of the show). There’s no through-narrative, which is fine, it is after all a collection of portraits. Sometimes songs are supported by visual imagery. Sometimes they are bridged by spoken text or brief, acted scenes. The singers are simply costumed and, for the most part, enter and leave casually. They are framed by a semi-circle of musicians. All of this is superficially satisfactory, but various inconsistencies and failures to follow through rob the show of the power it could and should have. The most striking of these is in the visual material.

Dreaming Transportation begins strongly and immersively on the 3 tall screens behind the musicians, with camera shots of a late 18th century ship filmed close to its timbers, the mast and the water flowing past. The strength of this kind of imagery and the later film of a body being punished (in Parramatta’s infamous Female Factory), of a head shaven and then, powerfully, of different parts of the body (hands, lungs, feet) is that it is evocative rather than simply illustrative and that it has a consistency of visual style. Other images projected in the show were doggedly literal (slides of cartoons of Newgate prison), or pointless (Sydney forming over 200 years on the banks of its harbour) or, like some of the interpolated text (lists of facts which thankfully seemed to run out), ploddingly documentary. The overall effect was of pickings from a ragbag of imagery, an educational cut and paste. Andrée Greenwell is an accomplished filmmaker—someone should commission her and her collaborators to visually through-compose Dreaming Transportation.

Part of Laquiem’s power was that it exploited the concert format. Greenwell’s decision in the new work to costume her 5 singers in early 19th century style dresses pushes the performance into an uneasy place between concert and theatre. Perhaps it would have been better to stay away from costume, especially since at one point the non-costumed Greenwell steps away from her conducting position and sings centre stage. As for the theatricality of the piece, sometimes it’s deft, funny and moving, sometimes cutely illustrative. Again, there’s insufficient consistency of vision. As well, any text added outside of Albiston’s contribution to the songs should be given to her to adapt in the spirit of her poetry, if it’s needed at all.

What was consistent was the audience’s rapturous response to the music, if in some doubt about other elements of the work. Greenwell-Albiston should have a winner on their hands. The show is being recorded by ABC Radio this week and hopefully ABC Enterprises will have the wisdom to see that a CD of Dreaming Transportation could sell, such is the calibre of Greenwell’s superior tune writing, its excellent scoring for a small group of virtuosic musicians and, not least, the presence of Deborah Conway. Dreaming Transportation needs another stage of development and then it should be ripe for touring, everywhere.

Dreaming Transportation, composer & artistic director Andrée Greenwell, poet & librettist Jordie Albiston, staging director Christopher Ryan, dramaturg Francesca Smith, digital artist & set designer Katerina Stratos, video artist Toby Oliver, costumes Jenny Irwin, lighting Sydney Bouhaniche; consultant producer Anna Messariti. Sydney Festival, Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, Jan 22-25

The Melbourne Electronic Music Festival has come up with something visually unique—a film festival celebrating electronic music around the world. Not only that, the festival will feature Midnight in Melbourne, Australia’s first documentary on the local drum and bass scene. Directed by Mark Bakaitis, the 40 minute film features interviews with DJs and promoters, a soundtrack of local and international artists with live performances from local and overseas acts including Grooverider, Optical
and Ed Rush.

Electronic music-based documentaries, film clips and shorts from around the world will be screened at at E2-E4, North Melbourne. The program includes:
Ulkomaat (Foreign Lands), a 4 minute “grey road movie” from a Finnish electronic lo- fi lounge producer and video artist Samuli Alapuranen; Pump up the Volume, a 4-part history of UK house music directed by Carl Hindmarch (120 minutes); S-Crashabout the neighbourhood perils of a rehearsing DJ directed by Melbournians Lindsay Cox and Victor Holder (3 minutes), and the 2 hour Hang the DJ, “a disc-jockumentary” from Canada (directors Marco and Mauro La Villa).

The annual MEMF includes workshops, conferences and exhibitions on arts asso- ciated with electronic music and culminates in a free outdoor event at the week’s end- MEMF Sound Off.

Melbourne Electronic Music Festival: various locations, February 9-16; MEMF Film
Festival, E2-E4, 170 Abbotsford St, Nth Melbourne, Feb 12-14, 9.10pm nightly

You open the first edition of RealTime for 2003 in anxious times. Australia is actively complicit with the USA in premeditating murder, a pre-emptive strike against Iraq, a brutal move contrary to the fragile but sometimes effective restraints developed in the wake of World War II.

Infinitely less publicised is the free trade agreement our federal government is negotiating with the USA, and which poses another kind of threat to Australian integrity.

This edition of RealTime features the work of artists, producers, government agencies and overseas partners in marketing and touring of the Australian performing arts. Consistent outcomes are very hard to achieve, but the determination of all those involved and the many successes in recent years suggest that a dream is on the edge of being realised.

All of this assumes that while we build international demand the supply side of the picture is safe. However, the example of New Zealand’s decimated domestic TV drama production under the terms of their free trade agreement is frightening.

On January 15, a host of Australian cultural organisations banding together as the Australian Coalition for Cultural Diversity (ACCD) and representing artists and companies in theatre, film, music, dance, television, libraries, museums, literature, book publishing, and visual and multimedia arts called on the Howard Government to support Australian culture in the forthcoming free trade negotiations with the USA. ACCD will be officially launched in February 2003. Some of the member organisations are Arts Law Centre of Australia, Ausdance, Australian Guild of Screen Composers, Australian Interactive Multimedia Industry Association, Australian Screen Directors Association, Australian Society of Authors, Australian Writers Guild, Media Entertainment & Arts Alliance, Museums Australia, Music Council of Australia, National Association for the Visual Arts, and Screen Producers Association of Australia.

ACCD has made a submission to the Department of Foreign Affairs Office for Trade Negotiations urging the Government “to negotiate a broad exemption for cultural industries, to allow it to continue supporting and fostering Australian cultural expression unfettered by the constraints of a trade agreement.”

Dick Letts, Chair of the Music Council of Australia and spokesperson for ACCD writes: “We believe that pressure will be applied by the US in forthcoming negotiations to restrict Australia’s freedom to act in support of its cultural policy objectives. The US Trade Representative, for instance, has been openly critical of measures such as Australian content rules for television as barriers to free trade. But while this is one of the most immediate issues at stake one must also bear in mind the potential impact of trade commitments on the whole range of cultural expression, and the extent to which such commitments could limit the Government’s ability to support Australia’s cultural industries in the future.”

Ian David, President of the Australian Writers Guild, is quoted by ACCD as saying, “To some this may just be about trade, commerce and access to markets. To us it’s about our heritage, our identity, our livelihood. What will be unique about being Australian if our songs, stories, pictures and ideas are crushed under the weight of a boot made somewhere else?”

The ACCD notes that the USA already has it pretty good in this country: “Australian government support for culture is open, measured and does not pose any real threat to the ability of the USA to sell its cultural products and services in Australia.” But as we well know, the fundamentalists of freedom prefer it for themselves, not others.

RealTime 54 (April/May) is titled BOOKish and will feature reviews of a wave of new Australian books about performance, digital arts and cultural issues. RT

An extraordinary collaboration between 2 major players in Tasmania’s contemporary cultural scene, is theatre ltd and CAST (Contemporary Art Services Tasmania), White Trash Medium Rare is a fusion of several art forms, a vehicle for some of the most ingenious and original artists working in the state. As well as attending performances, audiences could view illuminating open rehearsals and explore the set as an installation.

The performance asks what it is to be white and Anglo-Australian in the 21st century. Its extended title is “If Australia is the lucky country, how come we always cheat at sport?…A night of laughter to make you celebrate and question the place where you live.” Director Ryk Goddard leads a troupe of 8 performers as well as sound artists, dancers, actors, physical performers and visual artists working in hybrid technologies in a show devised by members of the is theatre company.

The audience enters the performance space to be interviewed and videoed before being seated. The space is the CAST gallery, dexterously converted with tiered seating along 2 walls and projection screens at either end, one serving as an entry point through which the performers access the ‘stage.’ Above the performance space is a grid from which athletic and acrobatic physical performance is woven into the show.

White Trash Medium Rare is a unique theatrical experience, a full-on onslaught of iconic Australian projected images, instantly recognisable and often amusing, evocative soundscapes, daredevil physicality and seamless vignettes portraying white Australians, including, movingly, the experience of post-World War 2 immigrants. Performers morph, frequently before our eyes, into archetypes and stereotypes of the white Australian experience, exploring the realities and quirks that make it what it is, accompanied by the fusion of media and artforms that characterise the piece.

The work is essentially unscripted and never the same 2 nights in a row. Working with so many different and skilled artists makes it “impossible to speak with one voice” about the show’s theme, says Goddard and no one voice can represent any group experience in this era. The result is a series of interpretations and experiences of what it means to be Australian. It rejoices in the fact that there is no singular, uniform version of living in this country, but many different and intricate ones.

One of is theatre ltd’s intentions is that the audience find the work as amusing, alarming, provoking and novel as the company found devising the work and examining white Australian selfhood and existence. They have achieved their aim of leaving viewers “thinking differently about how we live in this country” (Goddard).

White Trash Medium Rare, director Ryk Goddard; is theatre ltd and CAST (Contemporary Art Services Tasmania), CAST gallery, installation Oct 2-27, performances Oct 10-26, 2002

Time She Stopped is the second one-woman show directed by Adelaide choreographer Ingrid Voorendt. Astrid Pill performed the piece in January this year at Adelaide’s Space Theatre as part of the Adelaide Festival Centre’s innovative In-Space program. Naida Chinner featured in the 2002 work, Once Bitten, seen in the Mobile States program for emerging dance artists see in Perth and Sydney (see p 41).

On directing one woman works, Voorendt says, “I’ve known the performers I’ve directed as friends and…I’ve worked with [them] for quite some time. I can’t imagine entering into something like this with someone I didn’t know or didn’t have a connection with…The thing with Astrid and Naida is we are excited and curious about the same sort of things and we trust each other implicitly.”

I assumed Voorendt elicited material from each performer and then arranged it, but she views the works as “conversations” in which her own experiences, thoughts and feelings are present with those of Pill and Chinner. “I begin rehearsal by brainstorming with the performer using all sorts of questions and tasks. The beauty of working with someone like Astrid is that she will go home with a question or task and come up with performance ‘treats’ for me the next day and she is brave and imaginative about form. Astrid doesn’t censor. She allows herself to play and does the judging later. That’s a real skill. We collect texts and songs and movement ideas and end up with a thick pile of material. Then I get to arrange it. I love structuring material. I approach that in a very choreographic way. I’ve learned through various experiences about a more narrative approach but I come from a completely different place. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I guess it’s montage. A turning point in my process was a piece I made based on my sister’s writing. This was the first time I had worked with text and I began to focus on creating images rather than making sequences. ”

Voorendt loves images that appear strange but are true, and journeys that lead you to surprising places. She found her way into dance theatre instinctively; then discovered her way of working was being explored in Australia and overseas. She began dancing at 16 and soon became inspired by the Graham technique. After completing a BA in dance at Adelaide University she returned home to New Zealand and spent a year “in depression and self-doubt about her chances and her body and ability.” As a way forward she returned to South Australia and worked in Whyalla teaching dance to young people. There, she began collaborating with theatre director James Winter writing performances and experimenting with ways to “get people dancing.” To do this she had to relinquish the “teaching phrases” model of dance instruction. She invited Sally Chance, then Artistic Director of Restless Dance Company, to run workshops with people with disabilities in the community. Chance then asked Voorendt to lead workshops with the Restless dancers.

When Voorendt saw the Restless show, Sex Juggling she “absolutely lost [her] head over it…[I]t affirmed what I had hoped and wanted to believe, that you didn’t have to have the perfect dancer’s body or look or technique to be able to move people.” After seeing some of her devised work, Chance then asked Voorendt to direct the company where she says she found her niche. “I’m not interested in myself as a performer. I’m not interested in my body and my phrases. I like moving and other people might find my movement interesting but I’m much more interested in other people’s movement. [The work with] Restless was a confirmation of the way of working I had been developing in Whyalla without having a context for what I was doing. Then I went back to University and wrote a paper on collaborative processes discussing the work of Restless Dance Company, DV8, Ballet C de la B, Pina Bausch. I wrote about facilitation and directing and [it] helped…clarify what…I was doing and where I was going. I love responding to other people’s ideas. I like to pass their material through my head rather than have a piece coming only from me. I’ve always known that I didn’t want to be formulaic as a director. What keeps me on my toes is working with different people.

Time She Stopped was devised with and performed by Astrid Pill, an astounding contemporary performer. Strikingly present and equally skilled as a singer, dancer and actor, she seems able to swap medium or genre without blinking. In Time She Stopped she danced rolled up in a rug, danced with a rug, sang the rollicking blues number, Black Coffee, told stories against herself, dreamed, pondered, explained stain removal in great detail, let her hair down and danced with wild abandon in a party frock, raged against past lovers, dismembered gingerbread representations with originality and fury, exploded into speech or song or dance, pulled herself together, drank and drank red wine and sang a bittersweet, haunting song by Grieg to end. I was spellbound.

Time She Stopped also featured skilled musician Zoë Barry who has a history of interesting collaborations with dance and theatre people. Barry shadowed Pill’s performance—marooned on her own carpet square, she played cello, sat or lay lost in thought, sang snippets of songs and gave us a full rendition of the haunting ballad, 26 years. Her performance was a stripped back, skeletal version of Pill’s but her cello produced rich veins of music that underscored Pill’s emotional states and singing.

Time She Stopped is a treatise on the woman home alone at the end of an affair. Like much contemporary dance theatre in form, it features a montage of events with an associative logic: carpet stains, love stains, salt the stain, salt the wound, blot out stains, block out memories, pour, drink, break the wine glass, break with the past etc. The work is threaded with stories of one woman’s unsuccessful attempts to ‘be beige’, to ‘fit in and go unnoticed.’ Although frailty and despair are present in the central image and feelings confessed, I was struck by the sheer force and vibrancy of Pill’s performance. It reminded me of footage of Jackson Pollock’s action painting: abandoned yet focussed.

The work doesn’t add up or arrive at a point—its focus seems to be the pleasure of the ride—familiar, absurd, poignant, disturbing, astonishing. Voorendt described discovering the classic Harold and Maude and her work contains the angst of the likes of Donnie Darko and American Beauty, films that seem to capture the contemporary conundrum of ‘innocence’, meeting ‘desire for love’ meeting ‘not belonging.’ Sometimes you get closer to the way life feels through bizarre and/or startling images and stories that don’t add up. This work does just that.

Time She Stopped, performer Astrid Pill, devised and directed by Ingrid Voorendt, music Zoë Barry, lighting design Gaelle Mellis & Geoff Cobham, design Louise Dunn, lighting and production Ben Shaw, Inspace, Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, Jan 17

During the 1990s, the digital storage medium of the CD-ROM became a platform for artistic experiments in interactive form and participation. Accompanied by a boisterous technophilic rhetoric proclaiming the promise of liberation from passive media consumption, desktop multimedia (followed swiftly by the internet’s plethora of personal publishing systems) promised the digital avant-garde a new set of tools to cut up and into prevailing commercial narrative forms, as well as cheap, global strategies for distribution. Interestingly in the late 1990s, the consumer availability of digital video cameras and more recently the viability of large scale digital video storage through the DVD-ROM did not capture artists’ imaginations in the same way. Admittedly the libertarian hype about digital media has worn thin and, in many cultural theory and production contexts, given way to a more measured and critical assessment of the ‘newness’ of forms made possible by digital production. Nevertheless, there are relatively few examples of rigorous artistic investigations into the formal, technical possibilities and aesthetic implications of digital video.

Linda Wallace’s eurovision video work, completed in 2001, is a notable exception. Confounding genre specification and therefore implicitly resisting relegation to either digital or time-based media, it boldly announces its status as a ‘linear version of an interactive’ project. And it is precisely this montaging of form that allows eurovision to become an exploration of how visual digital operations—slicing images into each other, pulling them through the grid of the screen transforming them into information, and their slippery layering—might impact upon the temporality of video. Of course video has itself been subjected to a thorough temporal shakedown over the last 30 years, not least by the experiments with corporeal rhythm and duration by Bill Viola, Gary Hill and others. But many of these experiments have taken place against the backdrop of either the dominance or postmodern fading of linear narrative as a mass media form. eurovision instead investigates the productive possibilities for narrative by both interrogating and invigorating it through an interplay with digital aesthetics. The outcome is a new and exhilarating direction for spatial and temporal montage that no longer sees digital artefacts as mere simulators of film, the photographic image or other analogue media, but ushers in the possibility of what new media critic Lev Manovich has termed “digital cinema” (L. Manovich, The Language of New Media, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2001).

Where earlier computational experiments with narrativity, such as Peter Greenaway’s high definition video Prospero’s Books, failed to sustain narrative within the cumulative fragmentation of digital, visual layering, Wallace’s piece develops a kind of modular narrative that holds in place the splitting of the screen’s frame. eurovision is structured around 4 segments of songs sung by the Russian, Swedish, French and German entrants to the Eurovision Song Contest in 2000; each country’s contestant activating a different screen template for viewing a set of cinematic and photographic juxtaposed and sequential cut-ups comprising that sections’ module. Like a graphic mask that sits over the viewing plane, the screen is divided by blackness into smaller square and rectangular spaces that over time exchange their shape and scale and through which video and images stream at the viewer. Wallace was initially interested in imagining the piece for internet broadband delivery in which multiple streams of information could be delivered on the fly from a database of media stored on a server. (See Wallace’s artist’s statement: www.machinehunger.com.au/eurovision/statement.html.) But rather than some techno-utopian hankering after the promise of bigger and better, eurovision’s resulting linear meditation on the much proffered potentialities of speedier digital media gives viewers temporal distance from a world in which information incessantly streams at them.

The strategy of eurovision is not to substitute misinformation and chaos as a negative critique of the over-saturated and speed-obsessed arena of contemporary, global media consumption. Instead its formal experiments with the screen as a panel, almost an interface, distributes and resequences the internal coherence that the homogenisation of entities such as ‘the information age,’ cinematic narrative and European culture are presumed to possess. The vision of Europe we encounter in the video becomes increasingly situated historically and socially rather than remaining a singular, mythical entity suggested by a myopic European ‘vision.’ While the kitsch veneer of the performers and the consistently blithe pop melodies of the Eurovision song contest suggest a formula for a multicultural Europe, the filmic content playing through eurovision’s multiple screen frames, composed of cut-ups of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967), offers us a darker sense of a more alienated and displaced Europe.

For an Australian audience the video straddles tensions between representations of European-ness: the Eurovision songs, perhaps a reminder of languages left behind in the process of migration or—to Anglo-Saxon Australians—sounds and cultures never heard; the subtitles of the French films—glimpses of an intellectual and arthouse cinema scene; the 1950s and 60s Russian space program footage in the smaller side frames challenging our familiarity with the US version. If the technical effect of multiplying and dividing the screen space displaces a unified viewing perspective, then so too do the disjunctive images of Europe offset any attempt we might make at constructing this culture as easily digestible and assimilable. Yet the remarkable achievement of eurovision is its sheer watchability. It elegantly realises just the right blend of fragmentation and repetition. The re-use of older media form and content has been a common feature of digital art and of digital media within advertising and popular culture. And yet this can lead to a kind of visual malaise in which the content of a piece is evacuated or else the audience’s affective response is caught up in admiring technical mimicry. Instead the cinema and television cut-ups in eurovision conjure memories of a nascent post-war European culture grasping at the beginnings of global and mass media culture; a culture out of which contemporary information cultures are born. The subtitles from Godard’s film replayed and multiplied across the screen and tempo of the video, speaking to us from the 1960s of the failure of communication are just as relevant for the state of global communications networks today.

The repetition and fragmentation of form and media in eurovision successfully holds the eye because it is not used as simple commentary on the repetitiveness or loss of meaning produced by digital culture. Instead the selection and replaying of only segments from the films or television footage indicate that the digital reiteration of other media can provide new ways of understanding forms such as narrative. Linda Wallace redeploys only subplots from the Bergman film revolving around the characters of the knave and the witch that deal with the way social groups produce outsiders. This focus on the space of the outside is taken up at a formal level by the video’s digital aesthetics, which investigate the production of narrative outside of a centralised coherence or structure. Against the expectation of a linear unfolding of plot driven by a single event or character, eurovision suggests narrative can be produced through techniques of recombination, moving the subplots or modules around, pulling them apart and fitting them back together again. Narrative can then be seen to rest not upon linearity and singular viewpoint but on the layering, combination and texturing that differently sequenced modules bring to events. It is here that works like eurovision offer us new and productive possibilities for digital video as it thoughtfully remediates the content, form and history of painting, graphics, photography, film and television.

The Monaco Dance Forum is not a festival, but a rambling, multi-faceted event encompassing a multimedia showcase (with performances, exhibitions, installations and workshops), a discrete dance screen festival, a trade show, forums and interviews (the latter recorded onsite for local television), performing art exhibitions, audition opportunities for young dancers, co-production pitching sessions, live performances and an international prize-giving ceremony—the Nijinsky Awards. The Chanel-sponsored event occurs on the beachfront in the shopping-mall sized Grimaldi Forum which contains endless rooms and several theatres. Lagerfeld designed the stage set for the awards and attended several performances and royalty and fur coats made many notable appearances throughout the 5 days.

Hosted by Jeanne Moreau and with presenters including Maurice Bejart and an incredibly healthy-looking Cyd Charisse, the awards were truly jaw-dropping. Not surprisingly but commendably, William Forsythe won best choreographer and from the podium had a subtle dig at the classical ballet-dominated nominations for best dancer. Other nominees included the White Oak Dance Project, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and Akram Khan. With an international voting committee and squillions of artists cited (everyone from Darcey Bussell to Kate Champion), the concept of the awards was baffling. Most Predetermined Outcome: Princess Caroline and William Forsythe holed-up in the V.V.V.I.P room at the after-party.

Live dancing

Because the scale of the event was so overwhelming, I narrowed my focus to the Dance Screen events and evening performances, missing the performance showcases and multimedia showings that included Melbourne artists Cazerine Barry and Company in Space. I attended performances by Netherlands Dance Theatre, Rennie Harris, Akram Khan, Bill T Jones and Bangarra. As is to be expected, beyond the glamour, the actual programming lacked an overarching shape and attention to detail. The 2 performances in which the artists spent most of the time on the ground—Harris’ hip-hop show and Bangarra’s Corroboree—were presented on a raised stage with unraked seating. Bangarra’s audience balanced patiently on their seat backs, applauding enthusiastically despite their discomfort. As Barry commented, hearing the didgeridoo echoing through the basement venue of the monstrous Grimaldi Forum was thrilling. The medley they performed showed off dancers like Sidney Salter and Gina Rings, but I’m curious to see more of relative newcomer, Patrick Thaiday. The response to the company confirms that Stephen Page’s aesthetic resonates with large dance audiences perhaps exhausted by mathematical structures and hard-edged virtuosity.

Standard ‘class-act’ company, Netherlands Dance Theatre opened the performance season with a triple bill. Jiri Kylian’s Bella Figura is in the Australian Ballet’s repertoire but Kylian’s company showed up even more precision and lightness in the work. Kylian’s neo-classicism with its signature intricacy and swooning tone is emulated by ex-company dancers Paul Lightfoot, Sol Leon and Régina Van Berkel (who choreographed the other 2 works). Lightfoot and Leon’s Safe as Houses featured a revolving wall almost the width of the stage turning slowly on a central pivot which ‘magically’ shifted figures in and out of the space. Bill T Jones also featured in the main auditorium. At 50 he is still a commanding performer, speaking almost as much as he dances, improvising with style if not inventiveness. Jones remains political, commenting on the wealth of the festival and the political bully-tactics of the US, and won me over when he invited an over-excited audience member to join him in a very generous and careful pas de deux.

Harris’ Rome and Jewel, a hip-hop reworking of Romeo and Juliet featuring rival B-boy gangs, Monster Qs and the Caps, was too thin on movement and heavy on rapping and posturing and the ‘invisible’ female characters proved disturbing amid all that unleashed testosterone. Seeing Akram Khan’s Kaash again in a theatre slightly too small for the work didn’t detract from the compelling choreography. Bewildering speed and razor-sharp precision combine with Indian rhythms and an intricate working of the upper body, all boldly mapped across the square space of the stage. With scenography by acclaimed UK artist Anish Kapoor and a pounding score by Nitin Sawhney, this was the performance highlight for me.

IMZ Dance Screen 2002

IMZ Dance Screen has been running since 1990 at various locations. I attended the 1999 event in Cologne, Germany and this is its second year as part of the Monaco Dance Forum. IMZ Dance Screen included a videotheque with all 260 films in competition, special screenings, forums, pitching sessions and an awards ceremony. It also included a Forum for Festivals which featured presentations by dance screen curators and presenters from around the world: Argentina, Canada, Italy, New York and London. Each presenter discussed organisational and artistic aspects of their festivals and screened examples from their local filmmakers. A roundtable discussion lead to the establishment of a network of festivals, including Reeldance which I curated in 2000 and 2002. It will share information, programs and guest visits as well as plan forums for the various festivals where more presentations by individual curators will occur.

Dance Screen 2002 ended with its own awards ceremony. One of the judges was Vincent Paterson, choreographer of Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal video and Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark, making Paterson, along with Charisse, the sort of dance screen royalty you would expect to see in Monaco. Australian Sue Healey’s film Niche scored a nomination for ‘Screen Choreography not longer that 15 mins.’ This category was won by Minou, a magical short directed by UK filmmaker Magali Charrier, featuring a girl interacting with ‘animated’ objects in her home. Other winners included a stark and riveting ‘camera re-work’ of Moebius Strip by brilliant Spanish/UK choreographer Gilles Jobim, a sci-fi/fairy-tale featuring the remarkable Wayne McGregor, Chrysalis, and the wonderful documentary on Maya Deren screened at the Sydney Film Festival last year, In the Mirror of Maya Deren. The overall winner was The Dancer’s Body, a 3-part BBC series that I did not see, but which apparently “breaks new ground in creating a bridge between science and the performing arts.”

Most of my time was spent in the videotheque sifting through the unculled submissions, mainly the shorts. UK filmmaker Shelly Love has created 2 fascinating films with puppets, Little White Bird and Scratch. Since the remarkable puppet-dance sequence in Being John Malkovich, the possibilities for inanimate figures ‘moved to dance’ have increased and Love’s poetic and sometimes dark approach is intriguing. Another UK film, The World Turned Upside Down featured dancing dogs and in Rosemary Butcher’s Undercurrent a large woman was made ethereal by the process of shooting underwater.

Where novelty was combined with finely tuned aesthetics, the emphasis on physical performance was handled deftly in other films. New productions by Jan Fabre (The Warriors of Beauty) and Wim Vandekeybus (In Spite of Wishing and Wanting and Silver) feature compelling performances and the surprising situations and images we expect from both artists: a mouth covered in cockroaches, exploding pillows, men running through fields like horses. Wayne McGregor featured in another short, Horizone directed by Gillian Lacey, his spindly physique set against a desert/alien landscape which paralleled the sci-fi setting of Chrysalis. Measure directed Gaelen and Dayna Hanson is a neat film set in a corridor of an empty building. A man and woman perform to the soundtrack of their own feet, not tap or Irish but something blending the playfulness and precision of both. Divadlo, by Spanish director Guillem Morales, draws its aesthetic from Czech photographer Jan Saudek. Set in a brothel, the film is thick with sexuality of a theatrical kind with the polish of a music video. Australian submissions included Shaun Parker’s NO and Dianne Reid’s Luke and Reeldance finalists Arachne by Narelle Benjamin and Mathew Bergan, Frocks Off by Rosetta Cook, In Absentia by Margie Medlin and Sandra Parker and No Surrender by Richard James Allen.

Last year, Cornelia Niedermeyer (Theater der Zeit, January 2002) described Viennese theatre as a “geriatric institution”, populated by the elderly on both sides of the stage—and heavily reliant on the classics in its unadventurous programming. The “theatre miracle” that Vienna is supposed to be enjoying rests, she claims, on a small number of great productions at the Burgtheater, usually by visiting directors such as Peter Zadek and Luc Bondy who’ve made their mark (and indeed had their own theatres) in Berlin.

This Vienna/Berlin rivalry is nothing new, nor is the aging of both theatre-makers and their audiences in the German-speaking countries. And it is true, too, that some of the least interesting theatre I saw recently in both cities were classics produced at major theatres such as the Burgtheater in Vienna and Berlin’s famous Berliner Ensemble. At the same time, though, there is much going on in theatres in both cities that indicate a far from moribund scene.

Thus, while Schiller’s Maria Stuart at the Burgtheater (director Andrea Breth) failed to excite—a stately, static talkfest—a production of Beckett’s Happy Days at the Akademietheater was, conversely, a treat. It starred and was directed by 2 of the legendary actresses from Peter Stein’s glory days at the Berlin Schaubühne, Jutta Lampe and Edith Clever respectively: of pensionable age they may well be, but geriatic? Not in the slightest. Lampe was a very glamorous Winnie, her hair the blond of the sand pile she is buried in, her strapless evening dress the colour of the endless sky which floods the set’s backdrop. The production was beautifully lit—Winnie’s earthen mound transforming from golden sand to polluted dirt as the play progresses and she deteriorates and disappears before our eyes. Lampe, ill with the flu, was nevertheless captivating, her beautiful voice totally appealing in both senses of the word, embracing us and drawing us into the logic of her bizarre world.

Australians, incidentally are more than making their own mark in Vienna: at the Schauspielhaus Barrie Kosky had Paul Capsis in cabaret, Elena Kats-Chernin composed Maria Stuart for the Burg and Beverley Blankenship’s production of Phèdre, in a new and abbreviated verse translation by Simon Werle, was impressing audiences at the Volksbühne. This last was a totally satisfying exercise in elegant restraint, which demonstrated a profound understanding of the way (following Anne Ubersfeld) space is critically inscribed in the text.

George Tabori’s wickedly black farce, Mein Kampf, takes place in the men’s hostel in which the young Adolf Hitler lived when he first came to Vienna. Hitler is befriended by Schlomo Herzl, an itinerant Jewish bookseller, who looks after the newcomer, sometimes gently mocking, but never retaliating, even as the naïve and gormless youth transforms into the more ruthless and vicious personality we know.

This production actually took place in that very hostel, which is still operating, though there are plans to close it, relocate it even further from the city and—Sydneysiders will recognise this phenomenon—build new apartments on the site. Directors Tina Leisch and Hubis Kramar wanted to work with the residents before this happened. The cast is made up of both professional actors and the men whose home this is: they top and tail each scene with their own stories and experiences—and the production concludes with the rounding up and removal of these “undesirables.”

It was a slightly surreal experience to sit among both the destitute men and the affluent, middle class audience members slumming it for the evening. While the theatre-makers clearly were passionate about the nature of a society which pushes its poorest and most disenfranchised to its margins, well out of sight, and the repercussions this can have, I didn’t sense too much self-reflection going on in the audience.

And so on to Hitler’s other favourite capital city. Berlin: the city is broke, poor, in dire straits. This is the cry on everyone’s lips, especially those working in the cultural sphere. And while things are clearly worse than when I lived there 8 years ago with closures of theatres and diminishing subsidies, funding for the arts in Berlin alone (a city the same size as Sydney) is still around 10 times what the Australia Council spends nationally. But the subsidised theatres (and there are a lot of them) still have the money to think big—bigger than Australian companies can, with the exception of the occasional festival splurge. With permanent ensembles, casts of 18 are a possibility. And set designers can rebuild an entire theatre for a production.

The Schaubühne, run by a young and enthusiastic directorate, is pumping out some exciting work and developing international collaborations: following his Sydney successes with the Schaubühne’s resident writers David Gieselmann (Mister Kolpert) and Marius von Mayerburg (Fireface) Benedict Andrews will also be guest directing there this year.

The Schaubühne production of Roland Schimmelpfennig’s Push Up 1-3 was a revelation in translating across cultures. When it was workshopped and presented at the 2002 ANPC Conference in Canberra, the Australian actors were astonished to be told (by the play’s translator and original dramaturg) that this was, in fact, a comedy. This series of dialogues, interspersed with freezeframe monologues is set in the ruthless and dehumanising environment of the headquarters of a multinational corporation. Initially, to the Australian actors, it just seemed grim—the German production pushes it into the realm of semi-repressed hysteria, revelling in the grossness of physical excess and that uncomfortable zone where we laugh in uneasy recognition of our less attractive traits.

A stunning guest production from the Belgian company Het Toneelhuis also featured at the Schaubühne. L King of Pain, Luk Perceval’s massively truncated version of King Lear, concentrates exclusively on the family dynamics of the piece—hence, presumably the set design (Katrin Brack): one enormous tree with exposed roots in an otherwise gigantic, stripped stage space. Lear wants to relinquish the burden of power and with his band of rabble-rousing knights, spend the kids’ inheritance. It was an anarchic, chaotic and breathtaking performance, especially from Thomas Thieme as the violent, inappropriately affectionate, Alzheimers’-delusional father/ruler. (I noted, however, that the German sense of humour did fail here—an icy silence followed this joke: “What’s the high point of recycling? A German eating pork.”) And here’s another international difference—it was performed in Flemish, French and German with no surtitles.

Also at the Schaubühne was Tankred Dorst’s Merlin oder das wüste Land (Merlin or the desolate country), a retelling of part of the King Arthur legend, directed by Bernhard Kosminski. What was striking about this performance (apart from the 18 performers plus live musicians) was the imaginative and powerful set (Florian Etti). The audience was seated in an L-shape around a 3 storey, 14-sided hollow metal column, perhaps 15 metres in diameter, with gangways into the audience and ladders connecting the floors. A central platform (Arthur’s round table) in the internal shaft functioned as an elevator, raising and lowering the flat playing space. It was an exercise in stamina for the actors as they ranged across all the possible playing spaces this design offered.

Elsewhere in Berlin independent practitioners have found a home at the Sophiensäle. It’s run along the lines of Sydney’s Performance Space, producing and supporting independent artists, which makes it unique in Germany. Artistic Director Amelie Deuflhard has especially encouraged one young group, Nico and the Navigators, whose members trained in the visual arts, but are developing their own brand of physical theatre—not a commonly recognised form in Germany. Despite its unfamiliarity, their work is nonetheless attracting a following there and their production, Der Familienrat (The Family Council), is an adroit look at family relations, assisted by a clever, manipulable set (Oliver Proske) which progressively reveals and conceals spaces, stairs and compartments which the actors use to surprise and engage their audience.

One of the anticipated highlights of my stay was Heiner Müller’s acclaimed production of Brecht’s Arturo Ui at the Berliner Ensemble—still in repertoire 7 years after Müller’s death and still with the stunning Martin Wuttke (who won actor of the year for his portrayal) in the title role. But times change, as do ensembles, artistic directors and, indeed, the reputation of even illustrious companies. Wuttke is no longer a company member, having moved on to Frank Castorf’s Volksbühne after Claus Peymann, long term Artistic Director of the Burgtheater, took up the directorship of the Berliner Ensemble. And at the last moment Wuttke was unable to perform—he was deep in last minute rehearsals around the corner at the Volksbühne for the premiere of Der Idiot, Castorf’s third epic adaptation of a Dostoyevsky novel (following Demons and The Insulted and Injured).

Those at the Berliner Ensemble (distinctly unimpressed by Wuttke’s unavailability) served up instead a performance of Lessing’s 18th century morality play, Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise), directed by Peymann. A production intended to be both political and topical in its message of tolerance between Christians, Jews and Muslims, it was nevertheless a pedestrian, mannered and mind-numbingly literal (down to colour coding by costume: blue for Muslims, red for Christians etc) production. I rather suspect it was intended to introduce school children to a classic of the stage they ‘should’ know—but in effect was more likely to drive them from the theatre forever. And as an example of the “political theatre” Peymann promised to bring to the Berliner Ensemble, I expect it’s set the theatre’s founder spinning in his grave.

While I had to make do with a video of Arturo Ui, all was forgiven when I had the chance to see Der Idiot. Castorf is widely held to be one of the most exciting directors working in Germany and the Volksbühne was definitely the favourite stage of the young theatre enthusiasts I met in Berlin. Der Idiot was 6 hours long with one 20-minute interval—and totally riveting, even in the really boring bits.

The company had, in the leadup to the new theatre season, announced its departure from Berlin for “Neustadt”…and “Newtown” was what was, in fact, constructed in the stage and auditorium of the theatre: an entire town with cafes, pubs, apartment blocks, a motel and hairdresser and so on. The audience was seated on a huge revolve on the former stage, on 3 storey scaffolding which looked, intentionally, rather like the reverse of a film set. An extraordinary design by Bert Neumann.

The 16 actors performed throughout the town and the audience swivelled to follow the actors. But not all the time. A crew of video camera operators filmed all the action and this was fed, live, on about a dozen monitors visible to the audience. Although sometimes the actors played directly in front of the audience, often they didn’t. Sometimes we caught glimpses of them between the curtains of a flat, 2 levels up, sometimes they were in the hairdresser’s which we could only see from the outside. This made for a weird, totally compelling viewing experience which simultaneously made you literally rethink how you look at performance and what it is to be a spectator. A Verfremdungseffekt as Brecht could never have anticipated. What do you watch? The actor or the screen? What if you can’t see the actor—but can still hear them? Do you stare at the fluorescent sign outside the hairdresser’s, or do you succumb to the voyeuristic and ambivalent pleasures of the small screen? And after an hour in the hairdresser’s, it dawns on you afresh just how boring bad video can be. By this stage you’re desperate for that elusive, much debated, whatever-it-is that live presence delivers and mediatised performance cannot.

The actors too had fun with this conceit: a collection of some of the best in the country, they could play effortlessly with genres: mainstage German theatre acting directly to the audience? No problem. Soap opera acting for the camera inside a flat over a dinner with tensions running high? Sure. Self-conscious ‘I’m pretending the cameras aren’t there and there’s no one watching’; Big Brother moments when the “live action” is elsewhere? Why not?

The company’s dramaturg Carl Hegemann, exhilarated after the first 2 performances, told me that it was worth it—go all out with one production and live (modestly) with the financial consequences for the rest of the year (modest being a relative term, of course!). I agree; so, are there any Australian festival directors out there with huge vision—and a budget to match—to bring this masterpiece across the world?

Laura Ginters was the recipient of a Goethe Institut scholarship for cultural workers which funded her stay in Berlin.

I’ve often wondered why no Australian festival director has yet ventured a festival of work exclusively from the women of the world. We’ve had Ecstasy, Earth, Air and Water, The Sacred, Islands, Bach. Why not the Feminine? It could be called This, That and The Other. Researchers would flock. Theories posited in cold lecture halls, oeuvres hatched in mirrored studios would find audiences to match. Collective imaginings would see the light of day. Would half the sky fall in? Intrepid souls itching to find out are packing their umbrellas for the Magdalena Australia Festival in Brisbane in April.

The Magdalena Project is an international network of women working in contemporary theatre. It was conceived in 1983 when Welsh performer-director Jill Greenhalgh wondered what it would be like if the women she’d admired performing key roles at the festival she was attending in Italy, had actually authored the works themselves rather than their male collaborators. The artists included Julia Varley from Denmark’s Teatret Odin who’d worked extensively with Eugenio Barba, and Geddy Aniksdale from Greenland Friteater in Norway. Together they devised a set of workshops and performances followed by a week of collaborations involving 30 women. Magdalena was born. Greenhalgh named it after Mary Magdalene, a powerful figure in the ancient Christian church before she was cast in the role of that fallen woman at the feet of Christ.

The collaborative effort failed but the workshops were a revelation and both generated questions and energy, which continue to fuel the project. In 1986 the British Council in Wales came on board with funding. Over the years Magdalena has been responsible for a range of festivals and conferences around themes such as performing words, raw visions from young practitioners, writing image-based theatre, voice, presence, the dynamic patterns of theatre groups, new dramaturgies. At the same time, they’ve tackled social issues such as motherhood and the creative process, theatre at the margins and, crucial in these dangerous times, effective artistic responses to states of political crisis. The Project was also responsible for touring artists like Denise Stoklos and commissions such as Deborah Levy’s erotic interrogatory text, The B File in 1991, which introduced me to Magdalena. In 1999 the 10 years of almost continuous funding ceased. The project endures with a regular newsletter and a website www.themagdalenaproject.com. And whenever women of like mind anywhere in the world are sufficiently fired up, a Magdalena event will materialise. Many Australian artists have participated in these festivals but this year, for the first time, with the assistance of a raft of financial partners, the festival comes to us.

Driving the event to be held at The Powerhouse in Brisbane is the performance triumvirate called sacredCOW (Julie Robson, Dawn Albinger, Scotia Monkovitch) who took a work in progress to last year’s Magdalena Festival in Colombia. In The Quivering they play 3 wayward Sirens moonlighting as waitresses in a halfway house for the dead. “We found death has a different weighting in Colombia…but after each performance we were approached by men and women who were touched to the core by our work”, says Albinger. The visit also gave the COWgirls a chance to meet the Magdalena organisers and to rehearse some of the logistics of bringing together artists from across Australia and around the world for the 10-day festival in Brisbane.

The Brisbane event reflects the Project’s ongoing aims of bringing together women who are authoring their own work, offering a platform for artists who are marginalised and exploring the nexus of theory and practice. It’s primarily a meeting of practitioners and the Brisbane organisers have done their best to include as many of the artists who submitted proposals as possible. Among the Australians coming are Margaret Cameron, Robin Laurie, Maude Davey, Lisa O’Neill, Stacy Callaghan, Sue Pilbeam, Vulcana Women’s Circus, Christine Johnston, Lucinda Shaw, RealTV, Handzon Theatre, Chapel of Change, Ollie Black and Danni Powell. Kooemba Jdarra is hosting the Indigenous component of the festival.

International artists confirmed include all 3 of Magdalena’s founders: Jill Greenhalgh; Geddy Aniiksdal who’ll bring her work Blue is the Smoke of War; and Julia Varley who will perform 2 pieces including The Dead Brother a work/demonstration about how performances are made at Odin Teatret. “It begins with the first steps, how the actor creates her own stage presence to the last step in which the text, through the form and precision of the actions acquires rhythms and density of meaning.” Julia will also present The Castle of Holstebro, which she co-wrote with Eugenio Barba.

Also on the confirmed list are Teatro La Mascara from Colombia, Felicette Chazerand from Belgium, Graciela Rodrigues (AMAR, Argentina) Josefina Baez (USA) Gilly Adams (BBC Wales) Teatro Nomad (Spain), Christina Castrillo (Argentina/Switzerland), Laxmi Chandrashekar (India) and 12 representatives from Magdalena Aotearoa.

Uhan Shii Theatre Company from Taiwan will perform My Journey which follows the life of a woman who has spent her life playing male roles in Taiwanese Opera. Uhan Shii is a company of primarily older performers-their youngest member is 40 and they often involve young children in the performances.

Avatar Body Collision will present a cyberperformance entitled swim delivered live on stage and screen by 4 globally distributed performers, 3 of whom appear via the internet using cross-platform chat applications ivisit and the Palace. The women in this group have backgrounds in performance, visual arts, information technology and hail from Aotearoa/NZ, UK and Finland.

The article we ran in RealTime (RT44 p 6) generated considerable interest in Dah Teatar from Belgrade, a company formed in 1991 “out of the need for profound experimental work.” Readers will be pleased to hear that Dah will be coming to Brisbane with their Cirque Macabre a work using the form of an obscure circus to deal with the theme of violence.

There’s also a terrific program of workshops including one on the interaction between space and performance run by Antonella Diana and Jadranka Andjelic from Dah Teatar; Margaret Cameron deals with space as perceptual, exploring non-psychological approaches to animating text. Cristina Castrillo & Bruna from Teatro Delle Radici play with The Language of Silence; Julie Varley concentrates on the singing and speaking voice and the relationship between text and action; Actor director Geddy Aniksdal and script editor for BBC Radio, Gilly Adams will run a generative writing workshop. Uhan Shii offer insights into Taiwanese Opera and local indigenous elders and artists hold a 3-day workshop on song, dance and storytelling. There’ll also be a forum each day.

In the globalised, post-feminist noughties, female experience is still a largely foreign country. If you’re looking for innovative and creative approaches to the terrain somewhere closer than Mars or Venus, Brisbane in April will be the place to be.

Magdalena Australia, International Festival for Women in Contemporary Theatre, April 6-16, 2003, Brisbane Powerhouse.

Melbourne is built on a grid. Once you trust this system of rectangles it is very hard to get lost. When you want to find your way in the city that is fine but when it comes to the arts, it becomes kind of strange. The Victorian Arts Centre (VAC), however, seems to fit very well into this grid. It’s a highly organized, neat and shiny venue, in which it is hard to get lost. Not in terms of finding your way to your seat, of course, there are signs, don’t worry. I mean in terms of getting lost in another world, the world of the imagination, of surprise.

“(Designer) John Truscott wanted the audience to enter a new world,” says the VAC tour guide. “He wanted us to leave our everyday life behind and—coming from a world full of concrete and steel—to enter the world of fantasy and illusion.” That’s why he chose crimson carpets, black glass ceilings and used brass wherever he could. “The brass is to commemorate the Gold Rush”, the tour guide goes on in an attempt to give deeper meaning to this “elegance.” Even the Aboriginal paintings have been chosen to match the walls. No chance of entering a new world here.

So how about getting lost in the VAC theatres, deep underground in the Yarra River bed? Both operas playing at the time had incredibly old-fashioned settings. Every expectation of a German audience of 100 years ago would have been well served by these productions. “Why on earth would you present such an old fashioned interpretation to an audience in a large cosmopolitan city in the year 2002?” I asked Stuart Maunder, the Artistic Director of Opera Australia. “Old fashioned? Oh, traditional would probably be a better word for it.” Old fashioned, traditional—take your pick. “The company isn’t subsidised to the extent that German theatres are. So when we do avant garde work, like we did last season with our Freischütz, the audience reacts very badly. They just do not want something that they think is denigrating the piece or (privileging) a director’s vision on top of the piece. They want to see what Strauss and Hofmannsthal actually intended when they wrote Der Rosenkavalier.” In my opinion, the nature of art is that it stays up-to-date over time and can be (I think even should be) interpreted according to the present. And Maunder agrees. “The pieces that people know more we tend to play around with a little more.” So why didn’t this apply to the Figaro directed by Neil Armfield? People must know Figaro! But Maunder just comes back to that “very traditional part of the audience” which he thinks the company must not disappoint because, as he explains, “we are dependent on box office for about 70 percent of our income.”

I felt the same reviewer loneliness in my heart when I saw Neil Simon’s Laughter on the 23rd Floor produced by the Melbourne Theatre Company at the VAC. “That was a good laugh!” giggled the woman in the row in front of me when we got up to leave the theatre. Talking to other members of the audience I detected they were just happy to see Garry McDonald on stage who (in my eyes) tried hard to act like Max Price (a TV-host struggling for more audience) but didn’t get very far. There was not one single moment when I felt for him or believed in him. Jeremy Vincent, Marketing Director of the VAC says: “These stars have brought a television and film audience to the theatre, and also a younger audience.” Light entertainment and stars—is that what theatre should provide? “No,” says Julian Meyrick, the recently appointed Associate Director of the MTC (also director of 2 productions for The Melbourne Workers Theatre and author of See How It Runs, Nimrod & the New Wave, see page 34), “Theatre can make use of the high status it has by introducing quite sophisticated ideas to a very educated audience. And this status makes it possible for companies like MTC to do work that is quite testing and quite confronting some of the time.” Confronting? Does Laughter… fit this definition? “No,” he says, “but Laughter… was a Christmas show.” I just wished German politicians had been sitting with me hearing Meyrick talk. There is currently a debate in Germany about reducing subsidies and getting state theatres to rely more on box office. Here you see what happens—no sophisticated ideas at Christmas time!

With quite some joy I discovered Playbox Theatre in the CUB Malthouse. Finally, a much less settled atmosphere and an audience that seemed to me younger, not necessarily only in age but also in state of mind. I saw Rapture, a play by Joanna Murray-Smith, directed by Jenny Kemp, about the emptiness and loneliness that hide behind style, elegance and success. Even though her text told us exactly what to draw from the piece, I enjoyed the fact that the playwright tried to make us (members of the middle class) think about ourselves.

Most of the plays that Playbox present are surprises because they are world premieres. But one thing you can be sure of is that all these surprises will be purely Australian which is sad in a way. It would be interesting, I assume, for Australian work to dialogue with plays from around the world.

From Playbox I found my way out of the establishment. Picking up postcards here and talking to people there, I’m suddenly in the world of “cutting edge”, of “fringe” where somehow the grid doesn’t apply any more. You won’t find your way there if you don’t look for it. There is nothing in little tourist brochures like Melbourne Events. The cutting edge is only for people in the know.

Sitting with me in a fancy hotel bar next to the abandoned Preston and Northcote Community Hospital (the bar is where the mortuary used to be), actor Bruce Kerr says, “We aren’t necessarily after a tourist audience. But you can get all the information you need reading our newspapers.” And indeed, The Age quite loyally covers fringe theatre events. They had a very interesting article about the play I had just seen, The Teratology Project (review page 36), in which Kerr played a 168 year old man who wasn’t permitted to die. It was all about genetic science, birth, life and death, performed in the abandoned corridors of the hospital. A voice from the speakers invited us to “follow the white arrows to the open door.” We arrived in front of a counter where we had to give something of ourselves—a hair, a nail, some spit or earwax. The sample was put into a plastic bag and then carefully examined by a very scientific looking doctor. We were then split into 3 groups according to our samples (which wasn’t true but still made us shiver) and led through the operating theatres.

It took director Susie Dee 4 years to put this performance on the hospital-stage. “It is really hard for independent companies to get ongoing funding, it is a real struggle,” she says. The Teratology Project is the second show from a collective of artists calling themselves The Institute of Complex Entertainment (ICE) whose goal lies in “creating theatre outside the traditional venues, that challenges our audience both in form and content.” Their commitment is to work that is “framed by the strong but simple premise that an audience is not a ‘passive mass’ sitting in the dark of an auditorium, but a dynamic collection of individuals.” I appreciate this approach. This work just wouldn’t happen if Melbourne artists didn’t keep the faith and if they weren’t ready to put not only all their creative energy, but also their own money, into their productions.

I also saw Double Entendre at La Mama Theatre and found great actors performing 2 pieces by the Australian playwright Raimondo Cortese. In these stories, people meet for the first time, get into deep conversation, but don’t find what they’re looking for. There is no remedy for their loneliness and no end to their struggle for love. This time we are not given answers (whereas The Teratology Project was very explicit, just like Rapture). For once we weren’t handed morality with the ticket.

Then I had what I’d call “a good laugh” at Chapel off Chapel, seeing Molière’s Love is the Best Doctor directed by Allison Wall. What fun it can be when nothing meets your expectations and the poor daughter for example, who is to be cured, is for once not a sweet, pretty, silently weeping girl, but a stocky young woman wearing yellow plaits and big black boots under her skirt, sobbing angrily and screaming around.

At the Storeroom in North Fitzroy to see Kaidan I enter a completely designed space with candles and banners throughout. “Kaidan” is Japanese for “haunted tales” and the producer and artistic director of the show, 25-year old Anniene Stockton, wanted the space to be decorated accordingly. “I changed the theatre”, she says, “because I feel theatre is not about sitting down in a room and being shown something. It is much more about having an experience, being able to communicate with another human being. Technology has allowed us to come closer, yet as human beings we are so much further apart.” It works. People don’t run off to their cars when the show is over. They stay and talk. Anniene has worked with a creative team of 35 people and they all get profit share from the box office. Nobody here seems to be doing anything for the money.

In Germany there are many independent theatre groups struggling for funding just as they do here. The difference is that audiences don’t have to go to the fringe if they want “cutting edge.” The big theatres are quite proud when they have an artistic director who in Melbourne would surely be considered a “risk taker.” That is true for Thomas Ostermeier, for example, who became known for cutting edge work at the Baracke, the smaller, experimental theatre attached to the Schaubühne, one of Berlin’s most prestigious theatres. Ostermeier is now Artistic Director of the Schaubühne and The Baracke has disappeared for financial reasons. But other German cities still subsidize not only their state theatres but also these smaller, experimental stages.

Talking to lots of people, I am still not convinced that Australian audiences are really such mainstream lovers. I think if the big theatre and opera companies took some new approaches and presented work that is more than the expected light entertainment, they could be successful. It is just a matter of time and any transition process involves risk. Theatre should be interesting and innovative. It should make us think. It shouldn’t degenerate into just another turn-on-turn-off event. It should creep under our skins.

PS: Melbournian’s hunger for light entertainment may be stronger than I imagined—I’ve just read that 40 million dollars is to be spent on a giant ferris wheel based on the London Eye to become an internationally recognisable landmark for Melbourne. Maybe it is time to accept the inevitable.

Note: Germany has over 150 subsidised state and city theatres mostly subsidised by cities. German households spend 0.3% of their budgets on culture, 20% of which goes to theatre. How it’s spent varies city to city. In Munich the Munchner Kammerspiel are subsidised with 20m Euros (40m AUD) per annum and rely on only 7.5% of their income from box office. The Thalia Theatre in Hamburg gets 15.5m Euro per annum, but makes 30% income from ticket sales. Because of the state of the German economy most public funding bodies have not increased funding for a decade, meanwhile costs continue to rise and theatre companies spend 80% of their budgets on wages and related costs, which means that there is less and less money for new productions. There have also been funding cuts. Ulrich Khuons, Artistic Director of the Thalia Theatre argues that “in a time of globalisation arts help maintain the profile of a city. Pure economic thinking aside, we need places of excitement and of disturbance and to create these places is what theatre is about.”

John Davis has been the General Manager of the Australian Music Centre for 7 years. As a well-travelled, hard-working Vice President of the International Association of Music Centres (the AMC is one of its 43 members) and Vice President of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) he has been participating in national and international strategies crucial to the development of contemporary music and the documenting and dissemination of the work of Australian composers. Now at the end of both his Vice Presidential terms, although still the Australian representative, Davis is looking forward to feeling a little less split between national and international pressures, but in this interview points to the ever increasing value of the community of music centres. I asked this congenial and much admired manager of an enterprising organisation that achieves much beyond its immediate role of documentor and disseminator about his personal association with music and how it took him to his current position.

I intended to be a composer from the time I was 13. I was a performer for a long time on piano and prior to that, saxophone and other brass instruments when I was younger. I failed first year music at Sydney University in 1975, ran away to New Zealand, got involved in jazz, came back to Australia and spent about a decade, mainly on the South Coast of New South Wales, just doing piano bar gigs and whatever. And then I reached a point where I needed more creative challenges and went back to university at Wollongong when Creative Arts was set up in the mid 80s. As a result I did a lot of Australian music study there and then managed to score a job as a junior sales assistant at the Australian Music Centre in 1989 on Broadway in a pokey little office. The commercial activities of the centre were only 2 or 3 years old at that stage and a lot of my work was making up catalogues of what was for sale, selling scores from the library basically. There were one or 2 CDs available with Australian works, stacks of cassettes and LPs. By the early 90s that exploded and we set up our shop in 1993 and by 1995 there were 2,500 titles across all genres of Australian music, not just the classical area. The whole scene has changed significantly in the time I’ve been here.

In 1995 the General Manager, Cathy Brown Watt, left for the Major Organisations Board of the Australia Council. I was the Sales Manager and became then, as I still am, General Manager. I’ve been through 3 changes of location, from Broadway to the Argyle Centre [in The Rocks]and then to The Arts Exchange [also in the Rocks] in 2000. This last move has been most significant given the long term security of tenure with the NSW Ministry of the Arts as landlord and the space, which is a huge luxury, allowing us to do all sorts of things and provide a facility for others to do things here.

I don’t play any more, which frightens me more than anything. I will get back to it at some stage. That I’m not actually writing is not so important because there’s so much stuff that passes through here that I take backroom pleasure in observing. And what is more satisfying is to see someone else’s creative development and to play a facilitating role in that.

It’s how some people perceive the centre and it is one aspect of it. But what we do first and foremost is document the work of Australian composers. In the AMC’s early years that was a very broad and open thing—anyone who called themselves a composer could lodge material here—and then by the mid 80s it became more defined—formally representing composers applying for that status. Over the last decade that’s been broadened into other areas of art music making. There are all sorts of challenges in doing that because it’s fine if you have a composer putting dots on paper because it’s a physical manifestation of a work that a library can handle easily as opposed, say, to the work of a sound artist whose work exists in other media. There are ways to collect and catalogue these, for example, a web page as artwork, but you may not be able to sell that item. However, it’s the broader issue of representation in the centre’s collection that’s more important than sales. There are improvisors, jazz composers, real time composers in a range of formats—we like our systems to be challenged.

It does. It’s interesting too in how it reflects how artists think about their work. Dots-on-paper composers tend to understand the concept of their work being housed in an archive or a living collection like ours. Artists who work solely in live performance understand documenting through recording, generally commercially released, but in terms of other ways or forms—whatever’s scribbled down, whatever’s recorded in the preparation for the performance—they’re not necessarily sensitive. It’s a musicological issue: for example, the early sketches of a Peter Sculthorpe work or his correspondence with someone over the development of a commission and the resulting work, they’re all interesting form a musicological point of view.

Yes, but not of archival material: we don’t take on that role because there are the state libraries and the National Library, which recently accepted, for instance, all the Sculthorpe correspondence and papers. Ours is a living collection. We don’t have originals, we have good quality master copies of paper-based material which we are licensed to reproduce for sale, to give it a life.

The 3 things that drive our strategic plan are: documenting work by Australian composers; providing access to those materials, giving them a life, a function, a level of utility and offering a range of services that complement these. These may be professional development opportunities for composers, like ACOF, the Australian Composers Orchestral Forum, which we partner with Symphony Australia. It might be our awards [APRA-Australian Music Centre Classical Music Awards; administration of the Paul Lowin Prizes], our publications [including Sounds Australia] or recordings (we have our own record label, Vox Australis). The positioning statement of the AMC, Connecting the World with Australian Music, is about the Centre being a reference point: a majority of our enquiries are referred on to other people, they’re after the roadmap as it were. We get 5,000 to 6,000 library enquiries a year. For sales enquiries—CDs, educational materials—there was a calculation done in 1998-99 where it was estimated we deal with 25,000 interactions per year. It’s a lot for an organisation whose core activity is really that of a library.

Is the AMC looked on as a peak organisation or a service organisation? Are you expected to be politically active on behalf of artists?

There are as many expectations as there are people. Older composers—the centre was established in 1973—sometimes see us as falling short because we’re not a manager-agent-publisher. It’s a difficult expectation to deal with because the centre is a signpost to materials. If someone’s looking for repertoire to perform, for example we don’t say, “Here’s Peter Sculthorpe, or here’s our Top Ten Composers.” We have 400 composers represented in this collection and the number continues to grow; and there are 20,000 items. A handful of composers are represented by commercial publishers who take on that role and get the gigs. Our task is to identify areas of repertoire or musical activity that would suit a particular need. If performers are coming to us, we take the trouble to find out what their musical tastes are, what kind of context they perform in, what their subscription base is, what kind of audience they perform to. Then we point them in a general direction, empower them to make their own decisions—“Here’s a body of repertoire. Here are 25 composers whose work may be of interest to you.” They can borrow material, try it out, come in here and listen. And we encourage them to provide us with feedback to help refine their needs. It’s not a one-off relationship. We encourage them to be more articulate about what they want because often they don’t know. They know what they don’t want. Five staff look after library and sales, including the 20% of enquiries from international sources.

We’re provided with budget for some international promotions from APRA, the Australasian Performing Rights Association, and more recently some term-specific funding from the Australia Council for an international project. With these we’re able to send out materials to people who’ve approached us or we seek out those who’ve expressed an interest in showcasing Australian talent, but in the same way, finding out their taste, what they want. It’s a process of mapping the landscape.

Ten to 15% are composers, 10-15% performers, 55% from the education sector and, beyond that, interested individuals, other people involved in the arts, organisations, institutions, libraries who plug into our resources. There are 9 elected board members and another co-opted 6 with specific skills (legal, accounting etc). Of the 9, there are 4 composers—the largest number we’ve had—and there are performers, people from the education sector, administrators from the new music scene. It’s quite well balanced and they offer the organisation great support.

Would the AMC act on behalf of its members over, say, funding issues? I’m thinking about the role of the NAVA [National Association for the Visual Arts] in urging and shaping the Myer Report.

If there was that imperative from the membership, of course. However, music making is such a diverse world, even within particular genres—choirs, jazz, sound artists—it’s difficult to see issues that are big enough to have a common incentive. The arts community as a whole has found it difficult to lobby broadly because of specific interest groups that exist. One part of me yearns for that cohesive sense of purpose, but I don’t begrudge its absence because it provides other kinds of challenges and roles that I find fulfilling. I’d like the AMC to stay open to communicating in any direction at all.

You’ve had a close association with the International Association of Music Information Centres [IAMIC] and the International Society of Contemporary Music [ISCM].

I still attend IAMIC meetings as the representative of Australia, but I was on the Board for the last 3 years as Vice President. We expanded the Board from 4 to 6 members to make it more representative of the 43 centres. It’s a place where knowledge and expertise are shared. There are lots of exchanges and collaborations emerging out of those relationships. But it’s not a forum for promoting your own stuff: it’s a place to share experiences and compare different political, economic and artistic contexts that you can measure yourself against. But it’s also a community that as whole has a lot of potential: the resources, the data held by these centres around the world is vital for new music in a very real way.

ISCM is more about the presentation of music. Its annual World Music Day festivals are truly international showcases of what’s happening in music of all styles.

Does IAMIC’s work result in cultural exchange then, as opposed to marketing?

In actuality we do of course promote Australian work, but there are cultural differences. It’s not how the Swedes might do it. They work with huge budgets, they’re part of the performing rights society in Sweden and they’ll put on a huge gig in New York for Swedish Music, hire the venue, engage the performers and spend millions of US dollars. We just don’t have the resources or infrastructure to do that sort of thing. Each centre varies from the others. It’s more about exchange, about seeing how things are done elsewhere and what might be adapted for your own context. IAMIC is emerging as an international community in the best sense. For example, there’s a big internet project called Music Navigator emerging out of IAMIC with European Union funding. A core group of European MIC members are developing a search engine to search across all the centres’ databases. It’s a long way from happening but once realised it will be an amazing tool. Our ISCM activities are more proactive about promoting the presentation of Australian work.

The online service MusicAustralia has been launched in prototype format [www.musicaustralia.org].

It’s a new service jointly developed by the National Library and ScreenSound Australia and content partners including the Australia Music Centre. You’ll be able to locate contemporary and heritage music—recordings, digitised sheet music and resources from a range of organisations via a single web interface. For example, you can view the digital score [from composers using computer notation software] and listen to the integrated MIDI file of Ann Carr-Boyd’s Moonbeams Kiss the Sea or Raffaello Marcellino’s The Lottery in Babylon. And you can interact with scores.

We’re digitising our entire collection over the next 10 years, incorporating it into our usual work processes. When we make a sale we scan the material and store it as an electronic file. The copyright has been worked out for storing it here, not for rendering it online yet—that’s further down the track. Our imperative will be to render online so people can peruse the work but not download. For works already in digital formats it’ll just be a matter of the licensing arrangements being resolved.

We’re funded by the Music Board of the Australia Council as a Key Organisation on Triennial Funding and that makes up a bit more than 40% of our total income. We receive another 3-4% from APRA and about one and a half percent from the NSW Ministry for the Arts. That’s about 45% subsidy with the rest from sales and membership income. There are huge challenges in trying to survive with that kind of balance and it’s been that way since the early to mid 90s when there was a significant cut in funding from the Australia Council that precipitated the development of a different kind of business model and more reliance on other income. We’ve had the advantage of developing this model while other organisations have been facing it only in recent years. On the other hand it’s a model that requires constant review and revision and makes an organisation particularly vulnerable, as vulnerable as some of the larger presenting organisations with their reliance on box office. You have no idea of how the hell you’re going to go from year to year, to climb that mountain, but somehow it all comes together. Membership is constant but sales are another matter, the mix can vary—for example music retailing is declining and we don’t have the capital to invest in stock.

We get fantastic support from APRA [Australian Performing Rights Association]. The APRA-Australian Music Centre Classical Music Awards look like they’ll be on-going. It’s an important relationship giving the centre a brand name, a public face which is otherwise so difficult to achieve as a service organisation working behind the scenes. The international activities we’re involved in, the materials we send out around the world to performers and broadcasters, these encourage the performances which yield the royalties that flow back through APRA to Australian composers, our constituents.

Another partner is the ABC through Classic FM, through The Listening Room and some major projects including the Australian Adlib Project. This is now continuing in collaboration with the National Library and additional funds from the Australia Council for Jon Rose to collect more “vernacular music.” It’s a documentary process really complementary to what we do here and addresses the issues of collecting material, something we can’t do but we can partner. In the same way, Ros Bandt’s sound artist website is also complementary. We also welcome opportunities for input into Australia Council projects of the Music Board and the Audience & Market Development Division. There are many more relationships, all of which are vital for the Centre. It’s our job.

You mentioned IAMIC projects—how do they work in terms of exchange and resources?

One is a repertoire exchange, starting with Ireland who have expressed interest in some meaningful interaction. This is using what’s there, not seeking new funding or building new infrastructure. We’re looking at an Australian ensemble and an Irish ensemble sharing repertoire, ensembles with similar aesthetics, and looking towards co-commissions and exchange commissions and later towards touring opportunities. It’s about starting at a core point of what’s there and what crosses over.

Another interesting project evolving at the moment is a trans-Tasman composer residency exchange. There aren’t a lot of musical bridges across the Tasman or other creative bridges either for that matter. New Zealand’s Music Centre, Sounz, has some funds from Creative New Zealand for a composer to come to Australia to be hosted by a performing organisation here. The composer will come here for a couple of months and a commission and a performance will evolve with a similar arrangement for an Australian composer to go to New Zealand. We’re taking a lot of care over commonality and compatibility. This is another project that plugs into what’s already there. ‘We’ve got 2 sheep, you’ve got 2 sheep, how can we make a flock?’

For more information about the Australian Music Centre, visit www.amcoz.com.au and for a guided tour of the pilot site of MusicAustralia go to www.musicaustralia.org.

Dorothy Napangardi, Sandhills of Mina Mina 2002, synthetic polymer paint on linen 152 x 152 cms, Private collection, Sydney

There are a number of ways in which the paintings of Dorothy Napangardi, although superficially similar, directly contradict and subvert the modernist implication of the grid, and in so doing confront the viewer with cultural difference. Her works are narrative-based, mimetically tracing the movements and activities of the Women Ancestors as they dance their way through spinifex and over sandhills. They also repeat nature and the natural formations of the environment and as such deal very much with the ‘real’ as opposed to the ‘abstract.’ Whilst contemporary they nevertheless draw upon age-old tradition and cultural knowledge as well as a complex and articulated religion.

From the catalogue essay “Form and content” by Vivienne Webb, Dancing Up Country, The art of Dorothy Napangardi, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Image and text reproduced with permission.

Dorothy Napangardi is a Warlpiri woman from the area around Mina Mina, a significant site located near Lake Mackay in the Tanami Desert in the Northern Territory. She now lives and works in Alice Springs.

Dancing Up Country, The art of Dorothy Napangardi, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, presented in association with the 2003 Sydney Festival until March 9. The exhibition then tours courtesy of Asialink to the National Museum of Fine Arts, Hanoi, Vietnam, April-June, and to the National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, August-October.

Strange things are happening out west. As the federal government strengthens its preparedness to wage war against Iraq and escalates its national public information campaign alerting Australians to be ever vigilant against domestic terrorism, West Australia seems to be bearing the brunt of defence commitments with a corresponding shrinkage of cultural resources in the screen area. Perth-based SAS troops have had leave cancelled and US Navy jets will fly bombing sorties north of the state capital, dropping shells within kilometres of the fishing village and summer holiday destination of Lancellin.

The massive nuclear aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and its numerous escorts, which moored off Fremantle in the week before Christmas, has returned “indefinitely”, no doubt teeming with undisclosed Weapons of Mass Destruction. But with it comes over 6,000 personnel, millions of greenbacks for the local economy and political assurances of heightened national security as a result of the visits. It all seems a strategic pact of Faustian proportions.

And here’s the rub. While there has been discussion and dissension over the American alliance and the potential for aiding and abetting unilateral attacks, the ongoing mandatory detention of asylum seekers and the heightened powers of domestic and international intelligence agencies, little commentary has been directed at the cost to taxpayers and how these unanticipated federal spending initiatives are to be funded. The answer, it would seem, is the stealthy removal of cultural expenditure under the pretext of a federal arts economy drive.

Around the same time as the nuclear navy visits to Perth, Arts Minister Richard Alston ordered an inquiry into the top 15 cultural institutions—a decision reluctantly admitted to under Parliamentary questioning in the Senate. The rationale for Alston’s review is to find ‘greater efficiencies’ and to see if taxpayers are getting ‘value for their money.’ It’s a hoary old chestnut, and a political pretext of grand transparency. Within hours Greens Senator Bob Brown was decrying Alston’s ploy as a secret “arts tax” to pay for the anticipated war on Iraq and scandalous ongoing refugee incarcerations. Labor’s shadow arts spokesman Bob McMullan was more muted, though equally fearful that the exercise was one of “stripping funds from the cultural institutions and hoping no-one will notice.”

In many ways Alston’s rhetoric of additional public accountability rings false—what of government appointed board members, Senator, or mandatory government audits, or biennial external and/or internal reviews, agency annual reports to Parliament and annual Senate Appropriations hearings…? Given the cyclical and exhaustive accounting these institutions already must undertake, with the added assurance that in many instances the Minister may himself intervene and direct the agency, it appears as McMullan insinuated that “the review is really a cost-cutting exercise that will pay no heed to achieving cultural goals.”

After 8 years of the conservative Coalition’s governance, no-one should be surprised by Alston’s move, particularly at a time when the returned government is riding high in the opinion polls during its early to mid-term run. But unlike earlier cultural reviews such as the Mansfield enquiry into the ABC and the Gonski review of the film sector, with their ‘independent’ chairs, it would seem that the Minister himself will be in the driving seat with no sign of sustained criticism from the Opposition.

Nevertheless, Alston’s review, with its predetermined budget savings, is merely the logical extension of nearly a decade of Coalition reorientation, if not marginalisation, of cultural subvention. A case in point is the near erasure of the ‘National’ Cinematheque.

After a brief flourish, Perth is now entering its second year without a Cinematheque program. For cultural enthusiasts in ‘the world’s most isolated city’ this is an appalling state of affairs. One year (2001) there was a program, in the following there was not. The Fremantle based Film and Television Institute (FTI), which previously coordinated the local programming with the Melbourne Cinematheque, also exhibited the program at its funky, though somewhat decrepit cinema. Audiences fluctuated considerably from screening to screening, but without a marketing budget or dedicated PR staffer, promoting the Fremantle screenings was largely the responsibility of Brigitta Hupfel (now an FTI board member) who saw the still largely untapped tertiary student market as a major potential audience.

But how could these Perth screenings fail and the future programs be pulled with little more than a whimper of criticism? Like the Rashomon rape/homicide, it depends on your perspective. According to the AFC, funds were literally doubled in the year the Perth program was axed by the FTI. Former AFI chief Deb Verhoeven and Melbourne Cinematheque President/programmer Adrian Miles respond that, while technically correct, the increase came at the demise of ancillary funding for administrative and other exhibition infrastructure which the AFI could previously sustain within general overheads. For nearly a decade the AFI has been suffering death by a thousand cuts. It is symptomatic of government pressure that the AFC has devolved many screen culture responsibilities onto state agencies, particularly those emanating from Victoria. Yet Screenwest says that assisting the WA component of the Cinematheque complies with its advertised brief to support screen activities but they weren’t approached, since FTI felt that their principal sponsors, AFC and Screenwest, would consider this double dipping.

Regardless, the lacklustre show of bums on seats greatly figured in the FTI decision to drop the program. Like other state-based screen organisations, FTI has refocussed its output increasingly onto training, with fewer resources available for cultural activities. It’s a sign of the times—federal dollars for training, development and production, while screen ‘culture’ withers. Indeed, the counter argument, rarely heard today, is that government subsidy of the arts supports cultural outputs not considered commercially viable. This rationale underpins most political subvention. Hence Perth’s very isolation makes it an ideal candidate for special federal treatment, not mere parity with other states.

There is some light on the horizon, however. In 2001-02 Victoria’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) received AFC funds previously earmarked for the AFI’s national exhibition program. ACMI’s Lisa Pieroni is keen to develop a National Cinematheque program this year—including Perth—based on a model that offers components from the extensive and self-sustaining Melbourne program. Pieroni is confident that by April enough of the core Cinematheque material, complemented by short specialist programs of Alliance Français, Goethe Institut and Screensound, will attract interest in Tasmania, ACT and WA. Here’s hoping.

Overall, though, transposing the government’s own official agitprop, those committed to the screen culture sector should now be not just alert, but alarmed.

Documentary filmmakers are emerging as a distinct character type in popular culture. In society’s continual search for heroes, the documentarian has done badly. Last year in Joanna Murray-Smith’s play Rapture the documentarian was a female, a failure, incompetent, righteous and untalented. The popular English mockumentary series People Like Us featured Roy Mallard (Chris Langham)—the man who bumbled every story and interview he attempted to cover. In many ways the documentarian has taken over the tarnished image of the writer as a poverty-stricken, egocentric, patron-seeking whinger. Move aside Woody Allen, Robert Flaherty’s descendants have come to claim your role.

So what do the documentary makers have to say in their own defence? Do they deserve their tainted image? I spoke to guests of the Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC) which will be held this year at Byron Bay.

Sherine Salama

Sherine Salama, recent AFI winner, rejects the anti-heroic image: “I think of myself less as a ‘documentary filmmaker’ and more as the person who has made Australia Has No Winter and A Wedding in Ramallah. Rather than any thought of forging a ‘career,’ there was a lot of personal history, chance, idealism and practical expediency that led me to embark on each film. In each case there were stories that reflected themes in my own life such as cultural dislocation and inter-generational conflict, stories that couldn’t be contained by journalism—the career I had forged. In different circumstances I might have chosen to write a novel or a play, but having been exposed to powerful documentaries that struck a chord with me—[Dennis] O’Rourke’s Cannibal Tours, David and Albert Maysles, Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer’s Grey Gardens—documentary seemed an appropriate outlet for my creative urges.”

When I ask who the documentarian is, she says, “I don’t feel the need to construct a character—I think I am pretty transparent. The fact is, if I wasn’t myself, I wouldn’t meet the people who appear in my films, and gain their trust.”

But Salama is not naïve: “At times I also included [the interaction between the subject and myself in A Wedding in Ramallah] because not to do so would be dishonest. I don’t believe in the observational filmmaking that pretends the filmmaker doesn’t exist, that his or her presence isn’t felt. I was therefore quite happy to include Mariam’s comment to Sinora about me—’What a slut this woman is’—although I was advised to remove it.

Maybe the documentarian’s tainted image stems from including those awkward relationships with their characters in their films. You can’t discuss the image, especially [the documentarian’s] appearance in their own films, without mentioning O’Rourke who made The Good Woman of Bangkok and Cannibal Tours—an inspiration to Salama. In his book The Filmmaker and the Prostitute O’Rourke says, “…for it to work, the filming process must be an ordeal of contact with perceived reality—I must place myself within the flux of what I am attempting to film” and “the film includes a character—’the filmmaker’—who reflects me and others of my race and class, gender and profession, but who is not me….”

Unlike Salama, O’Rourke constructs a character or stereotype for himself. We may see him on screen, but we will not ‘know’ the man by the end of the film, though I imagine he hopes we’ll ‘know’ the other characters, his subjects. His intention is, in part, to rail against the image of the documentarian as cultural hero, a knight in shining camera armour. But to do so, he invents a fictional O’Rourke.

Wim Wenders

Does Wim Wenders agree with O’Rourke’s move against the heroic documentarian? Wenders makes both fiction films, for example Paris Texas and documentaries like The Buena Vista Social Club. I asked him what the documentarian would be like if he wrote such a character into a film.

Wenders speculated that, “I would write him or her into my script as some sort of detective, in the best sense of that profession: a searcher of truth, against all of his or her own interests, unconditional in his/her approach.”

I wonder if he’s being polite, as he is about to spend 3 days with documentarians at AIDC. And I’m not sure I agree—documentarians are endlessly searching for story and artifice in the real world, not Truth. They are also endlessly including their own selves and interests in the work, whether as blatantly as O’Rourke, or less overtly like Salama; they have too much at stake in the film—money, reputation etc. Because I believe that documentarians search for story I asked he what relationship he saw between fiction and documentary storytelling.

Wenders replied, “I’m not interested in ‘pure fiction.’ My films are all partly documentary, especially the fictional ones. In the course of a fictional film you always get into situations that you could never have dreamed of when you were sitting behind your typewriter working on the script. I love it when the truth of a situation just carries you far away from what you had first envisioned. And the truth can be so much stranger than fiction…On the other hand, making a documentary, you have to be aware of the fact that you might be witnessing a story, and that that story might sweep you away. Before you know it you’re in the middle of the river with the little boat that is your movie and all that’s left for you to do is not have it sink.”

There it is: he speaks of truth when talking about fiction and story when talking about documentary.

Donata Wenders

Wender’s partner, Donata, also a conference guest, works in the related field of still photography. Unfazed by the word ‘Truth’ which seems to haunt documentarians she says, “I see myself as someone who is trying to learn more and to be a more loving observer. I am not a journalist, and ‘lying’ is not an issue for me. I find cropping legitimate, for example, as I am not interested in ugly surroundings. Which does not mean that I would replace them with a Photoshopped image! That does not make sense for me. I could never produce with Photoshop what I am looking for: the hope of that person, the gentleness, the trust, the self-forgotten attitude…I am looking for a glimpse of the inner mood of a person, his or her attitude towards life, moments that have more to do with the expression of the heart of that person.”

No all-embracing truth, or constructed fiction, just fragments of an ever-changing world. Maybe it isn’t the interface with the real world that brings about documentarians’ struggle with Truth, maybe it’s the search for story.

Wim Wenders says, “editing a documentary is a much more complicated business than editing a feature film. To find the logic of images, and to provide them with a coherent form, all that’s much harder than on a feature.” And he views his camera differently from Donata: “The camera is a weapon against the tragedy of things, against their disappearing.”

A story

Now it’s time to tell a story, make you suffer the interference of my contact with perceived reality, because writing is also a weapon against the tragedy of things. As I write, pelicans wander around their little island as confused as me on the shore. It is 4:05pm and the sky is pink-black. There is no more day—the smoke from the fires in Canberra has put out the sun. Ash is everywhere, even in the sea. And the radio urges me to preserve my freedom by dobbing in my Middle-Eastern neighbours.

The documentarian or the writer could take these fragments and form a story (or find the truth). But it is the half-artist, half-journalist who reminds us of our suspect behaviour and breaks though the cloud of smoke we call society to see that purple has become pink in the red haze. There is some dignity in this role. It is unique. As German writer Albrecht Goes says, “People have forgotten. And things must indeed be forgotten, for how could anyone who cannot forget live? But from time to time there must be someone there who remembers.”

Australian International Documentary Conference, Byron Bay, Feb 16-20, to be followed by the Byron Bay Film Festival

Endgames

One of the curious dimensions of the Sydney Festival’s Beckett celebrations (an academic talkfest, live productions of Waiting for Godot and Endgame, Town Hall addresses from JM Coetzee, Herbert Blau and Luce Irigaray, and 19 commissioned films of Beckett plays) was the possibility of comparing live and filmed performances of Godot and Endgame. I saw both versions of the latter. Endgame is certainly my favourite Beckett, his too, and reckoned to be the greatest of the 20th century by Beckett director and scholar Blau. Both film and stage production had much to recommend, though the film outstripped the Sydney Theatre Company version, directed by Benedict Andrews, in getting the powerplay between the play’s principals, Hamm and Clov, knottily and rhythmically right.

Before pursuing these comparisons, a little about the dispute between Edward Beckett, executor of his uncle’s estate, and Neil Armfield, director of Belvoir Company B’s production of Waiting for Godot over the use of music (composer Alan John), particularly the addition of a song in Latin sung by the Boy. The story goes that Beckett left the theatre during the opening night curtain call and threatened to close the show for breach of contract. Armfield offered to drop the consonants in the song, the contract was closely scrutinised, no breach sighted, the show went on. Armfield, however, delivered a broadside at the Beckett symposium, defending theatre-making as a collaborative venture and querying the sacredness of classic texts.

With well-known classics of a 100 or more years of age, we’re not surprised if bits go missing, as long as they’re not what we regard as vital. With lesser known classics who would know what’s been cut? But if the plays were written only some 50 years ago, as in Beckett’s case, and copyright still holds and there’s an estate actively policing productions of the work, what’s to be done?

Towards the end of the Beckett film event, the producers of the series, Alan Moloney and Michael Colgan (Artistic Director, Dublin’s Gate Theatre Company) appeared on the State Theatre stage with session host, literary critic Don Anderson, pondering the significance of the stoush. Anderson clearly thought it a pity that the terms of the argument had become so reductive (“Waiting for Beckett jnr. ‘Bugger that for a joke’”, read a front page story header in the Sydney Morning Herald, Jan 10), while Colgan, an admirer of Armfield’s directing, thought the consequences potentially dire, with an ever more vigilant Edward Beckett taking a fresh look at the wording of all his contracts. In a letter to the SMH editor, Stephen Sewell defended the rights of playwrights.

Such is the power of the Beckett estate that the making of the films required the writing of a set of protocols so that each film director knew the limits of their interpretative freedom. Edward Beckett approved all the directors’ treatments: Colgan thought him more flexible than usual because of the change of medium. The producers had to choose their directors carefully in the first place: Neil Jordan missed out on Endgame because he wanted to insert a cutaway to the punt scene of Hamm’s recollections. He got, instead, Not I, where we see Julianne Moore briskly settle into a wooden armchair with a tight headrest winged against each ear before cutting to her quickfire monologue with some 4 cameras in extreme closeup on Moore’s mouth and, we were told, filmed in one take—a claim for theatrical integrity? Almost every film was done by the book, and exceptions to stage directions carefully monitored, though mostly allowed. Colgan had initially negotiated not with Edward Beckett, but with another figure in the estate whom he suspected thought these films were all to be recordings of stage productions. Colgan did not disabuse him. Asked if there was a time after which the plays will need to be radically reinterpreted and stage directions ignored or revised, Alan Moloney thought 50 years. After all he said, the World War II and post-war horrors that informed Beckett’s life and his plays are still, for many, within living memory—we are still living in Beckett’s time. Moloney is heard to muse over the end credits of the ‘making of…’ documentary screened on SBS, that Happy Days might one day be set in a hairdressing salon.

Play

Just as a musical score can be variously interpreted without ignoring notes or tempos the variety of the films reveal there was plenty of room for interpretative freedom, not that anyone got particularly adventurous, Anthony The English Patient Minghella aside perhaps. The producers certainly thought his film of Play the most effective experiment of the set. Instead of 3 of the living dead, their heads sticking out of urns, running over and over the trivialities of an affair that ruined their lives, Minghella places them in a ghastly, swirling fog purgatory, an infinite cemetery populated by many more of the rotting tormented. While the image remains unsettling it nonetheless assumes a horror film literalness that a sparely staged version would not.

The odd thing is that Minghella has framed his approach as calculatedly experimental—in the very manner of experimental film. For all the slickness of the image, the film itself breaks, flares, scratches. Camera pans lurch, often with a speed complementing the astonishing drive of the vocal delivery Beckett required. So watching is as demanding as listening. Exciting at the time but on second viewing all too over-determined.

Krapp’s Last Tape

Producer Colgan was of the opinion that naturalising some of Beckett’s abstract stage imagery was inevitable for film. What, he asked, would be the point of filming Krapp at his desk, with his tape-recorder, as if in an otherwise empty space—“film demands furniture.” It’s debatable. In the much shorter Ohio Impromptu, Jeremy Irons plays a man at a table reading to a duplicate self in an empty space which only transforms into colour and detail at the very end after one of the pair has evaporated. In Atom Egoyan’s rendition of Krapp’s Last Tape, brilliantly performed by John Hurt, Krapp is given a complete office-cum-workshop space, tightly framed and mostly shot from the front, but infinitely detailed. It works but only because the naturalism of setting and characterisation is so tightly framed—Hurt works from a set of recurrent expressions and gestures as the framing of the office space steadily narrows. The blue light from outside and the rain running down the window that give the room a richly hued gloom (pure Egoyan) are closed off by a lowered blind and Krapp successively turns off all but one of the lights in his room. Even more focussing is Egoyan’s restraint in editing. The first section of the play up until Krapp pushes the tapes off his desk is done in one glorious mobile shot. Edits thereafter are more frequent, but there are not many.

For performance and filmmaking acuity this was the best of the films. The balance between performed writing-for-the-stage and acting-for-film seemed just right against the theatricality of some of the other films. As did the steady intensification of Krapp’s regret as he listens to a former self get it all so wrong, even though we are denied most of the cosy clues of identification and sympathy that most theatre and film are still in love with. As Hurt, interviewed in the documentary, makes clear, it’s about empathy—you grow to understand and feel for Krapp, but you don’t have to like him. Hurt is of course a film and stage actor, Egoyan is a fine director of film actors, and Hurt was also directed by the late film director Karel Reisz in the production of Krapp’s Last Tape for the Gate Theatre prior to the making of the film.

Waiting for Godot

If you like your Godot warm, funny, finely nuanced and delivered with the lilting poetry of the Irish brogue, then this film is for you. Undisguisedly shot in a big sound studio (a former turkey factory apparently) and with a theatrical look, the lighting and set nonetheless convey the oppressive gloom of a dim twilight and an eerie night in what looks like an abandoned slate quarry. I enjoyed every moment of this film, reliving some of the anxieties and bewilderment I experienced when witnessing productions in the 1960s. I felt for the first time Vladimir’s desperation in Act II, telling the Boy to remember seeing himself and Estragon. I’d recalled the expression as resigned or confused, but here it hurt. For the most part though I did feel I was in a familiar place. The sheer strangeness, fright even, of my first sighting of the play had gone and director Michael Lindsay Hogg had not invented it anew. It seemed like it must have been a very short walk from the theatre to the soundstage for the actors.

Happy Days

Patricia I Heard the Mermaids Singing Rozema, on the other hand, went for a theatrical take on an actual desert location in her film of Happy Days. Winnie is buried up to her waist and then her neck in a very real Tenerife desert. It’s an awesome wasteland, sunny and beach-like at first glance, but, then the camera takes in the whole massive bowl of the landscape, a grim and forbidding place with no sign of life other than Winnie and the barely-there Willie from whom she craves response. Rosaleen Linehan as Winnie is an Irish performer who creates an obtuse, lyrical chatterer and conveys nonetheless a certain sensuality and a will to live. It’s a great performance on the big screen in a film with only a few, bracing shifts of shooting angle. Happy Days is a very effective if sometimes curious hybrid of the cinematic and the theatrical.

Some of the films feel artificial or stagey despite some hard work at transposition, others offer a refreshing surprise because they include some Beckett experienced for the first time, especially Rough for Theatre I and II. Both are shot in a luminescent black and white with fine actors. Rough for Theatre 1 (director Katie Mitchell), about 2 insurance assessors (Timothy Spall is superb as one) absurdly going over the moral scoresheet of a man poised on a window ledge as if about to suicide, has the kind of detail and gross humour you expect of some of Beckett’s peers from Theatre of the Absurd and even the likes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Endgame: on film

Playwright Conor The Weir McPherson’s film of Endgame is marvellously acted by Michael Gambon as Hamm and David Thewlis as Clov, a finely balanced pair of opposites, equally powerful, trapped in a relationship of pragmatic and psychological dependency. Unlike Waiting for Godot, where you could imagine an Act 3 and an Act 4 in which things would be much the same, if a little worse each time, Endgame has the sense if not the evidence of irreversible change. By the end, Hamm’s parents Nag and Nell are dead in their rubbish bins, Clov’s desire to leave has been activated by spying life outside the house in the otherwise dead landscape (with its post-apocalypse suggestiveness), and even if he can’t leave (we never see him go) things cannot be the same. The film realises a dynamic between the 2 men on a performative borderline between naturalism and the grotesque, and with a driven sense of inevitability, even if irresolvable: a grim tension indeed. My complaint about the film is that, unlike Egoyan and Rozema, McPherson or his editor has an itchy finger compounded by his cinematographer offering us every conceivable angle on the room. The constant reverse field shooting of the taut dialogues between Hamm and Clov loses some of the play’s immediacy, while the editing and shooting otherwise sit too much on the side of conventional cinema for such a strange play. But nothing could spoil the performances.

Endgame: on stage

Benedict Andrew’s Endgame is surprisingly respectful. Things don’t seem that way as we are ushered into a tiny theatre within Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf 2, a black room with the textured walls of a tired bedsit, white sheets strung across the front of the tiny performing area and our individual seats seemingly selected from the less salubrious of secondhand shops. As a claustrophobic blackout gives way to dull light, the sheets/curtains are lowered to reveal Hamm, also sheeted, in his armchair. Clov enters, the wiry Matthew Whittet, physically a fine, nervy Clov, his gaunt face a blustery red, his wild hair requiring an occasional obsessive preening, his limp a rude impediment. He has also enough of the clown in him to sit comfortably in the Beckett universe—he’s playful (making a ghost of himself as he takes the sheet off Hamm), objects defeat him (the curtains on the 2 windows on the world) and he’s slow to learn (forever scraping his telescope across the wall as he aims at the window). Relative to Thewlis’ impatient, businesslike, eager-to-leave Clov in the film, Whittet’s Clov is slow, and so are the rhythms of Andrews’ production. That shouldn’t necessarily be a problem but becomes so when, almost as soon as they dialogue you sense that Hamm and Clov are out of sync, that the give and take and the gags are not going to happen, and that the vocal weight lies resolutely with Jacek Koman’s richly intoned Hamm. There’s a gasp from the audience when Hamm is first revealed: it’s the usual look, like a run-down Edwardian gent in his smoking room wearing his “stiff toque”, but we can see the blood running down his cheeks from his damaged eyes and there’s something that suggests, as someone nearby mutters, ‘Mullah.’ Koman almost sings his lines (Clov parodies his stretched vowels) and makes poetry of the speeches about blindness and about the artist-engraver who sees only ashes, not the loveliness of the world (a moment curiously almost lost by Gambon in the film). Whittet cannot match Koman nor ably pair him in their exchanges. As Herbert Blau insisted at the Sydney Town Hall event, Clov needs to be as strong in his own way as Hamm.

If Koman and Whittet are an oddly cast couple they are still conceivably from the same ailing planet. However, Peter Carroll and Lynne Murphy, as good as they are as Nag and Nell in their rubbish bins (if rather tame compared with their film counterparts), would seem to come from a different production, directed, I imagine, by Neil Armfield with Max Cullen as Hamm and Geoffrey Rush (if available) as Clov. If Andrew’s Endgame didn’t hold together, nor yield the bold directing we’ve come to expect of him, there was still much to savour: the appalling sense of a space at the end of time, the un-maudlin power of the poetry of the Absurd, and the clowning, conscious and not, that insinuates itself into the midst of incipient despair.

The relationship between stage plays and their film adaptations has long been an unhappy one. However, the set of filmed Beckett plays screened at the Sydney Festival and broadcast on SBS are more than substitutes for works we rarely get to see on stage. With varying degrees of success they are primarily filmic experiences, often showing how flexible Beckett’s writing can be and testing the inventiveness of filmmakers. It’s interesting to note that many of the directors are writers themselves, of stage plays or screenplays. The films also more often than not reveal how much room there is for interpretation without getting too far away from the wishes of the late, great man. But will it be 50 years before truly revelatory interpretations of Beckett bestride the stage, or the laptop or the playstation?

Beckett on Film, Sydney Festival, State Theatre, Jan 10-12; Samuel Beckett, Endgame, director Benedict Andrews, design Ralph Myers, lighting Nick Schlieper, costumes Fiona Crombie; Sydney Theatre Company, Sydney Festival, Wharf 2, opened Jan 2

In October and November 2002, the word got around. Film producer Peter Sainsbury had made an incisive and provocative statement about what constitutes visionary filmmaking and what constraints are continually thwarting it in Australia. His paper was delivered to the 2002 Australian Screen Directors Association (ASDA) Conference and a number of people suggested that it deserved a wider audience. Here it is then, a rarity in this country, a sustained argument on behalf of visionary filmmaking. In Part 1 Sainsbury establishes his criteria for vision, using recent overseas films as examples. In Part 2, in RealTime 54, he looks at recent Australian feature films and the hindrances to vision that filmmakers face. The Editors.

Part 1: Beyond pragmatism— visionary cinema

To start with, we are not going to accept the complacent idea that a director’s vision is necessarily important, just because a director is a director. Some visions are more important than others. Vision and persistence are not enough if and when they fall short of the visionary. I am going to defend the visionary as a necessary, if pretentious ideal, and consider the visionary aspects of contemporary Australian cinema, their place in the market and the financing structures that do or do not encourage them.

So first, we should define what we mean by visionary. I shall try to do this by reference to 3 imported films screened in Sydney [in 2002]. It is not my intention to give full accounts of any of these films, but rather take from each, by way of illustration, something that is important to a definition of the visionary.

The invisible machinations of desire

In The Piano Teacher directed by Michael Haneke, we discover something we are not familiar with in Australian cinema. We find a contradictory heroine, a person who is inconsistent, a woman whose psychology takes her to the heights of sophisticated artistic achievement and to the depths of vindictiveness and self-abasement, one who dominates others expertly yet who becomes a hapless victim. She is near middle-aged, sleeps beside her mother, fakes menstruation by drawing blood with a razor blade and experiences sex, up to the point where she makes the dreadful mistake of revealing her secret compulsions, only by vicarious means. She is both sympathetic and not; a woman who finds no redemption but loses everything. She is a tragic figure, undone and destroyed by the vulnerability that leaves her open to male sexual revenge. To witness her journey is to learn of the frightening destructiveness of desire.

And desire is the important term here, because desire springs from that which we do not know about ourselves. This makes the realm of desire a privileged terrain when it comes to visionary creative work. In other words, the visionary filmmaker is obsessed with that which lies beyond or somewhere other than in the familiar appearance of things. Psychological realism, with its insistence on emotional behavior stemming from clear causes with logical effects and devoid of paradox, is simply inadequate to portray the chaotic, contradictory and essentially secret, even invisible machinations of desire and therefore of much human behavior. The way the heroine of Haneke’s film acts is both literal and symbolic. She is rooted in a terrible personal dilemma while her story suggests the entire, fateful fear and vengeance that perverse desire can arouse. She is a tragic figure in a world where the tragedy of blind narcissism has replaced the tragedy of blind fate.

Visionary cinema seems to open up what was not previously contemplated. Perhaps this greater dimension of meaning is one that Jane Campion sacrificed when she gave a happy ending to her piano player in the form of a tin finger, a tamed Harvey Keitel and a white picket fence.

The dark playfulness that illuminates confusion

My second example is David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and I have included it because it throws into sharp relief the role of playfulness in visionary filmmaking. Lynch is perhaps the most obviously visionary of contemporary filmmakers in the accepted sense of the term. His work sits in an essentially bizarre terrain, where conventional social behavior and logical cause and effect are displaced, and even satirised, to facilitate an investigation of human identity. Just as the monstrously perverse and violent antagonist represents the dark side of the hero’s psyche in Blue Velvet, and the hero transforms into a fantasy version of himself and back again in Lost Highway, so in Mulholland Drive one character both possesses and is possessed by another. In this later film, however, Lynch places his characters in the dream factory itself, and is able to play with filmic conventions across the narrative, the visual and the aural. He is able to satirise the world of film financing, to play with notions of performance and to construct elaborate jokes around the suspension of disbelief. Nor is he afraid of pastiche, or of moving from high seriousness to pure kitsch, or of spinning yarns that turn out to be red herrings or of flipping us through transformations of meaning by means of an elusive symbol. He can be provocatively bewildering as well as delightfully funny.

In fact, these continually surprising strategies are all essential components of the Lynch vision. He works with a complex rearrangement of aural and visual signs and meanings. Watching his films, we witness a concerted deployment of much that is magical in cinema. Like Lewis Carroll, his subject is imagination itself. His work is visionary because it demands that we reconsider, or see in a transforming new light, something about ourselves and the world we inhabit that we would otherwise take for granted. This something, this measure of everyday certainty, Lynch reveals to be fragile, transitory and paradoxical. His logic undermines common sense, certainty and the predictable. Such are the dynamics of desire and identity. He is externalising the hidden and cannot do so using linear narrative, realism or by character or plot driven genre filmmaking where the singularity and unambiguousness of identity are required conditions. Those who resist Lynch’s vision usually dismiss him as a pretentious show off, confusing us for the mere sake of it. Those who love his work find in it the dark playfulness that illuminates confusion.

Enlightening the political universe

The third film also opens up the perceptions of its audience but in a radically different way. I have not met anyone else who saw this film during its brief Sydney season, but for me it was visionary because it enlightened the political universe we inhabit in a direct and magically honest way. This was Raoul Peck’s Lumumba, the story of an obscure man who became the first head of state of the newly decolonised Belgian Congo in the 1960’s, and how he was subsequently deceived and betrayed, destroyed and murdered. This story is of mythic proportions, with mythic dimensions. The poles of national idealism and international cynicism it portrays go a long way to defining the ‘realpolitik’ of the modern age. The tensions between the private man and the public figure, between hope and despair, between ally and enemy, between third world and developed world are all lucidly illustrated by means of an understated but confident visual style and a dynamic narrative construction. This film enlightened a whole moral universe within about 100 minutes of persistent vision.

The centrality of desire

It would be a mistake, though, to define this film within the parameters of the political drama without recognising what it has in common with both The Piano Teacher and Mulholland Drive. This common theme is desire. Desire gives rise to the world of fantasy and in Lumumba what is at stake is not only the desire to be politically free but also the fantasy of the self-determining, self-knowing, and self-redeeming body politic. The mythic story in play here is of the aspirant idealist individual and the aspirant idealist nation as victims of the warring gods, in this case the gods of avarice and hegemony represented by the US and the Soviet Union, locked into a murderous rivalry for the hearts, minds and resources of the world. And as we know from all the classical examples, the victims of the gods are the victims of their own naivety, their own flaws and their own destiny. Above all, they are the victims of their own desire; their own craving for that which is and always will be elusive.

Commonality in difference

In certain ways these 3 films could not be more different. One is a relentless character study, one a fascinating conjuring trick and one a political parable. I want to make it clear that the visionary is not an exclusive category but an inclusive one. But I believe these films help define visionary film making by several qualities they have in common.

First is the strangely unearthly experience they offer their audience. They all appear to come together like some kind of immaculate conception on the screen. It is as if they were never scripted, and as if they could have taken only the form they did take and could exist only in the medium of cinema. In other words, they are entirely different from the novel, the stage play and from television in terms of the dialectic and the dynamic that they set up between screen and audience. They use the camera and the editing machine as well as the soundtrack to define narrative space and direction, movement, pace and variation. They have liberated themselves from the limitations of following actors around a set to catch a meaning largely and predominantly determined by dialogue.

Secondly, despite their entirely different narrative trajectories and subject matters, they appear fully realised. They are painstakingly constructed to seduce an audience into a set of curiosities, concerns and expectations and to play that audiences’ sensibilities along in all sorts of risky ways until the dramatic imperatives established in the beginning are paid off in the final images. Despite their tendency to enlarge the cinematic vocabulary and broaden its syntax, they are adept at generating catharsis. They have a powerful sense of narrative integrity and wherever they lie between the modern and the postmodern, they do not fail to deliver time honoured dramatic satisfactions.

Thirdly, like all good seducers, they do not attempt to explain themselves, being largely devoid of narrative exposition and of any attempt to explain character motivation outside what the character does. They take the risk of demanding that you come to them rather than choose a safer path by trying to make themselves clear in immediately accessible terms. And as in all good seductions, once you have had the experience on offer, you are likely to want it again. Each of these films leaves you with a sense of discovery, so that when the lights go up you might well wish for a repeat viewing, both to look more closely at how this sense of discovery was created and to enjoy it more. I saw each of these films twice in the cinema.

Fourthly, although set in specific times and places, and shot through with recognisable given circumstances, they use a highly sophisticated audio-visual language to take us into worlds and states of consciousness that were previously unfamiliar, and they burn themselves into your mind like the most vivid and enduring dream. They avail themselves of metaphor, symbol, allegory and myth as well as having a command of more literal narrative storytelling strategies. But most importantly, they invent, each for themselves, the necessary dialectic between narrative content and visual form. Herein lies their chief success and a critical attribute of visionary filmmaking. Rather than relying on any pervasive orthodoxy of craft in their conception, design or execution, visionary movies always have the capacity to surprise us, and it is in this that they fight their way onto our screens. Without their capacity to reinvent the world before our eyes, they would surely be buried by the competition of the less demanding, the more familiar and the more easily marketed.

Finally, I believe, nothing like any of these 3 films could have been made within the aesthetic world of Australian cinema. But I am not going to argue simply that Australian cinema is dull in contrast to gems of enlightenment from other countries. Far from it, for across world cinema these days there seem to be legions of dull movies and rather few visionary ones. Is this how it will always be in a world that demands much and gives little? Maybe so, but the whole idea of the visionary is idealistic. Perhaps, like the protagonist of a basic plot, we need to define our subject by giving it an antagonist. If the visionary is our protagonist in this thesis, how shall we begin to define our antagonist?

The uncertainty principle

Visionary movies exploit a central truth of the modern world; a difficult truth because it leads not only to a kind of moral relativism but also to a kind of personal relativism that can be deeply uncomfortable. But I believe it is unavoidable and of course in many circles it is nothing new. In many cultural dimensions, though not in many of the world’s film industries, it is itself almost taken for granted. Simply put, it says that there is no universal formula or matrix guaranteeing harmonious relationships on any level of human society. It says that this is true of sexual, political, economic and cultural relations. And it also says that, rather than coming only from the unique visions of the Michael Hanekes, David Lynchs and Raoul Pecks of the world, visionary movies defined as I am trying to define them also spring from this truth. It is more than a truth. It is a human condition. They take their inspiration from a conception of a surrounding reality that is by definition problematic, uncertain, and waiting to be reinvented from moment to moment.

It is from this demand that reality be re-defined from moment to moment that visionary movies legitimise their constant reinvention of the dialectic between narrative content and visual form. And the richly composite language of cinema is fabulously well-equipped to do exactly that. Visionary movies use the uniquely multi-faceted qualities of cinema to construct realities in which this difficult truth, and its complex implications, can be explored. Their use of mise en scene, and of narrative, is designed to open up what can be imagined only from a perspective governed by the uncertainty principle. They portray the essentially uncertain nature of human reality as both contradiction and dilemma, and exploit it in form and content and in terms that can be tragic as well as comic, entertaining and enlightening. But they are essentially revelatory.

If we are looking for an antagonist for our plot in which the visionary is protagonist, we could do worse than simply deploy its opposite. A cinema antagonistic to this truth about uncertain, unstable and invented realities is a cinema that trades on the belief that there are still guarantees about a universal human nature, that we can make rational and correct choices about our personal and social relationships and that we either know or can learn who we are. This cinema embodies belief in a knowable human nature and a stable social reality. It tries to dramatise lived experience as if that experience can depend upon a reliable relationship between cause and effect and it endorses a common sense perception of the world. Its paradigm is the story in which men and women make correct choices and decisions about each other, albeit deliciously romantic ones, leading to the promise of ongoing harmonious sexual and emotional relations. It believes in romantic love as a kind of magic wand. It has no truck whatsoever with the unpredictable and messy perversities of desire. My antagonist is, in a word, pragmatic.

The cinema of pragmatism

Let’s play for a moment with an opposition, even a conflict between the pragmatic and the visionary. In case we are in danger of getting bogged down in the abstract, we should take a survey of what pragmatic movies look like. And again we can avail ourselves of 3 imported movies, all recently seen in Sydney.

As it happens, all are built on stories set in contemporary England. They are About a Boy, Last Orders and Bend it Like Beckham. What do these films, directed by people with very different cultural backgrounds, have in common and why do they exemplify the pragmatic? About a Boy is a neatly constructed tale about a self-serving cad (a uniquely British type is the cad, nowadays playable only by Hugh Grant) who is converted to gregariousness and generosity by the emotional demands of a young boy. The film simply asks us, who could possibly remain selfish in defiance of the appeals of a child? And it answers, no one could. Needless to say, a happy ending was had by all. A comforting perspective on human nature is simply endorsed.

Fred Schepsi’s Last Orders is a more complex affair as its narrative moves between present time and various moments in the past, elucidating the relationships between a group of aging friends, one of whom has recently died. The drama is buried in an endless flow of expositional back story but that would not matter if the exposition aspired to unearth something that is generally invisible in such stories, some sub-text in these relationships that might disclose a surprising truth about them. What it does, in fact, is simply confirm clichéd values of friendship and loyalty while acknowledging the emotional strains of life’s travails. It is of course affectionate, sincere and very professionally executed, but very dull.

Bend it Like Beckham is a familiar if effective comedy that trades on the unlikely. In this case the genre is constructed around an Indian English girl who wants to succeed as a soccer player, and is calculated to milk the juice out of the sentimental and amusing contretemps that her determination, the family pressures, cultural differences and a touch of sexual rivalry provide. Again, we are invited to feel good about life, as all the difficulties every one has, be they friends, rivals, parents or lovers, are rather laboriously and predictably resolved.

The deep pragmatism of these plots, it seems to me, rests on their exploitation of tritely conceived emotional journeys, all of which are more or less predictable. They are trite because they have the narrowest possible implications, depending only on the vindication of the individual character. In other words, they lie smugly within a simplistic conception of human identity. Effectively, they define and commodify the emotional content of the human psyche, closing down both its potential and its problems. To this end, their pragmatism is further served by a careful observance of emotional boundaries that ensure against the disturbing, the paradoxical and anything that is not immediately understandable. They work for gratification rather than reflection and they work within the literal and the familiar rather than the symbolic and the surprising.

What is true of these films as narratives is also true of them as sign systems. All are extremely conservative in their use of what the persistence of vision offers by way of potential to redefine, re-envisage, or re-invent what constitutes the real world. In fact, they ensure the triumph of the taken-for-granted. The experience of watching a pragmatic film is to feel that the tools of cinema have been commandeered and enslaved by something that has come before they were applied, by something that demands a rigorous obedience and forbids all but the most minor show of independence. This something is, of course, the script. Pragmatic movies have been all but fully designed in advance of filming by their writers. Pragmatic filmmaking devotes itself to constructing the illusion that what has been written can also be seen. It has no further justification or purpose.

What struck me forcibly when watching these 3 films about England was the similarity to the experience of watching television. There was that same conformism, that same reliance on formulae and the predictable, that same safe and essentially depressing emotional range and mono-vocal control over the means of representation that is endemic to a medium primarily designed to bring audiences to advertisers. To a great extent, it seems, the ability of the cinema to survive and even prosper over what was once seen as the terminal danger of competition from television has entailed the colonisation of cinema by many of television’s imperatives.

Profitability and the visionary

I am talking my way into a problem here. The films I am sticking up for may be described as marginal. After all, though Lynch’s film earned itself a place in mainstream distribution channels in Australia and elsewhere, in Sydney The Piano Teacher and Lumumba were screened only at the Valhalla and/or the Chauvel arthouse cinemas. At the same time, the films I am disparaging must be deemed successful if success means reaching wider audiences and earning more money. So am I arguing that Australian cinema needs to be more esoteric, if visionary, and less pragmatic, if less popular?

I would first point out that an Australian film that had the critical success and prize-winning career of The Piano Teacher would be extremely rare. And an Australian film that ran in Paris cinemas as long as Haneke’s film has in Sydney (despite its inept disparagement by SBS’ The Movie Show) would be considered a minor triumph. Also, what is marginal in one country may not be in another. And further, it is hardly elitist to hope that what one sees in the cinema, leaving aside those products of the American cultural empire that dominate the box office around the world, should not be like staying home and watching TV.

I don’t believe it can be considered wrong, except in the most orthodox and conservative film industries, to allow that some filmmakers can and should be concerned with the use value of the cultural objects they produce before they are concerned with their exchange value. For if the ideal movie is one which is both visionary and popular, which is brilliantly enough conceived and executed to accrue a substantial exchange value as well as possessing appreciable use value (and maybe Mulholland Drive came close) it is very unlikely that such a film will be made within a cultural context and an industry structure that radically discourages visionary qualities.

I am not arguing some simple opposition between the high brow and the low brow, or some antiquated assertion of elitist over popular culture. Rather, that a film industry that does not have space or even much respect for the visionary will not produce internationally recognised movies of any lasting value. Further, I’d suggest a film industry that institutionalises pragmatism (as I will argue we have done) will not enjoy the rewards, one dimensional as they are, that a pragmatic approach can bring except very occasionally and almost by accident.

And it is not the case that the directors of these 3 British films lacked vision. On the contrary, a coherent sense of purpose is strongly evident in all, though the measured skills of Last Orders are a long way from the naïve constructs of Bend it Like Beckham. My reservations have to do with the need to insist on a distinction between vision and the visionary. I believe that a more or less pragmatic vision can apply only to what is there, needing to be said and done more or less in the same ways as they have been said and done before. The visionary, however, is what is required to make discoveries. A film culture which is radically skewed in favour of that which needs to be done over that which might be discovered (as I shall argue ours is) is one deprived of a mature sensibility. It is one in which the languages of cinema are only minimally understood and deployed. It is one in which only a limited class of things can be said. It is one in which neither pragmatically successful entertainment nor visionary revelation will occur. Only the unremarkable will survive and the industry will not flourish. This last point may sound paradoxical. If pragmatically made films can succeed financially, why wouldn’t a pragmatic industry also succeed, at least financially, and at least a fair amount of the time? In the second half of this paper, I will try to find an answer to this question.

Peter Sainsbury, “Visions, Illusions and Delusions,” ASDA Conference, The Persistence of Vision, Sept 2002. Reproduced with the kind permission of the writer and ASDA.

In RealTime #54, Peter Sainsbury discusses the Australian films The Tracker, Lantana and Dirty Deeds and the relationship between film funding strategies and creative outcomes.

Sydney Festival director Brett Sheehy’s decision to hit summertime Sydney with Samuel Beckett was just what the doctor ordered. Something spare to drown out the ‘drunk boats’ on Sydney Harbour; more complex than Nell Schofield’s Summer Edition on Radio National to sharpen the mind. Shades of grey to shut out the blaze of hellish light. Australians no longer recognising themselves (an increasingly prevalent phenomenon) dream for a while they live somewhere else—in “old Europe” where they still see sense, to speak in the old style. January in Sydney was positively Beckettian.

I arrived at the preview screening of Aki Kaurismäki’s The Man Without A Past at 1 minute past the hour and had to stumble in the dark to a seat in the last row. A barely subliminal noise scratched in my ears. The projectionist had to be Krapp.

The movie ran with the mood. After a savage beating by a street gang M (Markku Peltola) loses his memory and comes within a hair’s breadth of being given up for dead. I’ve heard this is usually a life-altering experience and it certainly is for M who escapes from the hospital to construct another version of himself altogether, from scratch. He wanders through familiar Kaurismäki territory—the bleak landscape of the outcast, railway yards and container homes on the cold outer reaches of Helsinki. In fact I realise this is now the only version of Helsinki in my imaginary. Fresh faced Finns in furs lazing on Alvar Aalto furniture were long ago supplanted by the charming dropouts and weirdos of Kaurismäki’s world. In this one, however, we encounter not so much the curious other as the all too familiar unemployed poor, the salt of the earth and the Salvation Army workers who minister to and are part of their community. And there’s Kaurismäki’s usual gifted band of musicians which in this case includes Annikki Tähti, one of the grand dames of Finnish popular music.

The narrative is more conventional than some of his other work, the dialogue delivered mostly deadpan in very measured style, by actors from his regular ensemble and lovingly filmed by Kaurismäki’s longtime collaborator, cinematographer Timo Salminen. The film doesn’t have quite the engulfing strangeness of Leningrad Cowboys or my all-time favourite, the black and white Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatjana but it has its moments—M and Irma sit silently, on a sofa with Hannibal the dog inside M’s shipping container home ,’just being,’ listening to rock ‘n roll on a jukebox salvaged from a dump. The film is full of such poignant moments as M encounters true love and friendship as well as the cold face of bureaucracy. All of these factors may account for the film’s “feelgood success” (as opposed to Kaurismäki’s usual “cult status”) touted in the publicity and the fact that it scooped the pool at Cannes last year. The Man Without a Past won the Grand Prix, Best Actress for Kati Outinen who plays Irma, The Ecumenical Award and Film of the Year awarded by the International Film Critics Circle.

Kaurismäki says: “My last film was black and white and silent, which clearly shows that I am a man of business. However, going forward on that road would demand skipping out the picture next. What would we have then; a shadow. So always ready for compromises, I decided to turn around and made this film here, which has loads of dialogue plus a variety of colours—not to mention other commercial values. I have to admit that deep in my subconscious, there might have been a hope that this step would make me seem normal, too. My social, economical and political views of the state of society, morality and love can hopefully be found from the film itself.” (Press notes.)

After the screening, making my dash to the Beckett Public Address to catch Herbert Blau on “The Vicissitudes of the Arts in the Science of Affliction” and Luce Irigaray on live video link from Paris I run through every kind of weather as “earth, wind, rain and fire lay siege to Sydney in 5 hours of meteorological madness” (SMH) and enter the Town Hall to the dry tones of JM Coetzee who stands below a photograph of Samuel Beckett who stands beside a couple of garbage bins. But then Blau delivers a deliriously dense oration interpolated with shards of Beckett; Irigaray weaves a blissful incantation on how to meet “ze uzzer” (including in oneself). Things are livening up!

When South Australian Labor Premier and Arts Minister Mike Rann took office in March 2002, central to his arts platform was the establishment of the Adelaide International Film Festival (AIFF). Soon after, former Adelaide Fringe Artistic Director Katrina Sedgwick was appointed as Director with only 8 months to program the March 2003 Festival.

The 2002 Adelaide Fringe, directed by Sedgwick, broke new ground in that film, digital media, interdisciplinary practice and sound featured prominently alongside traditional Fringe fare. After the success of the Fringe, Sedgwick approached the AIFF with a similar vision of expanded programming, including a mixture of media and practices. Taking a cue from the Fringe’s first screen program Shooting from the Hip, Sedgwick has broadly interpreted screen culture for the AIFF, including film, new media, computer gaming, music video and installation.

If the AIFF is received with the enthusiasm and passion Sedgwick brings to it, it’s bound to be successful. Launching the highlights in November 2002, she said, “If cinema was the art form of the 20th century what will the 21st century bring? Screen culture will continue to dominate our lives and culture but in what forms? The AIFF will be a celebration of the imagination, diversity and innovation of the screen and the artists and ideas behind this creative phenomena.”

With her emphasis on screen culture, Sedgwick has included diverse and innovative works which cross the many uses and interpretations of ‘screen.’ With events such as Mirrorball (the world’s hottest new music videos from the Edinburgh Film Festival) alongside a celebration of Hong Kong Cinema, video installation Ice Cube by Craig Walsh (Qld) and interactive gaming demonstrations, the program is a snapshot of Australian and international trends in screen innovation.

As an ‘international’ film festival, the program also aims to include broad cultural and geographic representation, with local, national and international guests descending on Adelaide’s East End for the week. The film component is strong, and coinciding with the SA Film Corporations’ 30th anniversary, several local productions are included. Rather than a nostalgic foray into past great SAFC films, Sedgwick has programmed recent shorts that reveal the SAFC as a leading body in digital media production. SA-based Rolf de Heer will present his unreleased feature The Old Man Who Read Love Stories (made before The Tracker) and 2 films by local directors Shane McNeill and Matthew Saville are also included.

Sedgwick details the challenges of staging a film festival in March: “Many producers aim to launch their films at Cannes in May, and it is difficult to obtain prints…” Despite this, she is delighted to have secured 45 Australian premieres of international features. Guests to the AIFF will include Iranian-Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi with his film Marooned in Iraq; Dominic Savage from the UK with Out of Control; American director Lourdes Portillo presenting Senorita Extraviada and Taiwanese Yee Chih-Yen, director of Blue Gate Crossing. These filmmakers and other AIFF guests will make public appearances in ‘Meet the Filmmaker’ sessions and other forums during the week.

A key component of the programming strategy is to make films and filmmakers accessible and visible to a wide audience. To encourage active engagement, there are free programs including forums, workshops and the outdoor Deckchair Cinema. The Animations for Kids program features short animated films from around the world for children of 8-12 years, curated by the Melbourne Animation Posse. As well, there will be hands-on computer animation workshops presented by Ngapartji Multimedia Centre and Come Out ‘03. A hip-hop program features New York documentary filmmaker Kevin Fitzgerald presenting New York Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme and Joey Garfield with Breath Control: The History of the Human Beatbox. A special event beatboxing night with Garfield will be held at the Late Night Festival Club in Rundle Street.

Sedgwick is keen to run interactive and gaming sessions alongside the features, shorts and documentaries. Central to this is the involvement of Los Angeles based C-level, a co-operative lab formed to share physical, social and technological resources. Artist Eddo Stern from C-level will be in Adelaide with the highly interactive Cockfight Arena, “in which volunteers from the audience will slip into feathered wings and helmets and then flap about in an arena with other dangerous faux fowl; wireless game controllers will translate, and exaggerate, their activities into images on large screens. The goal? To prompt “contemplation of violence, media and performance in the midst of ferocious, feathery mayhem” (Holly Willis, LA Weekly).

An all day forum on interactivity will be held on Friday March 7, plus screenings of digital and new media work curated by ACMI’s (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) Alessio Cavallaro. Special guest Mike Stubbs from the UK is presenting a compilation of international short video works spanning 25 years, to describe how video art emerged, formed its own culture and has subsequently transformed into the digital.

And to throw some schlock into the mix, the Sex, Death and Greed strand celebrates the ageing studio systems of the 1960s when filmmakers such as Seijun Suzuki, Dario Argento and Sergio Leone worked on the margins of the commercial film industry and threadbare genres, taking the studio system into a baroque and flamboyant phase. Rare screenings of iconic masterpieces Once Upon A Time in the West and The Good the Bad and the Ugly will be followed by spaghetti served to the enigmatic tunes of performance band The Ennio Morricone Experience. Philip Brophy will present a lecture “The Sound of Sex” and The Horror Sleepover, perhaps a film festival first, is an all night movie marathon starting at 11pm on Saturday March 1 (BYO sleeping bag).

And when it’s all over there’s a weekend of world music at WOMADELAIDE. Asked if she will be heading straight to Botanic Park at the end of the film festival, Sedgwick replies, “Of course. When it’s festival time in Adelaide you just keep going.”

Adelaide International Film Festival, Feb 28-Mar 7, Full AIFF screening program and timetable will be announced Feb 2003 www.adelaidefilmfestival.org,

In this feature report, the first of several on the marketing and touring of Australian artists to the world, we focus on 2 recent programs, artsaustralia berlin 2002 and the Biennale nationale de danse du Val-de-Marne, Paris. There are interviews with Maria Magdalena Schwaegermann, Artistic Director of the Zurich Festival and one of the instigators of artsaustralia berlin 2002, Karilyn Brown, Executive Director of the Australia Council’s Audience and Market Development Division as well as Gravity Feed and Tess de Quincey who both appeared in Val-de-Marne. Fiona Winning, Artistic Director of Performance Space talks about initiatives for touring and exchange in the hybrid performance scene. John Davis, General Manager of the Australian Music Centre (p12), details how the AMC works nationally and internationally with examples of recent developments including innovative exchange programs through the International Association of Music Information Centres (IAMIC).

We also take a look from the other side of the picture. Laura Ginters from Sydney University’s Centre for Performance Studies gives a vivid account of recent theatre productions in Berlin and Vienna. German broadcaster Anke Schaefer takes a comparative look at the Melbourne theatre scene. Erin Brannigan reports on the Monaco Dance Forum. We also preview the forthcoming Magdalena Festival of women’s performance in Brisbane.

[Liza Lim in Moon Spirit Feasting] has achieved an overwhelmingly powerful and contemporary invocation of an old Chinese myth that neither sinks into rigid avant garde nor pop, but plays instead with both—one of the few examples of a successful hybridisation.
Bernd Feuchtner, Opernwelt, Aug 2002

Did you know…?

Acrobat were in Singapore, London and Genoa in October and November last year; the Sydney Theatre Company production of Kevin Gilbert’s The Cherry Pickers played for 2 weeks at the culture shock! Commonwealth Games Cutural Festival in Manchester and did a 6 week tour of the UK in late 2002. Melbourne’s Kage Physical Theatre is off to Japan, where the Elision ensemble’s Liza Lim opera, Moon Spirit Feasting played mid last year before heading off to Berlin and Zurich. Melbourne’s Museum of Modern Oddities (Neil Thomas & Katy Bowman) have been in Zurich and this year goes to London, Oerol (off Holland), Ghent and again to the Zurich Festival. Dancer-choreographer Lucy Guerin’s producer, Cultural Pursuits, has just confirmed a 6-city US tour plus Ottawa, Canada. The list goes on and on.

A success story?

It all reads like a success story, but it’s more the case that it could be the beginning of one. To date it’s the result of hard work in preparing the way by numerous artists and companies, a very small group of industrious producers (including Wendy Blacklock, Justin Macdonell, Henry Boston, Marguerite Pepper, Barry Plews), and some very determined government agencies like the Australia Council’s Audience & Market Development Division and its Victorian State Government counterpart. As well there are individuals (presenters, producers, embassy staff) in Europe, Asia and North America who have taken to Australian work with a passion and whose labours on our behalf are as important as our own.

However, at every level there’s talk of under-resourcing and the challenges of distance (invariably the enormous costs of travel and freight), of difficult markets, of building networks, getting promotional strategies right and the need to form long term partnerships. High on the list of goals is continuity, getting past the one-off mentality that puts a show briefly on the map without charting the next stages of its journey.

Yet, despite the considerable odds, the drive to tour Australian arts to the world seems inexorable. For performers, there are new audiences and income, and the inspirations of exchange, for governments there are the benefits of cultural representation that also support trade and political alliances.

[Moon Spirit Feasting] is by turns mysterious, funny, aggressive, mystical, rude, expressive, obscene, in short uncompromising. Especially the mezzo soprano Melissa Madden-Gray…and baritone Orren Tanabe…let loose an explosive performance energy. Both their physical and vocal performances are acrobatic and virtuosic…The Elision ensemble presented the work outstandingly.
Tages-Anzeiger, Aug 24, 2002

Berlin: a new direction?

It’s 7 years since the Australia Council set up its dynamic and influential Audience and Market Development Division. Its Executive Director, Karilyn Brown, describes how AMD is currently reviewing its strategies, suggesting that the international marketing of Australian work needs to now enter a new phase.

One sign of a significant change in direction, and one which Brown discusses, is artsaustralia berlin 2002, a program that became part of the calendar of everyday Berlin arts activity for 6 months as opposed to the one-off events, festival participation and performing arts markets that have come to typify Australia’s venturing into the world at large.

The 6 month program included the Nigel Jamieson-Paul Grabowsky The Theft of Sita, William Yang’s Blood Links, the Sandy Evans Trio and The World According to James (trombonist James Greening’s band), Robyn Archer, Elision ensemble’s Moon Spirit Feasting, choreographer Phillip Adams and a selection of Australian films (through the Australian Film Commission). Also in Berlin as part of the program were dancer-choreographer Rosalind Crisp, performance poet Amanda Stewart, and authors Peter Carey, John Tranter, Sonya Hartnett, Phillip Gwynne and David Malouf. With the collaboration of numerous German partners, artsaustralia berlin 2002 was an arts export strategy of the Australia Council in partnership with the Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade through the Australian International Cultural Council (Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer, Federal and State Arts Minsters and government arts agencies).

Why the push into Germany? It’s 9th among Australia’s major trading partners and is cited as the second largest market in the world for Australian Indigenous art. It’s also responsive, according to Maria Magdelena Schwaegermann, to Australian artistic innovations in cross-cultural and multimedia collaborations.

[The Theft of Sita] is a cultural critique proferred by the West in the theatrical forms of the Far East…Nigel Jamieson has the requisite chutzpah to reinterpret the morality play…as a political, comic and environmental thriller…a metaphysical bed of nails from which fakir Jamieson conjures up a sensual sensation.
Daniele Muscionoco, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Aug 28, 2002

Maria Magdalena Schwaegermann

For over a decade Schwaegermann, as Deputy Director of Berlin’s Hebbel-Theater, has been responsible for significant commissions and collaborations involving Robert Wilson and other leading international artists. Schwaegermann has visited Australia numerous times, attracted to the country’s distinctive cross-cultural, multimedia and collaborative performance works. She has played a key role in the touring of Australian works to Europe, the setting up of artsaustralia berlin 2002, and now presenting Australian work at the Zurich Festival of which she is the Artistic Director (2002-2004). RealTime phoned her in Zurich.

How did artsaustralia berlin 2002 go from your perspective?

I think altogether it was a very good beginning. If you follow the arts scene and the audience and the focus in the city, Australia “arrived.” It’s not easy to have a season over 6 months and to keep an interest in it. Altogether, Berlin is very curious about Australia. The productions were received very, very well and the immediate reaction was that the next literature festival in Berlin will have a big Australian focus. A lot of different institutions now are very keen to get Australian work.

There was a fantastic review of Moon Spirit Feasting in Opernwelt [the leading German opera magazine] by Bernd Feuchtner. It is really a top critique which understands the contemporary nature of this production, the hybrid form as a quality—a contemporary composition in combination with something that comes out of a street ritual and the meeting of different cultures.

Very positive. The ELISION ensemble with their installation Sonorous Bodies with artist Judith Wright and [koto player] Satsuki Odamura (in 2001) had already been very well received. Their Moon Spirit Feasting was also very well received [in 2002]. The Theft of Sita was the success. They also loved Robyn Archer’s concert and William Yang.

The best critiques! Moon Spirit Feasting was the big, big surprise: 3 nights, 700 people. And maybe every night 10 to 15 people left, which is nothing. The critics were more traditional. They had a bit more of a problem with the hybrid form. But the reaction from the audience was very good. Very controversial. Lots of discussion. The Theft of Sita had standing ovations. William Yang was packed full with 300 people every night. And the biggest success was Neil Thomas and Katy Bowman’s Museum of Modern Oddities.

Neil built up a little village with 4 houses. There’s a special thing here in Europe. These little parcels of land that you get, when you don’t have that much money, along the railway. And you have a little hut on it and you can plant your own vegetables and these little houses are a kind of symbol for the little people, having a garden and creating a little paradise. Neil set up a village and implanted the museum into these houses with 2 local artists. The Swiss are not really famous for being communicators. They are careful and they like to wait. But it was interesting that immediately they opened a dialogue with the artists. It was the place for a dialogue.

They got the material mainly from secondhand shops and this one chain of shops which has a social background. You bring something for nothing and they sell it and the income goes into a social bank. They found a lot of very typical Swiss materials and created installations, objects and stories that somehow connected to Australia and Switzerland. Like the story of a little boy in 1908 who dreamed of going to Australia. He understood it was underneath him and so he started to dig under his bed for 42 metres into the ground with a little spoon.

We are in negotiation first of all with Stalker with their new piece, Incognita, and Back to Back Theatre with Soft (RT52 p33). Soft is terrific. Now I’m really needing to get other people into the tour and it looks as if Berlin is interested, London is interested, Hamburg. Next is Acrobat with a new piece for the stage we have on the lake. That will be something very special. And then Neil Thomas and Katy Bowman will come back to create something new, a co-creation with Melbourne Festival. We are commissioning them to create a concept for a kind of club chill-out space…people are welcome to come in and there will be different kinds of landscapes, different climates created where you can choose whether you want to eat or play or just sit and talk. And it will maybe be the key space where the [festival] dialogues will be held. Not bad, eh?

After all your years at The Hebbel-Theater in Berlin, which you’re still associated with, are you happy in Zurich?

This is a dream. People are much more open-minded here and careful, whereas Berlin is such a hard market. Here they love the festival and everything sold out. We had 100,000 people within 2 and a half weeks and 32,000 tickets sold. Imagine. Every night sold out. And that’s wonderful and it’s very constructive. I have a 3 year contract and maybe we’ll extend it another 2 or 3 years. But you know, my focus is in Australia.

What I’ve also started to introduce is an interesting process I’ve been working on. I invited a German director, Uwe Mengel [who created Lifeline at the Melbourne Festival, RT 52 p4], to join the jury for an award we give here in the festival. He saw every performance. I wanted him to be introduced to the Zurich Festival to create a piece for this year. And he saw Moon Spirit Feasting with Melissa Madden-Gray and he chose to create a piece for her. This is what I like to do, to put people together.

Museum of Modern Oddities

MOMO are on a roll and with work that is not based on box office. Their Zurich Festival show (described above) is followed by not only a return visit with a new commission but also a show for LIFT (London International Festival of Theatre, now a year round program instead of a festival) at the Natural History Museum in London with Neil Thomas’ son, Miles, as a child curator, and appearances at festivals on Oerol (off Holland) and Ghent (in an old birdseed shop). Thomas’ other project, Urban Dream Capsule, with its collaborators living in shop windows, continues to attract international interest, says his producer, Perth-based Henry Boston. On Sunday February 16, ABC TV will premiere a film of the same artists in the 30 minute Heavenly Laundry—a bus ride with angels.

The success with which the ritual power of this ancient art is so effortlessly combined with the language and technology of today is miraculous…[In The Theft of Sita] Grabowksy’s music, with its natural fusion of jazz and gamelan forms is magnificent…a swinging groove with gestures for attention, bawdy commentary, impassioned citation and soundtrack-style illustration.
Der Tagesspiegel, Sept 7, 2002

Biennale Nationale de danse du Val-de-Marne

Tess de Quincey
De Quincey, a unique performer whose style and preoccupations have emanated from her training in Body Weather with Min Tanaka in Japan in the 80s, combines solo projects, a part time company (DeQuincey Co) and international projects (her Triple Alice series of responses to Central Australia). She has just returned from performing her solo work, Nerve 9 at the Biennale de danse du Val-de-Marne Novembre Australien program. Director Michel Caserta selected De Quincey, Rosalind Crisp, Gravity Feed (all from Sydney, though Crisp is currently based in Europe) and Melbourne’s Chunky Move for his 2003 program. The Franco-Australian International Contemporary Dance Exchange 2002-2003 is a reciprocal touring program of contemporary dance involving the partnership of the Biennale, the Australia Council and the Melbourne International Festival of the Arts. The exchange was initated by Caserta after his visits to Australia supported by the DFAT Cultural Awards Scheme.

It was weird, Nerve 9 was not funded by the Dance Board and my company is now not supported by the Australia Council and there it was being promoted. It was picked up by Michel Caserta…I must say I was very happy with the experience. I was performing last (of the 4 Australian showings) and there was very clearly a sense that a feel had been created by the other 3, that people were coming on the basis of thinking, ‘this is fascinating because we’re seeing Australia from another angle….and each work is very different from the other, but there’s something that binds you together and it’s work that could never have been done in Europe, and it’s very fresh. I had the impression that Michel had put together a really interesting balance of work that worked well for Paris.

Absolutely. Particularly women came up after the show, even given the dense amount of English in the piece [Francesca da Rimini’s projected text, Amanda Stewart’s vocal score]. I asked them directly if this was problematic, they shrugged their shoulders and said, “Not at all. What I didn’t understand came through in the poetry of the delivery and the relationship between the tonality and the visual images made it comprehensible.” For me it was important to take the work to Paris because of its connection to Kristeva…but the French were just not interested. People don’t have a lot of worries about what they’re seeing, they respond directly to what they’re experiencing. It was such a relief to get such a sophisticated level of response. And the feeling that the program presented something totally different from the expectations of what exotic Australia is. I kept hearing that.

Paris felt a lot different—it was 6-7 years since I’d last been there—more pressured, harder, faster and at the same time I felt a little shift in where dance was lying, a much wider embrace than I’d experienced previously. I would have liked a formalised forum after the dances…there were unanswered questions.

It’s just harder…I am my own agent with some help from Performance Space. And not so many producers are travelling—10 years ago they’d hop on a train or plane. Now they don’t have the money to do it. We invited a lot to Paris, very few came.

Exchange, to my mind, is based to some degree on continuity…it’s got to keep rolling. We needed that extra person, like Gabriel Essar, to work on an engagement with process, an awareness of the body of work behind a show, not just the moment. Essar worked on the Olympics. He’s a business person who loves sport and dance and functions as a kind of informal agent for Ros [Crisp] and I since he went back to Paris…We got onto the subject of Central Australia—he’d been to Triple Alice—and as a result we might be able to get Digital Country up. It’s a cook-down of the 3 years laboratory work on Triple Alice, a 72 hour performance in a river bed, straddling the different aspects of the labs. This linked into the issue of what is going on in Australia and how this work is different.

I’d love De Quincey Co to tour. I’ve put together a repertoire with the company’s Cold Feet from 2000, a family friendly work, a public space work, making myself as accessible as possible [laughs]. And then a late night nightclub work dealing with deviancy, perversion, danger, eroticism. And Digital Country working out from the centre of Australia. I’m hoping that the first 2 are commercial enough so that we can live.

Athletic responses, an instinct for play, and eyes in the back of one’s head! These would be useful tools to benefit from Host, a spectacular trap, intelligent and malicious, laid by the Australian company Gravity Feed…[They] easily manage, successfully and without any concession, to weave a bond, artistic and human, between themselves and the public. This very beautiful stroke one owes to the tenacity of Michel Caserta, director of la Biennale de danse du Val-de-Marne for the past 20 years, who dreamt of making a discovery of Australian dance.
Tosita Boisseau, Le Monde, Nov 24-25

Gravity Feed

Jeff Stein, like all his Gravity Feed collaborators is an ensemble member and has his own practice. The company has wanted to tour for a long time. He recalls: “In 1999 towards the end of the season of Tabernacle, we actually dug in our heels in and said, look we’re not going to make a new work until we finally tour. What’s the point in doing one-off seasons in Sydney again and again? Before this trip, it looked like well, that’s it, it’s never going to happen because of the challenges of touring a company like Gravity Feed. Thanks have to go to Michel Caserta because he virtually just went okay, we’re gonna do this. I’m not saying it wasn’t difficult. And thanks also to Marguerite Pepper for pushing it through too. She facilitates a lot of things.”

Stein describes the pleasure of getting to do Host again, with the huge cardboard structures the performers move—transforming the space and the movement of the audience—having to be re-designed in Paris and adapted to 2 unfamiliar spaces. “It was really a re-working of the show because they were different designs. It was actually very positive. We rehearsed in Sydney and we virtually got to Paris and then had to adapt.” Horst Keichle created the original sculptures and re-designed them for Paris, but couldn’t go at the last minute. Fortunately the day was saved by the arrival of William Woo from Visy in Australia.

The first venue for Host was Salles Jacques Brel in Fontenay-sous-Bois and the next the Théâtre Jean Vilar in Vitry-sur-Seine, virtually outer suburbs of Paris. Stein says “they’re both communist areas where big theatres have been built. They’re not considered part of Paris. Fontenay has a lot of housing estates. It was a nice community. There were things like free internet. The first place we went into was the bistro in the local town hall. Everyone came in from work at lunchtime to eat and we were invited. The chef not only cooked but he served and greeted everyone. He came to see the show and he cooked kangaroo for us. And I’ve never eaten kangaroo in my life. I go to France to eat kangaroo. He was so pleased and thanked us for the show. And people came from the community to see the show, not just from outside. It was a community event. The second venue was in Vitry, probably the worst area in the whole of greater Paris. It’s very poor and it’s an area with a lot of problems. Before we went there, we had no idea…you don’t really notice it. The show sold out in the end. And the last 2 nights in Fontenay sold out. We did 5 nights in both towns. It was great to run something in and move to a second venue. The second venue was even better. It was a bigger area where you could step back a little bit and gain some perspective. At first we thought it might be a problem, ‘cause you know, you don’t wanna let ‘em escape! But in the end it’s good for the audience to have a respite and make the decision to be drawn back in rather than always being in, in, in.”

Audience response was very positive, says Stein, and the post-show Q & A sessions were good, helped by having several French speakers in the company. Stein says he got into trouble for describing the French audience as more compliant than Australians when it came to negotiating space, reasoning that the more crowded nature of the Metro, for example, might make them so. “It came back to haunt us.” Most of the audience stayed for the discussion, “which you don’t normally find in Australia after a show. They stayed and they were genuinely interested.

“The great thing in Fontenay was that the general community came whereas in Australia we have, for want of a better word, a narrower audience. From this community we got all age groups, people who’d never seen this kind of work before. It was great that they really enjoyed what we do, eclectic as it is. I have a feeling that a general audience here in Australia given the opportunity would enjoy this work too. I understand why this narrowing happens but I don’t think it’s necessary. Our number 1 fan was Michel Caserta. We did 10 shows and I think he came to 7 of them…he was genuinely excited to be part of the show.”

Did any other producers or entrepreneurs come to see the show? It was difficult. We invited lots of people and previously through arts markets we’d tried to make connections and hoped that once we got there, people would come. But it’s like doing a show in Sydney. You invite people from other parts of Australia and they don’t necessarily turn up. The hope though is that once you’ve proven yourself, they see that you are actually viable.

[William Yang’s] Blood Links is geography transcended; it is background historiography and a lesson in philosophy, its relevance extending well beyond the personal sphere: it examines the significance of tradition and assimilation, of identity and ancestry in a world in which individuals value the unbounded ‘pursuit of happiness’ above all else and release themselves from their blood links as a result.
Daniela Muscionico, Neue Zürcher Zietung, Sept 2, 2002

Karilyn Brown

The Australia Council is over 30 years old, but the Audience and Market Development (AMD) Division is just in its 7th year. Karilyn Brown says, “When it started it was very much fast turnaround, people like Philip Rolfe and Ron Layne did a huge amount of work, but also created important long term strategies that we work from. But I think we’re at a really interesting point now…it’s time for us as a team to evaluate where we’re going. There are a couple of reasons why that’s important. The first is that AMD is not a grant funding agency. Our role is to broker and initiate and to add value and develop longer term strategies. Secondly, how do we ensure we’re at the crest of the wave? This requires the flexibility to carve out some new territory, see what works and what doesn’t…how can it be picked up in different ways by different organisations and agencies, these are the new directions we should be heading in.”

You’re in collaboration with the Theatre Board on the Playing the World program and with the Music board on International Pathways. How does this work?

It offers fast turnaround. Once ensembles, theatre groups, companies are invited—they need to be invited overseas by a festival or performing arts centre—they then can apply and between AMD and the Boards, we look at a number of key things. Is this the right work at the right time with the right company in the right region and venue? Does the company have the capacity and capability to deliver the work and to be able to follow up interest generated by the tour? We’ll look at the business and marketing strategies. More often than not we’ll be familiar with who’s inviting the companies and where they’re going, but if not we’ll seek more detail to see how it’ll work. And we’ll look at the pragmatic side. How much is it costing? Is the inviting organisation paying fees and ground transport, because the killer continues to be freight and travel. So our focus will be getting the product there. Once the work is there we’re increasingly demanding of international presenting partners to cover fees, accommodation and on the ground costs. This issue is not going to go away, but increasingly we see companies being invited overseas and the call isn’t on government funding.

Berlin for us is a very interesting model and one of the things we’re doing as part of our re-evaluation is trying to test different models of developing longer term outcomes for international market development. We are increasingly not inclined to go with the big bang, one-off event. We recognise that they have had a role, like the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) project in New York in 2001, but they have greater impact if they’re actually based on a whole matrix of relationships and projects, exchanges and dialogues that develop over a period of time. And then you can have a peak that brings with it quite a profile…but then it has to continue. What are you doing to consolidate the connections and the networks and the opportunities for the companies?

I suppose one of the key things is recognising the role that a government agency like the Australia Council has, because we don’t have the equivalent of a British Council or a Goethe Institut or an Alliance Français. We don’t have that kind of well-resourced cultural infrastructure that’s located out there internationally. Almost everything we do internationally has to be done in partnership with other organisations, with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), with presenting partners overseas, state government agencies and business partners because our resources can’t facilitate the outcomes that we need.

Therefore we have to look at the most appropriate models. The Berlin model was one, I have to say, that government partners struggled with a bit because it is long term, it’s about developing relationships with particular individuals and organisations, it taps into venues, but it’s not the high impact ‘Australia’s in town for a week’ model. And it doesn’t have the high profile opportunities consistently for the higher VIP delegations.

It was probably very similar to past models. It involved trade, education, it involved tourism, whereas BAM and Berlin were purely cultural activities. We are working with DFAT and the Australian International Cultural Council so that we can each have critical international roles, different objectives and strategies, but also ways to find the threads that link us…We want to be able to say to Austrade, we have a big program coming up in Japan, or wherever, in 2 years time, how can we work together to contribute to the long term outcomes—to force the boundaries a little as well, so that they start to see the value of longer term cultural engagement.

You can’t keep tapping into festivals around the world all the time. I’ve noticed that people say of a work, “It’s a classic festival show” and that’s when you start to think you don’t want Australian work always being positioned in festivals overseas with that kind of expectation. So we’re not coming up with little festival packages here and thinking where will we send them but rather we’re constantly developing the depth of knowledge and understanding of Australian art. There’s a huge spectrum of curiosity and interest and commitment to Australian art overseas, but the depth is not there for a lot of artforms and in a lot of regions. We bring people here, encouraging them to commission, to present work.

We have an increasing number of overseas people who are becoming very strong advocates for Australia. Maria Magdalena Schwaegermann moves from the Hebbel-Theater [Berlin] to the Zurich Festival. She programmed to high success an Australian program in 2002 and is looking to program more work for 2003. These people, when they move, take Australia with them. We want to have more of this, shifting away from the days when people would say “but we’ve brought this person out to Australia once already.”

Given the lack of an infrastucture like, say, the British Council, are there Australians overseas playing a role?

We have Market Development officers. Catherine Hunyor was in the pilot role in Tokyo for 12 months and fortunately she was so fantastic she was then offered a permanent postion with the Embassy and continues to play a very active cultural role. The Tokyo embassy is one of the most culturally active Australian embassies in the world. Because of the work that was starting to develop around Europe, post-Oympics, particularly in Germany and in Berlin…we appointed Margaret Hamilton to that position in Berlin. We’ve just extended her term to its third year, based at the Embassy, because of artsaustralia berlin 2002 and 2003, but also because her role is Germany-wide and she has performed an extraordinary job and we have received nothing but amazing praise from people who deal with her in Germany and in France.

In an ideal world, one of the long term strategies I would like to start working on is creating more of those positions and longer term. It’s not about compensating for DFAT’s complete cut back on its cultural relations branch—what 5 years ago was 40 people is now 4. They were public affairs positions, but the Market Development Officer role is not public affairs, it’s about brokering and positioning opportunities for Australian art. It could be done with partners like Austrade and Asialink.

In the performing arts they are absolutely critical. I don’t think in Australia we recognise the role that these people play, still existing on the smell of an oily rag. It’s not a lucrative business…you’re in it for the love of it. Their role has created some really significant outcomes. There are few newcomers but we’ve been looking, with the Theatre Board and others, at how to create some emerging producer roles. If we had the resources I’d see a role for a strong mentoring program and a training and development program, because one of the key issues around is the burnout of these sorts of roles and who then takes on the responsibility for these companies. Wendy Blacklock (Performing Lines) and Marguerite Pepper have mentored many people who move on into other areas because it’s not a financially viable area. Karen Rodgers is with Wendy as part of a 2 year pilot project. Most recently we’ve supported a person for 12 months to work with The Studio team at the Sydney Opera House. These people have to be involved in international work as part of their brief. The interest overseas is often in contemporary performance, contemporary dance, physical theatre and hybrid arts and these artists are not in a position to represent themselves, they are in desperate need of support from producers. If we lose one or 2 producers that’d be a very bad situation. Producing is a whole area we need to look at carefully: for market development, for international exchange, for infrastructure, for the future of the companies. [Especially contemporary dance companies] which need audience development strategies put in place in Australia, a firm base before they can even think about international developments. We’re working very closely with the Dance Board. Our priorities for the next 3 years are contemporary dance, new media arts and Indigenous music and dance…while continuing to work on the other areas.

What is the role of performing arts markets as Australian work becomes better known and in light of other approaches, for example commissions with overseas investors?

We went to Osaka, Tokyo, Cinars (Canada) focusing on Indigenous work, New York (APAP, Association of Performing Arts Presenters), focusing on contemporary dance, and we’re going to the Singapore Asian Arts Market mid-year. Then we’ll review them and see if any of them are appropriate markets for us to continue in. It will always be hard to find a balance between ‘export ready’ work (they see it, they can get it) and work in the early stages of development. How do we find other avenues outside the market context to expose Australian work on our soil? We could look at a recurrent music market. Dance? No, not yet, but we could use the next Melbourne Festival, which has a contemporary dance focus, and target 8 to 10 key international presenters. They’d see fully-fledged Australian works but also could be involved in choreographic discussions and so on. Markets are not terribly expensive until you start showcasing work overseas, so we need different models.

AMD spend about $2.4m on international activities, the Australian International Cultural Council has about $1m, and the states, particularly Victoria, and Austrade all contribute significant support to varying degrees. The Major Festivals Initiative has $750,000, but it is focused on national creation of work. The amount of money going into creating international markets is no more than 3 to 4 million dollars. The UK, US, France and Germany spend no less than $2m and usually $3-4m just on the Venice Biennale…We’ve been talking with the Confederation of Festivals about trying to focus additional resources on international collaborations—having the buy-in from presenting partners at the beginning of a work’s creation because of the quality and calibre of the artists involved. Then we don’t get into the situation where works like Cloudstreet, Crying Baby, The Theft of Sita are all done, go to 3 festivals and then there’s a gap. It’s a bit of a dream, but it would be fantastic if it could happen, as part of the planning process from the beginning, part of the funding process with international investment. Then presenters would be involved in the beginning and know that in 2 years time they’d be getting that work.

The power of exchange

I meet Fiona Winning (Artistic Director), at Performance Space on a steamy Sydney afternoon to discuss some hot topics, all with international ramifications for Australians working in the burgeoning hybrid arts field. We discuss the second of PS-PICA-ANAT’s Time_Space_Place hybrid performance workshops (see Williams and preview of TPS2), the PS-PICA Breathing Space development of a body of tourable Australian work in exchange with Bristol’s Arnolfini contemporary artspace (a venue that partly inspired the founding of PS), and, less certain at this stage but urgently needed, a touring consortium to take innovative work to Australian audiences.

Speaking about the Breathing Space initiative, Winning says “it began with the visit to Australia of Helen Cole who was the live art and dance programmer and is now Senior Producer at Arnolfini.” Winning describes Arnolfini’s Breathing Space program as being “about giving space and commissioning money to emerging and established artists to start new work. InBetween Time is a small festival, a platform for showing some of that work. As a curator Cole often challenges the artist, for example she encouraged Robert Pacitti [one of the Time_Space_Place mentors] now doing large scale works to go back to some of the early things he was doing solo. Cole also established partners in Manchester and Nottingham to show several works, not as a tour but programmed over the year. The artists learn from their first outing with their work and then develop it with these further showings. It’s an interesting model we don’t have here.

“Cole was looking for Australian partners, we kept in touch, and she came out again and we began working out how to collaborate over a long period.”

So the idea is for PICA and PS in partnership to establish an Australian Breathing Space program which supports the development of a group of works annually, presents them at least in Perth and Sydney and, later, in a joint touring program in Australia and Britain with a mix of Australian and British works. It was hoped that Brisbane’s Powerhouse Centre for the Live Arts would be a partner, but that will now be a matter of wait-and-see after the surprising appointment of theatre director Andrew Ross—ex-Black Swan Theatre Company—as Artistic Director/CEO, replacing Zane Trow whose focus was on programming, commissioning and producing contemporary performance (see p 26 for Trow’s new venture).

For Winning the challenge of developing Breathing Space Australia is not just the availability of talent or works of quality to tour, but of funding models that don’t allow contemporay artspaces resources for commissioning:

“It’s instructive how things work in the UK. None of the Australian contemporary art centres have commissioning money in the way that UK centres can apply for it.”

Winning points also to the distances between Australian cities and a small population base from which to draw audiences as having to be factored in to touring, planning and funding.

The Breathing Space project comprises a number of stages, commencing with the recent showing at PS of 32,000 Points of Light (an evolving British work soon to be shown in its new motion simulator version at Arnolfini). In exchange, Arnolfini is to show the George P Khut-Wendy McPhee collaboration, Nightshift from February 14. Winning says, “Nightshift was not a commissioned work, it’s an artist initiative; this is an opportunity to show the work in a bigger context.”

The next stage is the development of an Australian body of work. As with the UK Breathing Space, a pool of commissioning funds would be ideal. However, says Winning, “We pitched to the Australia Council to see this as an important initiative to invest commissioning funds in…but they didn’t fund it. We thought it really fitted into the New Media Arts and Audience and Market Development Division plans for developing projects in the UK. It was also an across Council application, but the other boards didn’t have intiative money.”

How then do you develop a body of work without commissioning funds? “It’s all about artist initiatives funded by the Australia Council or the states. We will then offer them further support, include them in Breathing Space Australia and try to value add to their development. Our residency and PICA’s R&D programs will augment this. About 4 works will be shown by the end of this year. Some might already exist as first drafts or as works-in-progress.”

As for the makeup of a touring program, Winning says that the module will be a mix of long and short works, of live performance, installation, laboratory work and a talk event: “The whole program should be able to be shown in a weekend.”

Another stage brings some of the UK work to Australia in 2004 to be shown with Australian work. In 2005 Australian work will appear in Breathing Space UK. “It’s a long term strategy and we’ll keep talking to the New Media Arts Board and Audience and Market Development. The British Council are absolutely on board and extremely supportive of the UK work coming to Australia.”

Arnolfini are providing the fee that will take Nighshift to the UK and Performance Space is sending Winning, who will get to see the UK works, speak on a panel and use the opportunity, a few days later, to visit Glasgow for new territories, the annual festival of live arts, incorporating the National Review of Live Art. This year Australians Helen Herbertson and Ben Cobham are presenting their acclaimed Morphia Series (RT52 p6) as well as teaching in the festival’s Winter School.

In RealTime 54 there’ll be more on the international marketing of Australian artists: interviews with artists and producers, a report on literaturWERKstatt, Dr Thomas Wohlfahrt’s innovative literary crossartform program, and a close look at the resources available to artists and presenters from the Australia Council.

“data [information] terra [earth] investigates not only the technological, but emotional, psychological and spiritual implications of the digital paradigm, and…delves into the advent and purposing of data mapping.”

Birds are filling the skies again

Feather numbers are up and up. Graph spikes in what the birdologists refer to as ‘incidents.’ Witness the parklife across from Sydney’s Central Station. Abundance of beak and claw, a near liquid blob of feathery life force gathered, feeding ravenously. Can’t even see the footpath. People watch nervously from a distance, awed by the spectacle, daring not to think what such a mass might be capable of. Whispers travel around the perimeter—a boy in there somewhere, 8 years old.

dLux blurbalish

futureScreen02 data*terra was the 5th annual dLux X=ploration of new media meets cultural theory and emerging sci-tech. “Investigating the mediation of data across technological, cultural and physical terrains,” the event boiled down to: Data Conspiracy, a live debate over dinner (no spectators); The All Star Data Mappers, a survey and exhibition of database voyeurs and network fetishists curated by John Tonkin; Terra Texts, commissioned essays by Sean Cubitt, Dr Ann Finnegan, Bill Hutchison and Mathew Warren (www.dlux.org.au); Interalia, live thematic audiovisual assaults at The Chocolate Factory, Surry Hills; and Desert Rain, a large scale installation by Blast Theory (UK) at Artspace.

The man on TV

He said there was a major earthquake in Tokyo, Japan. SBS coincidentally, had programmed for that night’s viewers a cautionary tale about the inevitability of The Big One that’d shake Tokyo far beyond its state-of-the-art emergency services. And so it was with added resonance that the fragile, interconnected nature of our global economic electronic was emphasised one sober late 90s evening. Sever the Tokyo tendrils and the world wakes to a depression.

Joining the dots

The All Star Data Mappers mostly consists of websites clickable from the dLux homepage, so visualisation and data mapping enthusiasts can explore this fine selection of provocative datamapping tools months after the exhibition’s end. For me the Oz-gong went to the Firmament software interface for a radio telescope by Mr Snow and Zina Kaye. Josh On’s now infamous TheyRule.net slices through the Fortune 100 company connections with an incredible visual succinctness and Minitasking.com highlights the distributed backbone of the popular peer to peer Gnutella filesharing network.

Virtual warfare

As a large scale and much hyped Virtual Reality environment and interactive art installation, I expected to engage with Desert Rain at Artspace as a boy. Not that I’d be grinning because I was getting free trigger finger in textured corridor practice, just that I expected more technology than necessary. Somewhere amidst the gee-whizardy, the novelty, the gimmickry, the sheer cost of it all, I expected I’d feel like the kid who notices that the emperor isn’t in fact wearing any clothes. Once the impressive infrastructural veneer was peeled away, would it reveal a lack of substance at the installation’s core?

Real warfare

“If they do it, it’s terrorism, if we do it, it’s fighting for freedom”, said the US Ambassador in Central America in the 1980s when asked to explain how US actions like the mining of Nicaragua’s harbours and bombing of airports differed from the acts of terrorism around the world that the US condemned. Since World War II, the US has dropped bombs on 23 countries including: Korea 1950-53, China 1950-53, Indonesia 1958, Cuba 1959-60, The Congo 1964, Laos 1964-73, Vietnam 1961-73, Cambodia 1969-70, Guatemala 1967-69, Grenada 1983, Lebanon 1984, Libya 1986, El Salvador 1980s, Nicaragua 1980s, Panama 1989, Iraq 1991-1999, Sudan 1998, Afghanistan 1998, and Yugoslavia 1999.

Veneer peeling

Artspace. Spanky, Nick Eye-fi, The Lalila Duo and a little boy. All of us in the raincoats provided. In separate fabric cubicles, wearing microphone headsets and staring at screens formed by water dripping from the ceiling in front of us. Projectors glare onto the other side of the water, providing an almost blurry, ghost-like image to navigate. Finding our way around is done by leaning left, right, forwards or backwards on the small platform beneath our feet and by talking to each other through our headsets when we come within range in the 3D space we’re watching. With the sound of the constantly raining screens, each other’s muffled headset banter and the polygon war playground shining in the glimmery mist, it’s hard for a boy not to be impressed. We each have 30 minutes to find our target characters and collectively get our butts to a particular exit. But what does it all mean?

Oil-soaked birds

“…real events lose their identity…when they become encrusted with the information which represents them…As consumers of mass media, we never experience the bare material event, but only the informational coating which renders it ‘sticky and unintelligible’ like the oil soaked bird.” (Paul Patton tackles Baudrillard on the Desert Rain flyer.)

Desert guts

So I’m in this 3D Pac-man game and I’ve found my sticky ‘target.’ Eerily silhouetted in front of the projector, a character approaches the water screen from behind, then walks straight through it and gives me information about my target. Actors as soldiers have instructed us on our mission, guiding us to the cubicle and over a large quantity of sand to a mock-motel room, where our team learnt via video-recorded interviews that each ‘target’ had experienced the Gulf War in an unorthodox manner. This physical integration of people into its virtual environment and the evocative aesthetics of the physical space distinguish Desert Rain from most war-based computer games. This is just as well because Desert Rain’s simplicity means it couldn’t compete as gameplay alone.

Breadcrumbs

Ritual and sacrifice are understandable responses to larger forces we don’t understand. Daily breadcrumb dumpings were now occurring to appease the flocks. Thing was, a kid had been trapped under one dumping and, when the birds fluttered away, he was no longer there, just a distraught mother hopelessly scanning the empty footpath for some trace. As she looked up, about to cry to the heavens, she fell to her knees rubbing her eyes—the birds were flying in formation in the shape of her boy.

Motion Blur 75%

Blast Theory’s goal is to blur the boundaries between real and virtual events, “especially with regard to the portrayal of warfare on television news, in Hollywood films and in computer games.” This ‘mixed reality’ approach succeeds in part, hampered by the extent to which you are shepherded through the process and your lack of capacity to do anything meaningful in the installation—explore a maze representing a Gulf War bunker, find character and find exit. The Gulf was a resonant and important theme, but I didn’t really gain any new insights into its real or virtual nature through the game options I explored that couldn’t have been expressed through a simple website or pamphlet. Nonetheless it was a highly engaging experience, and Blast Theory’s next work on the streets and online using satellite tracking and handheld technologies should build on this and possibly appear in futurescreen:03.

futureScreen02 data*terra, www.dlux.org.au/dataterra, Nov 15-Dec 7. Desert Rain, Blast Theory, Artspace, Sydney Nov 16-22, 2002. www.blasttheory.co.uk

What would you expect of an International Symposium on Electronic Art? It suggests Peter Stuyvesant—yout international passport to new media pleasure—sweeping views, gold jewellery and sophisticated fashion. A symposium is a formal intellectual presentation and/or a drinking party in the classical Greek style. Electronic art sounds a bit, well, nerdish, leaving you with…a Microsoft conference in an interactive chateau in Aspen?

ISEA 2002 was held in Nagoya, a regional centre 2 hours south of Tokyo. The official theme, Orai, loosely means traffic—comings and goings, contract and communication—and participants were encouraged to respond to this. The symposium’s program, which included exhibitions, academic presentations and performances, was located around a small harbour. Once the official port, it has been re-zoned as a public space, including an aquarium, small museums and a park. About 100 academic presentations were given across 4 days, and 57 installations were housed in 2 huge, disused shipping warehouses.

Kaoru Motomiya’s California lemon sings a song was a highlight of the exhibition. Lemons joined by wires to digital chips produced simple melodies generated by electrical currents from the fruit acid. The audience must kneel, remove the lids from coin-sized boxes on the floor and put their ears almost to the ground to hear the work. First installed at the Headland Arts Centre, California, the piece was made in the shape of a missile, at 1:1 scale, using the same number of lemons as people and dogs who worked in an adjoining former missile base. The missile was pointed at Japan, where the lemons were to be exported. In Japan this work built upon the strong atmosphere of the abandoned warehouses in which the exhibition was held.

Another highlight was Date and Time, a retrospective of Californian video artist Jim Campbell held in the Nagoya City Art Museum. Campbell’s work uses monitor-sized fields of LEDs, rather than monitors or projection, as the display stage of his video pieces. While this technique recalls pointillism, the grid is coarser, heightening the level of abstraction. In pieces such as Running, Falling the movement of a human within the frame becomes intriguingly ape-like, recalling the ambiguous humanity of the opening scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The performance program favoured live sound/video presentations in the currently popular synchronised eye-candy style. Standing out from the crowd was Faustentechnology, a live audio/visual performance by Quebec duo Alain Thibault and Jan Breuleux. Their tight, minimal beat composition and video footage of abstracted land and cityscapes allowed for dynamic connections between the sounds and images, building on filmmaking techniques. Akiyo Tsubakihara and Yosuke Kawamura’s performance Ambiguous Senses/Misleading Feelings 2, also built upon established techniques, exploring video projection’s possibilities as a spotlight, highlighting small cropped squares of light on the dancer’s body.

Within the academic program, Alex Baghat’s presentation of the public-space noise works of Ultra-Red and Infernal Noise Brigade was engaging and well supported by documentary examples of the artwork. Shawn Decker’s brief talk illuminated his innovative sound installation practice, which employs low tech means in effective ways—using small motor and microprocessor units to trigger sound sculptures that display evolving group behaviours, and various resonators—such as metal buckets—acting as speakers. Decker’s work was inaudible amongst the soupy noise inside the exhibition space. Similarly compromised was Melinda Rackham’s engaging virtual space Empyrean and UK work, 32 000 Points of Light, a sound/video projection by Andy Gracie, Alex Bradley, Duncan Speakman, Matt Mawford and Jessica Marlow. The careful composition and otherwise seductive qualities of these soundtracks were also lost in the noisy setting.

Further serious problems existed—both with the local co-ordinating organisation, Media-Select, and the parent group who oversee the ongoing activities. ISEA is curated by committee, arguably allowing greater diversity and more artists who are less well-known into the program. This approach favours larger scale presentation, as a greater number of interests are represented. However, while a theme usually brings focus, in Nagoya the program was mediocre and half-baked. All the work in the exhibition suffered from overcrowding and most artists were disappointed by the result. By contrast the organisational style of the Multimedia Arts Asia Pacific (MAAP) resulted in a focused and dynamic event. Held recently in Beijing and curated by Kim Machan, MAAP was streets ahead of ISEA in its high standard of presentation, diverse works, artistic and intellectual rigour (see report in RT 54, April-May). Further, all the works in MAAP were operational and ready for public presentation, which could not be said of someworks in ISEA.

The massive number of installations, performances and presentations is an ongoing issue for ISEA and feedback from those who have experienced prior festivals indicates similar problems. Despite a huge production staff of committee members and volunteers there is simply too much, spread over too many venues. ISEA, contrary to its image, is poorly resourced—most artists sourced presentation costs independently. The million dollars necessary to properly mount ISEA’s ambitious program is not there.

More problematic, however, is ISEA’s context. Its original purpose to create international connections for artists in the emerging field of Electronic Art no longer seems relevant 14 years later. Roy Ascott, head of the CAII-Star post-doctoral research organization in the UK, suggested a name change from Electronic to Emergent Art, questioning the absence of work from bio-art, molecular and nano-technology, genetics, consciousness research and paranormal perception.

ISEA needs to shape up or ship out…but whaddya know—their next show is on a very big BOAT!—in the Baltic Sea, with the sharper figure of ex-ANAT Director Amanda McDonald Crowley at the helm as Executive Producer. Its organisational mechanism is already well underway.

ISEA 2002, 11th International Symposium on Electronic Art, Nagoya, Japan, Oct 27-31, 2002.

'There was always more in the world than men could see. The precious things are thought and sight, not pace. It does a bullet no good to go fast, and a man…no harm to go slow, for his glory is not at all in going, but in being.'

140 years ago, when one could see Europe by train in a week, John Ruskin was distressed by the speed at which we viewed the world, overlooking simplicity, subtlety and detail. These days, when the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts (ISEA) community jets into a global locale to hold their weeklong biannual exhibition and symposium, the desire to go slow is again relevant.

In one of ISEA’s opening dialogues, Japanese media theorist Hiroshi Yoshioka echoed this sentiment emphasising the need for slowness, subtlety, and contemplation when viewing electronic arts. This seemed strange from my gaijin perspective of Japan’s furiously paced technological evolution—its constant production of smaller, faster, cuter things. But there is a new social and cultural movement emerging in Japan, promoting an environmentally friendly, symbiotic lifestyle and discouraging mass consumption and waste. It’s not quite the slacker generation, but organisations like Sloth Club (Namakemono), whose motto is Slow is Beautiful, are embracing slow food and helpful technology. With this cultural insight framing my mood, I sought out the mediated aesthetic of being.

Japanese artist Kaoru Motomiya’s elegant interactive sound installation, California lemon sings a song, a rocket shaped floor installation of Sunkist lemons and traditional Japanese cooking pots connected by copper wire, generates its own electricity, becoming a fruit acid battery. Viewers can smell fresh citrus and hear sounds of greeting card size musical devices when they open the pots. Motomiya says that when she considers electronic arts, she thinks about power generation, not only consumption. The lemons also provoke us to contemplate globalisation, as we fuel our bodies, our own electronic circulatory system, with produce exported from around the world. Nature and technology entwine.

Unfortunately, delicate work like this suffered in the Pier Warehouse Exhibition, where disparate installations were squashed together. The lack of discrete viewing and listening spaces was consistently a problem for my gallery-trained sensibilities. The subtly shifting soundscapes produced by navigating through Squidsoup’s (UK) Altzero multi-user-networked shockwave installation were swamped by surrounding works, as was US-based Beatriz Da Costa’s Cello. This normally well disciplined robotic cello player, which alters its movement and sound according to viewer feedback, reacted erratically to the almost market place cacophony and kept tuning the cello rather than playing through its repertoire.

Faring better, as it relied on touch sensors rather than sound, was Talking Tree, which postulates a posthuman relationship with nature, as Takeshi Inomata and Tsutomu Yamamoto (Japan) search for the intrinsic information on being via a piece of driftwood. Touching the exposed and vulnerable rings of the magnificent sawn-through Kiso River tree stump activates texts on the effects of the unmitigated destruction of the forests and images of the stump’s mountain origin, as a ghostly 20 metre animated tree shadow eerily sways to the sound of axes chopping into the trunk.

Our embodied relationship with technology was a recurring theme in the ISEA Symposium. Academic papers competed for listeners’ attention with the venue’s superb gold and silver flock wallpaper, mirrored ceilings, and intricate sculptural chandeliers. Slovenian artists Darij Kreuth and Davide Grassi spoke of incorporeal communication in networked virtual reality performance. In their production Brainscore, sensors are attached to the head of the performers who remain physically constrained, while their tracked eye movements and electrical pulses from brain waves control their avatars. The vaguely face-shaped avatars consume data from the internet resulting in slow changes to their form, colour, size and location. The changes in turn effect the eye movements and brain functions of the performers, providing a self-sustaining feedback loop between performers and software and generating a projected 3-dimensional choreography of colour, shape and sound for the audience. Boundaries of human and machine consciousness subtly merge.

Another unexpected delight was Jim Campbell’s (US) work, at an associated exhibition in Nagoya City Art Museum. Campbell’s unique style questions the subjective experience of technology. He creates a matrix of varying dimensions, for example 32×24 (768) pixels, out of LEDs on which simple black and white (or red) video images of a person walking across the screen are reproduced. The LED display transforms the visual information into a numerical code resulting in a hauntingly beautiful and simple mediation of analogue metamorphosed into digital. In other works he includes a sheet of diffusing plexiglass in front of the grid to produce a blurring effect, shifting the digital pixel image back to a continuous analogue film image. Simplicity is powerful.

So too in the Electronic Theatre with Patrick Lichty’s fabulous 8 bits or less, a short film on alien abduction. Shot on a Casio WristCam with music produced on Commodore 64, the work proved that lo-tech is every bit as compelling as high fidelity: intricately rendered realism. Slowness and subtlety were also the strength of Anne-Sarah Le Meur’s (France) animation Where It Wants To Appear/Suffer. Simple surfaces meet with slow movement; smooth or fibrous textures, subtle colour and minimal light give the impression of both microcosm and macrocosm. Animal, vegetable and mineral are condensed in underwater or intra-body environments.

Appear/Suffer is the first stage of a virtual environment project, Into the Hollow Of Darkness, based on the viewer’s desire to perceive, about which Le Meur spoke at the symposium. In large-scale projection she intends abstract visual sensation to produce a strange intimacy with the image. Nothing tangible is represented—everything rests upon the power of the images and the reciprocity of the power the viewer has over the images. Abstract representations move away from the viewers as they move towards them; the viewers gradually learn that by becoming passive, motionless, they can pause the forms, or “tame” them as Le Meur suggests. This slow dance of viewing the artwork gives the impression the forms are alive, even looking back at you. Slowness creates intimacy.

My meander through the exhibitions and conference presentations was refreshing, revealing works that seek to seduce rather than control the viewer, immersive and interactive on subtle levels, based on simple principles often backed by complex technology. ISEA aroused my desire for feeling, listening and slowness to provide a delightful respite from knowledge, action and speed. It’s nice to be reminded that contemplation is as valuable as manipulation.

ISEA, Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts biannual exhibition and symposium, Nagoya, Japan, Oct 27-31.

We are yet to see what capital can become. So goes the ‘new economy’ mantra as its proponents lay claim to the future, which is synonymous with the ‘free market.’ Mastery of the latter supposedly determines the former. Bubble economies—exemplified most spectacularly with dotcom mania and the tech wreck in April 2000, which saw the crash of the NASDAQ—are perhaps one index of the future-present where the accumulation of profit precedes by capturing what is otherwise a continuous flow of information. Information flows are shaped by myriad forces that in themselves are immaterial and invisible, as they do not register in the flow of information itself. The condition of motion nevertheless indelibly inscribes information with a speculative potential, enabling it to be momentarily captured in the form of trading indices.

Michael Goldberg’s recent installation at Sydney’s Artspace—catchafallingknife.com—combines software interfaces peculiar to the information exchanges of day traders gathered around electronic cash flows afforded by the buying and selling of shares in Murdoch’s News Corporation. With $50,000 backing from an anonymous consortium of stock market speculators cobbled together from an online discussion list of day traders, Goldberg bought and sold News Corp shares during 3 weeks in October-November last year (for background to the installation see RT51).

Information flows are at once inside and outside the logic of commodification. The software design of market charts constitutes an interface between informational nodes and flows. The interface captures and contains—and indeed makes intelligible—what are otherwise quite out of control finance flows. But not totally out of control: finance flows, when understood as a self-organised system, occupy a tense space between absolute stability and total randomness. Too much emphasis upon either condition leaves the actor-network system open to collapse. Evolution or multiplication of the system depends on a constant movement or feedback loops between actors and networks, nodes and flows.

Referring to the early work of political installation artist Hans Haacke, Goldberg explains this process in terms of a “real time system”: “the artwork comprises a number of components and active agents combining to form a volatile yet stable system. Well, that may also serve as a concise description of the stock market…Whether or not the company’s books are in the black or in the red is of no concern—the trader plays a stock as it works its way up to its highs and plays it as the lows are plumbed as well. All that’s important is liquidity and movement. ‘Chance’ and ‘probability’ become the real adversaries and allies.” (Interview with Geert Lovink, www.catchafallingknife.com)

Trading or charting software can be understood as stabilising technical actors that gather information flows, codifying these in the form of “moving average histograms, stochastics, and momentum and volatility markers” (Goldberg). Such market indicators are then rearticulated or translated in the form of online chatrooms, financial news media and mobile phone links to stockbrokers, eventually culminating in the trade. In capturing and modelling finance flows, trading software expresses various regimes of quantification that enable a value-adding process through the exchange of information within the immediacy of an interactive real time system. Such a process is distinct from “ideal time,” in which “the aesthetic contemplation of beauty occurs in theoretical isolation from the temporal contingencies of value” (Ed Shanken, “Art in the Information Age”, www.duke.edu/~giftwrap/ InfoAge.html).

An affective dimension of aesthetics is registered in the excitement and rush of the trade; biochemical sensations in the body modulate the flow of information, and are expressed in the form of a trade. As Goldberg puts it in a report to the consortium halfway through the project after a series of poor trades based on a combination of ‘technical’ and ‘fundamental’ analysis: “It’s becoming clearer to me that in trading this stock one often has to defy logic and instead give in, coining a well-worn phrase, to irrational exuberance.” Here, the indeterminacy of affect subsists within the realm of the processual, where a continuum of relations defines the event of the trade. Yet paradoxically, such an affective dimension is coupled with an intensity of presence where each moment counts; the art of day trading is an economy of precision within a partially enclosed universe.

However, the borders of a processual system are also open to the needs and interests of external institutional realities. The node of the gallery presents what is otherwise a routine operation of a day trader as a minor event, one that registers the growing similarities between art and commerce. Interestingly, the event-space of the gallery expresses the regularity of day trading with a difference that submits to the spatio-temporal dependency news media has on the categories of ‘news worthiness.’

A finance reporter for Murdoch’s The Australian newspaper reports on Goldberg’s installation. Despite the press package, which details otherwise, the journalist attempts to associate Goldberg’s trading capital with an Australia Council grant (which financed the installation costs) as further evidence of the moral and political corruption among the ‘chattering classes.’ In this instance of populist rhetoric, the distinction between quality and tabloid newspapers is brought into question. The self-referentiality that defines organisation and production within the mediasphere prompts a journalist from Murdoch’s local Sydney tabloid, the Daily Telegraph, to submit copy on the event. Unlike the dismissive account in The Australian and the general absence of attention to the project by arts commentators, Goldberg notes how the Daily Telegraph report made front page of the Business section (rather than the News or Entertainment pages), in full colour, with his picture beside the banner headline “Profit rise lifts News.” The headline for Goldberg’s installation was smaller: “Murdoch media the latest canvas for artist trader.”

Here, the system of relations between art and commerce also indicates the importance that storytelling has in an age of information economies. Whether the price of stocks goes up or down, profit value is not shaped by the kind of political critique art might offer, but rather by the kind of spin a particular stock can generate. Goldberg’s installation discloses various operations peculiar to the aesthetics of day trading, clearly establishing a link between narrative, economy, time and risk, performance or routine practice and the mediating role of design and software aesthetics. catchafallingknife.com demonstrates that it is the latter—a theory of software—that still requires much critical attention. And unlike most players in the new economy, Goldberg’s installation was a model of accountability and transparency.

catchafallingknife.com, Michael Goldberg, Artspace, Sydney, Oct 17-Nov 19, 2002. www.catchafallingknife.com

Of all the arts-centres-on-riverbanks in Australia, Brisbane’s Southbank is one of the most distinctive with its string of performing arts venues, a museum, a major gallery, shops, restaurants, a rainforest garden, cafes, a very popular pool and artificial beach, university faculties (including music and visual arts) and, just a block back, a stylish shopping and eating strip replete with IMAX cinema. There’s also the nearby entertainment centre and exhibition halls. And there’s still room for more growth, which will include the new contemporary art home of the Queensland Art Gallery.

Millions of people go to Southbank every year, just passing through, promenading, having an after work drink, on their way for a swim or to see a show or enjoy a street market. This is a great potential audience for the very latest in public art, something that in Australia has been pretty much limited in the public imagination to sculptures, and a fair few controversies among them. Southbank Corporation, which manages the area, has appointed Zane Trow, formerly Artistic Director of The Brisbane Powerhouse Centre for Live Art, as its Director of Public Art. Selected by and working to a brief from the Public Art Advisory Committee (visual artist Jay Younger, Queensland College of the Arts, art theorist Rex Butler, University of Queensland, both from Brisbane, and Melbourne architectural reviewer and design consultant Joe Rollo), Trow has embraced this unique opportunity with his customary passion, planning a 3 year program, the first stage of which will be launched in April this year.

Trow explains, “South Bank Corporation Public Art Committee has developed a policy and I’m the implementation. It will be a mixture of research into permanent works and a time-based temporary installations program, a lot of which is focused around the Suncorp large screen. This is work that will be in the public domain. It’ll be free, sophisticated work with high level production values. There will be 2 or 3 temporary installations a year involving sound and image with performance and durational components for some of the time.”

Trow declares that there are already very good local new media artists working in the direction he wants to go and with whom he is eager to work—artists like Keith Armstrong and Lisa O’Neill of the transmute collective, Igneous (James Cunningham and Suzon Fuks) and Di Ball, as well as international artists he’d like to have working on Southbank. For local artists, says Trow, “it will certainly give them the opportunity to work on a large scale.”

Although he won’t launch his program until April, Trow offers a taste of things to come: he’s bringing UK DJ and sound artist Scanner back to Brisbane, this time to present his large screen performance-remix of the soundtrack of Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville with his own score, to be presented late night, outdoors. The event will be accompanied by a impromptu sound/image performance from local artist Lawrence English, I/O 3 and improviser Mike Cooper.

Trow also offers an example of a major work he is pursuing with Elision, Australia’s premier new music ensemble, and, potentially, UK composer Richard Barrett (who collaborated on the company’s Dark Matter in 2001) and leading Australian new media artist, Justine Cooper.

“Allowing key artists to come together to work on a large scale and allowing them access to a large screen and a performative environment,” says Trow, “is unusual in Australia. While there are large screens in this country, a lot of them are tied to special projects for festivals, or for open air film programs, or occasionally in museums. There’ll be one in Melbourne’s Federation Square, which I’m sure ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) will put to good use…but it’s rare to allow artists really playing with performance installations to get their hands on a resource like that. It’s in situ, a very good one, it’s digital—so it can take a line straight out of a laptop or a DVD player—and it’s mobile. There are about 4 locations for it I’ve identified so far, including floating the screen on the river on a barge for a river-based installation. Having it as an asset is fantastic because you don’t have to go to a ridiculously expensive commercial hire company and ask how much it’s going to cost a day. You’ve actually got the thing and a team of people here who know how to use it.”

Trow’s 3 year program includes works he’ll be commissioning, “a couple in partnership with existing events and linking to the Millennium Arts Project.

“That project is a major capital investment by the state into a renovation of the Queensland Museum and the State Library and the development of the contemporary gallery of the Queensland Art Gallery. That gallery will open in 2005 and will be a great opportunity to work within the precinct on ideas of contemporary culture and public space. It all seems to me to be very pertinent to think about the relationship of the public domain with the Feds circling around the idea of charging for admission to gallery spaces…Clearly the philosophy here at Southbank is about protecting the public domain, having a space in the city that is purely about relaxation and recreation, and creating art happenings in it for the interest and amusement of the general public.”

Trow is pleased to be working with a committee that is “thinking away from the idea that art is good for you or educational…We seek to place contemporary and broadly radical art in public space. It might even be easier putting such innovative work in the public domain, rather than sticking it indoors in arts centres and charging. It’s an opportunity to practically engage with ideas of contemporary art and popular culture. That’s what excited me, the prospect of being able to reach out into those areas with artists playing with communications and ideas.”

There are other aspects to Trow’s vision: he wants to encourage sound artists in particular, especially given there’s a new sound system going into Southbank soon. As well, he’s eagerly developing partnerships with festivals (like the Queensland Biennial Festival of Music). The Public Art program will also represent the Corporation in connection with the Percent for Art scheme, which requires developers to allocate funds for artwork on their sites, and the Melbourne Street development which Beth Jackson, formerly of Griffith Artworks, is working on for Southbank, planning permanent artworks.

Trow is looking forward to “twisting up the whole idea of public art” and getting past the inhibiting bureaucratic vision of it that Rex Butler has critiqued so well. “There’s no assumption in our policy,” says Trow, “that Southbank should behave like anyone else…It’s not an arts organisation. It’s a state corporation set up to manage a public space and the thinking here is about public culture and how you can change with the times, dealing with public art, with the business community, with tertiary educational developments…the mix of people is unique. There is a lot of good thinking about activating the river and integrating the entire precinct.”

Glare is a term that has contradictory or polar meanings. Used as a verb, ‘to glare’ is to fix with a fierce or piercing stare. As a noun, the word takes on different connotations. The glare is a strong dazzling light, an oppressive light that shines with tawdry brilliance. In the former sense, the glare fixes; in the latter it undoes fixity and creates dispersion. Jay Younger’s survey exhibition, Glare, at the University of Queensland’s Art Museum, plays with these contradictions. The tension between the expressed ideological intentions of the artist and the work’s blinding exuberance makes this exhibition rewarding and fascinating.

Glare is not a retrospective, but provides the opportunity to view and review the artistic output of one of Queensland’s most significant contemporary artists. Younger has played a formidable role in the development of contemporary art in Brisbane over the past 2 decades, not just as an artist, but also an educator, curator and mover and shaker in the arts. The social and political consciousness that has enabled her to contribute so profoundly to the development of contemporary art in Queensland also provides the central impetus for her artwork.

This impetus is most apparent in Younger’s installation works of the early 90’s. For Glare, she recreated the grotesque installation work Gormandizer (1993). In a critique of the inflexible concrete structures of masculinist culture, the artist coated a cement mixer in pink sugar. In her hands, this object becomes a great gustatory machine, chewing and dribbling forth a rich mucous of glucose and faux jewels. Other significant installations from that period, Big Wig and Charger (1995) and Trance of the Swanky Lump (1997), are included in the exhibition as video documents.

Big Wig and Charger is the most breathtaking and ambitious of Younger’s installations. It involved 30 women who, in turn, took their place (heads protruding through a hole in the floor of the gallery) beneath an enormous suspended Marie Antoinette wig. While it’s difficult for documentation to capture the immediacy of such an event, Younger’s video creates a powerful narrative that heightens the drama and suspense of the work. In editing the footage, she cuts between scenes of the vulnerable heads of the women, the wig, an idling Valiant Charger in an adjoining car park, and a third space in which headless bodies dangle from scaffolding. Through her focus on the tension of the rope holding the wig aloft, Younger creates a sense of impending doom. In this video documentation and in her re-presentation of Trance of the Swanky Lump, Younger is a consummate storyteller.

Whilst the work in the survey spans the period between 1987 and 2002, it provides the artist with the opportunity to showcase her latest photographic work, the ‘tropical noir’ series Ulterior. Using the glitter and glitz of 70’s kitsch tropicana, Younger has created a pungent tropical noir setting as a backdrop against which to revisit some of the notorious underworld stories and characters of the Fitzgerald era. For Younger, Ulterior aims to break through the illusion that Queensland is a carefree tropical paradise, revealing corruption as a persistent holographic presence.

Stylistically, Ulterior appears to have its genesis in the series of cibachrome photographs, Combust (1991), conceived during an artist-in-residency in the Australia Council’s Verdaccio studio in Italy. In this earlier work, the message is direct and simply composed. In Combust II (1991), a sparkling green pineapple rocket blasts off Las Vegas-style, leaving a trail of pink stardust, whilst in Combust III (1991) the burning letters N O come careening to earth. In the tropical noir photographs, the message is more obtuse with each image highly decorative and crammed full of signifiers. There is a vaguely uneasy feeling of trouble in paradise, but these stirrings don’t seem to unsettle the status quo. It is so easy to get swept up in the decorous glitz and celebration of a place where it is ‘beautiful one day, perfect the next.’ The ‘troubling signifiers’ in the photographs (images of characters from the Fitzgerald Inquiry era) appear as Christmas baubles on an overblown palm tree rather than characters from notorious underworld stories. Perhaps this is Younger’s point, to confront Queensland’s ‘cultural and political amnesia.’ However, the danger is that this meaning does not carry beyond the specific context of post-Fitzgerald Queensland. The works themselves become emblems of decadence and excess rather than a critique of them.

The magnificent full colour monograph that accompanies the exhibition comes complete with commissioned essays by Beth Jackson and Juliana Engberg, and extensive theoretical explanations of the individual works. It establishes the socio-political context for Younger’s work. Here lies the dilemma at the heart of any discussion of this artist’s work. The explanations enable the viewer to trace the political and theoretical impulses underpinning each of the works. Yet the contextual framing provided by the catalogue text tends to be didactic, prescribing in advance how the work is to be read, rather than allowing it to speak on its own playful terms. For example, Big Wig and Charger, Gormandizer and Trance of the Swanky Lump are claimed to offer a feminist critique of masculinist culture. In a similar way, Ulterior critiques what Younger sees as the political amnesia of the post-Fitzgerald era. However, at the level of the material and the visceral, the works move beyond political critique. In this tension I am reminded of Drusilla Modjeska’s claim that “art takes us not into political argument, or not only, but towards the ‘inviolate enigma of otherness in things and in animate presences’” (Modjeska, D, Timepieces, Picador, Sydney, 2002). Jay Younger’s work may be critique, but through it we are moved beyond critique into a realm of visceral corporeal pleasure.

Glare, Jay Younger, installations 1987-2002, Art Museum, University of Queensland, Dec 7-Jan 18, 2002

In her video installation, Lineage of the Divine, Monika Tichacek weaves a complex and visually sumptuous narrative. The protagonist, New York personality Amanda Lepore, is trussed in a salmon-pink, 1950s tailored suit, blonde hair in a net, lips overripe and gleaming, feet squeezed into precarious high heels. The figure paces a room with small, delicate steps, arms crossed, striking a pose in full awareness of being on display. This fetishistic assertion of archetypal femininity raises suspicions about the ‘true’ gender of the figure: is this really a woman or is ‘she’ just acting out? The figure appears to scan the gallery space, which also screams feminine cliché with its walls of studded pink satin, recalling a padded cell as much as the frou-frou bedhead that might grace a girl’s suburban bedroom. The feminine symbolism is interrupted by unmistakably phallic antlers that protrude from the wall, reinforcing the fetishistic yet sexually ambiguous ambience. The antlers, cast in resin in various sizes, evoke a dangerous male sexuality, but also look like children’s sporting trophies.

Close-ups and slow pans fragment and confuse the viewer’s perspective of the figure and the room, although it eventually becomes clear that there are 2 almost indistinguishable personae. The central figure is contemplating another, who lies sleeping, attired in identical clothes and make-up—this is the artist herself. A panning shot reveals that the 2 are conjoined by their hair—a blonde switch that snakes around the room, like an umbilical cord. The first figure slowly comes to touch the other, takes the other’s head in her lap before kneading her face and waking her. All the movements are slow and deliberate, choreographed actions intended for public view not for intimate exchange. Under her pink suit the artist wears flesh-coloured prosthetic casings on her limbs and torso that appear to be attached by strings and hooks to her skin. The first figure pulls these, scratching between flesh and plastic as if to manipulate, or liberate, the other. This scene is underscored by a video image on the facing wall that depicts the artist in prosthetics almost entirely still, breathing shallowly as though in an effort to control pain. She appears compelled to witness the scene opposite, over which she has no control.

Tichacek’s tableau recalls Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits, where the painter often expressed her sexually and culturally conflicted identity through the representation of physical pain, integrating the prosthetics she needed to contain her ravaged body into her compositions. In The Two Fridas, the artist represented herself as 2 women, separate but inseparable, sharing blood and holding hands, but riven by cultural contradictions (one wears indigenous Mexican garb, the other the high-collared lace of Spanish dress). Kahlo exquisitely aestheticised her pain and incapacity, her prosthetics and broken spine are as much a literal depiction of her experience as metaphors for her condition as a Mexican woman of a certain class. This aestheticisation, and extreme feminisation, of prosthetics, pain and incapacity, of dependence and strictured movement, also has a strong presence in Tichacek’s work, as does the metaphor of a divided self. Indeed, the symbolism in Lineage of the Divine crosses well into the bounds of overkill, though it is clear that this excess, this hysterical accumulation of charged signs, is very much the intention of the artist, as she forces us to confront the cultural phenomenon of femininity as well as the process of artistic creation. In seeking to articulate both art and sexual identity, the artist necessarily falls back on the language and gesture of cultural stereotypes. This sense of the need to speak with a borrowed tongue is echoed later in the video’s loose narrative, when the first figure lip syncs and shimmies a la Marilyn Monroe to Secret Love, Doris Day’s hit song that later became emblematic of closet lesbianism. The figure appears fated to perform this ritual of celebrity sexual tease; unable to speak her own language, she is forced to communicate through cliché.

However the overall effect of Tichacek’s installation is neither clichéd, nor a familiar exercise in parody and pastiche. Rather, what the artist has created is a seductively claustrophobic but moving evocation of the self-imposed strictures of identity, particularly but not exclusively, those of femininity and the artist. Like the central character in Bergman’s Persona, Tichacek’s protagonist discovers herself through and exploits her muse, is entirely beholden to and relies on her for her very survival, but rejects her, recovers the power of speech through her muse’s confessions but keeps her most intimate thoughts for others. She is one and the same person, but also entirely estranged from herself. Lineage of the Divine powerfully captures this complicity and estrangement between the authentic self and that reliant on cultural stereotype for realisation.

Lineage of the Divine, Monika Tichacek, part of group exhibition Cerebellum for Sydney Gay Games, curator Gary Carsley, The Performance Space, Sydney, Nov 2002. www.performancespace.com.au

Air Kiss’s glowing jumble of deep blue and red light globes dangle in clusters and loop along the walls. Heavy and lovely, lolly-coloured, mouth-shaped, they bloom from the top of columns and drape in strings across the space. Marshalled in corners, each gleaming bulb is linked by a series of wires that spread like secret commands. Yet while they seem to speak of fairs or parties, of Christmas trees and celebrations, beneath their ostensibly cheery appearance courses a vaguely disturbing energy. Contrary to initial impression, the globes are not necessarily celebratory: they could as easily belong to the corpse of a party freshly abandoned as to one waiting to happen.

Traditionally used as decoration, the coloured light globe here is transformed and elevated. As the sole constituent of the work, the globes do not decorate anything—there is nothing to decorate. They enhance nothing, and embellish only empty space. Thus we are welcomed to a floating world of appearances, of deceptive substantiality and ultimately hollow expression. Steven Carson treads a fine line, but successfully. Referring to a world in which style is favoured over substance, he neatly avoids the obvious pitfall of recreating such façadism.

The periodic interruption of the otherwise silent space by an interval of tumultuous music functions to further heighten the viewer’s sense of alienation. All excitement and fanfare, the clamorous crash of bright, harsh, disco-brashness seems to herald some impending event which remains unrealised, its promise unfulfilled. Cut short as unexpectedly as it begins—and before the viewer’s heartbeat has time to calm—this sudden interruption causes the quiet space to reverberate. Its subsequent and abrupt termination results in a resounding disquiet, leaving the space as echoingly hollow as that superficial gesture of affection—as empty as an air kiss.

Such uncertainty enriches Carson’s exploration of the peripheral spaces of mainstream culture and his subsequent manifestation of these metaphorical spaces into literal space. In considering the sub-fields that exist within social life and creative activity, it is to these fringes that both the arts and gay communities—this work was part of the 2002 FEAST Festival—are often relegated. Air Kiss, with its edgy atmosphere of ambiguity, connotes nightclub, brothel and the back alleys of illicit deals and encounters. The sense of seedy glamour—an ambience evoked by its illumination in shades of make-out-room red and druggie-deterrent blue—makes it a place where such ‘alternative’ lives could-can-be lived.

Air Kiss, Steven Carson, Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, Nov 21-Dec 20 2002.

Friday nights in February in Canberra, The National Museum of Australia will be the place to be from 7.30pm till midnight as the Museum hosts Sky Lounge, a unique showcase of Australian and international animation, DJs, VJs, electronica, multimedia and graffiti art.

Sky Lounge gives young artists a chance to share their work in a spectacular venue with a national profile and provides young Canberra audiences with greater access to some cutting edge urban culture. It’s also an innovative venture for a museum more usually frequented by an older or family audience. Let’s hope it’s the first of many, with copycats in the form of other nocturnal events in museums and galleries across the country.

Each program combines live performances by some of Australia’s top electronic artists and DJs with animated films on the big and sky screens, projected art, multimedia interactives and graffiti.

Malcolm Turner (Animation Posse) has assembled No future, no past…only present, a collection of 50 animated films from young international filmmakers including work from the Amateur Developers Handbook; Tout Va Tres Bien, a unique take on 3D imaging from France’s Soo-Mi Sung; “cool music, cool tools and cool ideas” in S-Crash by Lindsay Cox and Victor Holder (Australia); Drawing the War, a kerbside view of urban warfare by Lena Merhej (Lebanon); and Pandorama “a camera-less film” by Nina Paley (US).

Visual artist, curator and writer David Sequiera has gathered his Future Projections from well-known as well as emerging multimedia artists. Images by Anne Zahalka, Mark Kimber, John Nicholson, Matthew Higgins, Mike Parr, Anne McDonald, Justin Andrews and David Stephenson will be projected onto the walls of the White Cube in the Garden of Australian Dreams. ANU’s Australian Centre for Arts and Technology is putting together an interactive artwork using multimedia created by students.

You can watch the walls of the White Cube further transformed by some of Canberra’s best graffiti artists (Sinch, Kiosk, Atune) whose work will morph and evolve over the 4 weeks of Sky Lounge. And if you’ve got a minute, you can design futuristic vehicles and buildings and see your creations come to life in a 3D theatre in Futureworld.

Seb Chan from the seminal Sub Bass Snarl curated the Hip Hop program which includes The New Pollutants from Adelaide specialising in “a mish-mash of 8-bit hiphop, beat-driven electronica, funk-laden breaks and dark-themed soundtracks for 80s computer games and film scores” and hiphop with “Australian flava” from Sydney’s The Herd.

Two other Sydney bands put in an appearance: Prop combine minimalism, jazz, funk, trance, dub, techno, classical and groove; Katalyst draw influences from hiphop, funk, soul, soundtracks and jazz. Local hiphop act Koolism is also on the bill along with Toby 1 from Adelaide, self-professed makers of “the laptop rock of the future, creating tracks and processing vocals and instruments in real time.” International guests include DJ Scanner and Tipper (UK) and Andrew Pekler (Germany).

The programs are organised into themes (Retro Future, February 7; Beauty, Feb 14; Hip Hop, Feb 21; and Abstract, Feb 28). The artists are different each night but every program has a mix of live electronic music, film and projection. So choose your vibe or go for the lot. After suffering all that smoke, Canberra deserves a Sky Lounge. RT

Narelle Autio’s series of 6 colour photographs, Faith, reveals the dual aspects of her theme—as blind people are led through Sydney streets by their guide dogs, light suddenly illuminates each scene as if uncannily choreographed from above. Autio’s work is part of PhotoTechnica’s She Saw, an exhibition of documentary photography, which contains both recent and older works from well-known and emerging women photographers.

Deep and dark, as if shot at twilight, and full of elongated shadows, the images in Faith contain sharp lines, cones or pinpoints of blazing light, which briefly illuminate the sometimes claustrophobic city settings. These moody cityscapes suggest the shadowed, or completely dark experience of moving through the chaos of the city with no, or limited sight. Some of her subjects, Autio says, can just make out bright casts of sunlight, or feeling the heat of a sudden shaft, will sometimes ask if she took a shot at that moment.

Faith—that the blind invest in the dogs who lead them on their regular routes—is central to these works but so is the examination of public and private space. Guide dogs require a clear box-shape around them to work, which means Autio had to keep well away from her subjects while working, in order not to confuse the dogs who’d grown familiar with her scent. Despite the often crowded settings there is a spaciousness in her composition: footpaths appear like welcome clearings in a crowded grove, train tracks stretch into the distance, suggesting other journeys.

Jackie Ranken photographs places from a great height, and virtually upside down. Ranken’s 8 silver gelatin prints of her home town of Goulburn were made during near-acrobatic manoeuvers in her father’s plane. Prohibited from acrobatic flying above the town, Ranken’s 74 year old dad has perfected the art of tipping his Tiger Moth’s wing to the ground without flipping it so his daughter can capture her evocative shots of the town’s geography. Including both manufactured and natural structures shot from the air, and therefore lacking horizon lines, these Urban Aerial Abstracts take a while to decipher visually. In this sense, like Autio, Ranken prompts us to consider what we take for granted in our ways of seeing, to become aware of how we scan a photograph, assuming we’ll rapidly discover its direct connection to the real.

In Ranken’s work, what looks like a series of boxy houses divided by roads turns out to be a graveyard bisected with paths and then, stepping back, a flag. The circular formations of rose gardens or dams look more like urban forms of crop circle, all their detail miniaturised and made strange; the overlapping roads of the Goulburn bypass become a marvellous spirograph that leads the eye around its curves.

Ranken’s approach lovingly transforms everyday structures into something new. The sweeping lines and textures here remind me of work by some Indigenous artists (Rover Thomas for example) where bold shapes describe features on a 2D landscape. The flatness of Ranken’s style gives the work an appealing abstraction in a show of mostly realist documentary photography.

Moving even further into the stratosphere is Spaced Out at the Australian Centre for Photography. Part of the Sydney Festival, this collection of international and local works examines both real and imagined deep space, space travel and humankind’s continual search for new territory, or life beyond the earth.

In the ACP foyer William Eakin’s series of pigment inkjet prints memorialise the Russian cosmonauts of the early years of space travel. Eakin’s (Canada) series includes space memorabilia—A US Moon Landing Badge and a Japanese collector card featuring cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Beside these are several sepia head shots of other Russian cosmonauts; in circular frames they look a little like Russian icon paintings, or faces peering from portholes in antiquated rockets, or from space helmets. These once famous men stare out from black backgrounds pocked with tiny white stars. Eakin’s work reminds us how quickly what was once revolutionary can pass into the frozen zone of kitsch.

Also referencing popular mythologies of space are Ronnie Van Hout’s inket prints in the gallery proper. Each print contains a suitably discomforting concept in the form of white lettering—ABDUCT, UFO, CREATURE, HYBRID—against differing, spookily green landscapes. The word STRANGER appears to melt, morph or pulse before your eyes, and though it’s a trick of the dim gallery light, this animated quality effectively evokes the sci-fi schlock cinema of the 50s which Melbourne-based Van Hout references. While the exhibition notes claim The artist’s work is “less about outer space than the caricaturing and dramatising of cold war insecurities” the oversized white lettering and the hilly backdrops in his MONSTER shot also suggest the mythical land where such films were created, reminding me of the HOLLYWOOD hills where silicon enhancement and Botox are spawning new forms of life but not as we know it.

Juxtaposed against David Malin’s astronomical imaging, South Australian Holly Wilson’s fabricated galaxies and starbursts look remarkably convincing. Reminding us that our fantasies of space are often at least visually linked to reality, Wilson conjures the pocked, rough, corroded surface of a blue planet, the white explosion of a starbirth, by manipulating chemicals on pieces of film.

I find I can only make sense of photographic scientist Malin’s brightly coloured images by imagining them as something closer to home. They make me think of our own deep spaces. A brightly coloured swirling galactic mass looks like something protozoic, something possibly internal; a crimson webby expanse appears more like the surface of the womb shot with a surgical camera than anything out there.

Russian Yuri Batourin turns the camera back to earth from space, revealing the blue curve of our planet, the white-flecked oceans that cover most of its surface. Cited in the notes as a “21st century version of snaps from the plane, the hotel, the conference centre,” Batourin’s work captures the kind of views most of us will never witness. However, a quick search on the Internet reveals that for the wealthy, space travel is now a possibility. For a mere $US20 million (plus 6-months to a year of training, possible nausea while aboard and backaches after landing) you can spend 8-days in the International Space Centre and souvenir your own shot from beyond our universe. Spaced Out makes me wonder how soon it will be before the moon, now colonised, photographed and souvenired; mapped, charted and traversed becomes simply another (expensive) suburb of Earth.

She Saw. Australian Women Documentary Photographers, curated by Karra Rees, Photo Technica, Chippendale, Jan 18-Feb 15

Spaced Out, curators Alasdair Foster & Reuben Keehan, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney Festival, Paddington, Jan 10-Feb 1

LOCATION: As a co-founder of Squatspace, the artist-run gallery that operated from the Broadway squats in Sydney in the 90s, Lucas Ihlein is a veteran negotiator of the use of public and private spaces. For the duration of their latest exhibition, BILATERAL, Ihlein and collaborator Jane Simon negotiated to live in the Experimental Art Foundation (EAF) gallery in Adelaide. This challenges the dominant mode of exhibitions, where the artist simply installs the work and leaves, rarely taking an interest in its multiple effects and reinforcing the idea of art and the gallery as a kind of placeless, autonomous world. Although the work is a response to Adelaide, it brings other places into tension with the gallery: 3 exhibited works were made on the 1999 Artists Regional Exchange Project (ARX5) in Perth (dream narratives on typewriter rolls), Hong Kong (business cards with gnomic pseudo-proverbs in English, German and Cantonese) and Singapore (copies of a small booklet, My Typewriter Only Speaks English, featuring found and original images and texts).

MATERIAL: BILATERAL makes use of old and new writing/inscription technologies: nostalgic and playful, slow before fast, paying attention to everyday, seemingly inconsequential remainders. Rubber stamps, silk screen prints, stencilled letters and Letraset reference 60s and 70s network art practices, while contemporary technologies are used in refreshing, ordinary ways. A VCR suspended in a net throws an oblique projection of an aeroplane flight path over Sydney across 2 walls and above a bed. SMS messages form the basis of textpadpomes, for example, CAN’T READ/SCREEN CRACKED and POLAROID HAS GONE BUST SO STOCK UP ON FILM CAUSE THEY WON’T MAKE IT ANYMORE. As postcards these sell for $1 each—here in Adelaide there aren’t too many buyers. The touch-ability of the work and its invitation to participate is unusual and meets with resistance as well as engagement. A couple of people I ask think the sign “please buy” doesn’t mean what it says, that it’s some sort of trick, part of the ‘art.’ The use of discarded and found materials draws attention to the processes of making. The gallery becomes a workshop, or a sweatshop (I spend ages ironing T-shirts, others carefully/tediously stamp textpadpome postcards). Cheap white cotton T-shirts are stencilled with national stereotypes: ALL-DANES-ARE-HYPER-CONFORMIST-FASHION-VICTIMS; ALL AMERICANS ARE OBNOXIOUS; ALL AFGHANS ARE QUEUE JUMPERS. The blackboard invites guests/visitors to add more stereotypes eg south australians only have 4 types of love. Ihlein prints some of these during the exhibition, adding to the extensive collection.

INTER-ACTIONS: The work generates several special events and day to day interactions with gallery visitors which involve collaborators, ring-ins, and chance encounters. For instance, a screening of films about film (Samuel Beckett’s Film and Gustav Deutsch’s Film Ist) is introduced with a parodic discussion between local and interstate Beckett scholars (with EXPAT and EXPERT stencilled on their T-shirts) littered with false information, pretentious misreadings and spurious pseudo-debates. The screening is then ‘interrupted’ by a rare performance of AM Fine’s Piece for Fluxorchestra (1966)—24 performers recruited from local likely suspects. In the tiny Iris cinema (40 stuffed-tight leather seats) the work performs itself during the interval and is completed by unscripted interjections from a baby in the front row. In Event for Touristic Sites the exhibition takes to the streets during the Christmas Pageant, with Ihlein and collaborators bearing T-shirts stencilled with national stereotypings and armed with a digital video and Polaroid camera. Ihlein makes strategic use of local resources, from people to venues and events, in return making himself available to all and sundry, from dream researchers to community arts network meetings, to a local activist who also squatted in the gallery using it as a resource to make papier mâché guns.

IMMATERIAL: “The only 3d work I do is farming.” Artist statement. Contact letters fixed to the wall.

JUDGEMENT: The scattering of books and journals from the EAF library, along with Ihlein’s notes, work as a kind of open manuscript of work-in-progress showing sources and influences. The practice is performative and pedagogical, spontaneous and historical. From one of the typewriters:

6 crates filled with assorted reading materials ferdinand pessoa poems, ferrara poems, sausage roll 2.20 by simon barney, Dangerous Darwinism (‘i aint descended from no ape’), the chinese literary scene by Kai-Yu Hsu; Spine 3; Mafia for beginners; Audio on Wheels; The Australian Friday November 5th “free Trade Fight Against Terror” WTO in sysdney pic of a protestor (mid twenty sometting-backpack) being wrest hauled away by three police—one looking particularly peeved.”(sic.)

“To settle on private land without pretence or title” is one of the more archaic definitions of ‘squat.’ The works and events at the EAF are fuelled by Ihlein’s engagement with the everyday politics and practices of squatting on disused private properties. In turning the gallery into his own ‘borrowed’ personal space, interactions with local artists and writers, gallery visitors, students and staff become key elements of the ethics and aesthetics of the event: Ihlein offers coffee and biscuits to gallery visitors and makes himself continually available for questions and discussions. It could sound horribly worthy but somehow he brings a light, playful tone that sidesteps the moralising often associated with activist art practices. He says the whole experience of living in the gallery and interacting continually with visitors, often for hours at a time, though productive, is also profoundly disconcerting and exhausting. There is a major ambiguity in this gesture: on the one hand, Ihlein’s desire to be present and to monitor and intervene in audiences’ responses to the work could extend the notion of artistic control by manipulating the reading of the work. However, it also involves gestures of hospitality, generosity and vulnerability: a politics of networked exchange and encounter. Plans for future work include screenings of the Expanded Cinema [pioneering new media and multimedia] films of the late 60s and early 70s.

Lucas Ihlein, BILATERAL Residency and Exhibition, Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, Oct 25-Nov 16, 2002

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