Australian
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December 2003

Urban Theatre Projects, India@oz.sangam

photo Heidrun Löhr

Urban Theatre Projects, India@oz.sangam

Carnivale appears to grow stronger year by year, presenting more coherent and adventurous programs and opening up local talent to the wider audience it deserves. Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s The Living Museum of Fetish/ized Identities, Sidetrack’s The Book Keeper, Urban Theatre Project’s India@oz.sangam, Karen Therese’s Sleeplessness, Sivan Gabrielovich’s The Cool Room and the installation, Sound of Missing Objects at Performance Space were just a handful of the many Carnivale shows that made for an engrossing experience. The Book Keeper has already been reviewed by RealTime; Gail Priest’s response to the Living Museum.

India@oz.sangam

Urban Theatre Projects is adept at adroitly managing large scale performance events. India@oz.sangam is another fine example of the company’s ability to focus on a community, draw out its talents and concerns and present them in an open-ended framework that can attract large audiences from that community and beyond. Most distinctively, this production had a tremendous sense of pride, fun and celebration, embodied as it was in the spectacle and melodrama of Bollywood, that miracle of the hybrid arts, and focused on being young and Indian-Australian. Dancing and singing were to be expected at every turn. In the foyer we watch children in a story-telling circle and, on a large video monitor, their peers in India learning yoga. We are then invited to join a parade led by a turbaned man held aloft to the adjoining riverside. Sari-clad girls dance on a long stairway (nicely reflected in the river) and Indian hip hop beats sail across the water. On the riverbank below us a cricket game materialises alongside a Hills Hoist hung with sheets picking up movie projections. Broken into groups we return to the foyer, passing a couple of eager rappers on the way, to witness women in delicate, sensuous song and dance amidst candles and bells. Our guide explains we are celebrating Diwali, the festival of light. We file into a darkened room where guides introduce us to Indian film classics, spices, flower patterning, a Diwali altar and invite us to relax on a couch as projected images of a hand painting ceremony gather on its veiled walls.

From this intimacy we emerge into a crowded theatre where cast members are cajoling the audience into an Indian singalong. A couple in their 50s constantly surprise their fellow Indian-Australians with a repertoire of rarities which everyone seems to half know. A few rows back, 4 boys break into glorious cross-cultural doo-wop. Once everyone has gathered, the performers spring into a quickfire string of comic skits and little dramas—parents struggling to understand sons who only speak hip hop; a “This is Your Wife” parody, “putting the ‘arranged’ back into the arranged marriage”; a father with 2 PhDs unrecognised in Australia; the trials of taking money ‘home’ to India; a grim monologue about sexual abuse in a conservative society; a young wife denied English classes. The younger women gather in a song of defiance, one of their number on sax, the bodies say pop, the gesturing hands say traditional Indian dance. Two boys perform a great piece about being labelled black (“all my life I’ve been running from one image to the next…I need to get rid of the mask, the colour.”) The irony of their plight is powerfully stated in their admiration for black American heroes—Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X…Performed on a sitcom loungeroom set these scenes are informally presented, the writing is rough, the acting is variable, endings sometimes indeterminate, but the commitment and the drive is there.

We’re led into a cabaret-formatted courtyard with video monitors, a pair of traditional dancers onstage. A sleek car invades the yard, the bonnet draped with girls in their modern best, ready to displace the past, but the final gathering onstage of the participants offers all possibilities: this from one of the most remarkably adaptive of human cultures. Although sometimes more conventionally theatrical than its Urban Theatre Project predecessors, India@oz.sangam doubtless reflects the passions and artform interests of its participants. But the overarching structure (of installation, exhibit, performance and spectacle) maintains the hybridity for which the company is famed and which offers communities the most flexible way to present and explore their cultures.

Karen Therese, Sleeplessness

photo Angie Abdilla

Karen Therese, Sleeplessness

Sleeplessness

Karen Therese’s solo performance is one the most adventurous of recent times and certainly one of the best of 2003. It’s a risky venture, an up-close investigation into a state of ‘not knowing’, a sleeplessness, a family mystery in which Therese plays both herself and, at several critical moments, her Hungarian grandmother who long ago disappeared and whose death certificate described her as male. This is a medical and psychiatric mystery and a tragedy about the pressures of war and migration. Therese and her sister solve the mystery but the great weight of personal plight lingers unbearably, as does the dark legacy of heredity.

Therese’s performance style is forthright, unavoidable and the enactment of the grandmother’s seizures, an assault, shock treatment and her own childhood anxieties are such that not everyone in the audience feels comfortable—sometimes these lives and personalities are too big for this small space. But what a space. Projections flicker across the walls, ranging from little iconic images to wall-to-wall phantasms. It is a space of transformations and the back and forth of history. Filmmaker Margie Medlin travelled to Hungary with Therese to create the wonderful black and white images of the performer in the guise of her couturier grandmother. Other images have a haunting old world colour that is at once nostalgic and appalling because of the pain of loss they signal. This is a space that Therese inhabits, frantically scrawling the accumulating data of the investigation across walls pinned with letters and documents and certificates, old clothes, dress patterns and strange fragments of latex, like the skin of stretch marks and ageing and torture. This is set design as installation: the curious audience inhabits it at the end of the show.

Karen Therese’s script is plain and simply delivered, but it is rich in detail and place; the evocation of Sydney from a migrant perspective is grim, the sense of moment always potent, of growing paranoia and suicidal impulses. The performance is brave and the sizeable team of collaborators have made a wonderful dramaturgical and design context for it. Sleeplessness should be widely seen.

The Cool Room

The Cool Room is sensitive, sometimes explosive territory that director Deborah Leiser has visited previously in A Room With No Air (1998), with Leiser as a fleeing Jew harbored begrudgingly by a German (Regina Heilmann). A Room With No Air, was a powerful performance work in which the physical and visual components counted more than the spare verbal utterances. The Cool Room is primarily a play of words, beginning sparely and growing in density and moral perplexity as 2 chefs (Israeli and Lebanese migrants) locked in a restaurant’s refrigerated cool room feel the full weight of the deadly chill of their relationship. However Melbourne-based Israeli playwright Sivan Gabrielovich establishes the play in jump-cut fragments, pulling back from literalising the situation or its transitions, making us read them and make the connections. Leiser finds in the spaces in between a physical language for the performers that choreographs the moral twists in an increasingly claustrophobic space where arguments turn on themselves and ironies become overwhelming.

The production is striking from the outset—the chefs carry in 3 performers like sides of beef and hang them on hooks: they are the ‘meat.’ They become a chorus, no mere ‘meat in the sandwich’, there is little innocence in this world. I would have liked their role more tightly defined. Too often they slip into a generalist chorus mode, or become a handy satirical device. At the play’s end they get the last word, carrying a moral weight they have not earned, the content of which threatens to trivialise all that had gone before (in effect: ‘don’t cry for us, we love our war’).

Through its bloody anecdotes, appallingly cruel jokes, sexual paranoia, reflex racism, shared recipes (same foods, different names) and its acute sense of migrant displacement The Cool Room offers a disturbing account of cultural tensions carried over to another homeland, Australia. However, this local situation is barely coloured in at all, it is always a metaphor for a conflict initiated between Lebanon and Israel in 1982, lasting 18 years and still alive in the bodies of these men, these cultures even if they don’t want it. As a young Israeli writer, Gabrielovich is not easy on her own people, but nor does she see a way out. The end of the play is like hitting a brick wall—the Middle Eastern conflict as neurosis turned psychosis. Incurable. Of course, I might have missed significant nuances as the play argued its way to a conclusion; it’s a head-spinning debate. The Cool Room is one of many plays appearing now that urgently address social, political and ethical issues with a bracing immediacy. At its best it does so with passion, if not always with finesse, and with a not undeserved bluntness given Australia’s own moral obtuseness—who are we to judge?. Matthew Crosby is good as the extrovert chef, an ex-Israel soldier alert to his country’s wrongs, while Majid Shokor conveys a quiet intensity and woundedness that is palpable.

Sound of Missing Objects

Paul Virilio proposed a museum of accidents based on the premise that every new technology comes with an accident in tow (a ship, a shipwreck; a light, a blackout etc). Sound of Missing Objects is an installation created by Panos Couros (sound artist), Jonathan Jones (installation artist) and Illaria Vanni (writer, academic, curator), a spooky visual and aural evocation of a museum of cultural erasure. There are 5 elegant Victorian glass-topped museum cabinets (with plates like ‘The Great Exhibition, London 1851’), and there’s writing on the wall. In the cabinets there is crumpled, cryptically patterned tissue paper, the kind for wrapping precious objects, but empty. Finely etched into the glass are the names of cultural artefacts and their taxonomies reflected in the mirrored bases of the cabinets. The words are those of the European collectors: “Bamboo shaft”, “Womerahs”, “Nulla Nulla Sharp-pointed”, “Three Plaster casts of Aboriginal feet and fingers” etc. The words are like ghosts—you’re always looking through them. Some are crossed out. The patterns on the paper are also traces, delicate designs based, for example, on “‘two drawings by Mickey, native of the Ulladulla tribe’…1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition, Chicago.” The writing on the walls is just as fragile, it’s in pencil. On one side of long diagonal lines it’s in an Aboriginal language; on the other it’s in English, an often derogatory account of Indigenous people, forecasting their inevitable extinction, but noting occasional virtues, like skill at drawing. The sound score is also ghostly; it’s difficult to find its point of emanation (until you realise it’s the cabinets themselves) as it distantly catalogues a world of objects and people lost to invasion, scattered to the world’s museums and extinction. Sound of Missing Objects is a melancholy work. Beyond anger, its sense of loss is deeply felt, realised as measured, beautiful, putting desecration to rest in a reconstitution and emptying of the 19th century museum.

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India@oz.sangam, Urban Theatre Projects, co-directors Cicily Ponnor, Alicia Talbot; visual design artist Vananda Ram; multimedia Sam James; musical director Phil Downing; choreographer Chum Ehelepola; sound artists Masala Mix; DJ earthbrownkid; Parramatta Riverside Theatres, Oct 2-12

Sleeplessness, performer, maker, installation Karen Therese; visual media design, installation Sean Bacon; sound design, composer Anna Liebzeit; dramaturg Nikki Heywood; facilitating director Toula Filokostas; film artist Margie Medlin; latex screens Jane Shadbolt; Performance Space, Oct 1-12

The Cool Room, writer Sivan Gabrielovich, director Deborah Leiser, designer Niklas Pajanti, performers Matthew Crosby, Majid Shockor, Alex Ben-Mayor, Karen Therese, Konstantinos Tsetsonis; Performing Lines; Downstairs Theatre, Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney, Oct 16-Nov 2

Sound of Missing Objects, installation by Panos Couros, Jonathan Jones, Illaria Vanni; Performance Space, Oct 3-Nov1,

Carnivale, Sydney, Sept 24-Oct 19

RealTime issue #58 Dec-Jan 2003 pg. 10

Halcyon

Among new music events in recent months the one that lit me up was Raising Sparks from sopranos Alison Morgan and Jenny Duck-Chong who, as Halcyon, gather skilled musicians around them to present rare contemporary compositions and commissions. The standout in this truly daunting program was Harrison Birtwistle’s 9 Settings of Celan (1996) from his Pulse Shadows series. One of the enduring great late modernists, there is a monumentality about this British composer’s work, a sense of vast movements of nature and thought even when writing for small forces, here sublimely integrated soprano, 2 clarinets, cello, double bass and the requisite pulsing viola (Nicole Forsyth). Sensibly, Halycon reproduced translations of the Celan text in the program allowing for reflection on the poet’s brooding imagery. Morgan, in great voice, enunciated with clarity and in the challenging Todtnauberg, displayed eerie ease in the rapid alternations between the octaves of text spoken and sung.

In an hermetic reverie on the divinity scattered throughout creation, the Scots composer James Macmillan’s polystylistic Raising Sparks (to a poem by Michael Symmons Roberts) blends and juxtaposes chant, folk tune, flares and bursts of hurried sound, operatic passion and passages of simple tonal beauty. It’s music that is accessible but that also manages to formally challenge. Equally, Macmillan allows his Catholic faith to open up to Jewish mysticism, musically realised in the opening and recurrent chanting of ‘zimzum.’ (“In the Hasidic tradition the moment of creation can be understood as a divine act of self limitation [zimzum], where God held back his own power and light to make space to create something other than himself”; program note.)

By comparison, Australian composer Jane Stanley’s Aunts (2003) to a poem by David Malouf seemed modest fare, rather too literal at times in its enactment of the text, but nonetheless a fine vehicle for the entwining voices of soprano Morgan and mezzo Duck-Chong who seem to become the aunts while at the same time observing them at a distance both ironic and sympathetic. Also on the program, Paul Stanhope’s Shadow Dancing (2001) has a Ravelian summery ease, clarinet jazziness and, in the second movement, an (almost excessive) eastern edge on the viola, all held together by an engaging and finally mellow dancerly propulsion.

Raising Sparks was a big concert yielding striking resonances and contrasting visions between the Macmillan and the Birtwistle, from the low chant of ‘zimzum’ in the one as the light of creation shatters across the universe and, in the other, the final, hugely sustained last note on the word “light” following on from Beckettian angst glowing with hope, dimly (the same passage bluntly utters: “Art pap”). This was an exemplary concert—musically brave, thoughtful and meditative.

ensemble offspring

Back from Poland and beyond, ensemble offspring continued its adventurous programming with a collection of idiosyncratic compositions in a multimedia context. Ever a risky business, the engagement of music in concert with new media is littered with failures, while dance, for example, seems to me to be making a pretty good go of it. In Lucy Guerin’s Melt or the best work of Company in Space, there’s a meticulously crafted and balanced relationship between projected images, sound score and the live body. There were moments in Testimony, the Sandy Evans/Nigel Jamieson/Paul Grabowksy tribute to Charlie Parker, where all media coexisted in a thrilling dynamic. In this concert however the projected imagery didn’t always enjoy such a relationship, the conjunction between media simply being too loose, one or other element in danger of becoming mere background, and sometimes it was best to just shut the eyes. That said, it was still a pretty interesting concert which ever way you didn’t look at it.

Justine Cooper’s videos, Moist and Excitation, have been exhibited internationally, making beautiful a red and blue microscopy flow of “blood, phlegm, pus, cervical mucus and tears…transformed into images of interstellar geographies” (program note). Silence would do justice to these images, but Barton Staggs’ composition guarantees the reverie starting with bowed vibes and mellow piano rhythmically attuned to the ebb and flow of the bulging liquid image in Moist. The ensuing Excitation video tryptich suggests an eternity of living and the music is an empathetic mix of movement and stasis as if the instruments are resonating with the images, calling back to them, a bizarre music of the spheres, of micro and macrocosms. The associations seem casual, but they work.

Unfortunately, White Call, the James McGrath interpretative images meant to be teamed with Morton Feldman’s Instruments 1 had been impounded, we were told, by terror-nervous customs officers. Feldman had to stand on his own which, of course, he did admirably. Rarely heard in Sydney (Adelaide’s the place) there is much in Feldman to love and linger with and little to fear: an unpredictable linearity, theatrical moments, beautiful textures shades of ritual and evocations of the delicious rattle of the gangaku orchestra.

The concert’s main work, The Cattle Raid of Cooley or The Show, Imaginary Operas in Three Acts didn’t cut the new media mustard. This over-narrated lumbering juxtaposition of a tale of yore and trendy Manhattan arts scene fused with the disparate work of a trio of visual artists is in desperate need of editing on every front, as well as some serious aesthetic reassessment. Matthew Shlomowitz’s score needs more aural attention than most with its relentless modernist angularity let alone having to stand up against scrolling text inexpertly voiced and images that are either too far removed from the content of the tales or too obviously illustrative to be effective partners to the music. Occasionally there are visually inventive moments, for example when scattered sentences fall into a heap of words across the bottom of the screen. Musically it’s a seriously demanding work served well by the ensemble, especially in Adam Yee’s virtuosic performance on oboe, in fact this is the strongest visual element in this opera without song.

Ensemble 24

The highlight of this double bill was Australian composer George Lentz’s Caeli Enarrant… IV. Informed by the composer’s mysticism (it would have fitted Halcyon’s Raising Sparks program more than comfortably), the adoption of instrumental techniques that evoke the music of Tibetan Buddhism and the careful deployment of silences, Caeli Enarrant… is an engrossing work and not an easy one to describe in its many shifts of pace, tone and pitch. As Gordon Kerry writes in his excellent sleeve note on the CD of Caeli Enarrant… III & IV (Ensemble 24, Naxos, 8.557019), Lentz’s “harmony ranges between strident density and radiant consonance.” Passages of hard-edged modernism co-exist with a postmodern penchant for a sublime melody; a loud, starry burst of cymbals (pre-recorded) sits beside a silence that can surprise with its fullness, and the cosmos is evoked in all its strangeness. Presented essentially as a string quartet interpolated with pre-recorded passages (presumably to bring bigger forces into play, but making for an awkward fit) and very occasional live percussion, this was a truly memorable performance.

The audiophonic work, Derelict Woman (writer Susan Rogers, director Richard Buckham, composer Barton Staggs) was a less satisfactory experience regardless of its meticulous realisation and aural production values. Staggs’ contribution, realised live and on tape, musically and as soundscape, was assured and enveloping. Occasionally it revealed a distinctive compositional voice, most evident in the mellifluous piano part (Tamara Anna Cislowska) reminscent of his writing for Moist and Excitation in the ensemble offspring program (see above).

As for a relationship between Rogers’ text (intoned by Kerry Walker) and Staggs’ score there seemed little to it except in the very broadest sense as one would expect, say, of much movie music. Of course there were moments without words when spaces were opened up and there was a glimpse of a potential dialectic that could have driven what seemed to settle into stasis. The central problem was the text, a whimsical, sentimental evocation of a bag lady who narrates an account of her life, a world of velvets and perfumes and feathers and poetry, and encounters with other eccentrics. For the most part it’s numbingly ethereal, largely devoid of the specificity of personality and place that might have earthed it. Well into this epic of recollection when the woman finds 2 plastic bags, one full of body parts, the other of money, things liven up a little. The woman develops an affection for an ear and a penis and hangs onto them, and some of the money, when she turns over her find to the police. There’s suddenly an edge and wit to the writing (and some eerie plot possibilities) but it’s in such disjunction with the rest of Rogers’ reverie that by then it doesn’t really matter.

Halycon, Raising Sparks, conductor Matthew Wood, Verbruggen Hall, Sydney Conservatorium, Nov 7

ensemble offspring, The Imaginary Opera Project, Music Workshop, Sydney Conservatorium, Nov 2

Ensemble 24, New Music Network & The Studio, A Derelict Woman, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, Nov 16

RealTime issue #58 Dec-Jan 2003 pg. 44

There are 2 fundamental directions in sound: an increase in sonic or musical density through rising volume or an increase in layering of materials; or a decrease in density through the minimisation of volume or a greater spaciousness between materials. As I revisit those Punk era recordings that introduced me to experimental music, such as Suicide, The Velvet Underground, The Birthday Party, The Fall and Cabaret Voltaire, I find I have little patience for those who build on John Cage’s 4’33” by exploring ever more dispersed or quiet musics. For me the harsher, fuller soundscapes command attention more effectively than low level acoustics. At the 2 performances of the Melbourne leg of i.audio, it was the former which, to paraphrase Iggy Pop, brought raw power runnin’ to me.

The first night featured several artists whose approach epitomised, in different ways, the drive towards low sonic densities. Natasha Anderson (contrabass recorder) and Jim Denley (various flutes and parts thereof), both Make It Up Club regulars, represent a trend in the crossover between free jazz and new music improvisation. Their performance was all incomplete noises and ‘improperly’ produced woodwind and brass sounds, off-centre gasps across the mouthpiece, or un-tongued, barely sustained whispers through hollow tubes. This was a world of isolated fragments, of numerous gestures that led to surprises or sudden drop-outs of enunciation. While this approach has its adherents, it constitutes a musical cul-de-sac. Once you’re familiar with Denley’s extraordinary sonic range, there is little more to appreciate, while Anderson’s material holds marginally more interest largely because of her relatively exotic instruments.

Regular collaborators Oren Ambarchi and Philip Samartzis—here joined by Joel Stern—exhibited a considerably less gestural quality due to their instrumentation (processed guitar; prepared CDs and electronics; and laptop and electronics, respectively). There was nevertheless a similar sense of dancing about the edges of silences and spaciousness due to the extreme subtlety of Samartzis’ dispersed sinewave intrusions and crackles, or Ambarchi’s elusive, gritty materials. Once again, the lack of consistent, overt energy or something more arresting to hang on to left me indifferent. The unintended earth hum that persisted throughout all of the first evening’s performances was extremely irritating given the quiet nature of this piece.

The hum presented an insurmountable problem for Taku Sugimoto, the first night’s closing act. The Japanese artist’s long piece—frankly shocking in its radical minimalism—consisted simply of his crouching beside his guitar and amplifier, essentially willing a gentle, cottony, fluttering hum from these devices. With another hum already in the system though, identifying Sugimoto’s barely audible evocations required an act of monumentally close listening. I found myself wishing Sugimoto might spontaneously transform into extreme noise artists Merzbow or Voicecrack. If you are going to summon the beasts that dwell within electronic equipment, I’d rather raging demons than hollow angels.

Unlike the first night, the second was characterised by works of considerable sonic density and the earth buzz was absent. The first 2 performances by Will Guthrie and Arek Gulbenkoglu, then Scott Horscroft with his mini guitar orchestra, were both readily coherent because of their foundational use of layered, sustained notes and chords. Guthrie built his own base by lightly flicking a large, amplified gong with a carefully positioned hand fan, while Horscroft forged an even denser weft of chords by mixing and manipulating 4 continuously agitated, amplified guitars.

Guthrie sat at a desk of percussion items and electronic processors, while the similarly electronically endowed Gulbenkoglu tweaked and mashed materials over the pick-up of his prone guitar. Their improvisations had a visibly gestural quality, yet it was the bedrock of Guthrie’s gong and the equally evocative, underlying sound of fan-blades through the guitar’s bridge that made this performance more than a collection of intriguing discontinuities. The sustained, continuous materials established a context for Guthrie’s measured twangs and scrapes of pliable metal rods, or the shaking of a large spring, whose sound was reshaped through the amplifying medium of the small drum on which it sat. Gulbenkoglu meanwhile pressed metal brushes and steel wool over the guitar’s lightly harmonising strings and through its popping, crackling pick-up. When the sustained sounds dropped out, these smaller, secondary gestures were suddenly foregrounded, taking on a dramatic intensity.

Horscroft’s performance was simultaneously both more and less complex. Where Guthrie and Gulbenkoglu used a heavy, bassy substratum to provide a contrast to discrete musical flourishes of a different sonic character, Horscroft produced a thicker layering of essentially like materials, deepening and increasing their musico-dramatic charge through the accumulation of first guitar hums and taps, then single notes and chords, and finally inserting within these a simple, 3-note sequence. Although Horscroft’s extended gathering and cycling of polyrhythms recalled Steve Reich, the sound was closer to Terry Riley’s messier, more ecstatic minimalism, married with such classics of sheets of guitar and feedback as Television’s Marquee Moon (Elektra, NY: 1977).

Although jazz-noise artists David Brown (abused guitar) and Sean Baxter (drums and junk) had much in common with fellow improvisers Anderson and Denley, the proximity of Brown and Baxter to rock and its in-your-face manifestations gave their performance a greater depth and volume. The 2 shifted between tiny crinkles and passages that literally slid from one to the other as Baxter let his scratching, bowing stick travel in a single arc from one bent cymbal to another before the artists counterpointed each other with more aggressive, chaotic explosions. Brown and Baxter presented a typically solid work at i.audio, adopting a late Modernist, jangly quality through the addition of Anthony Pateras’ impressive prepared piano crashes, waves and fine miniaturas.

Japanese vocalist Ami Yoshida concluded the evening with an enthralling curio; a horrified, acoustic counterpart to the electronically produced “Little Voice” of Laurie Anderson. Yoshida both externally and internally squeezed her vocal chords and larynx, amplifying these sounds within her head alone, rather than in her chest. This created a highly restricted, squeaking, piercing, choked note; a kind of aural scraping of the open-mouthed, sound “e.” Yoshida’s performance constituted a distillation of the erotic scream of horror film, an absolute reduction and purification of the acoustics of terror and sex to its merest hints, yet no less sonicly powerful for this. The physical challenges involved in forcefully producing such a cry did mean however that Yoshida’s vocalisations functioned more as a demonstration than performance.

The highlight of both evenings was Robin Fox, who overcame the poor PA set-up of the first night to offer a forcefully ripping, laptop performance. Fox’s piece had a commanding rise and fall of squelched electro noises, cut with brittle, musique-concrete—like masses, all characterised by a sense of sonic cut-off and a leaping between materials which evoked a particularly aggressive, electronic version of hip-hop turntablism. Laurie Anderson once joked that her jangling, amplified violin work reflected the beat of a dance that we all unconsciously know: one that’s produced when you stick your finger into a power point. Fox’s compelling beats similarly summoned tunes that were too chaotic to consciously decipher, but which subliminally extended deep within the body and the psyche. Only sonic dynamism of this power can approach the “raw power” that Iggy Pop and the Stooges tore from their Marshall stacks.

i.audio, curator caleb k., Performance Space, Sydney, Sept 12-20; Footscray Community Arts Centre, Melbourne, Sept 17-18

RealTime issue #58 Dec-Jan 2003 pg. 45

Ed Osborn & Elision, Particle Moves 2003
photo courtesy Institute of Modern Art

In installations by Ed Osborn (Germany) and Nigel Helyer (Australia) in Brisbane and Sydney respectively, I spend most of the time staring at the floor. And listening. Especially listening. In both works suspect objects litter gallery floors. In Osborn’s Particle Moves, clusters of tiny metal disks, appearing to hover just over the sheen of the concrete floor, suddenly buzz and rattle to life and move short distances like wary robotic insects. In Helyer’s Seed, the objects are overtly worrisome, they’re landmines neatly positioned on the centre of a series of eastern prayer mats. But they’re also transmitters and as you approach them you pick up the sounds they emit in the earphones (which you collected when you left your shoes outside) via the handset you carry, replicated to look like a mine detector. Elsewhere on the floorspace of Particle Moves sound drivers vibrate wok-shaped bowls and long wavering rods; on the walls elegant elliptical black metal cut-outs a la Matisse are just as driven, quietly humming or crackling or thundering between protracted silences. As you come within range of each of the “mines” in Seed you detect not a warning, but the 99 names of Allah, looped Arabic music and extracts read from the Koran.

Nigel Helyer, Seed

At one level Seed is curiously meditative; you journey from one mine to another, from one passage of the Koran to the next, you learn, you take in the details of the mats, the insistent rhythms of the music. On another level it is alarming, associations turn between agriculture and war, between the seeds of life and the seeds of death. Helyer writes: “…the death toll inflicted by landmines (principally in the developing world) is equivalent to the appalling destruction of the World Trade Centre—repeated 5 times each year.” Other resonances accumulate in Helyer’s “sonic minefield” to do with our incomprehension of the Islamic faith and culture and what the West will reap from this ignorance.

Osborn’s work is urbane and abstract, but its irregular beauty is made from the fundaments of sound—the movement of particles. It too has much to do with resonance, the loud speaker/sound driver as an instrument engaging with other, musical instruments, the outcomes accumulating in a computer. So although there’s not much room here for metaphor (beyond the distant connotations offered by wok and rod), there is the sense of something unnameable, larger than the gathering of objects in a gallery space, because the objects are linked by sound, because they are growing something sonic and uttering it, it seems, whenever they like. The seeds for this creation were partly sown by members of the Elision ensemble in improvised live performance with Osborn recording them, feeding their sounds into the installation where they became something else. A week later I had the space to myself, but not really. The room rattled and sighed and sang and wailed and went silent and I waited and it sang again.

Seed and Particle Movement confirm in their very different ways the power of expertly realised sound installations to fascinate and disturb, to take you deep into and through sound into rewritten, re-sounded worlds.

Particle Moves, Ed Osborn, IMA, Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, July 31-Aug 30; Nigel Helyer, Gone to Earth: Seed and Haiku, Boutwell Draper Gallery, Redfern, Sydney, Sept 10-Oct 4

RealTime issue #58 Dec-Jan 2003 pg. 46

Lyndon Terracini’s second Queensland Biennial Festival of Music in July this year was another notable success bringing remarkable music to Queensland and from Queensland itself. Terracini also extended the festival’s regional reach, using the model of uniting local and visiting artists and communities, often through long term workshops and commissions that then belong to those communities. Over a mere 2 festivals the legacy of these collaborations is already in evidence in places like Barcaldine with its massive marimba ensemble and Rockhampton with its 2001 and 2003 symphonies by Elena Katz Chernin with words from local poet Mark Svendsen.

RealTime focused on the Brisbane portion of the program producing over 30 reviews that you can read on our website. (The site also includes interviews with artists working in regional centres—Svendsen, Graeme Leak and Jacinta Foale.) The Brisbane performances ranged from the sublimely epic, Heiner Goebbel’s vast orchestral and vocal work, Surrogate Cities, to the intimate, crystalline Rautavaara choral works performed in a small church, and immersive sound compositions in a tiny theatrette in the Judith Wright Centre.

Twilight concerts in the Spiegeltent attracted crowds with a free taste of some of Australia’s leading musical talents eager to sell their wares to visiting producers and presenters. David Chesworth Ensemble, Clocked Out Duo, Topology and Andrée Greenwell (with Deborah Conway and musicians with excerpts from Dreaming Transportation) delivered engaging sets with vigour and commitment. Patricia Pollett on viola gave one of the best, with an impressive range of Australian compositions, demanding serious listening from her attentive audience and. Trumpeter Scott Tinkler was equally intense, leading a marvellous set with his group, DRUB; the dueting and texturing from guitarist Carl Drewhurst was beautifully distinctive. A substantial excerpt from Chamber Made Opera’s Recital worked well in the intimate space with Helen Noonan in fine voice and executing tautly controlled choreography. The tent also housed daily forums and nightly cabaret performances, late night togetherness and exactly the right kind of hub for an intimate festival.

The Brisbane Powerhouse was home to the International Critics’ Symposium and several performances: a bracing array of creations realised by Elision and a generous and inspired staged concert from Meredith Monk and her ensemble. The highlight of Elision’s Burning House was seeing Lilla Watson’s artwork, Sight and Sound of a Storm in Sky Country (2003) side by side with and projected above Timothy O’Dwyer who delivered a sublimely controlled pointillist saxophone response to the work. Meredith Monk couldn’t bring the fully-staged version of Mercy past Singapore, so we got the concert version, but we weren’t short-changed—Monk and company magnificently gestured, tableaux-ed and danced to their idiosyncratic singing. In the Brisbane City Hall, The Big Percussion Concert packed them in twice over, once again a marvellous cross-cultural extravaganza, as subtle as it was athletic. The following are excerpts from a small selection of RealTime reviews of QBFM 2003.

Goebbels’ Surrogate Cities recalls the great choral symphonies such as Beethoven’s 9th, and Shostakovitch’s 14th, which (with solo voices) muses on an existential death. These were landmark works, as is this. Here, spoken word, taped, sampled sounds, all kinds of unusual percussion instruments, including torn newspapers, bundles of sticks being rattled, a stainless steel mixing bowl—the sounds of civilisation—bring the symphony into the present. Goebbels has managed to avoid the pitfall of many composers who try to blend heterogeneous forms, by weaving his own original form with just a few threads of others, rather than simply adding them on top of each other. ‘D and C for Orchestra’ is intended to evoke city buildings; these replace the forests and fields of the Romantic repertoire. It also suggests a dance, returning regularly to a pulsating theme driven by double basses and contrabassoon and heightened by a clanging triangle and massive brass forces. Passages in ‘D and C for Orchestra’ recall the fatal dance in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and the music for his The Soldier’s Tale, with their dynamic, irresistible energies and the sense of the inevitability of the drama of life being played out.

Generally, this was a splendid performance of an immensely difficult work. The orchestral elements are frequently an amalgam of disparate sounds and textures that do not depend on thematic or harmonic development, and strict direction is required to keep the event together. Expressionistic music of this kind requires concentrated effort by every performer. The work itself is metamorphosing, for example new elements were added in this performance and the sequence was quite different from the CD version (ECM New Series 1688 465 338-2). The soloists were superb—David Moss’ vocal range is prodigious, from baritone to countertenor. Goebbels’ writing would be unrealisable without such a performer. Smith and Moss are not merely singers. Some of the texts Moss delivered were babble, a meaningless abstraction of the sound rather than the content of conversation, recalling the work of Berio, and requiring consummate skill to bring off. Smith’s performance was superb; both are vital to the success of the work. On stage, their presence is dramatic, operatic in its intensity.

Heiner Goebbels has created an extraordinary synthesis out of a disparate array of musical forms and instrumentation. Surrogate Cities is a masterpiece and a fitting opening to the Queensland Biennial Festival of Music.

Heiner Goebbels, Surrogate Cities, The Queensland Orchestra, conductor Andrea Molino, Concert Hall, QPAC, July 18

Gail Priest opened the show. A couple of laptops, logos glowing in the darkness. Priest’s work involved live mixing of samples, and some text to speech improv. Beautifully paced set, starting slow with spooky wooo-wooos, scissors working, clanking train journeys with delays. The limited palette produced coherence with just the right amount of variation. The text to speech was hard to decipher at times, losing semantics to become punctuation for the underlying drones. One highlight of the set was the use of very deep register tones—sub-bass better than I have previously heard, no oscillating feedback boom resonating to the architecture, just clear and large. At the end, the lid goes down, and the machine shuts down.

Bruce Mowson then introduced his work with a slyly disarming apology. He told us that it would be fairly static, a case of turning a sound on then waiting 12 minutes for it to end. Ready. Set. Go. The sound jumped out like a real bastard, harsh pumping machine noise full on into the head. And it kept on coming, no let up, no change. Except to the listener, modulating their attention to the relentless interplay between room acoustics and sound source. Only criticism was the volume—too loud. Consult that audiologist. I joined many others in putting my fingers in my ears about halfway through. But quality music. And then it stopped.

Lawrence English and Philip Samartzis then stepped up and improvised some statics and circuits. Beginnings were gradual, slow microsounds from the turntable, walks on moist gravel. Some sine waves wandered in and got close enough to set up interference. Sounds of foraging and late night listening to something scrabbling inside the wall. Not so much overt structure in this performance. More crafted sounds and obsessive tweaking. Fine motor control. Rifling through cases of white label CDs.

After the interval came the grand old man. Bernard Parmegiani, pioneer of tape music and loops when loops were rings of physical tape, not a method for addressing files. Parmegiani mixed 3 stereo tracks from CD across all the speakers of the diffusion system to get those sounds moving through the space. Worked a treat, much better than just playing straight stereo.

The pieces came in chronological order. First up was Capture Ephemere from 1967. I’d forgotten how much I missed the rich sound of analog tapes. The piece had an economy of means that strengthened its impact. Speed changes and echoes, cut and splice. Next was Rouge Mort from 1987. Nightbirds. Wind. Trees. Hipster bongos and violins. From natural to abstract and back. 17 minutes of sonic and dynamic variety. Last up was Les Memoire des Sons from 2001, a more electro-acoustic work using the sounds of bells, the wind, blowing through pipes, accelerating to create headlong rushing and hurtling through electro-acoustic space.

Timothy O’Dwyer’s and Lilla Watson’s composition, Sight and Sound of a Storm in Sky Country (2003) is a collaboration in which Watson, an Aboriginal artist, has made an artwork in response to a piece of music by O’Dwyer, and the composer/performer O’Dwyer has then made a new piece of music for electronically mediated saxophone based on, or as a response to Watson’s artwork. That artists should respond in such a way to each other’s work is not unusual. For example, we know of Mondrian’s interest in jazz. What is significant here is the cross-cultural nature of the work and the active collaboration between 2 artists who have both reconsidered the forms of their cultural traditions and synthesised something new and different. Instead of using traditional pigment or modern acrylic paint, Watson’s artworks are made by burning rows of small holes in layers of heavy drawing paper and adding a further layer of coloured papers beneath that are visible through the holes, the colours evoking sky, water and so on. The paper around the holes is scorched by the burning process in a controlled way, creating motifs. Thus the artworks are highly symbolic—not only do they tell the story of Watson’s country, but they also symbolise for a wider audience the use of fire to pierce and to mark, and the importance of the trace (of the smoke) and the rituals in traditional art. The layering of the papers also suggests a metaphor for the layering of cultural and traditional forms, the ‘true’ colours found beneath the pierced, blank surface.

Watson’s work is an abstraction that parallels the abstract forms of another culture, providing common ground on which both artists can reach and greet each other. O’Dwyer’s musical response to Watson’s art is itself heavily layered and is concerned with the physicality, almost as ritual, of the performance. The O’Dwyer/Watson work is significant musically, and makes clear the value of experimental and developmental composition. Such a work can be appreciated not only in terms of musicality and form but also due to its symbolic significance within wider cultural contexts. O’Dwyer’s performance of the music, in front of the projected images of Watson’s works, was captivating.

The concert finale was Rautavaara’s 1979 setting of the Magnificat, a more darkly brooding piece than the lighter, earlier works. Sung in Latin, the voicing included a countertenor, and the soprano solos were hauntingly beautiful. The work alternates powerful, gestural statements with softer passages to build drama. Lines are sung in parallel with spoken text evoking an angelic chorus. But this work was not the finale after all, the audience volubly demanding an encore. The choir chose another Finnish hero, Jean Sibelius, and offered 2 of his works, the latter a choral setting of Finlandia. Culminating in a single melodic line that reaches a powerful crescendo, Finlandia was intense and moving. One wondered how many in the audience might have wanted to join the choir in singing what amounts to a Finnish anthem. The Kampin Laulu 23-member choir was superb, creating an ethereal sound that filled the gracious St Mary’s, the voices clear and balanced.

Ethereal Voices: The Music of Einojuhani Rautavaara,Kampin Laulu Chamber Choir
St Mary’s Church, Brisbane, July 23

Monk’s melodic style is like no other, but has connections to an enormous range of music; it embraces the notion of music as a universal language. The voice is perhaps the primary musical universal—all peoples sing. To explore the voice as a musical instrument (she calls it “the original musical instrument”), to produce an astonishing range of sound colours and in settings that suggest ritual, is to join a very ancient tradition that nevertheless sounds utterly new. A visitor from 50,000 years ago could relate to this music, but it has also been on New York’s cutting edge since the 1960s.

This makes the music an excellent vehicle for the themes embraced in Mercy, the experience of giving, receiving and withholding compassion. A highlight, for example, is a duet between a doctor and patient, ending with the sung word “help” repeated by both. The voices intertwine to become a single sound, Monk making virtuosic use of the hocket technique so beloved of medieval troubadours and West African singers, where the notes of a single melody are divided between 2 or more performers.

At other points in Mercy, sounds are passed around the whole ensemble (2 male and 2 female singers, piano, percussion and clarinets, with the instrumentalists contributing vocals) creating a mesmerising spatial effect. In “Liquid Air”, pairs of kneeling singers sway around each other, the sound moving between and seeming to wrap around them.

In Shaking, dance and music are married completely—the movement and sound are inseparable. The singers shake their heads from side to side while rotating their bodies, creating constant pitch shifts and tremolos. The effect is both disturbing (with its appearance of insanity) and absorbingly beautiful.

Monk’s troupe of performers are extraordinarily devoted. They constitute a whole singing tradition of their own founded on Monk’s inspiration. And they share great virtuosity (I was particularly impressed, for example, by Theo Bleckmann’s precise, clarinet-like head voice) and theatrical, whole-body sensibility. The camaraderie and community was palpable. The 3 instrumentalists embraced the performance whole-heartedly, contributing improvisation, playing multiple instruments (pianist Allison Sniffin often joining the vocals, and also playing violin; clarinettist Bohdan Hilash performing on all clarinets from piccolo to contrabass) and inventing new sounds (percussionist John Hollenbeck coaxing complex overtones by playful use of a microphone and cymbals).

Porch and Woo-la weh from Monk’s 1977 work Songs from Hill have a folk-based melodic progression exploring vowel sounds. Vowels and notes seem completely interlinked, in symbiotic relation. Her Insect Songs investigate some of the harsher edges of the voice, the first using a dry throaty static, the second ringing out nasal tones accompanied by playful gesture. Movement is inherent in the production of the sounds and Monk adopts a different body position and attitude for each piece, like the open-chested exuberance of Bird Code. Of these unaccompanied works the most impressive were the Light Songs from 1988, duets for solo voice, like Click Song 1 with its soft-palette humming accompanied by its own rhythm track of tongue clicks and tocks. The jawharp piece from Songs from the Hill was also a highlight with beautiful manipulation of vibration and harmonics.

These early pieces set the conceptual framework for Mercy, performed in a pared-back concert version but with a distillation of choreography, spatialisation and gesture to evoke a sense of the depth of the work. Mercy begins with Monk’s expanding arpeggios and the haunting tones of disembodied voices perfectly underpinned by the bowed vibraphone. The other performers join Monk for the collective calling of “leaping song.” It feels like a summoning. The ensemble is virtuosic—expansive voices with constantly shifting qualities and gloriously minimalist piano cycles augmented by perfectly placed woodwind and percussive lines. Of particular beauty are the reflective drone interludes performed by John Hollenbeck for cymbal and microphone. The highlight of the piece is doctor/patient, an astounding duet between Monk and Theo Bleckmann of syncopated vocal leaps and yelps for help, one of the few ‘words’ in the opera. Bleckmann and Monk go note for note, their voices so tightly plaited that you can’t tell whose voice is whose. Each segment of Mercy is divine, with shifts of tone and context, investigations of each singer’s vocal qualities, and the astounding beauty of the voices slipping around, melding and then separating again. Monk has written a cry for compassion that sinks into the flesh and dwells in you.

In the artists’ talk following the performance, Monk lets us in on some of the imagery created by Ann Hamilton for the fully-staged work, including a mouth held video camera, huge sheets of bubble membrane and paper cascades. You can’t help yearning to see Mercy in full production (the same goes for Laurie Anderson’s recent concert tour of Happiness), however the meticulously presented concert version is a rewarding and inspirational experience.

ABC Management has axed The Listening Room. ABC Classic FM has cut New Music Australia. Aside from Critical Mass and the occasional new arts documentary, ABC TV does little to embody the vibrant Australian arts. There’s something toxic in the organisation that’s invaded the broadcaster, eating at its art, destroying vital organs, impelling it to cut off its ears and gouge out its eyes, rendering it a near comatose, cosy-chatshow, personality-driven hulk, drained of the diverse riches that once were its life blood.

Despite the depletions it too has suffered, Radio National still manages to ingest and convert the world into rich aural sustenance but how long before the virus strikes there too? What has caused this hideous illness? Is it an agent from the outside or is it something immunological of the ABC’s very own making, hollowing it from the inside out?

It would be easy to blame the Howard government: sure it provides the sickly environment of funding deprivation, editorial trepidation and the dumbing-down fear of being labelled “elitist.” And yes, this year’s refusal by the Federal Government to properly fund the national broadcaster led, much to Senator Richard Alston’s chagrin, to the unplugging of the ABC’s new digital prostheses. But other savings had to be made. What were the solutions? Abortion— removal of the cadet training program—and sterilisation—cut out the ABC’s capacity to make art, remove the internationally acclaimed, prize-winning (2003 Prix Italia) Listening Room made by sound artists and composers from across Australia and its richly creative team of producers.

Of course, the ABC is no stranger to self-mutilation insanely lopping off an ear when it banished stereo radio drama to mono broadcast and conducting a home lobotomy with the excision of Arts Today. Julie Copeland on Sunday mornings and Andrew Ford on Saturdays just keep the arts brain ticking over, but can they live up to the prodigious Australian arts output? Why remove The Listening Room at a mere one hour a week! If it was a matter of cost, as smugly proposed by The Sydney Morning Herald’s The Guide (Nov 10-16) why not re-think, re-shape, re-budget? How about some holistic solutions for improvement? To toss it aside is to discard a living part of our culture. Where are the micro-surgeons of ABC management? Pick it up, put it back!

The Listening Room is living, contemporary art, exemplary of sound art and new developments in the generation of multimedia and hybrid art forms. As the concert hall future narrows and technologies provide new compositional tools and broadcast media, this program offers composers new ways of working. It provides established international links and outlets for Australian art. Each year an emerging artist is awarded a 6-month fellowship with The Listening Room, jointly offered by the Australia Council’s New Media Arts Board and the ABC. The associated Adlib project created by Jon Rose is archiving an astonishing collection of the ways all kinds of Australians make music. Cut out The Listening Room and you lose all of this, you do irreparable damage to the body of the ABC, the body of Australian sound art, the body of Australian culture.

The admirable New Music Australia on Classic FM plays music both accessible and challenging, recorded and, importantly, live and provides significant interviews with leading composers (a handful still downloadable from the no-longer updated ABC arts web gateway). It seems that the program will be dissected and its parts grafted onto Classic FM here and there in the hope that listeners will accept more Australian music if it becomes a part of the everyday listening experience. A lot will depend on the surgical cunning of the programmer—will the listening body tolerate an invasion of the unfamiliar and the sometimes innovative, and at what time of the day? Will the voices of living composers and musicians be allowed to interrupt wall-to-wall classics and, if yes, for how long? Will new music continue to be played live, and how often? If the transplant is rejected by audiences, what has the operation achieved? Will ABC middle management have the nerve and arts nouse to persist with a higher quota of Australian music in the face of possible bad reaction?

Again it has to be asked why the radical surgery? What’s wrong with a specialist focus on developments in Australian contemporary music in a specific timeslot, a place the listener knows they can visit. Yes, Australian music has come of age, but the mature body still needs a good solid workout, not short runs off the leash.

The death of programs like The Listening Room and New Music Australia is just more bad news for Australian artists at a time when David Throsby’s report for the Australia Council on artists’ incomes (Don’t Give Up Your Day Job) reveals high levels of poverty. With the exit of The Listening Room there will be substantially reduced commissions. The ABC may continue to make artful mini-series, comedies and documentaries but they hardly represent the full extent of the broadcaster’s capacities. When Throsby launched his report he decried the absence of an Australian cultural policy. When the ABC fails to live up to its charter “to reflect our cultural diversity” (that’s for SBS isn’t it?), to contribute to a national sense of identity and produce cultural enrichment, it appears to have no consistent cultural policy (Art is now subsumed to Entertainment in the ABC hierarchy). At times like this, it seems that achieving a cultural policy for Australia is about as likely as a policy on human rights—then we really would have to address the refugee issue.

The cultural health of the ABC used to be reflected, as the charter puts it, in its “balance between broadcasting programs of wide appeal and specialized programs”; the result was tremendous choice. Its vision of Australia was not ratings-driven. It was for all Australians, a truly diverse bunch, not a bland mass of homogenous bodies. Now the generalist position prevails with ratings clearly governing programming decisions. Lifestyle shows supplant arts programs and almost everywhere on radio live talk is easier than crafted programs and a lot cheaper—and sounds like it.

Deaf in one ear to radio drama and stone deaf to audio art, and in danger of tuning out to new music, will the ABC stop listening to Australian artists altogether? If so we might as well sign that free trade agreement with the US and get the selling off over and done with. What is needed is a coherent cultural policy so that art is assured of its place within the ABC and our national broadcaster regains its cultural well-being. KG

Happy Holidays

To all of our readers, writers, contributing editors, advertisers, subscribers and the funding bodies who generously support RealTime+OnScreen, we wish you a Merry Xmas and a creative 2004. ‘Prosperous’ is not a word thrown around casually in arts circles, but if you’re feeling flush think about treating yourself or a friend to a RealTime subscription for 2004. We’d really appreciate it and we trust you will too!

KunstenFestivaldesArt, Brussels, May 2003. Thirty innovative projects, 20 world premieres, 15 venues, over 3 weeks in one very edgy city. Time is of the essence. And it’s not just my experience of ‘festival time’, which always seems distorted, what with the early morning bedtimes, the running late through dark, unfamiliar streets and the twilight zone of entire days spent at the theatre. Time is a theme and an obsession in much of the work I see at Kunsten, offering structures and perceptions to interrogate and subvert.

Rushing from the airport I thankfully arrive on time for the latest offering from Societas Raffaelo Sanzio. BR#04 (IV Episode of Tragedia Endogonida) is the 4th part of a dramatic cycle to be presented over 3 years in 9 European cities. Director Romeo Castellucci’s aim is to investigate the traditions and mechanics of tragedy and reinterpret them in each city into the world of the here and now.

In Brussels, a large white marble room (perhaps it’s the lobby of some bureaucratic office at the headquarters of the EU) becomes the laboratory in which a series of scenes examine the duration of the body through life and time, from conception to death. Some of the images are devastatingly direct; the curtains open to reveal a baby lying on his belly. He is left to cry for 3 or 4 minutes. The curtains close. Other scenes are thick with complexity: apocryphal text, ancient and macabre rites, ominous figures who flash through the phosphorescence. I get the feeling that I’m not witnessing these astonishing images for the first time, but that they have been mined directly from my own or some collective subconscious, some shared dreaming. In one scene 2 policemen bludgeon a young man to death. The company is disinclined to suspend my disbelief. I watch them repeatedly apply fake blood to the young man’s skin. It spreads as he writhes. Each time he is struck the theatre shakes with violent synthetic sound and every blow to his body resonates through mine from sheer decibel power. The mechanics of theatre become the tools of brutality.

Tickets for the festival are, by Australian standards, incredibly cheap, and highly prized. Every event is full. One of the festival staff tells me that a woman who arrived late to a show because her husband was trying to park the car, threw herself screaming at the theatre doors and refused to be removed when she discovered her tickets had been resold.

The show she missed was Christoph Marthlaler’s interpretation of Schubert’s lieder cycle Die schöne Müllerin (The Fair Maid of the Mill). Bypassing the original performative context of the recital, Marthaler dramatises the cycle in a severe flat salon, a kind of rundown eastern bloc apartment, where a troop of listless nobodies mooch with seemingly no purpose, biding time with their songs of romantic yearning and loss. The staging, full of physical comedy and absurd imagery has a kind of anti-structure, which is at odds with and entirely complementary to the music.

Most of the ensemble are not professional singers and I was particularly moved by their imperfect voices. It is as if these characters have more to lose, mainlining the audience to the fragility inherent in the songs. There’s a compelling rhythm and sense of time at work. Where, in a conventional lieder recital, Schubert’s music would provide the dominant time structure, Marthaler has employed a choreography designed to work against it. Certain songs and actions are repeated again and again, or drawn out to be painfully slow, some characters disengage mid-song and go and hide in a cupboard or sleep in an enormous feather bed. Time dilates, warps or suspends.

Edit Kaldor explores the experience of cyber-time in her ingenious solo Or Press Escape. On entering the theatre we see her sitting alone, her back to the audience, in front of her computer’s giant screen. The only sound is the amplified staccato of the keys as she types. She records last night’s dream, makes ‘to do’ lists, tidies her desktop, receives mail, downloads files, deletes them, empties the trash. It’s an unlikely script, but this silent text is utterly theatrical. Solitary thoughts are made explicit, censored and unwittingly betrayed. At one point Kaldor enters a live chat room and for the first time we see her face via the web cam on her desk, illuminating a wonderful tension between the smallness of her body sitting in the half-light and the expansiveness of her projected cyber-self.

My highlight is 5, a timed journey through a series of installation/performances created by Kris Verdonck and Aernoudt Jacobs. Their work attempts to reduce to an extreme the codes of visual and performing arts, allowing the essence of each code to inform the other, producing a hybrid form, a distillation that achieves an exquisite impact. In one installation, IN, an actress dressed as a French maid is submerged in a tank of water. She breathes via a tube connected to air canisters outside the tank. Microphones amplify her breathing and the slight movements of her body. Her senses have been distorted: she is in a trance. In another, To Sleep we enter the tiny room to discover 4 people asleep on transparent cots. They have altered their body clocks and undergone hypnosis to actually be asleep. The initial impact deepens through the 20-minute duration of each piece. Our subjective responses begin to write the narrative. In the room with the sleepers, first we creep and whisper, then sit in silence on the perimeter, ‘performing’ with as much authenticity as those we are trying not to wake.

Die schöne Müllerin, co-production KunstenFestivaldesArts and Schauspielhaus Zürich, direction Christoph Marthaler, set & costumes Anna Viebrock, Halles de Schaerbeek, Brussels, May 6-8

BR#04, Tragedia Endogonidia IV Episode, Societas Raffaello Sanzio, direction, set, lighting & costumes Romeo Castellucci, vocal sound & score Chiara Guidi, writings Claudia Castellucci, music & live execution Scott Gibbons, La Raffinerie, Brussels, May 4-7

Or Press Escape, concept, text, performance Edit Kaldor, Kaaitheatrestudios, Brussels, May 5-9

5, concept Kris Verdonck, sound Aernoudt Jacobs, performance for IN Heike Langsdorf, BSBbis, May 11-15

I Am Blood has 2 dramaturgs listed in its credits. It is curious this fascination with and increasing dependence upon the dramaturg over the past couple of decades. These dramatic architects, these advisers and guides in the architectonics of theatre: the systematic arrangement of knowledge. With the unities of time, place and action, with the hero’s journey from unknowing to experience via the monster’s cave, with the lineal chain of cause and effect to anagnorisis and perepeteia etc etc, there was/is an underlying arrangement of experience, so that the various stories laid upon the top produced variations upon old (and deeply resonant) themes of individual and personal (re)organisation. Not so with so many contemporary performances: Teshigawara’s I Was Real: Documents, Needcompany’s Snakesong, Castelluci’s Giulio Cesare and Genesis, to mention only some of those that I have written about for RealTime over the past few years. And now the ‘anxiety of formlessness’ caused by Jan Fabre’s I Am Blood. They are not easy to absorb. They are impossible to fit into any recognisable structure. They feel carefully fashioned but without any underlying form; and maybe (horror!) this equates to surface without soul.

The Age reviewer Hilary Crampton concluded her review: “As Art, the work fails, because it lacks any sense of selectivity, of form and structure, resulting in an indulgent presentation…” Neil Jillett in the Sunday Age dismissed it as “a spectacular display of chaotic nastiness…poorly choreographed…a bloody shambles.” (Interesting that the word ‘shambles’ which, figuratively, has come to mean “a mess, a muddle”, was originally the word for “a butcher’s market-stall, a flesh market, a slaughterhouse.” Jillett’s description was more apt than perhaps he realised.) For many of my friends and fellow artists it was a ‘mess’, ‘studentish’, ‘obvious’, ‘lacking directorial control’ etc. There’s something going on here, some kind of extreme concern. Hence my term ‘anxiety of formlessness’ to describe the effect it has caused. And I’m not saying I was immune to it: alternately enthralled, confused, thinking I understood it, bored, excited and shocked etc.

Fabre’s show in 1984 was called The Power of Theatrical Madness—in that title he stated a mission which he still adheres to. Hans-Thies Lehmann describes it thus: “Theatre was and is searching for and constructing spaces and discourses liberated as far as possible from the restraints of goals (telos), hierarchy and causal logic. This search may terminate in scenic poems, meandering narration, fragmentation and other procedures…on the borderline of logic and reason.” (Performance Research, Spring 1997). Fabre is also a visual artist: a sculptor, graphic artist, installation artist and video maker. The pressure of the experimentation in the visual arts pushing against the tenacious borders of theatre can be felt in I Am Blood.

The beetle has been a fascination of Fabre’s for many years, in art and theatre. Beetles wear their skeleton on the outside. It is their defence against the penetration of the flesh. Near the beginning of I Am Blood a chorus of men in armour dance a mock chorus line number while one in their midst spins out into a crazed ‘structureless’ sequence in which armour and sword are no longer defences but potential for self-damage. On reflection, the show seems as much as anything to be a meditation upon the act of shedding and covering. The bodies cover themselves with armour, wedding dresses, ordinary clothes, only to take them off again and again revealing the vulnerable flesh (and blood) underneath. Suction cups are placed on the body, only to fall shattering on the floor, the shards swept up presumably to protect bare feet. More metaphorically, steel tables are alternately used as platforms for human display and surgical benches for bodily desecration. I think of the jeeps and tanks and helicopters in Iraq, supposedly providing armoured protection to the ‘invulnerable’ US troops, but ripped away increasingly by bombs and missiles to expose the flesh of the soldiers underneath. We are still kidding ourselves like beetles do. We are still medieval.

The ultimate protection, of course, is the word, which can justify and sanctify and give a sense of order to every mad thing we do to one another—in the name of the father. The show begins with 2 figures sharing the stage. One is the fearless, mainly naked, seemingly sexless, curly-headed contortionist who is witness to all the theatrical madness that proceeds, who attempts to send it all up, and who ends with his nakedness covered in feathers. The other is the woman with the book on her head. She is the word provider throughout the play. It is she whom we first see and she ends the show as she began it, parading around the stage, confronting us, the book as both weight to carry and armour against whatever may drop from above.

Paradoxically, whilst it resists the recognisable forms of dramatic progression, I Am Blood is made up of images and sequences of exquisite formality, set against sequences of seeming chaos. It is in the progression from one to another that the rationality—the ability to make meaning of it all—breaks down. Lehmann has called this “the aesthetics of poison”: “An image of beauty, craving and desire is presented, but with the addition of a disturbing element, a vivid poisonous green tinge of colour…(which) spoils my enjoyment, while at the same time stimulating it to reach a different level of reflection.” How to reach that level is the challenge these works of ‘mere anarchy’ place upon us.

I Am Blood, writer, director, choreographer, Jan Fabre, Melbourne Festival, Oct 9-25

Director Barrie Kosky’s Australian productions were marked by profuse energy and inventive, often deliberately excessive amalgamations, drawing on expressionism, German language cabaret and Yiddish culture. Although these sometimes seemed wrought only from a rearrangement of these antique references spiced with garish postmodernism, the results were compelling. Kosky’s current Viennese pieces in his new role at the Vienna Schauspielhaus are sharper and sparer but somehow less embracing.

The word about town was that Der verlorene Atem was not Kosky’s best Schauspielhaus show. Though a masterpiece of precision and evocative restraint, it was unsatisfactory as theatre—largely because it offered much but delivered little. Kosky drew on Kafka, specifically the instrument of tortuous punishment and the Law described in The Penal Colony and the destabilising self-transformation in Metamorphosis. Like much of Der verlorene Atem though, these rich motifs became throwaway ideas within a performance mostly devoted to the expressions layered within the strained female voice.

The piece began beautifully, with actor Yehuda Almagor playing a digressive Jewish Houdini, chatting charismatically with the audience about his “apparat” which contained Kafka’s ambiguous machine. Almagor unbuttoned his shirt in wan light while singing in Hebrew, suggesting that this appalling device might offer the transcendence that its victims desired. In Act 2, 4 variously costumed tap-dancers performed German, Yiddish and Broadway cabaret tunes outside Houdini’s former cabinet. Metamorphosis’ protagonist Gregor remained hidden inside this Tabernacle, but rather than depicting Gregor’s family confusedly dealing with his change, Kosky’s unseen Gregor was represented as a playful, growling-voiced participant in his relations’ light musical games, interjecting lines into songs otherwise unconnected to Kafka’s themes—an amusing interlude, but not much more.

If the second act constituted a fraying of Kosky’s theatrical conviction, the third signalled its abandonment. The audience was presented with nothing but almost immobile performers, caught in nebulous spotlights, singing Robert Schumann’s ode to lost love, Dichterliebe, in German. As one spectator quipped, a recital is fine, just don’t call it theatre. The performance was beautifully modulated in playing-off broken voices with operatic fullness, but this was not a well-conceived conclusion. As another spectator observed, yes, we all end up feeling like we’re locked in a box, alone and unloved—but this is a banal final message for a piece subtitled: A Kafka evening in 3 acts (Ein Kafka Abend in 3 Akten).

While Kosky staged a cabaret recital misrepresented as theatre, Melbourne’s Aphids offered 2 fine music performances which stretched (though did not break) the recital form. Skin Quartet, composed by David Young, used various graphic and notational methods which were then incorporated within Louisa Bufardeci’s accompanying projections derived from close-ups of skin tones, tattoo-like shapes, and maps rich in the patina of cultural history. Young kept the arrangements integrated and softly flowing, despite the composition’s post-classical basis, with interjections and exclamations largely resting easily within the overall sound, rather than cutting across it. This produced a beautifully seductive effect, but it did mean that all the musical ideas seemed to have been introduced about two thirds in, while only deferentially alluding to the racial politics foregrounded by the visuals. Skin Quartet was nevertheless an exquisite gem, sitting well against Aphids’ more variegated Fight With Violin.

Fight showcased 6 contemporary pieces for solo violin ranging from Motoharu Kawashima’s fun, John-Cage-esque instruction piece (rub violin on top of head, end performance with empty stage and a recording of a classical piece) to Kate Neal’s almost romantic sketch of melancholy, sour notes. Yasutaka Hemmi performing in a Japanese armed martial arts dojo, complete with demonstrations enhanced the novelty of these rarely seen works. The audience had to draw its own conclusions about what this combination suggested (the sound of a swiftly drawn katana blade generating a cruel tension in Neal’s work, for example). If nothing else, the staging added firmly poised, meditative bodies to such aggressively avant-gardist compositions as Helmut Lachenmann’s pointillist scrapings.

Dumb Type’s Memorandum was particularly energised by its paradoxical performativity. Video documentation of their 1994 Adelaide Festival production S/N suggested that Memorandum was a weaker work, while dance purists were nonplussed by the its movement elements. These criticisms missed the heart though of this extraordinary, totally overwhelming and wry, yet impersonal, work. At a sonic level alone, the monumentally forceful, finely tuned and shaped white-noise assaults and the repetitive, purified sine-waves of Ryoji Ikeda were sublime in the wonderful audio mix—I melt at Ikeda’s combination of carefully nuanced violence and electronic minimalism.

Dumb Type’s formation in 1990 epitomised the supremely manufactured and designed aesthetic of the Japanese “bubble economy”; the company’s productions today restate the familiar motif of the postmodern individual, a self sublimely dispersed throughout culture, language and technology. Dumb Type was however always guilty of presenting style over substance—indeed, style as substance—so such a summary does not do justice to its consummately slick form, produced through sound, action, multi-screen projection and shadow play. The company’s approach transformed the arguably antiquated technique of performance art (as in Jan Fabre’s I Am Blood) into a glistening, plastinated extrusion.

The company masterfully achieved an astonishingly clarified, controlled aestheticisation of banal actions, thoughts, experiences and metaphors. Everyday events and ideas were rendered strange on stage not through the manipulation of content, but through the form and framing of the work. A man sketched his room, trying to remember each piece of furniture, which then magically arrived. But it was the mundane details beautifully cast into relief by these acts that were significant, not what this act said about memory. I was entranced as each new gesture of writing made a sharp line in the creases of the man’s pressed, red shirt. Such exquisite minutiae of the everyday framed an act of play so serious in its simplicity of execution that it became both transcendent and funny. Dumb Type may be trapped in an aesthetic cul de sac, but remain nevertheless impressive. Memorandum was destined to appeal to those who marvel at simple things well presented, such as the donuts, coffee and pie that pervade David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, Laurie Anderson’s USA Live or Quentin Tarantino’s gangster cinema.

Der verlorene Atem: Ein Kafka Abend in 3 Akten [The Lost Breath: A Kafka evening in 3 acts], director Barrie Kosky, dramaturg Susanna Goldberg, choreography Dagmar Benda, design Alon Rodeh, Izaq Ronen, Michael Zerz, lighting Michael Zerz, performers Yehuda Almagor, Beatrice Frey, Tania Golden, Melita Jurisic, Florian Carove, Wiener Schauspielhaus, Athenaeum, Oct 14-19

Skin Quartet, Aphids, composer David Young, visual artist / projection Louisa Bufardeci, violin Yasutaka Hemmi, Stephanie Lindner, viola Jason Bunn, violoncello Caerwen Martin, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Oct 13-15

Fight With Violin, Aphids, violin Yasutaka Hemmi, martial arts by members of Melbourne Budokai, composers Helmut Lachenmann, David Young, Luciano Berio, Kate Neal, Brian Ferneyhough, Motoharu Kawashima, Kenshikan Dojo, Oct 19

Memorandum, Dumb Type, sound Ryoji Ikeda, visuals Shiro Takatani, Takayuki Fujimoto, Hiromasa Tomari, computer programming Tomohiro Ueshiba, performers Seiko Kato, Takao Kawaguchi, Hidekazu Maeda, Noriko Sunayama, Mayumi Tanaka, Misako Yabuuchi, Manna Fujiwara, So Ozaki, Forum, Oct 9-12

The first sign that sacredCOW’s performance is about to begin is indeed a kind of quivering, a rustling among the plastic strips hanging from the ceiling in John Levey’s sparse, but effective set, as if the wind has changed and something is afoot. Then from deep inside the cavernous brick hallway running behind the Brisbane Powerhouse Visy theatre comes the sound of voices, layered, spoken and sung; the content is obscured for the moment. The performers are first sighted amidst Suzon Fuk’s projections which use the floor and back wall as their surface. Underlying the entire performance, constantly changing and merging, they are vital scenographic components. While the detail is sometimes unclear, the evocation of a space that is never static, that’s in transit, is clearly felt. At first sight the performers seem to be floating mid-air, holding a lantern they navigate the deep recesses of the Visy before arriving onstage on what is revealed to be a hospital gurney. It’s a compelling beginning and casts a spell over the entire performance.

Described as “an irreverent meditation on death and beyond”, The Quivering was inspired by Homer’s Sirens. Rather than femmes fatales cruelly luring mariners to their death, sacredCOW portrays the sirens as “compassionate lamenters” navigating the passage of death. Once on stage, the performers (Dawn Albinger, Scotia Monkivitch and Julie Robson) transform from sirens crossing the River Styx into co(s)mic waitresses in an outback Australian roadhouse. This transformation, like the countless others on which this performance is built, appears effortless. It soon becomes apparent that this is no ordinary roadhouse. Here bodies are washed and souls are sung onwards. In their direct address and occasional audience interactions, the intention, and sometimes the effect, is to implicate the audience in this passing. One of the motivating factors behind the generation of this work has been to “address community responses to death and dying”, given that “dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living” (Walter Benjamin, program note). Accordingly, one of sacredCOW’s creative partners in this project has been Mount Olivet Hospice where the group were artists-in-residence.

Combining the comic with the cosmic is one of The Quivering’s most compelling traits. Filling time between the dying, these waitresses, like everyone stuck in eternal limbo, are by turns moody, bored and ecstatic. There are resonances here with Sartre’s No Exit and pretty much anything by Beckett, as The Quivering depicts the inevitable toll of familiarity. The broad, physicalised humour that arises from this is a perfect counterpoint to the delicacy usually associated with the subject matter. Special mention must be made of Monkivitch’s adept work in those perfect Aussie signifiers, rubber thongs. Her ability to maintain her grip throughout all manner of physical manoeuvring verges on the virtuosic.

Each performer brings unique qualities to the performance: Albinger, a fleshy sensuality; Monkivitch, a deadpan that flits between absurd and melancholic; and Robson, a sweetly naïve persona that is rounded out by the warm depths of her singing voice. Yet they are an ensemble in every sense of the word as each of the characters/performers is a vital component in the overall effect of the piece. It is rare to witness such intimate and effortless ensemble work, apparent both in the performance work and in the depth of image and beauty of language.

The overriding language of The Quivering is an interplay between image and sound (with exquisite compositions by Robson, Catherine Mundy and Brett Collery). These are the moments that leave an imprint. Monkivitch running on the spot, transforming before our eyes and the endless progression of deaths and dying depicted in a mesmeric sequence of bodies laid out. So simple and yet so clearly portraying the unrelenting nature of death both images evoke complex emotions in the audience. Even so, there were times in the orchestration of the piece where the layers smothered rather than illuminated, where the constant activity sometimes obscured moments that required our specific attention. A few stripped back moments, some time alone with each of the waitresses might have punctuated the overall effect.

Ending as it began, with the turning of the tide, the waitresses set sail again: “Send us a postcard. Let us know where you end up!” This is a performance that I hope will turn up again—it deserves a long life.

sacredCOW, The Quivering: a matter of life and death, devised by sacredCOW & Nikki Heywood, director Nikki Heywood, performers Dawn Albinger, Scotia Monkivitch, Julie Robson, dramaturg Virginia Baxter, music Julie Robson, Catherine Mundy, Brett Collery, design John Levey, video Suzon Fuks, lighting Andrew Meadows, sound Brett Collery; Brisbane Powerhouse, Nov 5-15

Part nightclub, part theatre, part church, part peepshow, the Living Museum of Fetish/ized Identities is a hyperactive, kaleidoscopic experience of identities, perceptions and realities. Wandering amongst the market-like crowd, each performer appears like a hologram—from one angle they display the trappings of this culture, this religion, this sexual inclination. Move your head a little, wander to the other side of the room and suddenly everything shifts.

This is the second visitation of Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Museum to Performance Space. The first, in 2001, provided one of the most invigorating experiences in contemporary performance since Sydney Front powder-puffed their genitals and paid some of us in the audience $20 to strip for them. This incarnation of the Museum reprised by Performance Space in collaboration with Carnivale had an abbreviated creative development time, drawing upon work discovered in the first version, the ongoing explorations of Gómez-Peña’s group Pocha Nostra, and a one-week Sydney workshop with former and new participants. As Gómez-Peña said, this version had the intention of “opening the doors” to the creative process.

Once again, Performance Space converts to a museum, with living tableaux dotted around performative stations. The performers have created schizophrenic identities for themselves, based on perceptions of nationality, sexuality, spirituality. A number of the “artificial savages” have carried over from 2001. Victoria Spence’s Sister Australis Domesticada Mongrolis is back—a Carry On/Benny Hill nurse (or is it check out chick?), her face obscured by a Luna Park mask. The statuesque Spence draws a crowd with her perplexing reflection of the middle class white girl’s confusion and incipient fear of banality. El Health Ministro Globalizionista (Rolando Ramos) is equally disturbing with his portable accoutrements of human size boxes that open out to a kind of cabinet of curiosities, lorded over by his alter-ego, a body-painted savage with bureaucratic proclivities.

Valerie Berry’s Oriental Warrior Terrorista Senorita, is a stunning performative specimen, swinging between a kind of catholic/voodoo black-veiled widow and stripped down vision of pure feistiness ready to challenge any opponent on any grounds with her own gestural martial art. Berry’s physical precision and power are matched by Brian Fuata’s King Poly-Captivatis Kong which has developed more primate DNA over the intervening 2 years. His Polynesian King alternates between devout austerity and flirty banana-munching naivety. These last 2 draw upon a heightened religiosity that sits well within the pervasive latino/catholicism of the Pocha Nostra performers Michelle Ceballos and Gómez-Peña.

Ceballos performs before the ever present crucifix as La Femma Latina Extrema, an armour-clad latino Amazon spliced with Prima Ballerina. Peña’s preoccupation as El Mad Mex Techno-Shaman is to create tableaux vivant with the live and sweaty audience members, many of whom are more than willing to participate and even bare all. The museum also had some new exhibits in the personae of Para/Normal/Trooper/Betty (Wahabibi Moussa), a lock-and-loaded walking sacred parchment with texts inscribed on rolls of flesh and, in amongst it all, a band of roving Ghost Specimens—Teik Kim Pok looking divine in heels as the Moonwalking Geisha, Kira Carden as a sexy, flexy hoolahoopa and Elena Knok as a go go-dancing rabbit/waitress(?). Add to this some body piercers in the corner, a noodle stand to indulge olfactory and oral appetites, and the Great Wall of Sound pumping out courtesy of DJ Gemma, and you’re getting pretty much to ecstatic overload.

This Living Museum of Fetish/ized Identities joins others in Gómez Peña’s ongoing investigation: living in this media consumed world, where all manifestations of difference have been commodified by advertising, subsumed to create ‘mainstream bizarre’, how can the performance artist be truly transgressive? He is interested in how a generation raised on the postmodern spectacle can absorb ideological content? Gómez-Peña’s answer is interactivity—disguise content in experience. In the first Museum, interaction began tentatively with audiences circling around the edges, testing their levels of involvement. As the season progressed, word spread of the most “unlikely” people stepping into Gómez-Peña’s collaged tableaux. This time I detected far more eager participation which set me thinking about contemporary audiences, how participation impacts on performance and whether all participation is valid. Are people participating out of a desire to add to the commentary or as a vehicle for relatively safe exhibitionism? Both have benefits for participants and performers alike but I wondered about the potential in a work like this for the latter to reinforce “the commodification and homogenisation of the transgressive.”

My encounter with Living Museum of Fetish/ized Identities was my 4th (clocking up 3 visits in 2001) and delivered an equally vibrant and stimulating experience. No doubt, for first time visitors, this one conjured all the power of the first. Gómez-Peña has created an amazing model for engagement and commentary. As the museum works its way around the globe, the grinding prerogative of the avant-garde becomes manifest. Where will this model go next? How can it push an audience—now desperate to get naked and participate—to the next level, so that spectacle doesn’t once again dominate the complexities of content? If there is an answer, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and his collaborators are well qualified to discover it.

The Living Museum of Fetish/ized Identities, Carnivale, Performance Space, September 25-28.

The wonderful Bruce Keller is no more but his spirit of invention, community and wild good humour persists in the lives of friends, close associates and students and in the memories of the many works and projects on which he collaborated. The number of Bruce’s friends is astonishing. As eulogists commented, many of them were at the funeral service reflecting the multiple facets of his life and talents. As James Waites described it in his fine obituary for Bruce in the Sydney Morning Herald (“Dramaturg who eschewed cultural boundaries”, Nov 19), the funeral service was a standing-room-only occasion replete with a standing ovation. The ceremony included chamber music, finely sung hymns, loving eulogies and, yes, jokes, and a sublimely sad a capella gospel farewell, “Steal away.”

Speakers at the funeral initiated what was to become the character of the day through to the end of the wake at Performance Space, and one which Bruce with his archivist sensibility would have enjoyed—the unfolding of a cultural history of performance from the 70s to the present constellating around the life of a unique artist. This mostly unwritten history was revealed in recollections, anecdotes, jokes and performances (including Scaring pigeons in the park: a solo performance with rubber gloves) drawn from memory, scripts, videos (Bruce, bigger than life) and a joke-athon. The history was told in no particular order but it evoked some 30 years when Australian theatre opened up to movement and image, intercultural exchange and social engagement. We heard stories of Bruce’s university days—the comic collaborations with the late Lance Curtis; spontaneous, anarchic one-off performances; briskly contrived dada-ist acts for public places; the wonderful Anthill years in Melbourne (Bruce had been a co-founder of Australian Nouveau Theatre with Jean-Pierre Mignon); a richly innovative decade with Entr’acte Theatre in Sydney and overseas; and, while teaching with great commitment at the University of Western Sydney, the intercultural project he was working on until the very end, Citymoon, the Vietnamese-Australian Contemporary Theatre Company with poet and performer Binh Duy Ta and other collaborators.

This packed, creative life also included a great success, Puppy Love, the solo work he wrote and played—as the dog—to thousands and which was published by Currency Press. Bruce was also a perceptive dramaturg on plays and performances including Alma de Groen’s The Rivers of China for the Sydney Theatre Company.

Friends quickly produced a commemorative booklet celebrating Bruce’s life and work and circulated it at the wake. They have also moved briskly to preserve and make accessible Bruce’s considerable archive of books, scripts, scrapbooks and videos.

It’s difficult to sum up a life, especially one as creative and multi-faceted as Bruce Keller’s. However, in eulogies and memoriums a recurrent theme was Bruce’s sense of humour and his love of joking. This was no mere quirk of personality but an attitude to life, a way of being. In the memorial booklet, performer Jai McHenry (now living in France) captures the first-hand feel of this spirit: “He would laugh so hard (at either his jokes or mine—it made no difference), he would laugh so maniacally. Well, there was nowhere to go but into the maelstrom with him. His laughter came so fast, it almost seemed to flee his body, like some wild thing making a break for it. He is the only man I know who could giggle so loudly, so like a child. His pleasure, his joy, his understanding that life is supremely, absurdly funny was totally contagious. To laugh with Bruce was a given. Just to think of him now brings great joy.”

Across that sad October day, from funeral to wake, there were many moments of vivid recollection and depiction of Bruce’s life and performance milieu, eruptions of laughter and surprise at hearing slices of forgotten history. Of the many, I enjoyed hearing read aloud an email from John Nobbs and Jacqui Carroll of Frank Theatre in Brisbane. In the mid 70s John and Jacqui had shared a house with and then lived in the same street with Bruce in Sydney. It says something of his spontaneity, communality and creativity. He would have loved to be in on this telling.

“Arthur St was…the HQ of The Ashes Of Sydney, the brainchild of Bruce, Jacqui and Greg Scheimer, set up as a international non-profit foundation directly in competition with The Fires Of London, the portentous chamber group led by Peter Maxwell Davies who had wafted through town some months before. There was only one legendary performance, I think in March 1976, and it involved many arty mates cruising around Sydney harbour in a ferry looking at some fairly bizarre site-specific events. One particularly memorable moment occurred when Bruce, Jacqui and I were to be observed in a rowing boat crossing behind the ferry somewhere near Balmain. It was an old-fashioned clinker rowing boat, Bruce was in the front in a monk’s habit holding a lantern a la Tarot. I was in the middle attempting to row dressed in a dinner suit with a pig’s head on, and Jacqui was in the back in a full-on wedding outfit with a substantial veil. We had set ourselves up neatly and were steaming along looking the very essence of surreal when the silly bloody ferry came around the island the WRONG way and nearly clobbered us. Jacqui’s veil became a sea anchor and tried to pull her to a watery grave. I hadn’t a clue what was going on as the pig’s head made things difficult and Bruce, the only one who could actually see the imminent disaster, was in the bow trying to maintain composure—and an Ahab like countenance—whilst continuously muttering under his breath, They’re getting closer!! They’re getting closer!!!

“Eventually they saw us and swerved but it was a bit toooo close and definitely NOT workplace health and safety. However, a great night was had by all and in many ways it was very essential Bruce in that (1) it wasn’t too organised, (2) it was fantastic in conception, (3) it was a lot of fun.”

The Sydney performance community has lost a fine performer, a great collaborator and organiser, and an inspiring teacher.

Bruce Keller died of complications from pancreatic cancer on Saturday, October 18. KG

Fran Ferguson was a seer of beauty and originality. Painter, theatre and costume designer, sculptor, writer, ceramicist, teacher and traveller, she lived an artist’s life, a passionate collage of texture, colour and intuition, leaving a trail of precious creations that criss-cross Australia.

Born in Orange in NSW, Frances’ mischievous nature and vibrant imagination propelled her to create the most extraordinary artworks and objects in the most ordinary of realities.

Cherished by her family, Frances was challenged early in her adolescence by severe diabetes. The onset of her medical condition was compounded a few years later by the premature death of her mother. This formative event shadowed her throughout her life and created a raw echo throughout her many creative works.

In 1986 Fran entered Charles Sturt University in Bathurst to study Theatre/Media. There she designed sets and costumes for over fifty student shows. After college Fran moved to Sydney where she created striking visual frameworks for the early innovative works of contemporary theatre companies such as Death Defying Theatre (now Urban Theatre Projects), Legs On The Wall and Stalker, amongst others.

Fran’s creative output was immense and she produced a body of work that included painting and drawing, costumes and ceramics. The inspiration for her work came from friends, family, memories, dreams and fantasies. The experience of being, with all its follies and graces, was the stuff of her art and it was exquisite.

She possessed a rare combination of deep emotional intelligence and manual dexterity, and so was rarely, if ever, thwarted in giving life to the curious stuff of her dreams. Anything conjured in her sparkling imagination could be wrought in her nimble hands. The techniques of many trades, from carpentry to welding, needlepoint to printing, came naturally to her.

In 1995 Frances was commissioned by Arts Out West and the Wellington Council to design and build the landmark sculpture “Gateway to Wellington”, in Central Western NSW. Using twisted steel beams from the collapsed Wellington Bridge, she undertook the greatest artistic challenge of her life.

Standing almost 15 metres high, the reinforced metal beams became the sculptural skeleton which she fleshed out with stonework, mosaics, glass, ceramics welding and metal work. What started as a six-month gig expanded into a project of Herculean proportions. The “Gateway”, resonating with local history and the essence of the surrounding landscape, took 3 years to complete.

Premier Bob Carr finally launched the work, but no public launch or applause could ever really recognise the painstaking hours and ultimately, years that Fran dedicated to that incredible work of glass, mosaic and metal. The “Gateway “ is visited by thousands of tourists annually.

This work, perhaps more obviously than many, demonstrated Fran’s dogged tenacity and sheer endurance when it came to completing an artwork. Many all-nighters went by where she had the sewing machine out utterly intent on finishing a costume. She always made it in time. And the work was always incredible.

Those of us who were privileged to be a part of Fran’s life could only sit back in amazement at the way a simple doodle on a shopping list became something you’d want to frame. A keen dancer (and enterprising op-shopper) Frances fiercely seized each day; perhaps she had an inkling that her illness would shorten her life.

Frances was humble, generous, courageous, reckless, warm-hearted, funny, wise, and strong. She was loved by many.

Brett Sheehy has taken on the mantle of artistic director of the Adelaide Festival of the Arts for 2006. In his 2004 Sydney Festival (his term finishes 2005) there are signs of an exciting, concentrated vision that could augur well for Adelaide where the considerable budget also allows for greater depth of programming and for a festival to be a work of art, a finely wrought, visionary vessel.

Must-sees…

Sydney Festival programs of the past have usually included a few must-see shows that demonstrate the passions and mutating forms of contemporary performance, dance and music. This time there’s a host of them: music theatre maestro Heiner Goebbels’ Hashirigaki; the edgiest of choreographers, Meg Stuart; the film of John Adams’ opera The Death of Klinghoffer; the Wesley Enoch/Legs on the Wall collaboration, Eora Crossing; Kronos Quartet; Bang on a Can All-Stars cellist Maya Beiser; Def Poetry Jam; Asian Dub Foundation; George Piper Dancers; Chunky Move’s Tense Dave; Chamber Made Opera’s Phobia; James Brennan’s The Glass Garden; Jon Rose and Hollis Taylor’s Great Fences of Australia; and new music ensemble Elision’s Tulp, The Body Public (our cover photo) in collaboration with new media artist Justine Cooper and composer John Rogers. It’s a substantial lineup with some welcome challenges of the kind that Sydney audiences too rarely experience.

The visual arts program is also strong, focusing on a handful of significant creators headed by a pioneer of installation, video art and multimedia performance, Nam Jun Paik who will be featured both at the Art Gallery of NSW and in the Opera House forecourt. The show at AGNSW will include documentation of his 1976 visit to Australia with the late Charlotte Moorman who collaborated with Paik, performing on cello while held aloft above the Opera House by helium-filled balloons and elsewhere wearing the TV Bra for Living Sculpture. Paik again returns to the forecourt, this time with a large part of his 32 cars for the 20th century play Mozart’s Requiem: silver painted vintage cars filled with electronic detritus surround a neon and laser tower built by Paik collaborator, New Yorker Norman Ballard. Provocateurs Tracey Moffat and the late Leigh Bowery will have retrospectives at the MCA. Photographers Cherine Fahd and Trent Parke will populate Circular Quay and Martin Place with their idiosyncratic images.

There’s spectacle of course and it’s free: Of Angels and Light by Compagnia di Valerio Festi is to be performed on the Olympic Boulevard, Olympic Park for 3 nights, with artists amidst and above the crowd in a light show of aerial feats and supernatural imagery.

Music theatres

Also in Sydney’s west, there’s a feast of music theatre in Breaking the Cycle, a program of performances accompanied by a 2-day forum presented by Music Theatre Sydney and Riverside Theatre. Melbourne’s Chamber Made Opera will present Phobia. In his online review for RealTime of the work, Jonathan Marshall wrote that “composer Gerard Brophy’s score for Phobia…draws heavily upon the Foley skills and sense of fun displayed by the members of percussionist Graeme Leak’s ensemble, the Ennio Morricone Experience…Through this theatre of sound effects, miked-up celery crunching and gentle mugging on the part of the performers, the narrative and themes of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo are torn apart and scattered throughout an overt performance of sound, identity and text…with a radioactive afterglow produced by film noir’s psychosexual ambiguities.”

Breaking the Cycle includes another significant Melbourne work, James Brennan’s The Glass Garden; Judy Glen’s Melba and Moncrief; a concert performance of the first act of composer Drew Crawford’s fascinating work-in-progress, Eugene & Roie about Eugene Goossens and Rosaleen Norton, the Witch of King Cross; and for young audiences Oz Opera’s Software and the Sonicsphere workshops hosted by Carlos Russell and Margery Smith.

The Riverside Theatre in Paramatta is also presenting Stone Sleeper, a music theatre work from Bosnian composer and director Mirsad (Giga) Jeleskovic setting the poems of Mak Dizdar for a capella choir and 8 musicians, dancers, actors and singers.

The music theatre centrepiece of the festival is Goebbels’ Hashirigaki. Even a concert performance of Goebbels’ Surrogate Cities at this year’s Queensland Biennial Festival of Music was an intensely theatrical experience, and the composer’s Black on White at the 1998 Adelaide Festival was one of that great festival’s high points. Hashirigaki is something altogether different in the unfolding ouevre of Goebbels’ creations. It radically juxtaposes but makes sense of juxtaposing passages from Gertrude Stein’s novel, The Making of Americans, The Beach Boys’ masterpiece Pet Sounds and traditional Japanese folk music taken to new places. The astonishing set and lighting design is by Klaus Grunberg. Willi Bopp, as ever, designs the Goebbels’ sound world.

By the way, don’t miss The Lab, instrument-maker virtuosi and musical wits Graeme Leak and Linsey Pollak’s mad scientist routine showing 3 nights only at the ArtHouse Hotel.

Cinematic musics

The film of John Adams’ opera The Death of Klinghoffer won the 2003 Prix Italia. It will have 2 screenings during the festival, a rare opportunity to see it on the big screen. It’s a powerful work about the hi-jacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship by Palestinian terrorists with Adams and librettist Alice Goodman striving to understand both sides and courting the inevitable controversy, still felt strongly in the USA. The film’s director, Penny Woolcock, claims to have made the work more accessible by adding realist fictional narratives.

Another cinematic music theatre experience, but one with a mix of live and screened performance is La Haine with music by the British intercultural music group Asian Dub Foundation. The acclaimed 1995 black and white film about racism and class, youth violence and police brutality is shown with a live soundscore by the Foundation with “bass’n’drum, bhangra and electro-klezmer.” Add Chamber Made Opera’s Phobia to La Haine and The Death of Klinghoffer and you’ll enjoy a fascinating perspective on sound and cinema.

Tulp: be in it

Not exactly music theatre, but a close relative in the era of hybrid arts, Tulp: The Body Public is a musical, surround-sound and visual exploration of the human body inspired by Rembrandt’s famous painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Thomas Tulp. Composer-musician John Rogers can write engagingly and accessibly (the musical The Sunshine Club 1999, the score for Bob Cat Dancing, Mt Isa for the 2003 Queensland Biennial Festival of Music) but also viscerally as in Inferno (2000) for Elision. And visceral Tulp is. Visual artist Justine Cooper’s internationally lauded videos Moist and Excitation make beautiful the red and blue flow, under microscopy, of bodily fluids. She has also exhibited MRI scans of cross-sections of her own body (see p28).

In December Cooper and Rogers will be collecting sound and body images from volunteers at AGNSW to use in Tulp. The performance space will be made of latex membrane, a screen for these and other images, with the musicians’ bodies as well as their instruments wired for sound. Brisbane-based and admired across Europe, Elision is always exciting, its new music dynamically integrated with design, its passion wrought with intelligence.

The newest music

The Kronos Quartet needs no introduction, but they will introduce you to a remarkable range of music across cultures and forms, proving how far this one group have extended the string quartet repertoire. Witness it yourself, especially in the second of their 2 programs, Caravan. Maya Beiser, the cellist from the wonderful Bang on a Can All-Stars presents a perfect companion program (Pärt, Golijov, Reich, Andriessen, Lang) to Kronos’ first concert (Ruvueltas, Gubaidulina, Reich, Vasks, Golijov), creating a revealing cross-section of contemporary music.

Ross Edwards’ 4th Symphony, Star Chant, like Gorecki’s 3rd is driven by an embracing melody and is accompanied here by projected images of the heavens (David Malin) while John Adams’ On the Transmigration of Souls, a reverie on September 11, is presented with a filmscape by Greg Barrett commissioned by the festival. The program inlcudes Chris Gordon’s Peace on Earth and features the Sydney Symphony Orchestra with Gondwana Voices, Cantillation and the Sydney Children’s Choir.

Watch out too for the Music House to House series, with Lisa Moore (Bang on a Can All-Stars) performing piano works by Kats-Chernin, Bresnick, Rzewski and Schwitters, all composed with text for recitation: the yield is intense, the theatricality striking.

Composer-violist Brett Dean heads 2 strong programs with works by Birtwistle, Boulez and Lentz in one and Lim, Sculthorpe, Messiaen, Ravel, Lentz again (and worth it) and Tulp’s John Rogers.

Last word…on dancing

Alongside Goebbels’ Hashirigaki, the most significant programming in the festival is Alibi, a creation of Brussels-based American choreographer Meg Stuart and her company, Damaged Goods. With powerful, fragmented dancing that appeared to be on the edge of physical and psychological distress, No longer Readymade and No One is Watching were the dance sensations of the 1996 Adelaide Festival.

The company’s dramaturg, New York-based writer André Lepecki writes: “As long as we move and are moved (in the 2 senses of the word, as motion and emotion), there will always be this disquieting accumulation, generation and degeneration of bodies inside the limits of our own bodies and inside the patterns of our daily choreographies: bodies of knowledge, bodies of feelings, bodies of lovers, bodies of sorrows. To acknowledge so human a predicament, the one of being always multiple, always contradictory, always in lack, constitutes the first step by which choreography can emerge.”

Also in the strong lineup of dance are Michael Nunn and William Trevitt (both ex-Royal Ballet) performing works by leading UK choreographers Matthew Bourne, Michael Clark, Akram Kahn, Russell Maliphant and Christopher Wheeldon. Chunky Move will present their Melbourne Festival hit, Tense Dave (see p 8), a fantasia of crumbling identity and voyeurism performed magically on a revolve stage.

There are many other shows in the 2004 Sydney Festival, but the constellation of new music, music theatre works, installations and cinematic music events makes for a great program for the festival-goer looking for a rewarding festival trajectory. Add to that some adventurous dance and you’ve got a festival to pick you up, kick you around, seduce and delight you.

Always a central feature of the Adelaide Festival of Arts visual arts program, the Adelaide Biennial promises to be a major event in 2004. Responding to a brief to stage a program devoted to screen and photographic media, curator Julie Robinson has selected 18 artists, 8 of whom will show screen-based work and 10 photographic works, including multimedia. Robinson will address contemporary photomedia’s subjects and its place in art and look at photography (manipulated and not), video and hybrid forms.

In planning the exhibition Robinson has considered the needs and interests of viewers and is offering opportunities to devote serious attention to the works. She notes that, given the recent proliferation of new media art, the issue of quality is key. Though video and digital forms have been developing for some years, the results are not always memorable and this carefully constructed survey exhibition will do much to focus opinion and raise awareness.

Some material in the Adelaide Biennial will be familiar, but worth revisiting and will gain strength from being included in such a survey. Patricia Piccinini (Melbourne) will be represented by some of the work shown to great acclaim in the recent Venice Biennale as well as a new work that continues her investigative simulations of the merging of human and animal forms. Currently showing, with Piccinini, at the Havana Biennial in Cuba, Craig Walsh (Brisbane) continues his exploration of public space, architecture and the re-centring of the viewer. “Craig’s work will be located in a part of the gallery that is usually out of bounds to viewers,” says Robinson.

David Rosetzky (Melbourne), now exhibiting in Berlin with the well-travelled Piccinini, Rosemary Laing (Sydney) and others as part of a major Australian exhibition (Face Up, Hamburgbahnhoff, Berlin), will show his Untouchable, a 3-video work set in what looks like a domestic interior without walls. Seen only once before in Australia, Untouchable shows characters crossing between screens, discussing issues that we might enjoin but can merely observe.

The role of political commentary in art, and its application in photomedia, threads through this Biennial. Some artists address the gravest questions: legendary Sydney performance artist Mike Parr is shown having his face sewn up in the 20-minute video UnAustralian. In the past Parr has tended to avoid making direct political statements in his work, but this video of a private performance directly addresses government policy on asylum seekers, and it’s harrowing to watch. Topical political concern is continued in Canberra artist Silvia Vélez’s images of hundreds of coloured Post-it notes, each carrying a print depicting anti-Iraq War protests—a collection of forgotten reminders.

In the gallery there will be a series of small rooms for viewing video adjoining an open area showing photographic work or video, or combinations of forms. “You won’t have to sit right through a video to appreciate it,” says Robinson. “Viewers will be able to walk through this area and browse. But…there will be a separate screening room where [viewers] can sit and absorb a succession of videos by several of the artists.” Neither video nor photographic works will be privileged in the exhibition layout.

Robinson has been very careful with her selection, “I am interested in works that anchor the image in, or address reality in some way.” Thus, the Biennial emphasises the capacity of the media to reflect life’s harsh realities and to identify prevailing cultural narratives. We are preoccupied as a society with reality and its transmission through the visual (think of the fashion for Reality TV). Using a range of devices from narrative to symbolic and metaphorical, works in the Biennial will highlight how these media work the ways our perceptions and beliefs are shaped. For example, Linda Wallace (Brisbane) has selected archival images from Australia’s televisual history and juxtaposed them with images from the outside world to establish ambiguous relationships between these spaces.

Wallace’s Entanglements comments on the pervasiveness of lifestyle imagery in the Australian consciousness. Sydney artist Liu Xiao Xian’s photography continues his exploration of the migrant experience, especially of those who are politically and culturally dislocated or isolated. Derek Kreckler (Perth) and Destiny Deacon (Melbourne) use multiple forms—Deacon’s photographs are mounted adjacent to plasma-screen videos, and Kreckler’s large-scale stills adjoin corresponding 3-dimensional forms, dissolving both the physical and psychological boundaries between these media and reiterating the equivalence of forms and information in an image-saturated world.

Deborah Paauwe (Adelaide) continues to develop her work on the costumed child or adolescent girl, adding garish, theatrical make-up to draw another narrative trajectory with references to the fantasy/reality of theatre. This layering of theatrical devices—both the posed photograph and its twin, the stage—acknowledges that the actors (ourselves) are playing at roles, consciously melding the multiple discourses to which we are inevitably subject.

Without the aid of digital manipulation, Rosemary Laing has created stunning imagery that muses on our intrusion into the outback—a stack of bulldust-covered IKEA furniture set on fire and casts of human heads, made by fellow artist Stephen Birch, lolling in a salt-stricken bore. Bronwyn Wright’s (Darwin) photos show derelict, graffitied cars, little oases of grunge art in the Northern Territory desert.

The soundtrack for Sydney writer and artist Adam Geczy’s video From a Remote and Lonely Place (Port Arthur Elegy) will be Peter Sculthorpe’s Irkanda IV (1961) for violin and orchestra. The title of Tasmanian-born Sculthorpe’s haunting, lyrical work is an Aboriginal word for “remote and lonely place”, and Geczy’s video will be exhibited in a long, darkened room on 2 screens, one showing clouds and the other scenes of the site of the former penal colony and recent massacre. Sculthorpe is writing an accompanying catalogue essay for this collaboration.

Works by Tracey Moffatt (Sydney/New York), James Geurts (Adelaide), David Haines (Sydney) and Bill Henson (Melbourne) will add to what promises to be a powerful and timely exhibition.

Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art 2004, curator Julie Robinson, Art Gallery of South Australia, Feb 28-May 30; Artists’ Week Feb 28-March 4 www.adelaidefestival.com.au

My wish is to sensitise the audience to the ephemerality of the event, and I think that sense of ephemerality is really played up when you feel the thing you’re watching is about to destroy itself.
Louise Curham

This statement goes to the very heart of Louise Curham’s filmmaking practice, which straddles the avant-garde traditions of materialist experimental film and reflexive questions generally associated with new media about how an audience interfaces with technology. Curham is a Sydney-based filmmaker who works primarily with Super 8, a narrow-gauge film format that once occupied the market space now filled by domestic camcorders. Rather than using the medium in a traditional way, Curham works directly on the film itself: “I torture the film in any way I can think of: cutting it, bleaching it, scraping it, marking it and collaging it.” This creates highly abstract images of pure texture, colour and light, which take on an organic life of their own when projected on screen.

Trained in film production at the Victorian College of the Arts, Curham produced several dance films (she has been a regular collaborator with choreographer Sue Healey) and conventional narrative shorts before studying painting in the mid-90s. When she returned to filmmaking through the Super 8 medium, her interest in the graphic aspects of the image led to a new direction inspired by filmmakers like Stan Brakhage and, closer to home, Len Lye and Albie Thoms. This has led to a specific approach to screening her work. Rather than employing conventional cinemas, she has exhibited her films in a series of “improvised” screening spaces, from warehouses and galleries in Sydney to the foyer of the New Zealand Film Archive in Auckland. Curham has also played a key role in the revival of the Sydney Super 8 Group, now known as the Sydney Moving Image Coalition (SMIC).

What was it that originally attracted you to the Super 8 medium?

I wanted a format that I could use cheaply and easily so I could teach myself and learn about film from the inside. Although I had done filmmaking at VCA and made several short films, I really felt I didn’t have a handle on the medium and its possibilities. Someone gave me a Super 8 camera and I went from there.

The Super 8 image is a chemical emulsion. Even though my work is very abstract, I’m interested in actuality and riding on the coat-tails of all the loadings associated with photography and its status as a physical document—the fact that it physically exposes a moment in time. Whereas with video it’s a becoming thing; every time you play a video back it’s re-creating itself from a signal. It’s the pure materiality of the filmic image I’m interested in.

How is this interest in reflected in your work?

One of the pivotal things for me is the photographic and documentary aspect of film, because the medium is always indexed to the actual, even when I’m just marking blank film by bleaching or painting it, or scraping away the emulsion. I’m actually physically making that mark and what you see on screen is a record of that marking. It’s also interesting to watch the film degrade as I continually reuse it.

The frailty of the medium seems to play a big part in your work. You always project actual Super 8, rather than making video copies for screening purposes, which means the film often tears or sometimes even melts.

I’m very interested in the “event” of cinema. Not just what’s in the frame, but the whole event of the screening and the environment in which it is taking place, including the location, the apparatus, the screen and the audience. If you take the event as part of the signifying process, then the fact that you’re showing your work using obsolete media becomes really loaded. More specifically, Super 8 has connotations linked to its status as the once-favoured medium for home movies. So I try and create these intimate, non-structured screening environments in galleries and warehouses, where the projection technology is right there in front of the audience. And audiences are often fascinated by the curio factor created by employing this obsolete technology. It’s a way of creating intimacy with the image and the apparatus, so that the machines themselves become part of the artwork.

For me the cinematic event always has a performative aspect that we’ve largely been trained to ignore. I try to re-attune people to the reality of what they’re seeing and what is happening to them right now in the environment they’re in, thus re-sensitising them to the ephemerality not only of the medium, but of all experience. The medium’s frailty is part of that, and helps create a certain anxiety. Because there’s always a tension in film between the medium’s status as a document, and the fact that the document is always ageing and changing. So it’s about reinserting the cinematic experience itself into time, rather than trying to lend it an air of permanence. Recently at the Techno-Derby exhibition at Kudos Gallery, I set up a projector playing black spacer going over sandpaper inside a spool. The film ran so that the emulsion was scratching over the sandpaper as the film was projecting, so the film was both generated and destroyed in the moment of projection. In this way the apparatus itself, and our experience of the apparatus, becomes part of the artwork.

So how does your filmmaking fit into your work with the Sydney Moving Image Coalition?

Originally SMIC was going to be a group for filmmakers to show their work in front of a small, intimate audience. I’m really interested in having that direct contact with my audience, in the same way musicians are. My suspicion is that most filmmakers don’t feel they need that; they’re happy sending their work off to festivals and that’s enough. Consequently the screenings have become more about the event than the filmmakers. Again, we’re interested in the performance aspect, and shaping the whole screening so that it becomes a work of art in itself. Several of the nights have featured improvised live musical collaborations with multiple-screen projections of my work. Three of our 4 events this year have been at Lanfranchi’s, a warehouse space in Chippendale that also plays host to the Camera Obscura screenings of local and overseas experimental shorts. I think the improvised cinema aspect is part of the attraction for some of the audience, and there seem to be a lot of these nights springing up around town. We’re looking at some kind of collaborative work with the Camera Obscura group next year. In the meantime, we’re always looking for films to screen.

Louise Curham’s work will be exhibited at Kudos Gallery, Paddington, February 24-28, 2004. The next SMIC screening: February 3, Lanfranchi’s. http://www.innersense.com.au/mic/sydney.html

42 films and games were banned in Australia over the last year. What better way to round the year off than with an inaugural International Ratings Conference?

In late September, Australia’s Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC) held a conference in Sydney attended by international media classifiers. The theme was “Classification in a Convergent World”, a reflection of the view that the rapidly evolving way that media is produced, distributed and consumed has resulted in media ‘convergence.’ In Australia this prompted legislators in March this year to combine the way computer games and films are classified into one set of guidelines.

Not all classifiers agree with the notion that we are living in a “convergent world.” In fact New Zealand Chief Censor, Bill Hastings, used his presentation to argue that we were in fact seeing media divergence, and reminded us that to a great extent the medium really is the message.

I have to wonder how much the vogue for talking about ‘convergence’ is the result of euphoric cross-marketing spin. To what extent, beyond superficial production values, have the fundamentals of video games and films actually become similar media? Sure, Lord Of the Rings game may look almost as good as the movie but does that mean we’re witnessing a revolution in gameplay that draws on key structural characteristics of the film medium?

A panel of speakers convened by Margaret Pomeranz and including the NSW Attorney-General Bob Debus, had its own interpretation of the “convergent world” theme. Panellists pointed to the ridiculous attempt to police media consumption within national borders when, for example, any Australian with a high speed internet connection can view the banned film Ken Park. Pomeranz proposed an international, purely informational system for media classification, which sounded extremely sensible, but unfortunately we live in a world where the most rational ideas tend to be dismissed as naïve idealism.

One high profile and controversial guest at the conference was American academic Dr Craig Anderson, famous for his strong public statements against video game violence. He naturally became very popular with the mainstream Australian press while here. Anderson presented a confusing (and suspiciously tersely labeled) array of bar graphs with which he attempted to convince us that there is more evidence of a link between media violence and real world violence than between smoking and lung cancer.

By contrast the other academic delegates characterised the results of international media effects research as too conflicting to draw useful conclusions. Australian academic Dr Jeff Brand had the last word in this debate with a commonsense observation: if there was a link between video game violence and real world violence we’d be witnessing a social epidemic and we simply aren’t.

In 2001 Brand was commissioned by the OFLC to write a report based on community submissions as part of a review of their film and game classification guidelines. The most important recommendation in a practical sense was the addition of an R18+ rating for games. This would go some way to halt the internationally notorious Australian practice of cutting and banning popular computer games. Australian gamers were outraged when the adult rating was undemocratically stymied by a veto vote from the Federal and South Australian Attorneys-General. Neither Darryl Williams nor the OFLC attempted to defend this decision during the conference beyond saying the guidelines with respect to games enjoyed “community support”, which they quite clearly don’t given Dr Brand’s findings. So whose are the community voices that the politicians are listening to?

The most visible lobby group from the “will somebody please think of the children” camp is Young Media Australia. From their name you might guess they’re a youth rights advocacy group run by young people but in fact they are censorship advocates and notorious television complaint filers who are visibly in their autumn years. I was struck by the inclusion of Young Media Australia fridge magnets in our conference satchels. The magnet advertises a “helpline” staffed by a real person 24 hours, 7 days a week (it’s true—I checked). Presumably we are supposed to stick it up next to the federal government’s terrorist hotline fridge magnet. That number, in case of media effects emergency, is 1800 700 357.

The classifiers state their primary aim is to safeguard the welfare of young people, and so I found it interesting that there was no youth or consumer representation visible at the conference. The debates centred around how to achieve a balance between protecting children from harm and giving adults the right to see and hear what they want, and arguing over whose duty it is to regulate young people’s media consumption—parents or the state. However, the notion of the right of young people to make choices about their own media consumption was given little attention.

Dr Michael Flood from The Australia Institute pointed out the inconsistency of having the age at which graphic sex is viewable set at 18 while the age of consent is 16. This could be applied to the assumptions about games inherent in the OFLC’s guidelines: that the impact of content is strengthened by interactivity (but as even Craig Anderson admits, this is mere theoretical speculation). Surely actual sex is the ultimate in interactive pornography?

Another telling observation came from Doug Lowenstein from the Entertainment Software Association in the US, who gave a somewhat reluctant response when asked to explain the exact cultural differences between Australia and the US that justified such different sets of regulation for videogames. He pointed out that the notion of protecting free speech is more culturally ingrained in the US than it is here. In fact a recent move by one US state to legislate point of sale restrictions of games to minors was overturned in court on the basis that it infringed the constitutional rights of young people.

I found the conference on the whole quite informative and interesting, and yet the benign and civilised atmosphere belied the true nature of what is at stake. I still remember David Marr’s words on the late night news broadcast a few months ago when the police broke up that screening of Ken Park in Sydney. From the midst of the scuffle he shouted, “This is what censorship means”: simple and blunt physical enforcement by the repressive arm of the state so that some people may not see what certain others don’t want them to.

Surely there’s another option: investment in good quality media. Anyone who truly cares about what kind of entertainment young people consume courtesy of “exploitative sex and violence sells” corporate media empires should be championing more state funding for public broadcasting and funding for videogames as cultural, not just commercial investment. And perhaps one day young people, indeed all people, will be able to make real choices about the media they consume.

“Classification in a Convergent World”, Office of Film and Literature Classification Conference, Crown Plaza, Darling Harbour, Sydney, Sept 21-24

Screen culture in Australia has changed profoundly over the last decade. The wholesale integration of ‘independent’ exhibition into national distribution corporations, the resulting disintegration of the independent exhibition circuit, post September 11 insurance and freight increases, dwindling funding options and greater box office pressure from exhibitors have all had major effects. Increasingly, independent screen culture events have to unwillingly compete with the commercial imperatives of the distribution and exhibition sector. Though the objectives of the 2 are very different, the dynamics of one are directly transposed on the other. Funding agencies are increasingly market driven. In their response to these dramatic shifts most funds are actually going backwards. Screen culture is simply not a priority.

In Western Australia, funding has been lacklustre, falling short of professional expectations and industry demands. Until 2003, screen culture funding for individual projects from the state film development agency, ScreenWest, was capped at $3,000 (though some received more) with the entire annual screen culture fund of $53,000 servicing 25 major and smaller projects/partnerships. Traditional alternate funding opportunities have also dried up with one of the largest government arts funders—Healthway—refusing to fund any film (or arts) project that depicts smoking in any form, whatever the context.

Despite these difficulties, event-based screen culture activity in WA has seen consistent growth. Grass Roots, Revelation Film Festival, Over the Fence, Big Screen, SPLIF are excellent independent examples. It is against this backdrop of enormous industry change and frustratingly static funding levels that a number of WA based practitioners have engaged ScreenWest in aggressive and sustained lobbying, the aim being to create a competitive and professionally based fund and policy with long-term purpose, muscle and impact for all.

Via this sustained pressure, ScreenWest has comprehensively restructured its existing program to create a model that centres on development opportunities and the encouragement of new players across the sector. Previously the fund had twice-yearly application rounds with projects applying to a single fund and assessed internally. The new structure provides a significant departure both in funds and strategic development. ScreenWest has approved a $25,000 injection, taking the fund to $78,000. Of this, $10,000 is an ongoing grant to the Australian Writers Guild, the remainder invested in independent screen culture. Fresh from the ScreenWest Board comes the approval of a 3-tiered structure. There will be a triennial fund of $30,000 for established, locally generated projects that demonstrate long-term strategies and development potential. An annual grant pool of $26,000 has been established for one-off or established local and national projects whose initiators have proven track records. Local events that show ongoing potential may be invited for application to triennial funds. A development fund of $12,000 for new events and practitioners is designed to provide new players with adequate funding and direct mentoring opportunities with industry professionals in the development of their project. The Film & Television Institute (FTI) will administer this fund.

The central priorities in the restructure are to raise the standard of all events and applicants and to encourage the engagement of greater rigour in examining WA audience and industry specifics to develop critical, curatorial, employment and analytical skills in the state and with the applicants. Projects will be peer assessed.

Timing of the rounds is yet to be established but the $25,000 fund increase fell well short of industry needs and recommendations which advised a conservative, considered and well argued $50,000 injection. However, levels will be reviewed as early as February via ScreenWest’s half-yearly budget analysis so the outlook is hopeful for possible increases.

In a positive response to increased costs, the fund is CPI-indexed and reviewed annually in consultation with a new independent screen culture industry body. This body will examine streamlining local and national project logistics in the creation of consolidated freight, advertising, equipment and accommodation accounts to facilitate bottom line reductions for event-based projects local or otherwise.

Compared with the lack of movement in previous years, this restructure will greatly benefit and impact on the local and national sector. It does not at this stage embrace critical writings, journals and publications, electronic or otherwise, a major sticking point that remains to be effectively addressed and will also provide an immediate and initial focus for the new sector body.

ScreenWest’s movement on this issue and its recognition of the sector as a professional activity in its own right must be applauded, along with the commitment of local practitioners who brought it to the table. Certainly the structure of the new fund is very strong and perhaps one of the best in the country in its intent, but this must be supported by muscle, providing the sector with the ability to develop, not simply survive.

The film Dances of Ecstasy by writer/director Michelle Mahrer and producer/co-writer Nicole Ma represents modes of trance experience that take participants into relationship with larger dimensions (“borderless, mysterious, vast”). For Mahrer, the intention to represent a “commonality between peoples”—a place of “no division…no walls of ego, culture, religion, fear”—is ably matched by the film’s virtually seamless form. Like a tone-poem, it is to be tasted or half-dreamt, carrying the viewer on waves of movement, rhythm, visuals, and sound. Dance-parties staged in the foyers of each film launch in Melbourne, Sydney and Byron Bay were held to encourage a continuity of this seamlessness, a bodily processing of what was viewed in the film. “We wanted to illuminate [and presumably tease open] the spiritual vacuum and deep loss of community that exists in our modern lives,” Mahrer says.

Footage of skyscrapers and hurried, crowded streets imply contrast between the psychological and physical isolation in modern (Western) life, and the communal experience of dance/trance, ritual and healing as shown in footage from the Kalahari (the San), Nigeria (the Yoruba), Morocco (a Hadra women’s ritual), Brazil (Candomble initiates), the Kut in Korea, Sufi whirling in Turkey, a workshop run by healer/dancer Gabrielle Roth in New York, and a trance party (the Rainbow Serpent Festival) in southern Victoria. Commentaries from Western specialists such as Jean Houston and some of the healers themselves presumably call up our hunger for connection. And yet, for me, this at times astonishing film shows up significant and notable differences of ontologies not caught in those language grabs.

I respond on 2 main levels to this film: to its artistry—as a beatific artefact in itself—and to how it represents what it documents; the cultural beliefs and practices it shows. Clearly, the makers earned the deep trust of the communities they filmed. Episodes of trance and possession, of men and women, are captured in full, and sometimes violent force: from Sufic spiralling, to the passing of sharpened knives across a shaman’s tongue; from an inwardly-intensifying shaking to sweating, writhing, screaming, collapse. Rare forces explode through willing bodies almost thrust out of themselves by a supra-human power. And there is the lighter, more individually oriented pleasure of the Rave. And yet, while the experiences of ecstasy are all presumed trans-individual and extra-bodily, the shape of movement and experience of trance is quite clearly also shaped by the beliefs and permissions (the “walls” and “borders,” perhaps) within each distinct culture. It’s as if (the same) gods need to negotiate their passage differently, and to different purpose, according to the tribe.

I admire the filmic details, such as a sense of otherness created by using slow shutter speeds and fast film, which tends to blur the outline of dancing bodies as if they are ghosted, or accompanied by spirits beyond themselves. And yet, I am also troubled by the blurring of both fine and gross differences, most especially in effects which include the slowing down of footage to make one culture’s movement conform to the rhythmic pattern of music from another culture’s practices. Shamans’ voiceovers detail how a different rhythm calls on a different spirit. The filmic blurring does disservice to this understanding.

Most difficult is where rave music, with its insistent, quite controlled repetitive rhythms, overlays footage of shamans in different trances/possessions slowed to the Serpent Festival groove. Quite clearly, the dance of trance (social healing), where a shaman/healer endures often intensely painful possession, is so immensely different in experience, purpose, and intention, to the noticeably individuated, extending and recoiling, ego-expressive dances of the rave. Shamanic dance, by contrast, seems to spiral inward to an almost invisible core. The exhausted, absented ecstasy in the faces of the shamans and tribal peoples who collapse are quite distinct from the ravers’ smiles of (relatively) simple joy. Significant is the aspect of the shaman processing unquantifiable pain on the way to embodying a healing force then distributed (as wind, breath, smoke, “medicine”) to the rest of his/her tribe. These are such different healings.

That said, I wept when I viewed the film for a second time: not only being moved again by such intensities, but also from witnessing the exquisite companionship that the indigenous communities give to each other in their processes. Yoruba and Candomble participants, carried to safety and guarded to recovery in tents; the Haddarat women in trance, sawing violently, bodies held safe by their sisters in their writhing trance…I weep to see both the acceptance of this non-ordinary experience, and because of the multitude of arms ready to hold others in their collapse. In our culture, we are often lucky to get mere words of agony, illness, ecstasy in edgeways (and the last perhaps only in childbirth, or sex).

I am left wondering whether ecstasy is a place to build up towards (or try to make cohere into a film); and what difference it makes within a culture to know ecstasy is accessible through repeated ritual—a rhythm to come back to. The film actually makes several nice moments of building and falling, resisting singular climax; but perhaps, as an experience of an event in itself, it reminds me of, rather than heals, my unhappiness at the separations of ecstasy from our everyday—birth, death and pain from daily life; self from selflessness or communality—which may be our greatest pain of all.

I was unable to view the additional documentation on the DVD version of Dances of Ecstasy before publication. This review is a response to viewing the publicly screened film.

Dances of Ecstasy, director/writer Michelle Mahrer, producer/co-writer Nicole Ma, director of photography Paul Elliot, sound Paul Finlay, editor Sioux Currie; 58 minutes.

Unbearable Lightness (tree of fortune) is a collaboration between Keith Armstrong and Linda Carroli recontextualsing the christmas tree. On the South Bank Cultural Forecourt, a fig tree is decoreated with small glowing baubles which on closer inspection are digital ‘text modules’ each with their own message.

“We live in a time of unbearable lightness, thinness, emptiness; a time where hope has become blanketed by fear. Christmas is traditionally a time of hope and renewal for many cultures, a time of giving (and taking), a time for reflection, a time to rethink what it is that must be thought. This artwork suggests that opportunity in a networked poem… to say goodbye, once and for all, to unbearable lightness.”

Keith Armstrong and Linda Carroli, Unbearable lightness (tree of fortune), South Bank Cultural Forecourt, Brisbane, November 28th 2003-January 4th 2004 from 6pm, http://www.south-bank.net.au/

These Lucy Guerin creations have finally made it to Sydney after a tour of the USA where Melt and The Ends of Things won glowing plaudits. Melt is a triumph of invention, and new media artist Michaela French was heroine of the opening night along with Guerin and dancers Stephanie Lake and Kirstie McCracken. Like Guerin’s best work, Robbery Waitress on Bail, Melt is a work complete in conception, here a pulsing organism comprising entwined dancers framed and patterned with fluent painterly geometries of light and image. It is not just that bodies and images are in fine sync but the demands of the projected framing are precisely met by the choreography’s anchoring of the dancers, generating a largely upper body focus with marvellous work with arms and hands (lines rippling along them) and resonating with South-East Asian dance traditions. The women ‘melt’, their bodies separate, projections go on the boil as does the dancing until the togetherness and apartness of the relationship stabilise into acceptance. On the way there’s magical play with images of flowers, snow crystals and shards of ice caught on bodies, cupped in hands and a breathtaking moment when McKracken leaps onto Lake’s breast like a child and a projected red net flies across her back, brief warmth and comfort amidst the chill.

The Ends of Things has the wonderful Trevor Patrick as an oldster miming his way through morning rituals in comically outsize clothes. Patrick’s persona owes something to Chaplin and Keaton-timing deftly based on distraction and delayed responses. Outside his little abode (back projections create domestic details), a trio of youthful phantasmic figures dance abstract patterns. Occasionally they’re in parallel with the old man—he folds a shirt, they fold each other as if ordering lives and relationships. Soon they enter his life unseen but disorienting it (the best of this is in Guerin’s facility for entwining her characters, here in knots with Patrick at his bewildered best), eventually dismantling his house and, it appears, setting him free while they freeze. Something has ended, something begun, even in old age. While The Ends of Things is finely made and frequently inventive, the metaphysical promise of the title is not matched by the pervasive whimsy and the trio dancing becomes predictable. It’s at its best in Patrick, especially when a darker comic dimension emerges—the pants-down, bum-baring exhibitionist in-the-privacy of-his-own-home.

Melt and The Ends of Things, Lucy Guerin Inc, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, Nov 18-23

Synergy crafted a seamless integration of their eclectic influences and the masterful performance of Hossam Ramzy on doumbek and Omar Faruk Tekbelik on ney and zurna. Faruk added even more colour to the mix with his beautiful instrumental and vocal improvisations. The ensemble played an array of percussion instruments from the western orchestra as well as djembes, bongos and bells. The djembe has become such a standard instrument for modern western groups that it is almost due for absorption into the orchestra.

After a break, Senegalese master drummer Aly N’Diaye Rose and his musical brothers, son, and cousins walked onto the stage one by one. The first began with a sweet boogaraboo solo. He was gradually joined by 7 others who added saba drums, dunduns and djembes to the sound. The contrast with the previous performers was fascinating. Where the music of Synergy was moody and mesmerising, Aly’s family were extroverted and where Taikoz was full of intensity and discipline, the Senegalese were relaxed. Moving dynamically from the subtle patter of the boogaraboos to the rumble of the dunduns and then to the cracking explosion of the djembes, the musicians laughed and joked with the audience—sometimes stopping to mug or pose, sometimes ripping out a masterful line of tones and slaps. A feature was made of the tama, the talking drum and there was lots of great stick work on djembes and saba.

The poise of Synergy, the melismatic trances of the Ramzys, the intensity and discipline of Taikoz and the breezy relaxation of Aly N’Diaye Rose tantalised and energised the audience. At the end of the marathon 3 and a half hours people were either screaming and dancing in the front of the stage or flat on their backs from fatigue. Both exhausted and energised the City hall auditorium emptied into the cool night with rhythm on their minds.

This concert included the same artists as the first but with an additional feature—the world premiere of Gerard Brophy’s Brisbane Drumming. The players and young people from the Caboolture Shire Council region near Brisbane—grouped as the Tonga Bell Players and Djembe Players—combined under the direction of workshop teachers, percussionist Elliot Orr and instrument-maker Steve Langton, to present the work. It’s a dynamic, riff-driven work, beautifully textured (the bells providing the upper notes and a melodic sweetness), the young players appearing totally at ease with it, responding to cues from Orr and the professionals scattered amongst them. The rousing free-for-all finale of the concert incorporated the gift of traditional African clothing from Senegalese master drummer Aly N’Diaye Rose to Terracini and Brophy who had to don them on the spot. Surely one of the festival’s biggest drawcards in Brisbane, The Big Percussion Concert again proved itself a complex and rich cultural meeting point.

Christopher Langton’s bright blue, inflated PVC facade, built for the entrance of Experimenta’s recent House of Tomorrow exhibition symbolised the concerns of this collection of new media art. Reminiscent of The Futuro House created by architect Matti Suuronen in 1968, which looked like the spaceship from Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks, Langton’s facade created a sense of nostalgia for the future that characterised many of the world fairs, home expos and films of the 1950s and 60s. This sense of retro-futurism was used by the exhibition curators to guide their selections for the program. But, they were particularly concerned with how domestic technologies are shaped by the fusion of our present desires and fears, technological capabilities and ongoing obsessions with past imaginings of the future.

Like its predecessors, such as Robin Boyd’s House of Tomorrow exhibited at the 1949 Modern Home Exhibition in Melbourne, this show offered both “futuristic visions of the living environment through new technology” and a “forum to critique, to parody and to play.” Some works would have been equally at home in a trade show, which is not to condemn them—rather, to suggest that in an age of internet connected refrigerators and microwaves, the line between function and fable is blurry.

Zizi the Affectionate Couch (Stephen Barrass, Linda Davy, Kerry Richens, Australia, 2003) is one such work. Gorgeously upholstered in pink and purple velvet, Zizi is a responsive ottoman that growls when sat on, purrs when touched and groans with delight when caressed. Designed to support you both physically and emotionally, Zizi evokes the responsive air conditioning system that not only adjusts itself according to your presence in the room but, as a recent TV-ad suggests, mysteriously makes you cups of coffee. Zizi would be right at home in this paradise of involuntary action where the home is transformed into a veritable homeostasis of human-machine life. I’m surprised the artists weren’t asked to take orders.

Virsual—The Digital Rocking Horse (Steven Mieszelewicz, Nimrod Weis and Asaf Weis, Australia, 2003) is billed by its creators as “the ultimate toy for the playroom of the future.” Virsual brings to mind the Holographic Nursery envisioned by writer Ray Bradbury in his short story, “The Veldt.” Riding a rocking horse equipped with a motion-sensing device, users navigate a 3D simulated environment projected on a screen in front of them. The faster you rock, the more rapidly you move through the depicted terrain of Virsual Island, collecting apples and horseshoes with the aim of finding the end of the rainbow. The immense popularity of this work at the exhibition suggests a ready market through Toys R Us.

Not all the works promised domestic futures of benign comfort. Many were far more unheimlich—to use Freud’s famous term. Sally Blenheim’s Dirty Pillows (2000), for example, critiques the desire to see technology as a substitute for human companionship and comfort. Blenheim invites the user to lie on a bed facing a monitor on which a woman’s face is projected. The woman gazes back at the user, occasionally blinking but perpetually passive. As users are drawn into the woman’s gaze, they are simultaneously reminded of the “ultimate emptiness that televisual relationships offer.”

Similarly, Expecting (Isobel Knowles, Van Sowerwine, Australia, 2003) disrupts the belief that new technologies can replace real nurturing with a virtual equivalent. The user is invited to create playmates for 8-year old Charlotte who is imprisoned on a screen in her virtual bedroom. Using a teddy bear as an interface, users can affect the animation on the screen by squeezing the bear. As you squeeze, Charlotte’s belly appears to distend until eventually she gives birth (quite grotesquely) to a virtual playmate who, after a short while, vanishes. Without user input, Charlotte remains alone (and presumably lonely) in her room, suggesting that only human intervention, and not technologies, is capable of alleviating human alienation and isolation.

Mirror D (Marco Bresciani, Sam De Silva, Australia, 2003) plays on the ambivalence of our relationship with new technologies by drawing attention to the tendency of surveillance technologies to disrupt the very sense of security they purportedly strive to engender. A digital mirror takes the user’s reflection and digitally distorts it in ways that make the user question the veracity of the claim that the mirror (or the CCTV camera) never lies. In an age of increased visual surveillance and digital technologies, Mirror D reminds us that appearances can be deceptive. The very tools we use to protect ourselves from the alien and unknown can just as easily alienate us from the world and from our selves.

House of Tomorrow will tour nationally to towns and cities in 2004 and 2005. More information about the exhibition can be found at www.experimenta.org/

House of Tomorrow, Experimenta, curators Liz Hughes, Shiralee Saul, Helen Stuckey; Black Box, Victorian Arts Centre, Sept 5-Oct 3

The thin membrane of skin separates one supposedly independent, free, voting individual from another. Yet when bodies bleed and ooze, when one body’s psycho-neural shaking is communicated beyond the family into society as a whole, we react with horror. Bodies are supposed to be cohesive and self-contained in all but the most intimate of contexts. However in the wake of AIDS, digital technology and postmodernism, society has been forced to acknowledge that bodies are not always self-contained but rather dangerously contingent, contaminated, fluid and interconnected.

Sandra Parker’s choreography has focused for some time on such disturbed bodily metaphors. Her dancers oppress and manipulate each other and themselves in an aggressive yet disturbingly banal fashion, such that their sense of solidity, of clear presence in performance and unambiguous intent in movement or expression is violated. Parker’s bodies have an almost camp quality, performing with such force as to suggest the essentially socially-imposed nature of our psyches.

If the body is thought of as sound, Katie Symes’ score epitomised what was most successful in Parker’s Symptomatic. Symes created an aural realm of large, yet sonically dirty, oppressive spaces, of environments filled with constant throb and hiss that allayed the nerves by imparting a sense of banal, urban familiarity, while also suggesting dehumanisation and tense endurance. The body in performance took on the same character as a fluoro-lit carpark, rich in potential for movement, yet enclosed by a feeling of blighted industrial space. Overall Symptomatic was replete with moments in which suggestions of tension and character slipped through the performers. Though this was alluring it lacked the clear tempo or musical development that characterised Symes’ score. Yet in sketching such a suggestive realm that both denied and invoked emotional trauma, Symptomatic’s contradictory possibilities remained in memory long after the performance.

In-Compatibility the first collaboration from Tony Yap and Yumi Umiumare as their new company “—”, was similarly energised by troubled bodies. Yap’s approach comes from Grotowski technique and shamanic inspirations, while Umiumare’s style is based in butoh and modern dance. Their many collaborations have rendered them as intense, symmetrical presences who, simply in shaking their heads or thrashing quietly at each other’s side, capture the slightest nuances of each other’s jazz-like improvisations. In-Compatibility is the first co-production from these 2 involving other dancers since Yap’s Narcissus Dream (1997). While Umiumare and Yap related to each other in violent and delicate ways (such as a particularly beautiful moment when Umiumare simply lay on top of her partner, her head at his feet, and vice versa), the use of the 3 other dancers was problematic, producing only marginal—albeit evocative—detailing.

Musicians Tim Humphrey and Madeleine Flynn have a wonderful sense of light, slightly neo-Dadaist/Fluxus improvisation that has complemented Yap’s solo improvisation performances. Their approach nevertheless added to the rather studio-feel of this production. In-Compatibility was superb as an initial study of pained, ecstatic bodies, but presented so that its clarity and more tangible intentions remained mysterious. It was an interestingly structured improvisation, but the kind of subliminal ‘order-behind-chaos’ achieved by the likes of John Coltrane was lacking.

Rather than these tensed, conflicted, chaotic bodies, director Kate Denborough staged the surreal body in her Kage Physical Theatre production of Nowhere Man. The piece was full of wonderfully inventive illusionistic devices and sketches, recalling an expressionist magic show or a music hall performance. Tramps in hats and coats played at vocal sound effects before launching into a short hip-hop section; later the audience marvelled at a pair of sashaying torsos bearing 3 plastinated heads (1 from the neck and 2 others sprouting from upraised elbows). These were great suggestive moments, but overall, Nowhere Man had little to say. A character from the margins of society was introduced and we followed his dreams and his fears—including a superb, almost Pataphysical discourse on the value of “quadrupedism”—but that was about it. Denborough’s direction was tremendously seductive in its assurance and sharpness of execution, recalling Phillippe Genty’s equally illusionistic work. As with Genty though, Denborough’s latest production constitutes the popular face of surrealism, referring to little beyond its own strange, magical dreamscapes and piecemeal iconography. Denborough’s images were immediately intriguing and engaging, making them highly accessible, but not especially sophisticated in conception.

The highlight of the Australian material in this year’s Melbourne Festival (besides the Phillip Adams gem Nativity) was Chunky Move’s Tense Dave. Chunky Move has long been burdened with its status as Victoria’s “flagship dance company”, making it difficult for the institution to live up to its marketing. It was therefore intensely satisfying to see Chunky Move fulfil its promises here.

Michael Kantor’s program notes for this piece which he co-directed with choreographers Lucy Guerin and Gideon Obarzanek describe his marvelling at the dancers “creating a shell of work based on an initial idea and then filling” it out and “infusing” it. Despite the dangers inherent in this process, it was precisely this quality that made Tense Dave so effective. The simple narrative constituted an apparently rigid framework through which the audience followed an increasingly gob-smacked Dave (Brian Lucas) as he circled an eternally revolving space within which otherwise free-floating events, movement sequences, dramatic games and encounters occurred. As with Guerin’s The Ends of Things (2001), the performance began with the man alone in his self-contained space which suddenly and disturbingly exploded outwards. This space coincided with 3 other apartments, then with an unending stream of social and psychological realms as the 4 partitions separating the initial rooms began roaming about the revolve before fracturing into further divisions before finally flying away, leaving a frighteningly open, unadorned environment in the centre of a bleak stage.

Like Symptomatic, Tense Dave examined what happens when bodies and minds flow into each other, exploring where our most secret fears, desires and nightmares come from: through the walls, from the minds of others, and what happens if our dreams blend with others’. Lucas’ lanky Dave was juxtaposed with the jagged, ropy tension of Luke Smiles’ tangles; or the equally pointed yet desperately grasping presence of Michelle Heaven (clambering across Dave’s forehead like a fairytale imp); the easy, weighty power of Brian Carbee (whose commandingly mellifluous voice introduced the fears and games of yet more characters); and Stephanie Lake’s poisoned-chalice of melodramatic sexuality. Tense Dave’s overall message amounted to little more than a retelling of Sartre’s existentialism, but by letting these ambiguous performative images hang unexplained on stage, the directors produced a piece rich with psychological suggestions and contaminated bodies.

Symptomatic, DanceWorks, choreographer Sandra Parker. dramaturg Yoni Prior, sound Katie Symes, lighting Jenny Hector, design Anna Tregloan, performers Deanne Butterworth, Phoebe Robinson, Katy Macdonald, Tim Harvey, Asher Leslie, Athenaeum II, Oct 11-25

In-Compatibility, “-”, choreographers/performers Tony Yap, Yumi Umiumare, performers Tom Davies, Nic Hemple, Meredith Elton, musicians Tim Humphrey, Madeleine Flynn, lighting Dori Dragon Bicchierai, design Michael Pierce, 45 Downstairs, Oct 16-20

Nowhere Man, Kage, director Kate Denborough, performers Gerard Van Dyck, Merfyn Owen, Dylan Owen, Byron Perry, Antony Hamilton, Fiona Cameron, Christine Envall, Steven Richards, Gordon Wilson, sound Franc Tetaz, lighting Marko Respondeck, design Paula Levis, N. Melbourne Town Hall, Oct 20-Nov 2

Tense Dave, Chunky Move, choreographers/directors Lucy Guerin, Michael Kantor, Gideon Obarzanek, performers Brian Lucas, Brian Carbee, Michelle Heaven, Stephanie Lake, Luke Smiles, lighting Niklas Pajanti, sound Franc Tetaz, design Jodie Fried, original design/concept Bluebottle (Andrew Livingston, Ben Cobham), Malthouse, Oct 2-11

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Richard Wanambi and Trevor Graham (director) in a cell at the Supreme Court Darwin

Two recent locally made documentaries demonstrate the diverse challenges facing our communities—and the ties that bind them.

Richard Wanambi lives in Yirrkala, a small isolated community in Arnhem Land. He’s been drinking since the age of 14 and now, aged 35, he’s in trouble for committing a serious offence. He’s looking at doing a long stretch in prison.

Tony Wood and Lee Matthews live in Melbourne. They’re a gay couple eagerly awaiting the birth of their first child from a surrogate mother in America. This is the culmination of a long and expensive process for Lee and Tony and they are both excited and apprehensive as they wait to fly out to meet the mother and witness the birth of their son.

Nami White, the woman who Richard Wanambi calls his mum (he is, in fact, her deceased sister’s son) is worried about her other son, Jamie, who is also drinking and getting into trouble. Nami has already lost one son as a result of a drunken fight and she’s petrified that the same thing will happen again.

Lee and Tony are busy preparing the baby’s room with the assistance of their mothercraft trainer. The white wine is poured and sits on the dining room table, ready to toast the future of a new family. Meanwhile, Richard is heading into the ‘long grass’ to catch up with his drinking buddies. He has a cask of moselle to consume.

Different lives, different communities, same country but separated by so much on so many levels—geographically, socially, economically, culturally—that it takes a mind-stretch to see them co-existing on the same terrain. Then again, the ties that bind them are obvious too, such as the breakdown of the family structure or its transmogrification in response to personal needs and social pressures. (Reading the film notes, I also found another common denominator: Jenni Meaney who was camera operator on both films—a remarkable achievement to cover such disparate projects).

Viewing these films end-to-end, as I did, is to experience (albeit at a viewer’s safe distance) the dead weight of social inequality, moral imperatives and legal constraints. We watch the inevitable unfolding of events that seem nevertheless to catch those affected by surprise, and feel the confusion and trepidation of people trying to cope with unusual circumstances and their consequences.

Lee and Tony, Richard and Nami are all defined by their historical moment, a conjunction of quite different competing interests that block off some options, close some doors and offer other ways out that are certainly not always ideal and, ultimately, propel them to do what they do, be who they are.

Richard’s story (he calls himself Lonely Boy, a sign of his own isolation from the rest of his community due to his alcoholism) is an example of the problems besetting remote communities in the Northern Territory and, in particular, the devastating impact of alcohol on traditional ties and relationships.

This is a frustrating film. Everybody interviewed seems to know what the problem is and understands its impact; the lawyers, judges, police, community leaders all recognise that alcohol abuse is central to the routine violence and self-inflicted human misery found in places such as Yirrkala. The lack of meaningful progress on this problem, however, seems inexplicable. Certainly, the film offers no answers and that may be intentional; it raises issues, presents them lucidly but doesn’t pretend that anything is anywhere near being resolved.

As Richard disappears into prison, Nami White remarks that she will probably not see him again in her lifetime and her matter-of-fact tone belies the palpable pain of this situation.

The film benefits from the obvious sense of trust and openness before the camera that everyone in the film displays, not least Richard himself. The film tries hard to connect with him and succeeds momentarily although it is hard at times to penetrate the fog of alcohol and find the person within.

Man Made also benefits from an intimacy between the camera and the subjects while never shying away from the obvious implications of Lee and Tony’s situation, such as the parallels between shopping for baby and shopping for a baby. As both Lee and Tony acknowledge, once you start flipping through the egg donor catalogues, political correctness goes out the window and it all comes down to face value.

The film owes a lot to the perceptiveness of the camera work, the happy knack of being able to capture the prescient detail, such as observing the meticulous preparation of the couple, clothes neatly folded, travel items arranged in a row on the bed, an orderliness that underpins their approach to the buy-a-baby arrangements (and undermined when baby refuses to arrive on time). This observation is particularly acute in the hospital, firstly during the nervous wait for something to happen (life measured in dilated centimetres) and then as the relationship between the couple and the surrogate mother, Junoa, gradually shifts as the moment of separation approaches.

The actual birth, a coincidence of commercial, social and scientific developments, is also the site of powerful emotions that are invariably ambivalent and unruly.

Lee and Tony’s surrogacy raises issues about the rights and roles of mother, dads and baby. Man Made is sensitive to these concerns—motives are examined, feelings questioned—and, by and large, the subjects respond with candour. In a sense, the film is as much about the couple’s relationship as it is about the birth of their son, Alexander. The birth becomes a means of examining how the couple negotiate the transition to a new phase in their lives through what is largely uncharted territory. In the end, Junoa’s argument that everybody should be given the opportunity to raise children seems justified and the couple grow as a result.

From a documentary perspective, both films underline the value of spending time with the subjects, gaining their trust and presenting their situation honestly without trying to dilute the implications of their behaviour. There is a tough fairness about them both which is ultimately hopeful if only because, whatever the problems and challenges their subjects face, at least there’s somebody out there who cares enough to tell their stories well.

Lonely Boy Richard, director Trevor Graham, producers Denise Haslem, Rose Hesp; Man Made: The Story of Two Men and A Baby, director Emma Crimmings, producers Toby Patten, Michael McMahon

Issues of personalised sexual politics have dominated cinema screens since the late 1990s, taking precedence over politics. While this trend is not necessarily reflected in most of the Australian features nominated for the 45th Annual AFI Awards, the 2003 nominees in the Short Fiction category all reject any ‘big picture’ social or political commentary to focus on interpersonal relations, memory and frustrated sexual longing. In these films, characters exist in narrow worlds of heated desires and obsessions, living out their dramas in generic settings.

Cracker Bag (director Glendyn Ivin) for example, is ostensibly set in early 80s suburban Australia. A young girl named Eddie steadily works at earning enough small change to purchase fireworks from the corner shop. At home she is taunted by her older brother and haunted by the sounds of her mother’s telephone arguments with the family’s absent father. Eddie channels all her energy into assembling a firework stash, which will be unleashed cracker by cracker on fireworks night. Inevitably, when the night arrives it ends in disappointment.

There are many touches in the design of Cracker Bag to remind viewers of the relatively recent time when we all lived without home computers or mobile phones, and even the smallest child could purchase explosives. Essentially, however, these elements are window dressing, forming a backdrop that is never integrated into the main character’s emotional journey, creating the sense that with a few surface alterations the same story could have been set anywhere, at any time.

Similarly, Preservation (Sofya Gollan) is a period piece with very little to say about its historical setting. It tells the story of a young, repressed female taxidermist living in late 19th century Sydney, nurturing an obsession with her dead father through frequent visits to a spiritualist photographer. Early in the film, she takes in a lodger who is nursing his own deep grief at the loss of his wife 2 years earlier. A sexual tension develops between the 2 as they each wrestle with their memories and unwillingness to let go of the past.

The drama primarily unfolds in the young woman’s cavernous house which is filled with the preserved corpses of dead animals. Given the characters’ obsessions with dead relatives and ossified memories, the hermetically-sealed nature of the world we see on screen is at least thematically justified, but the viewer never really gets a sense that these characters inhabit a wider societal context. The setting appears more like a theatrical backdrop sketched in with a few historical markers.

The Visitor (Dan Castle) is a contemporary drama which focuses on a middle-aged gay man living alone, coming to terms with the death of a relationship with a younger man. The beautiful cinematography from Richard Milchalak provides an effective contrast between the sun-drenched glare of the beach, where the central character spends time wistfully observing the bronzed bodies of local surfers and the dark interiors of his apartment at night, where he broods over his memories. As in Cracker Bag and Preservation, the pivotal relationships in the film, while containing no real surprises, are effectively handled, but could have unfolded anywhere. The main character lives in what looks like Sydney’s eastern suburbs, but there is no engagement with a world outside his immediate, non-specific surrounds.

The lack of specificity in the settings of these 3 films is not necessarily a problem when each is examined individually. Not every movie should be expected to offer a commentary on the time in which it is set, nor do its themes necessarily have to resonate on a broader social, political or historical level. As a trend which seems to infect much Australian cinema across the board, however, this “fear of specificity” is frustrating, and reflects a deeper fear of creating films in Australia that might demand or require any kind of intellectual engagement beyond a fairly prosaic emotional response.

This is not to suggest we should be seeking a cinema of didactic political agit-prop, or social-realism in the style of Ken Loach. A filmmaker like Swedish director Lukas Moodysson has shown it is possible to create highly effecting humanist dramas which contain very few characters, yet which resonate in many ways with the broader currents of the times in which they are set. Moodysson’s Together is both an examination of how human beings long, and often fail, to be “together”, while also offering a nuanced and extremely subtle reflection on the social and political currents streaming across mid-70s Europe. Based on the shorts nominated for AFI Awards this year, it’s hard to imagine any of our emergent filmmakers coming close to pulling off a similar feat.

Having said that, the 4th Short Fiction nominee, Roy Hollsdotter Live (directed by Matthew Saville) was refreshingly unequivocal in its affirmation of a particular physical setting. Although it once again focused on a relationship in crisis, the noirish lighting and passages of expressionistic editing effectively evoked the smoky, well-worn interiors of Melbourne pubs, plunging the viewer into the unique atmosphere of the rain-swept city. This alone set Roy Hollsdotter Live above the other Short Fiction nominees. The gritty sense of place was also bolstered by Darren Casey’s complex lead performance. By turns amusing, obnoxious, charismatic and repellent, Casey never failed to hold the audience’s attention with a face as worn and weather-beaten as the pubs his character frequents.

None of the films nominated for the Short Fiction award this year represents anything new or innovative in content or form, but Roy Hollsdotter Live at least created a cinematic world that bore some recognisable relationship to our own. However the generically Australian settings of many of our films perhaps goes some way to explaining why so little Australian cinema seems to resonate in any effective way with Australian audiences.

The Atlab AFI Award For Best Short Fiction Film and the Award For Best Screenplay In A Short Fiction Film were won by Cracker Bag.

My initial impulse in discussing the 2003 45th Annual AFI Awards was to write about what a poor year it has been for Australian films, but there have been so many articles on this subject recently that it seems merely fashionable to put the boot in again. Instead, let’s try to understand the films as industrial objects and ask what they tell us about the current disjunctions between production and consumption in this country.

As comedy after comedy thudded to earth this year, I noticed that many of these films stemmed from the Macquarie Bank FLIC (Film Licensed Investment Company). FLICs are a part of the present funding regime that is attempting to move production toward a more commercial basis. This is a thankless task. There is a general, though undeniable, link between high production budgets and box office returns. Given that Australian films are always going to have low budgets relative to Hollywood, positioning them in the commercial mainstream is a tenuous business.

The trick is to find a type of filmmaking that can complement rather than compete with Hollywood. Blurred (director Evan Clarry), for example, marks a worthwhile effort at the teenpic, a genre that is popular, and not reliant on stars or expensive special effects.

Asian film industries are adopting horror as a staple genre, while Australia has opted for comedy. Comedies are generally thought to be a genre that represents a good defensive investment with a limited downside. While they might have small theatrical appeal and no international market, they can perform reasonably well in ancillary markets, filling the pipeline for Pay-TV, and let’s not forget that Showtime is a significant investor these days.

Director-actor Nick Giannopoulos finally follows up The Wog Boy with The Wannabes. It’s a tired critical move, but I can’t help seeing this as an allegory for Australian cinema. The central idea is that Australian entertainment industries are wasting their time worrying about talent and intelligence. If your heart’s in the right place and you can overturn Hollywood convention with enough ironic distance, then you’ll be okay. The giveaway here is the appalling and appallingly prominent score by David Hirschfelder, on other projects a composer of skill and subtlety.

Crackerjack (Paul Moloney), the only real box office success of the year, just about gets the mix right. The movie shambles around in a likeable enough way and the plot pretty much falls apart but it seems churlish to point that out. At the other end of the spectrum, The Nugget (Bill Bennet) shows how easy it is to misjudge when you’re taking the piss. This profoundly misanthropic and politically reactionary film suggests that Aussie battlers are stupid and mean-spirited. They should all thank God they aren’t called on to think for themselves too often, or all kinds of bad shit would happen. At the movie’s end we are yet again exhorted, Don’t Worry, Be Happy.

Mick Malone’s follow-up to Crackerjack, Bad Eggs (with Tony Martin), begins as a dryly ironic comedy but then starts to take its crime narrative seriously, as though someone smuggled a Shane Maloney novel on to the set and they started to think they might be able to take a crack at this type of thing too. The nationalist pay-off is in localising a popular genre that people associate with international production, converting the action protagonist into a bloke. Blokes never take themselves too seriously, even when staring down the barrel.

Any film that dares to take itself seriously invites the piss-take, with self-mockery being taken as a badge of national pride. To attempt a national epic such as Burke and Wills or Ned Kelly is to invite a Wills and Burke or, this year, a Ned, 80 minutes of NIDA pretty boys doing rape jokes.

Ned Kelly (director Gregor Jordan) was itself an attempt to test the possibilities of a high budget film with international appeal. There’s a Sam Peckinpah film in there somewhere but the story of outlaws inevitably succumbing to the establishment is itself too much of an establishment exercise, respectful of approved styles. There are some wistful Celtic pipes, some bleach bypass cinematography and some good opportunities for the actors to do their working class accents, but alas, no hint of the shambling majesty of a Peckinpah film or even the flash boldness of Chopper.

This brings us to Gettin’ Square (Jonathan Teplitzky) which is like a night out at a casino—a mainstream pleasure for those who accept the nastiness of the world. Lots of colour, lots of cinematography, lots of soundtrack, moderate amounts of Packer money. David Wenham gets to play a character role and chews extensively on the scenery. There’s no third act, but there is enough furiously flashy energy in the framing and cutting to provide you with a pleasing distraction while Kerry takes your money—and isn’t this the main thing about being Australian these days?

At the other end of the industrial food chain, Phil Avalon plays low-budget guru with 2 entries. The Pact is the kind of movie made to be seen at 2am on cable TV. Sigrid Thornton is being stalked in some strange parallel-universe Australia where everyone has American accents and people name their kids Brittany. Still, its very existence signifies the persistence of a place for the cheap exploitation film. I have a dream, that one day we will be free of taste, and of Acting, free in a land where movies are full of disreputable energy.

Please forgive that digression. This is still Australia and the favourite this year is probably Japanese Story (Sue Brooks), a seriously worthy serious film. It is burdened with some of the clunkiest theatrical acting you’ll see. Toni Collette will win Best Actress, even though she gives one of her worst performances. While it’s about time we had a film which acknowledges that Australia might want to think about its relation to Asia, this is unfortunately limited to checking off national and racial stereotypes (Japanese men are gruff, Japanese women are inscrutable, and there is so much space in Australia).

The art cinema entries are a bit thin on the ground. Maybe Rolf de Heer’s Alexandra’s Project has some sort of a chance. It is certainly notable for sustaining a narrative in which the protagonist watches TV for the middle half of the film. As in The Tracker, Gary Sweet is again the villainous white guy whose chickens must come home to roost.

The question of winners this year is a little like being asked to choose between John Howard and Simon Crean as PM. Maybe the palpable lack of enthusiasm which will greet any winner will lead to a radical re-evaluation of feature film production in this country. Things have to get better.

Japanese Story won The Showtime AFI Award For Best Film, the Empire Magazine AFI Award For Best Direction, The Parker Pen AFI Award For Best Original Screenplay, Complete Post AFI Award For Best Editing and Awards For Best Cinematography, Best Sound, Best Original Music Score And The Jan Logan AFI Award to Toni Collette for Best Actress In A Leading Role.

A very sparse crop in this year’s AFI documentary film awards with no obvious contenders and nothing like The Diplomat or A Wedding in Ramallah to catch the eye. This year we’re staying very close to home, having a look at our history and immediate environment, urban and natural. There are 2 films about photography and 2 that explore our archives; they are worthy, well-intentioned, carefully researched, intermittently interesting and enlightening, technically skilful, the product of good hard yakka and an obvious dedication to the topics in question.

Painting with Light in a Dark World (writer/director Sascha Ettinger-Epstein, producer Renata Schuman) is one of the films about photography, in this case the photographer Peter Darren Moyle who has dedicated his life to recording the inhabitants of Kings Cross in Sydney. The film aims to show it like it is in terms of gritty real-life, on the edge, on-the-street action and succeeds in re-creating a specific locale and community. Moyle’s pictures of wasted bodies lost in a statuesque torpor are eloquent enough, more so than Moyle himself who swivels between overbearing bravado and fragile insecurity, a fuck-you brashness masking a painful vulnerability.

The narrative ruse of following Moyle as he moves towards his first exhibition seems somewhat contrived, determined to track a rags to riches storyline, the unknown artist ‘discovered’ which, in the end, just seems to be part of the ‘romance’ of the street. The photographs themselves, for all their supposed importance to the ‘story’ of the documentary, are devoid of any context in terms of the tradition of street photography and our understanding of them hardly progresses beyond the voyeuristic impulse. They deserve better.

Silent Storm (writer/director Peter Butt, producers Peter Butt, Ross McAuley) tries hard to get us bursting with indignation with its own shock-horror unmasking of deceitful deeds. The great unsuspecting Australian public is once again subject to terrible goings-on and treachery in the name of—well, whatever you like—progress, the Empire, national security. While there is clearly a worthwhile story to be told here about Australia’s participation in the British testing of the atom bomb, and useful parallels can be drawn between politicians and national paranoia then and now, this film aims for more and achieves less.

Somewhere along the line it has been decided that all this science stuff needs pepping up a bit and so there are re-enactments galore, spliced together with archival footage and, in places ‘faux footage’, that is re-enactments touched up to appear authentic which, as a distancing technique works quite well but to what effect? Such estrangement simply makes us strangers to the story.

The hyperbole is pressing, insistent—the most powerful, the most contentious, most politically charged, most brilliant, bitterest etc—but the material doesn’t really need spooky piano music and the clichéd commentary along the lines of ‘the security net is closing in’ to make its point. Some of the archival footage is amusing, such as shots used to set the scene for 1950s Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane etc that instead make the locales appear almost identical—slow moving cars and pedestrians, brown buildings and golden light.

After all the trickery and visual manipulation, what is the message? That the public were kept in the dark, that when faced with an unpalatable truth, politicians will intimidate and dissemble. In that sense, the film is a reflection of its time ie today, but the conclusion that those in power will lie in order to protect themselves is unlikely to surprise too many people.

The Original Mermaid (writer/director Michael Cordell, producer Ian Collie) is yet more archival film, this time from London, Paris, Sydney, interwoven with a lot of watery images of people swimming, diving and splashing about. It’s the wettest film, a poetic paeon to swimming. Still, Annette Kellerman, who was the original mermaid, is a fine advertisement for all things watery. The film does a thorough job placing her in context, explaining what made her unique for her time, how she challenged social expectations about what women were capable of achieving. Kellerman comes across as the Madonna of her age, admired by men and women, someone who was not afraid to use her physicality and aquatic prowess to shock, titillate and entertain.

Wildness (writer/director Scott Millwood, producer Michael McMahon) is the most focused of these documentaries. It has the biggest canvas—the Tasmanian wilderness—but one that is viewed from the perspective of 2 nature photographers, Olegas Truchanas and Peter Dombrovskis, so time after time we are invited to stand in their shoes, share their views, literally see what they saw. The film shifts easily between the men and the places where they roamed, back and forth through time and across country. There is symmetry and balance between the men’s lives, their work of photographing the natural state of Tasmania, which spanned 2 generations as well as different but related conservation battles. Indeed, having seen both men represented together in this film it would be hard now to look at them in isolation—they each reference the other, forward and backwards. It’s interesting, too, comparing their different photographic styles: the stillness and particularity of Dombrovskis, the more gregarious Truchanas who populates his grand vistas with idyllic family scenes. The fact that the men were also close—like father and son, the film says—reinforces the parallels, creates a context that is both personal and political.

There are more re-enactments in Wildness, this time a re-creation of the slideshows given by Olegas Truchanas to raise people’s awareness of the natural beauty on their doorstep that was in danger of being lost. Wildness itself is an extension of these shows, still concerned with delivering a conservation message via the medium of film. It makes us care about places that most of us will probably never see in person, a result which, in itself, is a fairly basic but important effect of documentary film, both still and moving.

Which just goes to show that for all the dazzling cinematography on display in these films, you still can’t beat a good slide show when it comes to making an impact.

The Film Australia AFI Award For Best Documentary was won by Wildness. The Award for Best Direction in a Documentary and For Best Editing In A Non-Feature Film went to Painting With Light in a Dark World.

For the 2003 AFI Awards, “a panel of accredited industry professionals” whittled the list of 47 short fiction and animation films down to 4 finalists in each category. It’s a lot of whittling and in the process you’re always going to lose something. In the case of animation, the loss is serious and the outcome is a misshapen vision of the artform in Australia. What were these professionals thinking? The Projectionist (14 minutes, director Michael Bates, producer Anna Messariti), already an international prizewinner, is one of the most striking works of animation of recent years. Perhaps, with its pixilated human performers and its real city setting there was uncertainty about its status as animation; perhaps the slow unfolding without apparent narrative—rather a reverie, a state of being—didn’t engage the judges in this post-postmodern era of chronic addiction to story-telling. It’s small compensation that The Projectionist snuck into the nominations for Best Achievement in Sound and for Cinematography in the Non-feature film categories but not for Short Fiction or Short Animation.

Competition for the big prize between The Projectionist and that other international prizewinner, the clay animation Harvie Krumpet (see the interview with director Adam Elliot, RT#57), could have made for instructive comparisons and a telling outcome. Both entail particularly intensive methods of making, both evoke the life of a solitary European migrant and both implicitly pay homage to the animation traditions of middle Europe. Both are unusually serious in tone for animated film in this country even though one is patently comic. Both share the European penchant for metaphysical whimsy. As the situation stands, Harvie Krumpet will easily sweep the board. Although its competitors are finely crafted and one of its number almost has the wit to rise above a conceit, Elliot’s labours are so intensive at some 20 minutes of animation, and his mood so consistently droll and adult, that he must win.

What of the other contenders? Cane Toad—What Happened to Baz? (directors David Clayton, Andrew Silke) is expertly made digital cartooning, an episodic gag (with a clumsy title) about the various nasty fates likely to beset these voracious, cute-ugly predators. The cruellest, for a yob toad it seems, is to be stuffed, dressed in a tutu and stuck in a tourist shop window. That’s Baz’s fate. In the meantime and in the tradition of the American animated cartoon, his fellows meet gruesome ends, the most spectacular being dismemberment by a Victa mower with a spray of toad blood and guts across the lens. Unlike their animated US cousins these guys don’t bounce back to life: Cane Toad’s fatalism is much more thorough. What’s more, through its beer-swilling cane toad narrator, the film’s anthropomorphism plays back as a metaphor for the dumb Australian male—loves a yarn, a good laugh at fate and enjoys a bit of Schadenfreude. Slender, if grimly enjoyable stuff, best in the volume of visual detail and some nice play with point of view. Cane Toad—What Happened to Baz? won a Triple J Moonlight Framebreaks competition and is screening in international competitions.

Susan Kim’s Mother Tongue (6 mins, producers Lea Croydon, Susan Kim) reminded me of a few precious, illustrated books for children, fundamentally still and painterly, beautiful if static. However, compared with the big picture lives of The Projectionist and Harvie Krumpet, Mother Tongue is unusually specific (though it shares the migration theme). It focuses on a period of adaptation in a Korean child’s life. Her father migrates to Australia ahead of her family. She is told he has “gone on an adventure.” She manages by making him a sound tape everyday. She also learns English—we see words and human figures on the textbook page magically unfold and dissolve. The sad coda to this quietly reflective animation is the narrator’s comment that “I never spoke my language again.” Though not particularly compelling, Mother Tongue does open up some cross-cultural territory, not least in its visual style.

One viewing of Hello (director Jonathan Nix; 6’30 mins, produced by David Atkinson, Jonathan Nix, edited by Jeremy Parker) didn’t seem enough. Again, the isolation of the protagonist is central, but here love solves that. The conceit is a nice one, a humanoid world where everyone has a sound device for a head—the central male has a portable cassette-radio player atop his shoulders, his beloved a CD Walkman with small speaker ‘ears’ and a sage, aged acquaintance an antique turntable and horn speaker. The deftness of the line drawings (hand drawn, ink on paper and 2D and 3D animation), the imaginatively realised backgrounds and the swelling, movie-ish fantasy of the conclusion elevate the slightness of the material and a conceit that is not taken very far…but perhaps far enough when the protagonist plugs into his beloved. Hello has received an AIM Graduate Award and Best Animated Production and Best Use of Sound in an animated production in the 2003 ATOM Awards. You can see drawings and clips from the film at http://studionix.com/hello.html. Nix is clearly an animator to watch if he can make more of this material.

Harvie Krumpet (23 mins, director and animator Adam Elliot, producer Melanie Coombs, editor Bill Murphy, sound by Peter Walker) is quite a feat, a carefully measured tale of feelgood misery coolly narrated by Geoffrey Rush. This mini-epic packs a lot in without ever feeling hurried: a European peasant birth, Tourette’s syndrome, migration to Melbourne, magnetisation by lightning, the pleasures of nudism, a tussle with testicular cancer, a thalidomide child, a dead wife, life as a hermit, as clinically insane, as a drunken finger puppet street performer and, finally, in a home for the aged, as a near-suicide. But Harvie persists, though it’s not always clear why, especially towards the end of this fraught life of disadvantage, disability and loss where Elliot seems happy to have us simply believe in Harvie’s will to live and sentimentality overtakes an otherwise carefully constructed pathos. It hardly seems enough to be reassured by one of Harvie’s sustaining aphorisms: “life is like a cigarette, smoke it to the butt.” I began too, to doubt that I had heard mention of Tourette’s, since curiously, nothing is made of it. Nor is there much to be made of Harvie’s cultural transposition. Nor is the internal logic of the film always clear in its unfolding of Harvie’s catalogue of considerable woes, but we learn to accept its quiet relentlessness and his cartoon character durability. As ever, Elliot forgoes spectacle and for the most part keeps a lid on sight gags, focusing instead on character and detail, looking to amuse and to disturb (most affectingly with a limbless child). Although his technique is conventional claymation, perhaps it’s Elliot’s seriousness more than anything which has won him plaudits and awards (at Annecy this year: Palmars du 27th Festival du d’animation Prix FIPRESC Press Award, the Prix du public Audience Award and the Prix special du jury; and Leeds, the Louis Le Prince award in the short film animation competition).

As the longest of the nominated animations and the most thought-out and sustained, Harvie Krumpet is clearly the winner. However, while the quality of the other contenders is not in doubt, it remains a pity that The Projectionist wasn’t admitted to do battle with Harvie. For the record, The Projectionist has recently added best Experimental Film, LA Short Film Festival (USA) to its growing list of awards that include the Kino/Dendy Award for Creative Excellence in an Australian Short Film (Melbourne International Film Festival), Grand Prix at the Tampere International Film Festival (Finland) and Best Experimental Film Atlanta International Film Festival (USA).

The AFI Award For Best Short Animation was won by Harvie Krumpet. The AFI Award for Best Cinematography in a Non-Feature film was won by The Projectionist .Hello was awarded Best Sound In A Non-Feature Film.

It’s been a satisfying year for Melbourne’s emerging film talent, particularly in short film. Harvie Krumpet won top animation prizes worldwide. Roy Hollsdotter Live bagged major awards for script, cinematography and editing. Excursion gained a passport to the world’s key film festivals. Cracker Bag wowed them at Cannes. Melbourne filmmakers are visible, and it’s tempting to whip out the old “tale of 2 cities” cliché. Let’s stick the middle finger up at big, bad Sydney with its Fox Studios and big-budget Hollywood productions. Why not champion Melbourne and its risk-taking, commercially unsound shorts?

A look at this crop might even suggest that Melbourne will underwrite the next wave of Australian feature-film makers. But whether any of the principals make a feature depends upon many inflexible factors, a few illogical ones, and many frustrating hurdles that, in cash-strapped times, no amount of success or community pride can seem to overcome. Some points to consider then: Is Melbourne’s status as a centre of short film renaissance by accident or design? What’s so good about short film? Can you define a ‘Melbourne film’, or even a Melbourne film community (and why would you bother)?

Nick Feik, Melbourne International Film Festival’s short film coordinator, agrees that it’s been a great time for some Melbourne films. But he’s not sure “if it’s anything more than chance that they came out of Melbourne in the same year. Those successful filmmakers have ideas that are in some ways atypical even in Melbourne, and each has been working hard making films since at least the middle of last decade.” Still, he notes, “the filmmaking community in Melbourne is a supportive one in which success is applauded rather than a cause of jealousy.”

That support is appreciated by Melanie Coombs, Harvie Krumpet’s producer. Originally from Sydney, Coombs chose Melbourne to launch her producing career. Her Melodrama Pictures office is in a Fitzroy building that’s home to a gaggle of production companies, including Sue Maslin’s Gecko Films (Japanese Story), Trevor Blainey’s Retro Active Films (Roy Hollsdotter Live), and Richard Keddie and Andrew Wiseman’s Apollo Films. According to Coombs, “In this building we’re competing for the same funding and that can be hard, but we choose to work as a community. That doesn’t exist in Sydney.”

Coombs is wary of making broad generalisations but she does say Melbourne’s communal aspect is perhaps due to “second-city syndrome, because all those Sydney people are out there being amazing. Maybe it’s the weather…I don’t really know. But there’s no way I’d work in Sydney now. Here, people are more generous, more experimental. The commercial imperative is a big factor in Sydney.”

Melbourne is undeniably strong in short film, but Coombs says you could turn that on its head and posit a crisis in feature film making in Melbourne. The point was made in RT 57 (p15) that while the AFC/SBSi/Film Victoria-funded 50 Minutes from Home scheme provides a valuable chance for new directors to make a so-called short feature, it’s a bit pointless when there’s no equivalent scheme for feature films. Sadly, a high profile in short film doesn’t guarantee anything about your next project.

It seems that a generation of filmmakers is being held back from making feature films (and that’s not just a Melbourne thing). The names attached to current Australian features—like The Wannabes—have a depressing sameness. Funding structures appear to protect those already securely making films. Trevor Blainey worked on 30 feature films as a production accountant before deciding to produce. He formed Retro Active in 1994 and it’s taken him 8 years to get his first film up—Matthew Saville’s Roy Hollsdotter Live. But even Hollsdotter’s success, aligned with Blainey’s extensive experience in the industry, won’t open many doors when it comes to funding.

According to Blainey, everyone wants to make films and resources are undeniably thin, so the funding bodies try to raise the bar. “Both the AFC and Film Victoria are now saying that producers can’t access development funds unless they’ve produced 2 hours of television drama or feature film. Even though Matthew and I just made a film which has been widely praised and nominated for everything it could have been, because it’s only 53 minutes long it doesn’t fulfil that criteria.”

But Blainey pushes on and, like Coombs, is grateful to be part of that tight-knit Melbourne film world. “The sharing of resources is useful to us all. If things are going to be awkward financially you might as well be in it together, rather than working from the second bedroom at home—which is what most people are forced to do.”

For Blainey, scraping for resources does impart a particular feel to the films that get made in Melbourne—Roy Hollsdotter Live was originally touted as one of the AFC’s “million dollars movies”, but was retooled for 50 Minutes From Home when funding ran out. He, too, can’t resist jokes about the weather playing a part. “Perhaps the crummy environment—downtrodden, wet and grey—has something to do with it. But it could be this: if you want to go and make one of the major TV programs or work on a high-budget American picture, then you’re going to go to Sydney because that’s where the studios are. What that leaves Melbourne to be good at is lower-budget, gritty urban dramas. I guess we gravitate to what the economic possibilities are. I’d like to think it’s a state of mind. I’d like to think it’s the talent base. But it’s probably not.”

Melbourne’s weather has also made an impression on Cracker Bag’s writer/director Glendyn Ivin, who moved to the city a decade ago due to “some kind of romantic notion that it was more conducive to making films. I’m not sure if that’s true or not. There is a smaller community here and that’s probably good. Maybe working in Sydney or Melbourne depends on whether you want an overcast or sunny backdrop to your films. Give me overcast any day!”

Naturally, Ivin aspires to be a fulltime feature film director, but he doesn’t think that’s possible in Australia, let alone Melbourne. Like Adam Elliot, he hasn’t been pushed into a rarefied atmosphere by Cracker Bag’s Cannes hype. The only change he’s experienced is that “people are more likely to take your calls and meet with you. Before, that wouldn’t have happened.”

Ultimately, then, there are 3 things that we can assert about Melbourne: its environment affects those who make films there; those who make films there are really good at making shorts; and being really good at making shorts doesn’t necessarily mean you will be “promoted” to making features. Actually, being really good at making shorts won’t even guarantee that those shorts will be seen. As Ivin notes, “Short filmmaking in Australia is seen as something students do or as a way to get attention from ad agencies. It’s not seen as a stand-alone art form like in other parts of the world. When I was making Cracker Bag, people would say, ‘How will I see it?’ and my honest response was, ‘Well, you may not!’”

Adam Elliot knows why that might be. He recently attended a meeting with some Federal MPs who wondered why shorts aren’t shown before feature films. “[I] said, ‘Why don’t you pass a law that there have to be shorts before features?’ And they said, ‘That can quite easily be done.’ But at the end of the day you’re up against advertisers—and a Coca Cola ad makes more money.”

Louis Nowra, Walkabout, Australian Screen Classic, Currency Press, Sydney, 2003, ISBN 0 86819 670 3

English film director Nicholas Roeg’s Walkabout opened worldwide in 1971. Based on the novel of the same name by James Vance Marshall, an English writer, the film tells the story of 2 white children lost in the Australian outback. They survive only through the help of an Aboriginal boy who is on walkabout during his initiation into manhood. The film earned a unique place in cinematic history and was re-released in 1998.

In this illuminating reflection on Walkabout, a leading Australian dramatist and screenwriter Louis Nowra discusses the iconic status of the Outback in Australia and the peculiar resonance of the lost child story in the Australian psyche. He tells how the film was made and how its preoccupations fit into the oeuvre of director and cinematographer Nicolas Roeg and screenwriter Edward Bond. Nowra identifies the film’s distinctive take on a familiar story and its fable-like qualities, while also exploring its relationship to Australia and its implications for the English society of its day. He recognises the film’s relevance to the contemporary struggle to find common ground between blacks and whites.

Walkabout, says Nowra, “destroyed the cliche of the Dead Heart and made us Australians see it from a unique perspective, as something wondrous, mysterious and sensuous. It took a stranger…to reveal it to us.”

So, Roeg came and walked in the forbidding place, the Outback, sometimes still called the Dead Heart, at a time when the occasional Australian film was avoided by many Australians. There was no Australian movie industry. Roeg showed us a different image of the Outback. Nowra explains how he felt when he first saw the film in the 1970s:

“The images of the Outback were of an almost hallucinogenic intensity. Instead of the desert and bush being infused with a dull monotony, everything seemed acute, shrill and incandescent. The Outback was beautiful and haunting. It didn’t matter that some of the animals were incongruous to the location, and the countryside was at times absurdly out of sync with the actual terrain traversed. The setting sun was a richer red than I ever thought possible, the solitary quandong tree in the middle of the desert had the mysterious visual potency of a Byzantine icon, the animals had a fairytale brightness, and the Aboriginal boy’s dance seemed one of the strangest yet beautiful expressions of yearning I had ever seen. The visual splendour mocked my stereotype of the Outback. Never before had I entertained the notion that our landscape could be so romantic, so glorious both in its potent dangers and beauty.”

Reading Nowra’s balanced account of Walkabout is a journey through the film of places, of people, of the journey of the characters as well as the era of the film’s production. However, it is through time most of all that the turbulent, intertwining Aboriginal journey—glaring-into-the-distance-for-a-glimpse of reality while nurturing the land from an ancient point of view—is brought to the surface. The journey of reading Walkabout was a painful reminder of who we are as Australians today and the role played by the language of a civil tongue. David Malouf refers to this as “what we all, as English speakers, come home to.” This is also a language without urgency, which does not highlight the turbulence of Indigenous Australian reality, nor lessen the widening gap between Black and White Australia. A similar civility was once described by Primo Levi (The Drowned and the Saved, 1988) as one of the weapons of a modern state in a war against memory, deployed in propaganda, camouflaged by upbringing, instruction and popular culture in order to deny the entry of memory—or what should be remembered. In book, in film and still today, Walkabout, albeit a fable, omits some of the deep concerns and facts of memory for Indigenous Australia.

In her essay collection, Playing in the Dark (1992), Toni Morrison says the form of evasion which uses a substitute, racially-inflected language as a wilful critical blindnes—created by habit, manners and political agenda and by excising the political from the life of the mind as being ‘race free’—has proven costly to the artist and added to continuing racism between White and Black people.

First published in 1959 as The Children, Marshall’s book was republished as Walkabout in 1961. The story was modernised to suit a 1970s movie audience. As an Aboriginal writer reading this fable of English sensibilities I am still angered by the film’s portrayal of the Aboriginal character, named simply “Aboriginal boy”, who conveniently commits suicide at the end of the film because he fails to gain the affection of Mary, the white girl he saved. Because he only speaks his Aboriginal language, noone can communicate with him. He is in fact muted, silenced—but this was not a problem for the purposes of the story as he had been given a different role to play. He is the backdrop, an offering from Indigenous Australia. As Morrison said about Black oppression: “This black population was available for mediations on terror—the terror of European outcasts, their dread of failure, powerlessness, Nature without limits, natal loneliness, internal aggression, evil, sin, greed. In other words, this slave population was understood to have offered itself up for reflections on human freedom in terms other than the abstractions of human potential and the rights of man.” The male Aboriginal character in Walkabout was in fact choked—an idiosyncratic choice—hanging himself from a tree at the end of the film, after leading the girl and her brother to safety. With his silence complete, the film totally succeeds in enforcing an invisibility of the racial reality of the times, strengthening the dire consequences of a distorted history for Aboriginal people today.

Very much relevant in today’s Australia, where so much hope continues to be forsaken by the exclusion of people on racial terms, a story like Walkabout should also include a different reading where issues of race are put to the test. Walkabout was about a White man, in this case the British author, Marshall, testing White power and domination in the “black playground of his imagination”, and here in the homeland of the Aboriginal. This was an agile writer’s game in morals, ethics and visions of justice. The game was continued by the screenwriter Edward Bond 20 years later, while still denying the reality of unimaginably painful decades for Aboriginal people, just to see how Blackness will lose—and not only that—pay, because Blackness wanted the ‘unimaginable,’ the purest representation of innocence in the White world that must be protected above all else from Black hands, a White girl. In fact, those who belong to an Aboriginal world might view the film’s portrayal of this Aboriginal character’s life as being trivialised and powerless: the premise being that even a young, white schoolgirl could cause the death of this newly initiated, Aboriginal man. This reading of the story is that Aboriginal knowledge counts for nothing. The chilling thought is that because of the continued silencing of the Aboriginal voice, young Aboriginal men are committing suicide to perhaps have their voice finally recognised.

Black American author and scholar Ralph Ellison once said this stereotyping of the collective imaginative body of the ‘Black’ giant, who, lying trussed up like Gulliver, forms the stage and the scene upon which the action unfolds, was a literature more about consoling the White man, than crushing the Black man. On the other hand, Edward Said, in Orientalism (1995), examined the British needneed to have executive responsibility over the coloured races, and explained, “It was of this tradition, its glories, and difficulties, that Kipling wrote when he celebrated the ‘road’ taken by White Men in the colonies:

The screening of Kalkadoon Man, a documentary commissioned by the Queensland Biennial Festival of Music about the seeking out and making of a didjeridu by composer William Barton, was a generous theatrical affair. There were speeches, performances by Barton on the instrument and by his mother, Delmae Barton, in soprano vocalise, and the handing over of the didjeridu to the museum’s director.

I spoke to director of the film, Brendan Fletcher about the experience of making the film. He described a rich and intense experience—10 days on the road outside Mt Isa with Barton. “It was pure process…just me and William, a camera and a microphone and the bubble of the journey.”

For Fletcher this was an adventure and an education. The adventure comprised traversing a unique landscape, Barton’s traditional Kalkadungu homeland, during the wet season. A sudden storm meant re-crossing 5 rivers to avoid being stranded. There are brief dramatic shots of Barton taken from the car as he wades ahead, the sky filled with rain and lightning. Some days were hot and fly-blown, making it hard to work. Mostly though it’s the pleasure of the collaboration that comes across.

Fletcher says he filmed Barton each night as they sat by the campfire, recording the stories and songs that would become the vocal strand of the film (some of it re-recorded later, but using the same words). As the 2 travelled, Barton would fill Fletcher in on family and clan history, visit key sites and recollect his own history with the didjeridu. Producer and editor Chris Newling says that the makers soon realised that there was no need to narrate the making of the didjeridu: you can witness that without words—the only exception appearing to be the explanation about filling cracks in the timber with spinifex wax from the plant’s roots.

What Barton has to tell us is a spare but intriguing account of his parents’ battle for land, their success, his father’s death, memories handed down of massacres and narrow escapes, glimpses of good, caring relations between whites and blacks, and Barton’s education as a player. The elders of his clan passed on to him his teacher’s didjeridu (though he points out that ‘teach’ is not in the Kalkadungu language—the learning player watches and listens and learns). This was rare, he says. Usually such an instrument is broken, “silenced” after its maker and player passes on.

The most powerful moment of the film is when Barton first plays the instrument he has made. The music he makes with the didjeridu is sombre and fluent. Shot in tight close-up, he appears to finish, but his eyes remain fixed on the didjeridu, his hands stay in place. It is as if he has hesitated rather than ceased playing, as if to ask the instrument is it satisfied, has it been awoken.

Kalkadoon Man, A documentary film, Queensland Biennial Festival of Music, Queensland Museum, July 18

Ars Electronica is revered in the annals of new media arts and theory, and for its role in the European, Oceanic and North American new media art scenes. Packed into 5 days at Linz, about an hour and a half from Vienna and straddling the River Danube, the event comprises a conference, an exhibition at the Ars Electronica Museum of the Future, the Prix at the OK Centruum, electronic theatre and live performance. Linz is small and it’s easy to flow between the riverside and downtown venues while media arts lay an incongruous internationalist map onto the medieval city.

The conference is now rather institutionalised and themed (this year: Code = art, code = law, code = life). Among the exhibitions and performances there are 3 threads I want to mention: realtime video and audio manipulation; multi-user environments; and developments in tactile user interfaces.

Realtime manipulation of video and audio signal flow is a prevalent techné. The Cinema Fabrique (Justin Manor, USA) is a gesture-controlled, hardware/software environment for single-person improvisation. Holding a section of the interface in each hand, the visitor can choose, filter, scratch, loop and otherwise manipulate projected pop culture video/audio sequences. The 2-handed interface is enticing—it encourages expressive, free-form movement and a dance approach to interactivity.

The software artists TMEMA (Golan Levin, Zachary Leiberman USA) in collaboration with voice artists Jaap Blonc (NL) and Joan La Barbara (USA), performed the playful Messa di Voce. The piece is written in custom code developed during a residency at Ars Electronica, and is based on speech recognition algorithms. In what was more a series of set pieces than a fully realised performance, the vocalists were tracked spatially and their utterances analysed in real time. The system synthesises and outputs graphics in response—so Blonc performs his virtuosic vocals and the graphically rendered bubbles projected around his head are pushed up and suspended by the force of his breath. While the possibilities of the technical arrangements are very inspiring, I had to ask what creative and aesthetic development has been sacrificed for the complexity of the software development.

A wonderfully realised live performance with interactivity was POL, a Mechatronic Performance by Marcel-li Antunez Rocha (Spain). Two performers with exo-skeletal apparatus drive the fable of a rabbit’s search for love; performers’ action and voice, transcoded by the exo-skeleton, manipulate robotic offsiders, sound and projections. The complex, 3 channel Flash animations are synthesised into a retro-futuristic trope of mythical creatures, Bosch-like scapes and scenarios of sex, death and betrayal. The robotic and the cybernetic merge with an aesthetic of baroque intensity, evoking various origins of the abject and disembodied subject: surrealism, 1920s futurism, medievalism and collective fable.

Multiuser environments provide a challenge to new media artists and designers. Instant City (Sybille Hauert, Daniel Reichmuth, CH) is developed in Max/MSP. A very tactile interface helps—visitors stand around a square plinth on which they arrange acrylic blocks in architectural forms—the ‘buildings’ of the instant city. The placement and mass of the blocks manipulates the sound composition (visitors choose between 6). The installation successfully brings visitors together across the top of the plinth: the acrylic blocks, lovely in their own sandblasted way, are non-threatening. It is easy to play with their manipulating effect and to tweak the compositions with a degree of finesse.

Access by Marie Sester (France) allows more freeform audience response. A motion-tracking spotlight attaches itself to a passerby and follows them around the gallery. A simple idea, which has complex interactivity affect (people become self-conscious about ‘being in the spotlight’ and probably about the simplicity of the metaphor too). Why am I grinning so foolishly? Visitors become inventive—playing tag with the light, and with other potential ‘subjects’, pushing the installation to its limits. Access plays with notions of light as sprite, the audience as focus of attention, and an anthropomorphism we cannot help but bring to animated objects.

In Pockets Full of Memories (George Legrady, USA), visitors scan an object of their choice and enter associated metadata into a database. Throughout the duration of the exhibition the database grows and is continually reconfigured (and projected) as an emergent system using a Kohonen self-organising map algorithm. Although employing a single user interface, the installation evokes real world consciousness of being and contributing in a system with others, in which we nevertheless aim to make an individual mark.

Can you see me now? (Blast Theory and The Mixed Reality Lab, University of Nottingham, UK) is an addition to an important body of multi-user performance works. CUSMN operates in the non-private, non-public cultural spaces emerging around wireless communications like mobile phones, GPS and 3G. ‘Real’ players on the street and online players inhabit the city and a virtual overlay—“the players online and the runners in the street enter into a relationship that is adversarial, playful and ultimately filled with pathos.” A crucial feature of Blast Theory projects is the ability to extend user and audience affect outside the game—rather than delimiting our consciousness to the stereotypical and virtual, the gameplay pushes us to understand aspects of ourselves, our communities and social responsibility. This is partially achieved by the very visceral gameplay—in CUSMN the players and gameplay self-generate affects of pursuer and pursued. In a new work, Uncle Joe, players are encouraged to buddy up and commit to long term mutual support outside the game, without any mediation by the organisers. It was encouraging to see Blast Theory awarded the Prix Ars Electronica Golder Nica, which has in the past lauded some commercial, apolitical projects.

Developments in tactical user interface were particularly in evidence at the Ars Electronica Centre. Many of these applications are prototypical and easily understood as collaborative production tools. However the possibility of artistic application imbues them with extra frisson. The Audio Pad (James Patten, Ben Recht, MIT, USA) enables sole or collaborative users to compose using freely mobile discs that trigger and manipulate predetermined audio compositional variables (eg timbre and pitch). The interface is very attractive, fluid and responsive. Also developed at MIT, the SAND TRAY tool enables multiple users to model interdependencies in earth science, engineering or hydraulic projects using a tray of coarse sand as the interface. Depending on how the sand is modelled—add a hill, flatten a mound—the effects on height, topography, water flow and temperature are calculated and projected back onto the sand in realtime. These innovations in tactical and multi-user interface address current issues about collaborative work process and the role of interactivity.

Other displays use sound as data input, and many visitors were fascinated by Protrude, flow by Sachiko Kodama and Minako Takeno (Japan), an installation of strongly magnetic fluid which responds to sound inputs. An attempt to model matter freely, as well as express wild and organic shapes, the work responds to synchronous sound by creating 3D patterns of splitting, clustering, flowing or dripping.

Finally, a whimsical work Earth Core Laboratory and Elf Scan (Agnes Meyer-Brandis, Germany) encourages a very careful, delicate form of tactical user interactivity. Based on the conceit that mineral-dwelling elves carry on a complex, humanoid life within a parallel universe of mineral cores, the work demands visitors very carefully scan the cores with some pseudo-scientific gear. The more careful, delicate and composed your search, the steadier your hand, the greater chance of seeing the little elf vignettes.

Ars Electronica, directors Gerfried Stocker & Christine Schopf, Linz, Austria, Sept 6-11

Given the inherent difficulties in creating art events in public spaces, it was fantastic to see the MCA’s Primavera (in conjunction with City of Sydney and AMP’s Art & About) take to the street with Re_Squared. Staged at Undercroft, a strange, brutalist cave beneath the Australia Square building in Sydney’s CBD, Re_Squared projected the city back onto itself, concrete onto concrete, reflecting its textures and terrors, visually fetishising everyday urban existence.

Re_Squared is the creation of Cicada (Kirsten Bradley and Nick Ritar) on visuals, with Ben Frost on sound. With a massive surround sound system, Frost lulls us into his audio zone by re-sampling the actual environment. What sounds like the rumbling Martin Place underground turns out to be the opening body-jarring bass frequencies of the piece. The projections are concentrated on a screen with 2 angled pillars used for flanking images. Pillars behind catch more projections and texture the space.

The 1 hour 15 minute audio visual immersion breaks into episodes, or tracks, as in an audio recording. Comparisons with the Koyaanisqatsi model of urban ambience come to mind, though there is something more engaging in this work. Partly it’s the combination of grittiness and meticulous production. A great section takes place in an underground carpark with the camera strapped to the underside of a skateboard. Another loop follows a superkooldude in stupidly wide pants down the road—no destination is ever reached but the rhythm and purposefulness is compelling. Sometimes it’s pure aesthetic absorption: water in a gutter filmed so it looks like an exotic rock pool; a smoke trail meandering from an ashtray; an escalator infinitely ascending like a city artery. An interesting inclusion is a personal narrative with each of the artists filmed in silhouette on split-screen, pacing, preparing…for what? These visuals are manipulated live while the overall score seems predetermined. Frost’s sound is sumptuous, full of beautifully defined dirt and crackle, spliced with orchestral melodic swellings. Only by the end of the piece did I feel the climactic waves becoming a little too comfortable.

Having enough time to access the space in order to truly explore its potential is one of the challenges for artists taking on site-specific work. While the audio and visual elements of Re_Squared are well tended and blended, with the exception of one stark graphic, the flanking columns are only really explored as a surface for a kind of washed out texture. I wondered whether some smaller, more focussed projections might have more power. Also, the surround sound creates a desire for a 360 degree experience making the frontal focus here unsatisfying. That said, I found Re_Squared an engaging audiovisual experience. Hopefully there’ll be further such immersive explorations in response to other spaces in the future.

Re_Squared, Cicada + Frost in association with MCA and City of Sydney/AMP’s Arts & About, Primavera, Undercroft, Australia Square, Sydney Oct 9 & 16. www.cicada.tv

I once dreamed I was falling off a bridge and as I fell, scolded myself, “Dreaming symbols again!” as if my failing had caused the fall.

Marie Brassard has come up with a richer commentary on the postmodern condition in her solo work, Jimmy. For Brassard, a close collaborator with Robert Lepage, the creation of this play in 2001 was her first experience as solo writer/director. The work has been an international success with tours and translations. She arrived in Sydney after a successful season at the Melbourne International Arts Festival. Her new work, La Noirceur premieres in Montreal in June.

In Jimmy, Brassard spins the intriguing tale of a homosexual hairdresser born in the dream of a (homophobic) American general in the 50s. “As [Jimmy] is about to kiss his lover in the dream, the general dies, leaving the 2 in no man’s land, in a state of pure pleasure. After staying suspended in time for 50 years, Jimmy starts to live again, but to his despair, in the dreams of a Montreal actress.”

Brassard’s beautifully orchestrated performance takes place on a deceptively simple stage. We’re on the sloping edge of somewhere, a step in time maybe, with only a mirror to reflect on. Using a pitch-shifting device to deepen her voice, Brassard’s measured delivery is captivating, her richly detailed tale of longing holding us in thrall till the end when she drops us too suddenly back into the world. Along the way, there’s a nicely orchestrated rift in the narrative when the device drops out and for a moment we’re unsure whether the technology has failed. This gives the real actress a chance to reveal herself momentarily to her audience. I’m a sucker for these gaps in the theatrical fence. Others, I discover later, find the postmodern folly too familiar—don’t fall for it at all. This lapse into uncertainty makes the telling even more enticing. Brassard has such a light performative touch, her French-Canadian accent delayed by the device makes her sound like a live puppet. This effect is enhanced by her fixed facial expression and articulated movements confined largely to a fixed plane. She is the perfect dream being, waiting to be filled with our projections.

There’s a note in the program about the moment of waking from a pleasurable dream in which we try to return: “You close your eyes again and you try to slowly get back into the exact same position you were in when you opened them. You try to go back to where you were. To that place you only glimpsed.” Like many artists before her, Marie Brassard attempts to capture that state and very nearly nails it.

I think I know where Jimmy spent those 50 years he went missing. Days after this performance I dropped into Light from Shadow, the wonderful exhibition at Ivan Dougherty Gallery that features recent hologram art in intriguing juxtapositions with historic works by Tiepolo, Goya and others. Peering into Paula Dawson’s To Absent Friends (Midnight Fragment) 1989, a silvery hologram of a totally realised hotel bar, I swear I saw Jimmy’s shadow.

Jimmy, performer Marie Brassard, design Simon Guilbault, technical designer Christian Gagnon, sound adviser & soundtrack realisation Michel F Cote; The Studio, Sydney Opera House, Nov 4-7

Light from Shadow: The Legacy of Chiaroscuro in Spatial Imaging, Ivan Dougherty Gallery October 22-Nov 29 www.shadowyfigures.com

Jill Scott, Coded Characters: Media Art (with DVD-ROM), Hatje Cantz, Germany, 2003; ISBN 3 7757 1272 0 (Hardback)

Jill Scott’s art spans video, conceptual performance and interactive environments and has been exhibited in the US, Australia, Europe and Japan. Scott’s work explores relationships between the body, technology and experiences of real time and virtual space, most recently using computers, 3D Animation and Interactive Art. Born in Melbourne in 1952, Scott lectured in Media at the University of New South Wales, College of Fine Arts, Sydney and founded the Australian Video Festival. In 1993 she won an Award of distinction at Ars Electronica for Interactive Art. Based in Europe for many years, Scott has been Artist in Residence and project co-ordinator for the Medienmuseum at the Zentrum fur Kunst und Medien Technology in Karlsruhe (ZKM) and Research Fellow at The Center for Advanced Inquiry into the Interactive Arts, University of Wales, Great Britain, where she received a Doctorate in Media Philosophy. Professor for Installation Design in the Media Faculty at The Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany until 2003, she is now Research Professor at The University of Applied Science (FHA) and the Academy of Art and Design (HGKZ) in Switzerland. Eds.

When an artist publishes a book surveying the vast body of their work it is sometimes difficult to decide, as a reviewer, whether to evaluate the art it contains or the text that contains it. In such a case, the tasks of the writing, presentation and design, which fall to the book, should be to contextualise, historicise and indeed engage the art in broader aesthetic dialogue. A book, rather than say a retrospective show, should draw the reader into the world of art and artist, offer new possibilities for understanding the work and bring the artist into an exchange with external perspectives. Here the art book differentiates itself as a form and becomes a mode of inquiry that goes beyond simply the documentation or re-presentation of work. When this happens, reading about art and its producers turns out to be a rewarding and enriching activity. The balance between pictorial survey and textual engagement is infrequently achieved—Jill Scott’s Coded Characters is no exception.

Admittedly the job of translating time-based and interactive art into the static book form is a daunting one. A single image of an installation or video never does justice to the transitory qualities of these media forms. It is perhaps for this reason that Scott includes copious amounts of visual testimony to a career spanning the decades of the 1970s, 80s, 90s and forward into the new millennium. And yet given its inclusion of a DVD-ROM for the purposes of documentation and the inherent problems of photographing screen-based work, Coded Characters as an art book falls short of anything more than a simple catalogue of the artist’s work. It does not give us a good sense of how Scott’s work sits within the broader phenomenon of media art or where, as a result of her contributions, media art may go in the future. Instead we are presented with a rather standardised view of the history of technological development that serves as a mode for organising Scott’s pieces into 3 all too tidy categories.

Her first phase, spanning 1972-1982, Scott labels “Analog Figures” in deference to the body-based performative nature of the work. This quickly gives way to her video period of the 1980s, which she conceives of as “Digital Beings”, and is followed by an attempt to resolve this opposition between materiality and information technologies in the final label “Mediated Nomads.” This last period, with which Australian audiences may be more familiar, focuses upon her computer-based 1990s pieces such as Frontiers of Utopia (1995). This is an interactive installation that allows the audience to initiate dialogues between 8 fictional female characters from different decades of the 20th century. Scott, with many of her contemporaries such as Roy Ascott (who writes a brief introduction to the book) and Peter Weibel, sees the technologies themselves as the driving force of media art. Hence early work concentrating upon the performer’s body can be deemed ‘analogue’ because there appears to be a more direct or analogous relation set up between the performer’s body and its representation in the media of the performance. Furthermore, it is only the deployment of analogue technologies by politically informed media artists which undoes the distortions of identity commercial media interests produce when using these same technologies. As Scott states: “We wanted to explore these process-oriented mediums for their potential levels of mimicry and distortion of the figure (body), governed by a fascination to record ourselves, recreate our identities and rebel against our commercial environment.”

Similarly when discussing work produced using digital technologies, she unthinkingly draws an equivalence between the nonlinear capabilities of the software and a conception of digital art as aesthetically pluralistic. Although many artists have chosen to explore nonlinear systems during the late 20th century, they have not necessarily used digital technologies to do so: Hans Haake being one of the better-known examples.

There are 2 consequences of relying on this evolutionary, techno-determinist view of media art’s growth. The first is to completely miss the interesting connections to be made across Scott’s work and across the conceptual frameworks that underpin the technologies themselves. In an early media and performance work, Moved Up Moved Down (1978), Scott plays back a pre-recorded loop of herself climbing a giant staircase alongside a realtime video monitoring audience members climbing stairs. The audience complained that this had the effect of making their climb more difficult. This catapults the concerns of the piece, which investigates the experiential effects of mediated feedback on human beings, more firmly into a contemporary aesthetic terrain that explores the ecology of cybernetic systems. Breaking art down into neat eras that coincide with the use of particular technologies facilitates against more nuanced associations.

The second consequence of conceiving media art as the outcome of technological change is, paradoxically, to leave little room for the impact of its experimental currents. Scott’s narrative—beginning with the body accompanied by sound and video, moving to digital video and ending up with interactivity—sounds suspiciously like a history of the rise of the Sony Corporation. Media artists are always confronted with the social reality of consciously situating themselves in relation to the media industry and may choose to appropriate, infiltrate or simply occupy similar territories. But Scott fosters an old-fashioned and elitist approach to media culture by asserting that her mode of artistic intervention works in an intelligent way, ‘outside’ the intellectual desert of the media industry.

Today’s media artists know they cannot get away with this aesthetic avant-gardism and humorously, passionately and tactically insert themselves into the hub of any and every mediated experience. It is a pity that Coded Characters does not interrogate the relation of Jill Scott’s media art to the context of the media cultures within which she found herself working. Although the book offers us a number of essays and an artist’s interview, it seems that none of the analyses up to this task. Ultimately we are left with a slim view of where media art has been and an even narrower idea of where it might be heading.

‘Sweet bird, that shunn’st the noise of folly, Most musical, most melancholy.’
Milton, Il Penseroso

We, the vinyl generation, are able to recollect our personal histories through the music of our time. Particular songs remind us of periods and situations in our lives. Pivotal events become woven into the fabric of human existence: John F Kennedy’s assassination, the death of John Lennon, the aeroplanes crashing into the Twin Towers. Moments we remember as shared and personal.

Raimund Hoghe’s performative reflection on the 1960s, Another Dream, is a collage of many such moments. Evoking the social via a poetics of the personal, Hoghe quietly walks us through his account of this period. Music is used to stimulate memories and feelings, whereas words articulate his life experience. Hoghe successively unfolds himself to the gaze of the spectator, simultaneously revealing some things about time and place. His 1960s is decidedly German: it consists of post-war rubble, his sister scrubbing steps, the local cinema he frequented.

Famous songs of the 60s delineate each section of the piece, which consists of simple actions: repeated arm gestures, a reclining body waving an incense stick in time to the music, hands measuring the length of the body, walking patterns. The colour red stands out—communism, solidarity, blood. Hoghe lies down for peace beside a red t-shirt. Some sections are meditative, ritualistic, even reverential. A lacquer box of tea lights is lit, extinguished, lit, arranged, and packed away again. Spare gestures accompany poignant songs, many from singers no longer with us. Life is not a bowl of cherries.

At one point well into the performance, Hoghe carried a lantern along a pathway. This simple act provoked a perceptual shift out of ordinary time into a more epic awareness. The epic is a poetry of the heroic. Another Dream is a performative recollection of things past, a revelation of time and place and body. Its heroism is a tale of survival, of a lived body out of the ordinary, oriented towards the extra-ordinary. This moving work is meticulously crafted and performed. Hoghe is utterly present within his work in a way that gives it a dignified clarity. The last image in Another Dream is of Hoghe’s buckled back facing the audience, his head supporting a small box of shifting sands. The box is illuminated. The world is dark but also illuminated.

Superficially, Balletlab’s latest work, Nativity, is also about a moment in personal history—choreographer Philip Adams’ childhood. Its opening look is every bit as good as David Lynch’s picket fence in Blue Velvet. A select audience is welcomed by our maitre d’—Adams resplendent in brown velvet suit. His house is a faux cabin/home, furnished with a selection of Australian objects, circa 1960. We are treated to some horrible biscuits (Iced Vovos, I believe) while Adams gives us a tour of his collectibles.

But don’t be fooled. This is not a trip down memory lane. From the iconic twee of 60s suburbia to the mementos of Adams’ childhood, there isn’t a scintilla of expressivity about this work. Nativity is a postmodern autobiography. It lacks any sense of the biographical. A woman enters the house and hangs her coat. Is she Adams’ mother? We neither know nor care. She is a Stepford wife, her absence is palpable. The walls of the home open onto an Aussie backyard, a tiny Hills Hoist twirls in the background. A toy Spanish bull from Adams’ past is our portal into a bullfight scene: the girls are toreadors, the boys are bulls. A reference to childhood initiates some backyard roughhousing using Adams’ familiar group choreography where people anonymously throw each other about on a tarpaulin. They fold, twist and turn with ping-pong timing.

Stuffed rodents, moose and marsupials jerk on and offstage. They exhibit the same deadpan as the dancers. We are enticed into a climax of vacant spirituality: one dancer is a Snow White character surrounded by a manger of stuffed animals. Somehow this leads into an offstage UFO sighting and the deliverance of a sort of saviour.

Nativity is very funny. It is imaginative and creative. Adams’ presence as our tour guide and some inspired animal grooming make the piece work as quirk. Two areas could be improved: the dancers are required to use their faces very carefully, way beyond the usual demands of contemporary dance. I think some skilful direction would assist, to help the performers work out what attitude to adopt in the various scenes and the overall tenor of the piece. Secondly, the dancer’s relationship to objects could similarly be further nuanced. There is often a touch of subject/object cross-dressing in his work—objects are animated, whereas humans are evacuated of human emotion. How are those stuffed animals to be handled and moved? How should the various inanimate objects be animated? Whatever the answers here (puppetry skills?), their development would give a greater edge to the bent humour that animates Nativity, encouraging its eccentricities and enhancing its insanity.

Lucy Guerin’s Plasticine Park is a much more modern dance piece. A collaboration between Guerin and 4 visual artists, Plasticine Park, consists of 8 scenarios that juxtapose dance and the moving image. Some segments are humorous, some naturalistic, some video-arcade and some otherworldly. The naturalistic works (David Rosetzky) are accompanied by a kitchen sink monologue by 2 young things (Kirstie McCracken and Kyle Kremerskothen). Although (perhaps because) they were everyday, these sections had some interesting choreographic moments: movement found on a rug or with a chair. The more imaginary Create Grid (by Stephen Honegger) was a very geometric piece whose corresponding choreography was equally directional. It was precisely executed by Brett Daffy who has an admirable ability to move with mercurial fluidity. Polygon Jungle, also by Honegger, looked like it inhabited the colourful universe of video games, sporting the meanderings of a queer bunny (Shona Erskine). Laresa Kosloff’s 2 pieces were cartoons that documented the travails of wannabe athletes. Guerin’s comic responses drew upon the lexicon of the gym and running track to create a narrative, faithfully rendered by Trevor Patrick and Rebecca Hilton.

Patricia Piccinini’s images were the most disturbing. Her imaginary compositions of human bodies recalled the stark realism of documentaries on surgical procedures. Blood bubbled, swollen organs emerged and mutated. Sally Gardner performed a meticulous series of hand and head movements with a rhythm and quality that matched Piccinini’s alien landscape of the flesh. In a final sweep, Stephanie Lake cut through space to the last of Piccinini’s corpulent imagery. This was the most poignant section though I’m not sure why. Perhaps it was because Lake seemed more exposed than the others, closer to the audience. Plasticine Park was a “degustation”, an aesthetic series of tastings coupling food (dance) and wine (image). It afforded the opportunity to see the breadth of Guerin’s kinaesthetic imagination in response to a series of artistic constructions, designed to stimulate the palate.

Nativity, Balletlab, choreographer Phillip Adams, designer Bluebottle, performers Joanne White, Ryan Lowe, Brooke Stamp, Toby Mills, Rachel Ogle & Phillip Adams, Dancehouse, Melbourne, October 13-35

Plasticine Park, director, choreographer Lucy Guerin, visual concept Lucy Guerin & Patricia Piccinini, performers Brett Daffy, Shona Erskine, Sally Gardner, Rebecca Hilton, Kyle Kremerskothen, Stephanie Lake, Kirstie McCracken, Trevor Patrick, visual artists, Stephen Honegger, Laresa Kosloff, Patricia Piccinini, David Rosetzky, music/sound design, Paul Healy, ACMI Screen Gallery, Melbourne, October 11-25

Keely O’Shannessy’s Alice’s Conversations in Cyberspace, at the Centre for Contemporary Photography’s always-intriguing e-media gallery, is an interactive installation in which participants are invited to ‘converse’ with an on-screen Alice (transfigured from her literary Wonderland to the brave new frontier of screen-based computer technology). The participant types questions or observations into the computer, triggering various responses from the on-screen character that range through intrigue, delight, scorn, confusion and outrage.

The hitch is that Alice’s side of the conversation is restricted to phrases from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass and Alice in Wonderland, and thus the conversation becomes something of a guessing game, as the participant is compelled to try and string together some sort of meaningful interaction. There is a conspicuous score in the top left corner of the screen—your points for interesting and pleasing Alice. They’re deducted for boring, confusing and disappointing her.

Thus, the subject matter that interests Alice the most scores you the most points and leads to the most favourable response: a high score of 5 and a warm thank-you “for your interesting story.” Piss her off, however, and she lashes out, dismissing you as being “perfectly idiotic,” and ending the conversation abruptly, leaving you to start over and try and do the right thing next time (whatever the ‘right thing’ is in Wonderland/Cyberspace).

The idea of “winning” a conversation by placating the other party as compliantly and entirely as possible provides a wry commentary on the loaded and sublimated nature of our seemingly innocuous everyday interactions and conversations. As a conversation with a machine—and O’Shannessy is quick to point out that this is not an experiment in “artificial intelligence”—it provides a humorous insight into the ways in which our expectations and hidden agendas are present in every move we make, and every interaction we have, be it with live or inanimate collaborators. Alice may have a highly specific (and necessarily predetermined) agenda, but it only serves to highlight the participant’s own expectations. The interaction increasingly becomes something of a test of one’s adaptive and intuitive finesse.

Pleasant as the conversation can be, Alice’s incredulous “attitude” and the omnipresent evaluative score lingering on the screen inevitably provokes some aggression and competitive attitudes. I found myself going back again and again to try and trump Alice at her own game. I was clearly not alone—the final comment for the exhibition in the CCP’s comments book reads “Alice is a whore—she called me an idiot.”

While remaining relatively small in scale and ambition, Alice’s Conversations in Cyberspace is a witty and polished installation. Indeed, it’s a refreshingly subtle and considered take on the increasingly visible media art/game hybrid genre. Beckoning the viewer to unravel Alice’s mysteries, this humorous and intelligent multimedia encounter throws the spotlight back on the participant.

Alice’s Conversations in Cyberspace, Keely O’Shannessy, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, Oct 3-Nov 1

Alessio Cavallaro is one of the most authoritative and engaged figures in new media arts in Australia. Senior Producer/Curator, New Media Projects, Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne, Cavallaro is a former director of Sydney’s dLux media arts (1997-2000) and co-editor with Darren Tofts and Annemarie Jonson of Prefiguring Cyberculture (Power Publications/MIT Press 2002). In the exhibition, Transfigure, opening at ACMI in December, Cavallaro has drawn on the centre’s significant collection to engage with the theme of transformation, but also adding some new works and a seminal immersive experience. We met at the RealTime office in Sydney (Cavallaro was once co-editor of OnScreen) where he took me on a verbal tour of the works and themes of his curatorial adventure.

Essentially, it’s about changing forms and appearances and it also suggests a property that the moving image has which, in general, the other visual arts don’t—the ability to change in and through time. Hence the idea that we could bring together a collection of works by prominent artists both Australian and international, mainly derived from ACMI’s exhibition collection, that would explore notions of perception, body, space and landscape as transformed by the moving image.

You’ve also programmed some seminal immersive works and a new interactive work. What is it about these that you think is important?

Osmose and Ephémère were created by Canadian artist Char Davies in 1995 and 1998 respectively. With Stelarc’s new project, Prosthetic Head, they form the thematic focus of the exhibition—body, landscape and technology. As film innovator John Whitney argued, to experiment with the medium of cinema is to confront the technology of cinema. Bringing that notion forward into the new media art realm, we find that more and more artists, particularly those in Transfigure, are not only using it to produce quite startling works but often to raise questions about the disquieting implications of our technological revolution.

The works of Davies and Stelarc not only implicitly explore the creative potentials of technology but also notions of embodiment, agency, consciousness and subjectivity. With VR, Davies enables us to explore how our subjective experiences of the natural world might be altered in a fully immersive 3D digital environment. There’s a direct critical inquiry not only about technology and the way it allows us to experience the world but also about how the technology is changing nature.

It involves a head mount, as in the classic VR image from the early 90s, and also a tracking vest. Rather than using a data glove or a joystick, for example, or some other kind of touch interface, you navigate through the worlds by breathing in and out and by leaning forward or back, to one side or the other. It takes the “immersent” a few minutes to adjust and orient themselves in the virtual space. The remarkable thing is that once you’re there, wherever you look—above, below, around you—you are in this world that Davies has constructed.

It’s one of the very few. Interestingly, it’s already regarded, rightly I believe, as a classic of its genre. I’m amused when people say, “oh, but that’s an old work, not a new media work.” Already there’s a notion of age creeping into new media arts as if to say that the only works exploring interesting concepts are those produced in the last 6 months.

What about the big new media exhibition issues? How long do people need to experience the work? How will you handle the queues?

Each “journey” in Osmose and Ephémère [which represents a symbolic correspondence between landscape, earth and interior body ed.] has a duration of 15 minutes. It’s free of charge but you need to book for a session. It’ll take around 20 minutes including the time for strapping on the vest and the head mount and taking them off. But, as has been proven when these works have been exhibited around the world, people are very disciplined about sticking to their designated timeslot because they want to experience them—and it really is an experience, one well worth having.

As you walk into the darkened space, you’ll see a computer-generated image of Stelarc’s head projected large scale onto a wall. There’s a plinth holding the keyboard and sensors that detect your entry into the space. The head will look towards you, greet you and invite you to initiate dialogue. You key in a remark, a question or a comment and the head responds from a substantial database vocabulary.

The work is a progression of Stelarc’s career-long investigation of the ‘obsolete body.’ The head is uncanny, certainly amusing and utterly engrossing. As with all of Stelarc’s work, it raises serious issues about consciousness, embodiment and artificial intelligence. In doing so it’s not only questioning those attributes and how they’re embedded in technology but also how we can re-define our own concepts of consciousness or identity through interacting with such a work.

It’s more informal. You don’t have to book for this one. Groups can gather while the person at the keyboard is conversing, as it were, with the head. With the Char Davies’ works, although only one immersent at a time can engage with the works, there is an ante-room in which a 2D projection of the landscape being travelled can be viewed by a group of people who might be curious or waiting their turn.

There are 13 other artists represented in Transfigure. How did you choose from the ACMI collection?

It was a matter of finding works to complement these major works in some way. Certainly, I was interested in notions of perception and landscape—and by landscape I don’t just mean representation of the natural landscape or cityscape but also the space of the screen. It’s interesting, certainly in single channel, 2-dimensional works, to think of the screen as a landscape space. For example, in Sydney artist Ian Andrews’ Departure, there’s a loop of found footage that repeats but the textures of the image begin to fragment and, as it were, exfoliate. You glimpse a shadowy figure of a man moving away. There’s something forensic about Andrews’ exploration of this image. He’s asking you to look deeper and deeper into it. For me, there’s an analogy in terms of perceptual interplay with the experience one might have with Char Davies’ works. And the difference between those experiences—the way the transparency of Davies’ images opens up to you as you glide through a virtual landscape, as opposed to the arrested moment and the movement in Ian Andrews’ work.

What other connections and associations might the visitor make between works?

Char Davies is at one end of the gallery and at the other there’s the world premiere of a multi-player game called acmipark by a Melbourne-based collective called selectparks. These works represent parentheses for the exhibition. The gameplay is quite different from the virtual spaces of Davies’ work. acmipark is an example of interaction in virtual worlds in a public space and in distributed space, because it can also be accessed and interacted with online. While Davies’ work offers a solitary experience—a more contained, private virtual space.

The works in between in one way or another raise issues of the body and space and how our perceptions and experiences are transformed in viewing and engaging with such works. For example, there are some astonishing biomedical visualisations by Drew Berry who works at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne. Coming from the scientific community, he probably wouldn’t refer to himself as an artist, but his visualisations are intricate and painterly and utterly captivating. What you’re witnessing are vistas of cellular molecular activity in the human body realised through computer-generated animations. There are analogies with Char Davies’ virtual landscapes. Justine Cooper’s Rapt was constructed by animating MRI scans of the artist’s own body, spectral vistas of her corporeal self. Gina Czarnecki’s video work, Infected, raises disturbing questions about the impact of technology and bio-engineering on the human body manifested through digital mutations of the image of a dancer. I’ve also included the music video by Chris Cunningham for the Björk song “All is Full of Love”, which in this exhibition can be aligned with Stelarc’s various projects documented in Alternate Interfaces, a video compilation of his recent performances involving robotic and prosthetic technologies.

I feel very gratified about the calibre of these artists and the aesthetic and technical diversity of works exhibited—online experiences, computer animations, documentary and experimental film and video, VR installations, gameplay and a computer-generated talking head. It makes for an intriguing amalgam of influences, convergences of ideas, applications of technologies. It’s also about representing the history of the moving image forms: film, video art, online experiences, new media and virtual reality all within the one exhibition. That for me has been the delight and privilege in being able to curate such an exhibition.

Other artists exhibited in Transfigure are Mike Stubbs (UK), Paul Brown (UK), Vikki Wilson (Australia), Ed Burton/Soda Creative Ltd (UK), Robert Gligorov (Macedonia/Italy), Steina (Iceland/USA), Tamás Waliczky (Hungary/Germany).

Transfigure, curator Alessio Cavallaro, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, Dec 8-May 9 www.acmi.net.au/transfigure

“What software do you use?” This question inevitably arises at any presentation by artists working with new technologies. Certainly, knowing something of tools is important, but this query all too often sends dialogue into a tailspin of tech-talk and TLAs [three letter acronyms], diverting attention from artistic intention and inspiration to methods and technique.

My overwhelming memory of this year’s Electrofringe festival was of presentations and discussions that mixed theory and practice with a mature sophistication. Something had definitely changed since my 2001 visit to Newcastle; artists performed works in progress and then discussed them, academics presented alongside VJs; panels included toolsets in discussion of concepts and artistic aims; masterclasses tempered technical know-how with practical examples. I felt Electrofringe had come of age in an environment it has helped build over the past 6 years.

First, some background: each year around early October under the auspices of the Octapod Association, Newcastle hosts an amazing array of interrelated festivals. The This Is Not Art festival (TINA) includes: Electrofringe; the National Young Writers Festival; the National Student Media Conference; Sound Summit, a national conference of independent electronic music and hip-hop; Radioactive, a national radio industry conference open to anyone involved in community, commercial, public, online, and digital radio; and Critical Animals, a graduate conference focused on the themes of all the above.

As an interdisciplinary event like no other; it’s not uncommon to find yourself wondering: “now which festival is this panel a part of?”

Electrofringe is “a hands-on, all-in, new media arts festival exploring sound, video, gaming, audio visual integrations, screen, hypertext and installation” (from electrofringe.org). That’s a very tall order, and a quick search of the website reveals that the program covers a lot of ground. It is impossible to be at every presentation, so you really have to choose whether to concentrate on one strand of the festival or sample widely from the range. However, Electrofringe is a lot more than the officially sanctioned events and anyone who only follows the program will miss out on a great deal of what the festival has to offer. Putting in time at the festival club (definitely try the ginger beer) and gigs are both worthwhile. Dinner is optional.

It’s the relaxed atmosphere of TINA that makes Electrofringe a must-do for anyone interested in maintaining a connection with what’s happening in Australian new media art and activism. The distinctions between presenter, audience, emerging and established artists are the fuzziest I’ve experienced anywhere. In what must be Australia’s highest concentration of eclectic new media talent outside a capital city, the festival fosters connections, collaborations and (increasingly) critical reflection. The many ongoing networks and collaborations that trace their existence to a specific Electrofringe forum attest to this, as to some extent does the recent explosion of Australian VJ culture and artists using digital games for creative expression.

This year’s festival featured diverse international artists presenting workshops, masterclasses and overviews of their work. Jonah Brucker-Cohen from MIT Dublin ran a workshop for creating alternative MIDI controllers (out of junk) and presented his extensive body of work subverting common conceptions of what networks can be. His installation PoliceState, a physically manifested carnivore client, was a great addition to the FraGGed exhibition (curated by Thea Baumann). The-phone-book Ltd from the UK helped participants create artworks for SMS and wireless delivery (courtesy of ANAT). Marije Baalman from Berlin gave a very thorough masterclass on Wave Field Synthesis and presented electroacoustic works written for this new way of spatialising sound. Janek Schaefer performed and presented work situated on the edges of architecture, art and turntablism. These guests expand the context of the festival, injecting new ideas and practices into the Australian scene. While bringing international credibility to the festival, this also raises the question: are Australians still averse to keynoting local talent?

On that front, other major highlights (surveyed from a range of attendees, organisers and performers) included: a series of in-depth workshops exploring patcher-based software techniques; investigations into the nature of text in visual culture and digital environments in panels chaired by Linda Carroli; plans for ongoing collaboration and discussion from sessions on surviving artists collectives and videotista tactics; Archimedia’s presentation on representations of Hackers in Media; QuantaCrib, a hybrid performance space designed to enable new media artists to interact with traditional media artists; an unofficial collection of the infamous and insanely intense as the Dual Plover label gave good reason for people to stray from the festival plan; and performances and masterclasses at the SPA[V]CE.

As an area concentrating on multi-channel audio-visual work, the SPA[V]CE inverted the usual panel model, having 40 minutes for presentation and performance with 20 minutes for discussion after. The atmosphere allowed for subtle works, with presentations ranging from live audio-visual improvisation and works-in-progress to very polished performances, inspiring some artists with “greater motivation to pursue ideas and projects.” The team responsible for the SPA[V]CE (Alan Bamford, Alistair Riddell & Shannon O’Neill) represent 3 quite different artistic practices based in 3 capital cities, a fine example of what Electrofringe is so good for: creating connections and mixing it up. It’s great to hear that the festival directors, Vicky Clare and Gail Priest plan to continue the format next year.

With eyes (and ears) to the future, the challenge Electrofringe faces is to stay connected and open to possibilities while it continues to develop and organise the program. In true Electrofringe fashion, it’s a challenge best met with a mix of audience, artist and curatorial input. There’s just one major problem to overcome: you can only take so much in one long weekend. All the extra-curricular activity, the associated late nights and hoarse throat (attempting to continue conversations over the band) combined with daily injections of new theories, people, techniques and experiences add up to a formidable test of the mind and body. You may want to start training for next year.

Dancers are Sace Eaters provides the Perth independent contemporary dance scene with a mirror on itself and a lens on the outside world. Two Suits (David Corbett, Paul Roberts) opened the festival; literally planted among the VIP speakers at the opening night launch who did double-takes as the welcome slipped into contact improvisation. The performers’ tactile, acrobatic flourishes were a lozenge for the dance-happy.

As dance becomes less about perfecting existing techniques and more a matter of morphogenesis (the creation of novel reality) Perth is an interesting place to be in a dance audience. The connection between cultural studies and dance-making has all but swerved and missed here, where dance engages more with popular culture than semiotics.

My first response to NightShift (George P Khut, Wendy McPhee) was, “Ah, the inside of my head.” McPhee’s blank poem and a sequence of semi-stripteases on film, inter-cut phrase by phrase, sputtered at breakneck speed. Cascading into the peepshow darkness of PICA’s central space from 4 transparent screens, the effect was of visual, poetic and polemic chiaroscuro all in relative non-sequence, and yet it flowed. Sexistentialism: who knew desire was anonymous femme-fleshy staccato, crisp shadow and font at transcendent rate of variation? It seems obvious to me now.

Throw the Body into the Fight refers to the nature of Raimund Hoghe’s entry into solo performance-making back in 1994. The performance is a journey through the works he has created since, through excerpts and reflections. The excerpts comprised anecdotes and dance sequences; personal moments of meeting oneself in historical circumstances of (sometimes pleasant) dislocation and suffering. The dances, set to torch songs, displayed a technique reminiscent of Pina Bausch for whom Hoghe has worked as dramaturg. The song choice flowed from the given narrative of each anecdote, but the ensuing movement phrases, having only the slightest hint of narrative segue, were starkly literal, disjuncted, set in a personal present. The effect analogised Hoghe’s very real otherness; small for his age, with a twisted spine and hump, gasping sometimes for breath between clauses. Uncomfortable yet welcoming, he gave license to re-attach ideology to body-memory. The audience passes with Hoghe as a native ‘outsider’, looking in as a post World War II German crossing out into a new and unfamiliar international politick—an essay in the instability of citizenhood. The lucidity of childhood, its time-looping, space-warping is a key to Hoghe’s performance and, I imagine, teaching logic. A complex encounter, not for everyone but a rare gift to Perth performance artists.

New dance has been about physicalising one’s creed. Graduate dancers have mostly relied on the obvious rules of engagement given by the stage-dance tradition. But contemporary dance audiences require a new kind of communication in the performance exchange. Do dancers know that the other disciplines they employ, like cinematography, visual art and narrative are fully-fledged and flux-ing disciplines in their own right? Even with short cuts and dabbling, gaining adherence for their work requires the additional form (or formlessness) of a performance structure—a communication mode.

Showcase 1 presented local dance groups doing new and extant work. In Commentary and The View Outside, Paul O’Sullivan experiments with hybridity (the added dimension is interactive video); in the former, to parody the discourse of contemporary dance, and in the latter to argue social justice through a ballet fairytale treatment of everyday class violence. Brave and mature but I imagine, grating to non-dancers. In Contact, Danielle Micich created a refreshingly feather-light critique through parody of the classical ballet ingénue. A post-modern chestnut, it was nonetheless lovingly rendered here, through technique, costume and music selection.

Watching Sete Tele and Rachel Arianne Gold in the collaboration N_TN_GOLD I was reminded of Chunky Move’s send up of ‘intricate and detailed’ movement (this being very popular among Australian audiences according to the company’s survey piece, Wanted). Performed with the kernel of an original voice, humour and darkness under sumptuous data-projected lighting effects, I felt I could look at N_TN_GOLD but not touch, nor be touched. Chasing Terror by Olivia Millard was a heartening example of independent dancers of varied experience and background working collectively. In the scheme of the night, it was unusual to see dancing without theatre or technology. I could not tell though whether the distance in their faces was performative or from the stress of ambitious risk. In any case, the length of the piece slightly outlasted its idea.

It is a difficult testament to the flaneurial nature of Perth dancer/choreographers in their relative isolation, traveling to national and international centres of dance, that upon returning home, the rich data collected does not (yet) necessarily translate into the local language. Now as cultural studies shifts from theory to functionality it will be interesting to see if and when it swings over Perth it will create a new legibility for dance here, if only by osmosis.

In order to appear on this page, a body moving quietly in the space of a black box must accede to translation. Watching Lucy Guerin’s Melt on the final night of Dancers are Space Eaters I found myself flipping through my head in search of inky simulacra the movement of bodies in space.

I settled on the noun ‘articulation.’ The ‘Articulata’ were Cuvier’s third great sub-kingdom of animals, embracing invertebrate animals with an external skeleton and having their limbs composed of segments jointed together—insects, crustacea. Here, I thought, was a word that would do the job nicely, itself articulated, registering the indivisibility of things, jointed between the real body and the organ of speech, the tongue. Articulation seemed to resonate simultaneously and without prejudice or precedence across words and movement.

I congratulated myself before I was lost in the extremities of Melt. Kirstie McCracken and Stephanie Lake quivered and shook. The tiny bones in their fingers contracted and extended. Thin white lines of light tracked across their bodies, like cracks in ice. Joints collapsed at the slightest touch. As the performers folded into each other, I was struck by the achievement of this piece at every level—lighting, sound score, graphic design. Afterwards, I read that Guerin had been interested in making a translation between temperature and movement. What a perfect articulation of a creative impulse, I thought. After all, it is in the extremities and the joints that heat and cold register, where a state finds its physical equivalence. A moment of legibility.

There is another sense to my word, which drives it in the opposite direction. “To articulate” is also to cauterise and compartmentalise, as in “to divide vocal sounds into distinct and significant parts.” So, is dance a jointed thing, a spine of relationships, or a series of incommensurate parts?

Against this isolationist stance, Dancers Are Space Eaters is an event that thrills in its capacity to extend the space of dance and give form to the interrelationship of contemporary impulses. Who would have thought that ballet—that Freudian field of attraction and repulsion for so many performers—should demonstrate the flexion that we associate with the contemporary? I am thinking here of Holly Croft’s compelling Frag, rather than Emiliana Lione’s more predictable Did it Happen? In Frag, 5 women, resident dancers from the West Australian Ballet, parade their pale uniform of leotardian (Lyotardian?) conformity with post-human precision.

Ballet finds it difficult to forgo its edges and ends—its neat corners. Even when punched in the gut it cannot forget its toes, its hands. I love it when ballet abandons the finishing school and takes a few punches.

Sometimes video and lighting design can do for the sweaty, dirty, contemporary body what ballet does for the hands and feet: deliver clean lines, sharp planes. In Swallow, Sue Peacock moves with asymmetrical precision, captured within a horizontal grid of blue and white light that makes us all voyeurs. There is a kind of resolute intentionality in Swallow; however abstract and foreign the tongue, it knows what it is saying. This is not to confuse articulation with the literal; simply, there was no rush for the program notes to supplement the gaps in the performance.

I suppose dance is a bit like crochet: holes are fine as long as they’re meant to be there.

Cazerine Barry’s Sprung is a different kind of articulation. A recognisable narrative (the end of the Oz dream of home ownership) is broken down into discrete elements (mortgage/banks/renovation) and extrapolated in an innovative 3-dimensional graphical space. Barry demonstrates the potential of an emerging juncture—that of solo performer and sophisticated digital artist. Her fine and funny story is replete with cars and suburbs and the Death of the Kangaroo. And yet, in embracing thematic, story and content—the ‘legible’—the artist goes for the too easily read. Dare I mention the comic book? Complexity and reference are sometimes threatened by 1950s visual data that is so easily reducible to kitsch. Why sacrifice contemporaneity for style? Despite these reservations, Barry’s is an original and accomplished voice—we all want to see where she goes next.

‘What is and is not meant to be?’ was the question on everybody’s lips after Molly Tipping’s work. Tipping opened the Platform Performances on the final evening of Week 2 of Dancers Are Space Eaters. The evening is designed to offer young and emerging choreographers and performers the opportunity to find a broader audience and refocus work developed through the earlier STRUT studio showings. I’d seen a version of molly and the light at one such showing, and what had been lo-tech was now definitely plugged-in. Edging away from dance, and firmly framing itself as performance, what had passed as charm and unmediated simplicity in Tipping’s earlier work stopped working for me. Despite a strong lighting concept (fluorescents head to tail across the floor, spinning bulb on white wire) she lost me in a disjointed narrative that touched on loss and European travel and woundings, but added up to confusion. As she wandered around on all fours with her head hidden beneath her up-ended dress (have I lost you?) I wondered about the vulnerability of the female body. What was she saying? When rape was mentioned I wondered too about the limits of this particular articulation. Neither dance nor spoken text was up to the task.

The dynamic Aimee Smith’s solo, the-state-of-in-between, plays in the space between the leaden gravity of the unconscious body-in-sleep and the elevated intentionality of the waking. A perfectly articulated concept was strongly mapped upon the body. Smith returned to dance with choreographer Jessyka Watson-Galbraith in Kind of Entwined, another strong piece that showed its movement research origins in an exploration of lines, planes, and geometric tracings.

Finally, the girls got together in Roxanne Carless’ Feelin’ Good. The choreographer shows strong affinities with dance theatre in her femme take on the bordello and the strip club. This playful up-ending of the gendered spaces of performance left me smiling.

Space Eaters began with Raimund Hoghe. In articulating his imperfect body to an audience expecting virtuosity and perfection, he reminded the audience that every body is worthy. It’s the sort of thing we mouth off but rarely take on. I am still shocked at his devastating challenge to contemporary dance.

I think of Rosalind Crisp’s Raft. She wears ordinary clothes—the sorts of clothes you don in the studio. But her body is not ordinary; it is wiry and expressive, marked by years of disciplined practice. Raft takes time. A mode of coming to the body is first demonstrated in slow, ever so slightly comic articulations of hands, feet, legs. Gesture and rhythm rehearse and repeat across the body, building to a final, short kind of expansive release. The artifice and exhibitionism implicit in so much dance is replaced with a kind of intense anatomy of internal space, the body becoming the raft across more profoundly intangible explorations.

Dancers are Space Eaters, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Oct 29-Nov 15

Restless Dance Company’s Starry Eyed directed by Kat Worth, draws its audience into an intricate world of gestures where space and time intensify into a climactic, breathless question. Despite its title, Starry Eyed doesn’t entertain culturally constructed visions of glamour or false images of pop culture success. Rather the work trespasses into the inner world of dancers as they grapple with the dystopian reality of their own means of creating pathways, choosing directions and dealing with ambition. Starry Eyed asks, “What do we learn about ourselves while getting to where we want to go?”

This organic process is symbolised by the sound of a Tibetan bowl, played by composer Heather Frahn, which gently wakes the dancers. They begin breathing deeply as a continuous shower of dried rose petals falls. A small dance of breath initiated, falling, rolling, settling for a moment, suggests an unfolding universe. The sound of bells draws the dancers into densely-woven actions that suggest self-examination around past success and future survival: impatient finger tapping, caressing faces, heads shaking to rid themselves of debilitating self-talk, reclining contemplation. Low level falling, rolling bodies slowly fill the spaces left open by pockets of light. An ascending, reaching dancer breaks the hypnotic meditative state of shifting bodies.

A pulsing earth beat draws the dancers’ dreams to the surface as they sketch shapes in the fallen petals of past success. By moving the petals, the dancers map self-fulfilling prophecies, gazing into their momentary creations as if reading leaves in a teacup. Itchy feet glide through the petals, testing the water before taking the leap. They wind up with swinging arms, dusting off the past to prepare for the future. There are so many directions, which do you choose? The future is like walking blind. Perhaps if I run ahead I’ll catch it?

The soundscape grows denser as the pace builds. Live vocals beckon the dancers like a siren song, singing their dreams into existence. They respond but it’s not easy. Protective huddles are hurdled, sparks of ideas are pocketed, gestural pages turned. Dancers are stopped mid-stride and taken down. Movements become more automated as the bodies walk imaginary urban streets, punching imaginary time cards, avoiding eye contact, negotiating narrow footpaths at the edges of the space. It’s here I notice the uniform quality of Gaelle Mellis’ earth-toned costumes. Meanwhile, a solo of yearning, breaking free, reaching and falling captures the emotions of the race only to be stopped and returned to the fold. The residue of potential success is collected by dancers breaking from the controlled urban environment, carrying each other, catching falling bodies, gently easing them to the ground, messing up the space with running, sliding, falling down and getting back up. They end in a line across the front of the stage, lit dramatically by designer Geoff Cobham, telling personal stories. This chattering wall of a desiring mass is paradoxically juxtaposed with the invitation to share each dancer’s private thoughts.

Secrets made public abruptly stop. The lights swing, imbuing a sense of vertigo, exposing too much. The dancers slowly, delicately step backwards while looking tentatively at each other. Who will break out, who will succeed, who will fail? A brave duo falls out of line, triggering a climax of sound and movement. The relentless falling of petals and bodies is on. Dancers slide, fall and recover, greedily grab, stuff, roll and bathe in the flowery sea that symbolises reward and success—an act of resisting the dystopian world. The intoxicating perfume of petals hits me at this moment and, with the profusion of images and actions, triggers a heady mix of associations about memory, survival and emotion.

Starry Eyed, Restless Dance Company, director Kat Worth, composer Heather Frahn, lighting Geoff Cobham, design Gaelle Mellis; AIT Arts X Space Theatre, October 10-17

Tasmanian artists Kylie Johnson and Tiffany Winterbottom’s exhibition Everyday Entertainment takes the ‘bad grrrl’ phenomenon of a couple of years ago—and runs with it.

Johnson and Winterbottom take an experimental approach to their work within popular culture and develop its content from personal experience. Their creations are set in the social spaces they inhabit—bars, clubs, living rooms, parties, public transport…In the name of art, they remodel their lives into “something more entertaining, powerful and glamorous” (media release).

Winterbottom’s 5 large-scale scenarios derive from photo-shoots (at home) of friends dressing up, drinking, smoking and playing to the camera. Luridly seductive, colourful collages of digital prints, vinyl and plastic sheet, they are sexually explicit and slightly cartoon-like. Photoshoot for Boyfriend Overseas dabbles in deliberately cheap eroticism, exploring female sexual stereotypes. The subject of this image is semi-naked, assuming a submissive pose, yet her face is defiant and confident—a “girl with attitude” (exhibition notes).

Pop Bandit is all legs and torso. Its subject wears boots, fishnets and black lingerie, her stance bold and challenging. In The Night the Cops Turned Up, the subject matter is taken to its extreme, with what appears to be a rape scene, but is actually a ‘hard-edged’ depiction of sexual coupling. These works are powerful, confronting and highly original in their execution. The subjects are “cast in fantasy roles that exaggerate their eroticised self” (exhibition notes). Winterbottom’s extraordinary animation, the affecting and disquieting Dribble Girl in Lounge Room combines abstracted still elements overlaid with linear moving components and depicts a young woman writhing in a slightly pathetic sexual display.

Kylie Johnson’s work is, by comparison, understated—and a good foil. Her obsession is seduction. She says, “to be seduced is to be preoccupied, absorbed or enchanted by someone or something to the point where one’s individual identity dissolves into nothingness.”

Johnson’s images are smaller in scale; predominantly black and white digital prints from video. Her titles are long and descriptive, incorporating the artist’s name in a Tracey Emin-like gesture that nevertheless has its own originality—Kylie Johnson took his photo to her clairvoyant; Kylie Johnson sits behind boys on public transport; Kylie Johnson made a template of his tattoo from memory—each title expanding the work and having its own subtle wit. Text is used to effect in the artworks as well, and Clairvoyant incorporates sound; earphones allowing the gallery visitor to eavesdrop on the seer’s musings.

Tattoo interestingly incorporates an artist’s book of images of the facsimile tattoo Johnson adhered to her arm for 7 days, removing it to reveal slightly scabby skin in its shape. This work is dominated by an enormous wall-based bat-wing vinyl shape—a blow-up of the tattoo in question.

These are voyeuristic and confessional works. The 20 small digiprints, Kylie Johnson followed her because she had that familiar hard skin feature an anonymous woman’s legs and shoes and prompt the question—What else does Kylie Johnson get up to? An intriguing question about an intriguing artist. Everyday Entertainment is an excellent 2-hander with 2 strong bodies of work complementing each other exceptionally well.

Everyday Entertainment, Kylie Johnson & Tiffany Winterbottom, CAST Gallery, North Hobart, Sept 6-28; Gallery Wren, Sydney, Nov 6-22

The 10th RealTime-Performance Space open forum, Video + Art = ? was hosted by Blair French and Alexie Glass with some 100 video artists, experimental filmmakers, curators, afficionados and scholars gathered to discuss what’s happening in video practice at a moment when the form is enjoying new dimensions and wider popularity. You’ll find the transcript of the forum in the feature section of our site.

French is Associate Director at Performance Space and is curating a series of exhibitions focused on video. Glass, a curator at ACMI, is working on the video section of the joint ACMI and National Gallery of Victoria show surveying Australian practices, 2004: New Visual Culture. She’s also co-curating I thought I knew but I was wrong: New Video Art in Australia in collaboration with Asialink, touring a number of venues across Asia soon.

The cross-media artist

French initiated the discussion by asking Merilyn Fairskye, an artist who’s worked across a range of media including a variety of video forms, to comment on where video fits in her work. Fairskye replied that video work was “very different from the early video experiments of the 80s which had much more direct relationship to television and its mechanisms. For the most part, what we’re seeing now is…art that’s not based on materiality but on ideas…an art that comes together because of the participation of people within the space…I describe myself as a cross-media artist, not a video or photo-media artist. I work with the form that I think is best for a particular set of ideas and sometimes that might involve 3 or 4 different media. But a lot of my work is time-based rather than video-based (although video is always a component) and it’s certainly different but not unrelated to my still work or my installation work in public spaces or in other art gallery contexts.” For Fairskye this has meant opportunities for creating flexible works that can appear in different ways in different spaces, single screen, multi-screen, for gallery or cinema, short and long versions.

Performance & video space

Sam James works extensively in collaborations with performance and dance artists and companies, creating images and performative virtual spaces. With a multi-artform background and training in architecture, he began in theatre building sets until he was struck by their limitations: “So I started using projections to try to expand that [space]. I use it as a tool to get a release from the physical space.” Illustrating how diverse the use of video in performance is, James described himself as sometimes feeling like a filmmaker, for example when shooting on location for a dance film. However, for Gail Priest’s Sonic Salon installation, “a non-physical performance, more about performative presence…the video I was making for that was just purely abstract, graphic imagery to relate to a 5.1 surround sound installation. I also built various screens which a one-person audience could sit within and have an immersive experience.” For Victoria Spence’s Communication Failure, the performance “turned into an interaction with suspended monitors. I didn’t shoot any of the footage. My role was to operate and to create a sort of a sympathetic consciousness based on Victoria’s autobiographical video material which she filmed herself.”

Configuring viewing

The dominant theme of the discussion soon became the challenge of exhibiting video. Alexei Glass spoke about the very different attitudes that abound about exhibiting experimental film and video. “People who primarily come from experimental film will say, “Put in screenings in the cinema. Put it in film festivals…not in the gallery.” Glass described the range of alternatives offered by ACMI ranging from its large exhibition space to state-of-the-arts cinemas with digital projectors to “screen lounges where 2-5 people can sit and watch screens by themselves or with friends just for the price of a movie ticket. They can watch single channel works which are often short films curated into 1 hour programs.”

MCA curator Russell Storer said of the gallery’s engagement with video, “there are concentric circles of information provided to audiences about how to deal with video work…It’s presented in the broader context of contemporary art.” He described artists’ requirements for setting up video in their works and the reconfiguration demanded by the architecture of the gallery spaces. Glass commented that “[ACMI has] an architect as part of our installation team because of the technology that we’re working with. You need an architect to work the space and to actually navigate the design of the installation and the sound.”

Learning to watch

Storer reported that “the most popular shows tend to be photography. It’s still the artform that people are most comfortable with. A lot of people are still not sure how to interact with video art.” Glass said, “At first, when people came in to ACMI they were treating it like television. They wanted to surf through the exhibitions. I was in the Susan Norrie show at MCA today…I kept watching people move through it in circles. It became like this fluid, performative space. That often happens in ACMI now that we get repeat visitors.” Blair French described the MCA’s Liquid Sea as being like a journey through the history of screen culture from the filmic to the immersive. He found the required perceptual shifts that others enjoyed were challenging: “I was kind of working with the screen stuff but couldn’t look at all the objects and paintings in between. I was looking, but not looking. Something was going on about light.”

Video = cinema?

Several speakers described a different kind of challenge, fatigue from sitting through future perfect and Transmediale screenings in Sydney. This prompted some intense discussion about the appropriacy of the cinema screening of video art. Visual artist Lucas Ihlein suggested breaking up the screenings with introductions and comments to create space between the works and for reflection “rather than a room full of bodies gradually sinking down into vinyl chairs, peeling ourself off them at the end of the night, all stiff. It’s an experience, an event, a performance. We should become more interactive.” Others disagreed, but writer and academic Edward Scheer argued that “if we take another genealogy apart from the cinematic one to come to time-based art practice where it is now, you find that in fact people don’t want to be sitting in the dark watching things. They want to have interaction. The televisual model is a live model. It’s predicated on interactivity. Cinema is not…I think there’s a challenge to re-think the debate about physical presence in relation to the presentation of this work.” Louise Curham (see interview p15) suggested that “cinema doesn’t need to be a dead space. I think it’s a big ask for an audience to actually go into a gallery and treat it as a pseudo-cinema space. It’s uncomfortable. And you’re asked to give the kind of concentration to a work that is being asked in a cinema.”

Video artist and curator Emil Goh added further heat to the conversation by suggesting that higher definition projection means that soon video won’t require darkened gallery spaces, that the duration of works should be signalled so that viewers can choose when and for how long to watch, and that, as with the last Asia Pacific Triennial, comfortable spaces be provided for viewing.

Education for choice

Curham and video artist John Gillies pointed beyond the issue of choice to the diminution of context, for example in tertiary education where the availability of works and the time for them to be seen is increasingly limited and in film festivals, where directors are nervous about challenging their audiences. When new audiences see video they have no context for it.

The forum ended with a discussion on the challenge for galleries and events to keep up with the technological demands of screening video. Despite the disgruntlement over this and the education issue, the forum generated valuable debate over modes of exhibition, intriguing reports on various manifestations of video as art, positive talk of audiences adapting to video in galleries and the happily looming prospect of video lounges.

Video + Art = ?, RealTime-Performance Space Forum, Performance Space, Sydney, Aug 18

There is a scene in the Coen brothers’ film The Big Lebowski (1998) that prepared me for the 50th Venice Biennale. Julianne Moore is a conceptual artist entertaining an 80s looking black-garbed German video artist. She’s giggling on the phone to her agent about the Biennale, “Darling…the Biennale…” The posturing world of contemporary art as the butt of a joke in this very funny scene kept coming back to me in Venice.

One of my agendas, after queuing an hour for tickets, was to figure out how, or if, new media was integrated in the Biennale. I don’t necessarily mean the obvious computer-based, interactive point-and-click model of new media, but ways of thinking about the form as different kinds of physical and non-physical spaces, and all things hybrid, recombinant and mutant.

This year the Biennale’s theme, “Dreams and Conflicts: The dictatorship of the viewer”, ensured that much of the work was strongly embodied in issues of sociological crisis and cultural conflict. Curators seemed compelled to contextualise contemporary art with an overwrought and heavy-handed social consciousness. The curated show Utopian Station about self-sustainable communities, took the Biennale’s theme to heart and the result looked like a bad hippy commune—complete with John and Yoko’s “Give Peace a Chance.” Thankfully not all artists ran with the loaded theme.

Appearing like a set of embassies from countries with cash, the institutionally controlled, government regulated and culturally endorsed international pavilions in the Giardini, make up a large component of the Biennale. They function as part international art show, part art trade show and part tourist expo (the Singapore Pavilion even offered tourist brochures).

Some of the more memorable works included Italian Diego Perrone’s A dog dead of old age (2003), in the curated show The Zone in the Giardini. Perrone’s dark and foreboding animation depicted a hyperreal computer generated dog in the throes of death, caught between the living and the hereafter. If any work in the Biennale audio-visually and perversely articulated the theme of ‘crisis’, this was it. The Estonian pavilion featured the fictional artist John Smith created by Marko Maetamm and Kaido Ole. Marko and Kaido (2003) offered a spatial narrative to be followed through a series of rooms in a mutant, sci-fi, Boys’ Annual mix. The Australian pavilion, as we know, featured Patricia Piccinini’s continuing biotech preoccupations.

Much of the video work was disappointing. Exceptions included Yang Zhenzhong’s Let’s Puff (2002), which used 2 video screens. One featured a girl strenuously blowing in the air towards a screen opposite and causing the action to accelerate and slow down in time with her blowing: a simple piece that extended the artificiality of video and notions of screen space. Notable also was Dan Graham’s important 1974 precursor to interactive new media work, Opposing mirrors and video monitors on time delay. This closed circuit TV video installation and mirrors captured the viewer’s image from a few seconds before and allowed you to watch yourself as both subject and object: a work based around simple notions of participation. Most of the other videos were recordings of the banalities of everyday life, a style that seems to be an international phenomenon.

Other highlights in this enormous event were works in the curated Zone of Urgency, part of the large Asenale Show. Much of Asenale was predictably austere, precious and boring, taking place in huge derelict shipping assembly warehouses. But Zone of Urgency offered a far funkier engagement with contemporary art, with lots of refreshing cacophonous noise and media arts spaces, a barrage to the senses playing with notions of survivalism and cultural resistance. The show included the web work of Heavy Industries and Alfredo and Isobel Aquilizan’s fantastic chrome-plated World War 2 Army Jeep, M201, in god we trust (2003) which seemed like the product of a crazed survivalist and religious zealot.

Less advertised components of the Biennale contained some of the more perverse and genuinely strange work. The Absolute Generations show at the Palazzo Zenobio featured Russian artist Oleg Kulik and his mutant Sportswomen, a stuffed, zombified version of tennis player Martina Hinghis. Cabinet of Manipulation, by Ben, a kind of mutant 19th century laboratory in a large room, dealt in all manner of human and non-human transformations. Though I missed it, I was intrigued by stories of Maurizio Cattelan’s remote-controlled animatronic boy Charlie, who roamed around the Giardini grounds on his tricycle, freaking everyone out.

After 4 days overdosing on contemporary art, I left feeling that while Venice is great for the artists involved, the event is only a blip on the radar of what’s actually occurring in contemporary art at any given time. It is too big and unfocused. The sheer scale only amplifies the more banal examples of contemporary art, rather than offering a concise and focused undertaking. One also gets the impression that the Biennale’s attraction is partly due to its picturesque European setting, in the middle of summer. I’m sure the artists in the The Big Lebowski would have loved it.

New media at the Biennale is not canonised as ‘new media’ nor ghettoised as such. It was refreshing to see ‘new media’ coming under the larger and expansive rubic of contemporary art, a sign that the term is as redundant as ‘light art’, ‘earth art’ or ‘body art.’ This distinction was also apparent in Paris at the Pompidou Centre and the new Palais de Tokyo gallery. At these institutions, new media comes under the subset of video art and contemporary hybrid practice. The Palais de Tokyo, a huge contemporary art institution, is very much a hybrid space, with art, design, fashion and lifestyle converging under one roof in shows that include video and painting with new media. The Venice Biennale, for all its problems, proves that new media can and does sit side by side with other contemporary practices.

Dreams and Conflicts: The dictatorship of the viewer, The Venice Biennale, Venice, 2003 www.labiennale.org

Contemporary performance has played a key role in the development of the arts in western Sydney over the last decade, evident in the work of Urban Theatre Projects, Citymoon and a host of groups and individual artists. It’s also had an impact on youth theatre, most visibly in the artistic direction at PACT and in Shopfront collaborations. Now members of the performance community and associates from music and theatre have created Live Bait, winning a tender for a summer arts and music festival taking up the January space vacated by the deceased Sydney Fringe Festival formerly based at the Bondi Pavilion in Sydney’s East. The producers are Michael Cohen (Theatre Kantanka) and Glen Wright (Vitamin Records) with fellow artistic directors, performance artist Jeff Stein and theatre director Sarah Goodes.

Working with a dauntingly limited budget, Cohen and team are nonetheless excited by the festival’s prospects, believing that idiosyncratic programming and the collaborative strength of its ‘stakeholders’ will make for success. Inspired by the Adelaide Fringe’s Garden of Unearthly Delights, Cohen is keen to create a fluid, carnivalesque environment mixing free attractions with walk-up ticket purchasing for shows. However, unlike other fringe festivals, this one is curated. A bigger fringe “with a critical mass” can afford to adopt the open-ended approach, says Cohen, but not one on this scale. The spaces in the Bondi Pavilion therefore have been carefully allocated for particular strands of performance.

The upstairs theatre will be home to contemporary music with an impressive line-up of artists working the intimate 250 seater venue, the kind that is rare in Sydney. Musicians include The Necks, IOTA, Sarah Blasko, Fourplay, New York-based Greta Gertler, Chris Abrahams solo and with Melanie Oxley, Jeff Lang, the Israeli band Shiva and Dha, the wonderful Indian percussion band.

Cohen’s Theatre Kantanka is committed to outdoor and site specific performance, so it’s not surprising that his attention is, as much as it can be, on the outdoors program, Boxed Set, with the company performing and MC-ing. Adapted with visiting French company, Royale Delux while Kantanka were putting together their show, The Eye, the program centres around a shipping container that has a fold-out apron, a mini-proscenium arch and can be climbed and swung from with the help of a crane especially made for this season by Stalker’s Joey Ruigrok van der Werven. Boxed Set, will feature architectural performance virtuosi Gravity Feed, wild nerd girl-show Frumpus, dancer Julie-Anne (Miss XL) Long and Kissing the Mirror (performers/installation artists Clare Britton and Halcyon McLeod). Cohen thought Britton and McLeod’s Unit one of the best shows of 2003, with its transformation of the apartment for artist residencies above the old Petersham Town Hall into a bewildering world of mirrors and puppets. Each group will perform for up to 20 minutes in a program that will be repeated 6 times over the 2 week festival.

The Boxed Set site will also be home to 2 late nights of provocative entertainment in Mister Monster Cabaret hosted by Imogen Kelly (Machine Gun Fellatio) and featuring Bum Puppets, Joel Salom, Christa Hughes, Frank Bennett and Toy Death. Also playing late night in their own program, and adding to the “adult carnival” ambience Cohen and his cohorts are keen to bestow on Bondi, is South Australia’s Circus Bizarre subjecting their persons to all kinds of nasty interventions.

Wandering the Pavilion site you’ll encounter Nick Wishart’s The Cell, an industrial street orchestra comprising, among other things, drills, hammers and air compressors. A couple of caravans will house installations including one by performance group Shagging Julie.

Also coming to the party is the enterprising Reel Life short film festival with films by and about young people in a 2 night program. In the gallery Electrofringe will present 2 programs of screen-based art, corpo[real] and [ill]uminations. There’s also Fine Film’n’Food—outdoors eating with feature films of the kind the cinema-less Bondi population must travel to see: Kill Bill, Frida, The Swimming Pool and others. In the Pavilion Theatre independent Sydney theatre artists will find a summer home for readings of new plays, showings of works-in-progress and trial runs. Some titles intrigue: Kate Mulvany’s Enbalmer! The Musical, Lickety Split Productions’ Simon Crean! The Musical, Patrica Johnson’s The White Light of Enlightenment and Susan Prior’s Making Love to the Scarecrow, inspired by the music of Patti Smith. The New Mercury Theatre will present Refugitive, a one-man show by Shahin Shafaei.

Having won the tender for the festival, Cohen and his associates had only 2 months to put their program together. For a first run it’s already got lots of character and plenty of edgy talent. This is live bait that should hook a big audience.

“Gotta keep an open mind, don’tcha?” whispers the guy sitting next to me as a woman in the front row assists the show’s naked solo performer into his snug-fitting Calvin Klein boxers.

A fug of nervous amusement hangs over the audience as performer Jason Sweeney recites masturbatory fantasies about having sex with the brother he never had. Yep. Open mind. Wide open.

Showing as part of Adelaide’s FEAST gay and lesbian cultural arts festival, Peculiar is the performance incarnation of mixed media experiments designed collaboratively by sound-maker and performer Sweeney, Martin Potter (video image maker and sound designer for Sample People) and Ingrid Voorendt, a director of movement-based theatre.

As if performing to a live version of the non-existent album, Sweeney presents a series of short mixed media compositions or “tracks”, manifesting in a hybrid of spoken word, video, musical theatrics and live sound effects. Throughout each track, he interacts with the audience, flitting between them and a trestle table laden with props. Amidst bottles of wine, delay pedals, a portable turntable and a selection of queer porn magazines, Sweeney encounters camp in some dark and intimate locations, be it a grimy basement in a forest of masked young men, or inside the mind of a young underground prince, pumped full of pharmaceuticals, club sleaze and narcissism.

Glancing to my right, I notice that the open-minded whisperer is looking a little apprehensive. I think he suspects he’s become a target for a little audience participation later in the show, as he is handed a sample of nasty red wine in a plastic cup and a tiny sealed envelope…

I find it difficult to know or care how autobiographical these works are. The development of any fictional character may draw upon personal experiences, but inevitably its creator sacrifices personal details so that an audience may step partway or perhaps all of the way into this identity. For better or worse in Peculiar the boundaries between performance persona and a completely fictitious character were complicated by the use of personal references, affecting the quality of emotional investment.

In track No. 4, Boy Story, Sweeney’s voice calmly discloses intimate details of some of his sexual encounters, occurring within what could only be described as horribly dysfunctional relationships. His narration accompanies documentary video of an absurd puppet show, using teddy bears, bottles and condoms in front of a household mirror and balanced on what we presume to be Sweeney’s lap. This lo-fi home video composition reflects an amusing pathos running throughout the show, which is both entertaining and annoyingly solipsistic.

Towards the end an OK Computer-style voice-bot announces with subtle, then not so subtle hints that the show is over…the performer has slunk away without waiting for applause. I left with my head full of subliminal flashes, lipstick traces and the smell of cheap aftershave.

Ripe with clichéd gay references, exquisite video works and a drag-salute to the sad tunes of PJ Harvey and Radiohead, Peculiar captures the intensity and melancholia of queer romance as its tenderness vies for attention within the emotionless force of sexual excess.

Peculiar was developed with the assistance of para//elo as part of an open platform artist residency (POP) in 2003.

Peculiar, performer Jason Sweeney, designers Jason Sweeney, Martin Potter, Ingrid Voorendt; FEAST gay and lesbian cultural arts festival, Iris Cinema, Adelaide, Nov 12-15

Dramaturgy is a hot topic. It’s been on and off the boil since the late 70s with a lot of resistance to and misunderstanding of the role of the dramaturg, their function, their training, their artistic status and their power. A rather intimidating monodimensional view of the dramaturg as ally of the director and the theatrical status quo has prevailed for over 20 years. However, the large number of small to medium sized companies and individual artists turning to dramaturgs and choreoturgs is transforming this threatening vision into a flexible model for getting a perspective on your work, good craft advice and serious help in sustaining your vision. This quiet development has been aided by the rise of hybrid arts practices and the emergence of different kinds of dramaturgy not solely centred on the written text. Attitudes (but not necessarily funding resources) have also changed about how long it takes to develop a script or a collectively devised performance. Back in the 1980s Playworks began supporting women writers with a more measured dramaturgy than the Australian National Playwrights Conference’s hothouse approach where it also wasn’t always clear whether the people cast in dramaturgical roles were in fact dramaturgs. It’s interesting to see, under the leadership of chair Campion Decent and the 2004-5 conference director Chris Mead, a well-worn model given new life. Other models have emerged, particularly in the Australian film industry where sustained attention is paid to the importance of script development in the Spark (RT56) and Aurora (RT55) programs. These don’t have to be imitated but they suggest ways of nurturing creativity unmuddied by other purposes.

This is the second of our reports on developments in dramaturgy in Australian theatre, dance and contemporary performance. Earlier this year Peter Eckersall, Melanie Beddie and Paul Monaghan of the Dramaturgy and Cultural Intervention Project reported on the conference they organised as part of the 2002 Melbourne International Festival of the Arts (RT 55). The transcript of Dramaturgies I was reproduced on our website (see the Dramaturgy Now section). That forum took a global view of dramaturgy, focusing on the importance of seeing the developing work in a socio-political context and the dramaturgical role as an inclusive one involving all the artists in a project. In February 2003 a second conference, Dramaturgies II was held for 2 days at Melbourne University. This time the focus was on the dramaturgical process (when and where does it happen, with writers, devised by groups), the kinds of dramaturgy practised (eg by lighting designers and sound artists working on productions) and some analogous practices (eg art gallery curatorship). You’ll find the sizeable transcript, labelled Dramaturgies 2 on our website. What follows, given the scale of the event, is a brief, even cursory summing up of some of the key utterances and issues.

What dramaturg?

Peter Eckersall bravely attempted to delineate the big picture of dramaturgy, ranging through various models, across continents and performance traditions. The picture of the ideal dramaturg that emerged was of a sounding board, a collaborator and mediator who democratises the creative process making sure every actor understands every word and can answer questions (deep, difficult and as provocative as possible) about the work and not just the work as a script. The German model, inevitably debated over the next 2 days because of the dramaturg’s power in German theatre (adapting, translating, helping choose plays), positions them as those who “guard the integrity of the play.” Although mostly seen as a supportive role, Eckersall argued that it should challenge, with the dramaturg as agent provocateur, crossing borders, mediating complex interactions and connecting theatre with culture. He cited Eugenio Barba’s metaphor of the weave, “everything that has action or effect; not only text and actors but also sounds, lights, changes in the space.” The weave is not an object or a skill, he said, it’s an attitude, a process, a sensibility. For Barba artistic discipline, and therefore dramaturgy, is an “attitude that…presupposes…a continual exercise in revolt, above all against oneself, against one’s own ideas.” It’s a way of refusal, said Eckersall, against accepting conventional notions. Dramaturgy is therefore a disorientation because it evokes something different. It is a process of “being undecided”, of discovering the creative tensions in the evolution of a work.

However, ranging through the opinions of Brecht, Esslin, Pavis and others, Eckersall made clear the complex position of the dramaturg, involved in the creative process but also as critical observer, responsible for putting the play in a wider context; “our work touches so many areas of the production process, we do so in an atmosphere of not really knowing our function, thus leading to a kind of ambivalence that surrounds dramaturgical practice.” Viennese writer and satirist Karl Krauss declared the dramaturg, “a potential artist who is unable to provide convincing proof of his or her art. He or she is an artist without either the means of expression or the tools…The dramaturg does not risk his or her skin every night.” Others have written of dramaturgs and their ‘poverty’, as ‘artists without tools.’ Although Eckersall challenged these notions, they recurred over the 2 days of the conference with some surprising animosity towards dramaturgs coming from a few experienced hands. In the meantime, Eckersall celebrated the significance of “the new poetics of dramaturgy” concerned with fractures, disorientation and flows and in which making theatre is a collective dramaturgy.

Some of us were beginning to wonder if this dramaturgy can be practised without a dramaturg—so we quietly worried at that. The discussion that followed included a valuable reminder that the dramaturg keeps the memory of the writing, the workshop and rehearsal process alive, as well as bringing to bear the cultural history of theatre and its processes, thus “countering historical amnesia.” Eckersall noted, in an exchange about different attitudes to dramaturgy, that it is part of an intellectual tradition in Europe, a reflective one. “In Australia,” he quipped, “it’s a matter of getting the play on and not reflecting too much.” He later added a handy label for the brisk cut and paste school of script editing sometimes practised by our major companies—“industrial dramaturgy.” Whatever one’s slant, the session’s emphasis on sustaining vision, the significance of various kinds of memory and the importance of cultural intervention held promise for the dramaturgical process, though perhaps not so clearly for the dramaturg.

Who’s talking? Who’s listening?

In the session on dramaturgy and devised performance, where collectivity often rules, Maud Davey (Vitalstatistix) declared that because dramaturgs “are not responsible they can be quite radical in their suggestions.” A number of us quietly tucked away ‘responsibility’ for something else to worry at. She described having John Romeril as dramaturg on Crying in Public Places’ Skin (2000) as like having an extra brain. Clearly wary of dramaturgs (seeing them as potentially “improving” a work to the point of damaging it), Davey fantasised in a later session an ideal situation in which she’d have a clone of herself as dramaturg to her director self, “to do what I’m not good at.” Bruce Gladwin (Back to Back Theatre) described himself as a director-dramaturg working with a full time ensemble over a long timeframe and using a dramaturg only as a script consultant for a couple of weeks. For Gladwin the key to dramaturgy is collective continuity of collaboration. Paul Monaghan took up Barba’s weave and the way the weave of action involves everything, like a multi-track sound recording. But as strong and rich as the weave is, the structure might be weak and that has to be addressed dramaturgically. Elements of the weave, for example, can be deployed in various structural ways—sound as a trigger or for slowing time.

Rachael Swain (Stalker, Marrugeku Company) brought into play a stage prior to the usual notion of creative starting point: “For Stalker and Marrugeku, dramaturgy is about the process of negotiation with Indigenous people who do not readily give out their knowledge.” Therefore casting is “a major dramaturgical function” because of the cultural complexities of dealing “with multilayered intercultural meanings combining notions of dreaming with contemporary consciousness.” Raising the issue of ‘different culture, different dramaturgy’, Swain detailed the kinds of cultural negotiations and key personalities involved in creating a new work, of using reconciliation “as a process of learning to move”, of timing (“the importance of going slow: someone might get sick”), and using the South African Truth in Reconciliation Commission as a model of dramaturgical responsibility. The final work, a hybrid performance fusing storytelling, dance and personal histories, becomes a kind of translation for a white audience, encouraging a shift in perceptions.

It had been frequently proposed throughout the conference that in creating a work everyone involved plays a dramaturgical role. However, in the session on ‘Dramaturgy, Space, Visuality, Sound and Technology’ Paul Jackson opened up the very issue of how such a dialogue begins, a matter raised from the intercultural perspective by Rachael Swain. Jackson said the important thing, in his case, is to ask, “How can you have a conversation with a lighting designer?” [In another conference, performer and director Chris Ryan described dramaturgy as finding a way in which you can talk to an artist.] Rather than seeing lighting as a history of technology, Jackson argued for it as a history of design, of “creating narrative with light and shadow”, of “space reacting to bodies”, of “how we want space to move.”

Designer Kathryn Sproul whose projects include working with director Nigel Jamieson on the outdoor orchestral and performance spectacle Flamma Flamma for the 1998 Adelaide Festival, described the designer as visual dramaturg, “a scenographer who writes the stage space creating a text, articulating one beyond language.” Also keeping to the fore the challenge of communication, she claimed that designers are often not called on to sufficiently verbalise, that there isn’t an established language for them to deal with directors and little time to reflect. Sproul emphasised the role of the designer in testing the validity of the directors’ intuitive ideas, of playing provisional audience. Sound artist and designer Lawrence Harvey spoke about the power of sound, describing himself as a creative mediator in other people’s work but also in his own, which he graphically described and where he has to “step back from himself.” When working for NYID (Not Yet It’s Difficult), his aim is to create an acoustic set entailing the spatial and temporal dimensions of sound. What Harvey wants to hear from collaborators is “not the sound you want but the feeling you want to achieve…If you want to fetishise the text you don’t need a designer.”

In the discussion that followed it was agreed that if in fact the various designers play a dramaturgical role then, as these artists were insisting, we need to know how to listen to and talk to them; we all have to expand our vocabularies (to speak of design, sound, light); and the artists need to be employed much earlier in the creative process than they currently are. Perhaps, mused Paul Jackson, a work could be initiated from a lighting idea. Laurence Harvey reinforced the notion of the weave: “Inherent…are a whole lot of ways that images will move, ways that the environment will respond to a whole lot of input from the actions. As a sound designer, I have not only to respond to the visual information in front of me but also the data information that comes back to the environment that I’ve been working on to deliver the sound design.”

Structure & self-dramaturgy

On the second day of the conference, in a session titled ‘Dramaturgy, Text and Structure’, Yoni Prior spoke about the experience of being part of Gilgul Theatre where the multidisciplinary ensemble took on the dramaturgy and there was no initial script. Barrie Kosky, she said, was interested in ideas, not character. Everyone was involved in the process and wrote and edited the text, everyone negotiated structure and all took responsibility. Prior said there was a gradual move into areas of specific responsibility. Tom Wright looked after research, Prior teaching and, later, character issues. Michael Kantor shared in developing the choreography. Kosky at the piano controlled the pace. Self-dramaturgy, she said, involved stepping in and out of a work with Kosky as the predominant outside eye and aided by very long development period. Prior described the work as highly physical, highly cerebral, demanding and fractured. “You had to think, had to be inside and outside the work and you had to deal with different performance modes.”

Describing herself as semi-dance literate, Prior has subsequently been working as a dance dramaturg with choreographer Sandra Parker who wants to develop a more theatrical edge to her work. Prior said she was helping Parker break out of “choreostructures”, integrating different processes, coming up with new combinations of material and dealing with multi-tasking for modern performers who are often in extreme states. She sees herself as adapting choreographic techniques for use with text, looking for musicality, for patterns, listening for the sounds that come out of the body in extremis. She surmised that the rise of dramaturgy was one way of compensating for the increasingly short times available for creating work: “I think the fact that we had really long processes for Gilgul Theatre allowed spaces for reflection for all of us, so that we could actually step outside and into a third eye position, and have time to reflect on what it was that we did.”

Writer Maryanne Lynch described a variety of experiences of working as a dramaturg, with an Indigenous theatre company, with a youth group and as a script editor late in the development of a particular play. In all of these she saw herself as concerned with structure. “I privilege structure over text, because there’s no work if there’s no structure—there’s only text…Structure’s the thing which makes the texts become more than themselves.” Lynch placed structure next to the relationships between the artist-participants, context and how these 3 intersect. She also emphasised the dramaturg’s point of entry in the process. Introducing another metaphor, and one relating to the weave, she described the dramaturgy on one work as analogous to scoring, working to 2 time signatures.

Playwright John Romeril spoke of himself as involved in cultural dramaturgy between Australia and Japan, borrowing from the riches of myriad forms found in our region, extending what we can do in the theatre and, among other things, “heightening our visuality”, given the much higher integration between visual and verbal in Japanese culture. Dramaturgy, he said, is research, a constant preoccupation with structure, “a blow against anti-intellectualism” and our Eurocentricity, legitimising what theatre can talk about. Romeril’s turn (relish it in its entirety online) entailed many more observations, descriptions of the evolution of recent and forthcoming plays (some fine examples of a particular kind of self-dramaturgy) and the passing thought that perhaps it was time for him to buy himself some dramaturgy.

“…Maybe only after working for 20 years did I really begin to develop a skill of self-criticism; that thing of swinging from objective to subjective. You need that subjective belief in yourself…That level of commitment is not just an idea; it’s a whole visceral lifestyle…to be able to step back and go, ‘Oh, that’s a crock, Johnno’, calling yourself into the office, sitting yourself down, and giving yourself a big fucken rap, ‘Now get back out there and fucken do it properly this time!’ I wouldn’t have minded having someone to say that stuff to me…Can you buy [dramaturgs]? I’ll start saving.”

The curator as dramaturg

The session on curatorship as dramaturgy was richly informative, suggesting by analogy that dramaturgy is about creating a context for experiencing a work. Alison Carroll described how modernism had ‘disappeared’ the curator, hiding the significance of their role, their years of training, their personalities, presenting an illusion of non-mediation. Carroll suggested that curators need a sense of theatricality, quipping: “especially when faced with venues like the Australian pavilion in Venice.” Curators should have a public face, she argued, not least in Australia’s arts festivals where the performing arts hold sway. Kevin Murray concurred with Carroll, describing the prescriptive view that “the curator must not contaminate the data.” He argued that the curator’s role should be collaborative, playing witness to the work, providing the perspective with which to see it, where to stand, how to move, just as “a lot of painters use the stage frame in their work.”

Big picture

In a final session too substantial to be detailed here (again, read it online), Aubrey Mellor put the current dramaturgical situation in a fascinating 30 year Australian perspective. In an age when the ensemble has disappeared, when financial resources have to be prioritised and forward planning is more and more difficult, Mellor said that dramaturgy was increasingly important, but that it was still being defined and would be different for every company. The history of dramaturgy in this country has certainly been difficult, he said, and has been tied to the battle to get Australian plays onto the stage; it’s a tale that includes playwrights banned from the rehearsal room, the word ‘dramaturgy’ tabooed, the them-and-us schism between directors and dramaturgs and the ‘literary manager solution.’ Mellor declared, “For me, [dramaturgy] is now the most important tool for the creation of an original Australian theatre. We’ve all been doing it in many ways, and the missing ingredient I now find is the dramaturg, and that’s the one that we actually need most to be able to give you the sorts of things we imagined we’d all be doing by now, but we’re not…” Julian Meyrick, not taking sides, defined the variables of dramaturgy, while David Pledger took us back to the other side of the dramaturgical coin: “The theatre company is the dramaturgy. [The dramaturg is] another question all together…What is the dramaturgy? Essentially, the dramaturgy is the operating system of the work for the company, and over a period of time, that operating system accumulates so that you develop a repertoire, and a way of working with a group of people.”

At the close of these 2 days the value of dramaturgy had certainly been asserted as well as the dramaturgical role of all the artists working on a project. The role of the dramaturg was less resolved. For example, feelings about the dramaturg’s ‘ownership’ of the finished work were sharply divided. Certainly it was admitted that the balancing act the dramaturg negotiates in being, on the one hand, the ‘memory’ of the creative process and, on the other, an ‘outside eye’, is a difficult but important one. In general the view at the conference was that it should be flexible, the point of entry taken into account, a mode of communication between artists established and importantly that the choice of dramaturg was crucial for a particular job. And, as with the dramaturgical ideal espoused in Dramaturgies I and again here, the dramaturg should provoke as well as support. Apparent irritants such as whether or not the dramaturg should share the vision, the takings, the praise and the responsibility for failure, would be discussed another time. The conference organisers spoke of Dramaturgies III as an opportunity to go another welcome step further and explore dramaturgy on the floor in 2004.

Dramaturgies II was an intense and invaluable probing of dramaturgical practice in Australia.

Find the complete transcript of Dramaturgies II under Dramaturgy Now. Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter were guests of Dramaturgies II. [currently offline]

Dramaturgies II, The Open Stage, Melbourne University, Feb 21-22. Supported by the School of Creative Arts, University of Melbourne.

Draped over extravagant fluffy-cloud settees, 2 glamour-puss demi-gods open Frank Theatre’s Midsummer Night’s Romeos by playfully messing with Shakespeare’s florid treatises on love. Part-chorus, part-skeptics, part-voyeurs, the pair (played by John Nobbs and Lisa O’Neill) lounge about, feasting themselves on the lusty interactions of Cupid, the Moon, and 3 couplings of Romeos and Juliets. In director Jacqui Carroll’s ‘modern masque’ rendering of Romeo and Juliet (with text from A Midsummer Night’s Dream), nothing comes quite as expected.

Much lighter than Frank’s trademark austerity, Midsummer Night’s Romeos revels in the kitsch and frivolity of a youthful Valentine’s Day. Plush velvet hearts, feathery angel wings and dashes of leopard skin are prominent as the performance moves through a cleverly edited selection of Shakespeare’s most evocative love imaginings. Imagery of night, sun, moon and stars feature as the Romeos and Juliets, after rising from their fridge-like coffins and wheeling themselves to life, seek to play out their fantasy love scenarios. They are spurred on and thwarted by a mischievous Cupid (Caroline Dunphy) whose wicked grin punctuates her gameplay.

Frank Theatre’s work is characterised by a measured and grounded choreography and, until recently, tragedy has been its signature form. But with Doll 17 (Carroll’s adaptation of Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll), and now Midsummer Night’s Romeos, the company is out to play-with form, text, and comic energy. The use of comedy within such a rigorous tradition-abiding context can often be strained, yet in Midsummer Night’s Romeos, while there were shades of performer tentativeness, the humour arose from the text’s cheeky playfulness and the performers’ delightful thwarting of audience expectations.

In reconfiguring the R&J legend, Carroll’s use of 3 couples carefully avoids predictable repetition, instead affording rare glimpses (for a Frank show) of the actors’ quirky personalities and individual differences. The 3-by-2 approach also offers opportunities for nuanced physical moments to underscore the “yes, yes, almost…but not quite” intimacies of these eternal lovers. Each couple re-interprets the touch, the longing, the striving for the kiss, resulting in some very funny comparative vignettes. While Cupid works her cheesy smile for laughs, it is the Romeos and Juliets who provide the subtle comic play. Perhaps not so nuanced was the ensemble’s handle on the text, but given that Midsummer Night’s Romeos is one of the most ambitious pieces vocally for this physically-defined company, the spoken text stood up to the challenge.

The unexpected leaps from the sublime to the silly were engaging, particularly with the selection of bubblegum classics ranging from Yummy, Yummy, Yummy by Ohio Express to accompany some nicely eroticised lolly-licking, to Connie Francis’ Stupid Cupid when the Romeos and Juliets finally get their own back on the frisky Ms Cupid and her childlike alter-ego, the Moon. The Doors’ End of the Night was an appropriate mood-setter for the near closing of the performance as the Romeos and Juliets wheeled their way back to their graves to face the fate of those “born to endless night.” After all the fun and sensuality, the Romeos and Juliets never get that one big, long kiss. On opening night, Carroll entreated the audience to consider the performance’s spirited take on carpe diem (seize the day) and cogita mori (remember death): proverbs that this production embraces as totally entwined.

Midsummer Night’s Romeos, Frank Theatre, director, choreographer, text Jacqui Carroll, design John Nobbs, Robyn Graham, performers Thierry Cartou, Conan Dunning, Caroline Dunphy, Ramsay Hatfield, Yuu Matsuyama, John Nobbs, Lisa O’Neill, Emma Pursey, Leah Shelton, Neridah Waters; Brisbane Powerhouse Theatre, Oct 22-25