Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

April 2005

Helen Paris, Family Hold Back

An audience of two. No sooner have we entered the tiny house in suburban Tempe than we’re corralled by Lois Weaver from the UK performance group, Curious, who takes us a little too easily into her confidence. She offers chocolates and then whisks them away. The gesture calls up a childhood memory that still stings. Before we know it she’s inveigled us into a disturbing tale of lost scents as she sniffs from bottles and speaks to a video camera in the corner. Only as we’re ushered out of the room do I notice that the couch we were sitting on is littered with rose petals and that we have shared the performance with a fish watching from a giant bowl. Such is the hierarchy of the senses.

The kitchen is more welcoming; the table piled high with red chilies. Leslie Hill seems at home, though this place is not her own. For us over here on the other side of the table, on the other side of the world, she conjures a dark reverie from a girlhood in New Mexico using her own sure fire recipe: tobacco smoke, the sweet sizzle of pork chop in frying pan and a special blend of “sacred” chili powder which at one truly alarming moment she sniffs through a bank note like cocaine. Add a sqirt of hairspray and a mess of popcorn erupting onto the floor from a cartoon appliance on the bench, some ceremonial Native American music and our own oily shot of Tequila served with lime and salt and you have it: a whiff of the uneasy calm of living in the shadow of the H-bomb tests in Los Alamos. Like the liquor, this memory burns in the throat. We drink, with Hill, to homesickness.

In the darkened bedroom, Helen Paris is home sick. She languishes between the sheets; feverish with snaffled angst, female trouble. She wallows in a bog of constrained desire and disgust till, consumed with hunger for something other, she upends herself into the box of biscuits she’s concealed under her pillow. As she recalls the quest for her mother’s very par-tic-ul-ar perfumed lotion, I sense anger in the bitten lip and catch the sudden, bracing stench of disinfectant.

Shown the door, I’m wary of the lady in the lounge. I don’t like the sound of either rose or violet cream. As it turns out it’s just our scent memories she’s after for the camera. We snaffle the sickly treat and swap her for linseed oil on a cricket bat, the pine needle tang of Eau de Givenchy, and leave.

On The Scent is one of a number of performances I’ve experienced in houses. All have had their moments and this one has many. The one that’s intrigued me most was the very first part of IRAA Theatre’s Secret Room (2000) in which Roberta Bosetti invited an audience of 7 to join her for a meal. At the table we sat with a mix of familiars and strangers. In the corner was a website version of the same room on a monitor, like a mirror. Bosetti came and went between kitchen and dining room, dishing out food and improvised small talk, dropping in small clues to her dramatic purpose. For a time we around the table could not place ourselves. We were functioning from the learned habits of theatregoing using the gestures of table manners and yet we were ‘elsewhere.’ I could have stayed for days. What was happening in the room was live and uncertain. The performer lost me when she led us upstairs into a small room and shifted suddenly into actor mode and, though we were in a real house, we might as well have been watching a play on a stage.

Impressed as I was by many aspects of the Curious performances, I experienced something of the same sense of distance. I loved the ease of these performers, the sinewy syntax of Paris’ diatribe, Hill’s dark materials casually meted out in her kitchen confidential. The scents were rich and real enough but I wondered why, despite the intimacy of the site and the proximity of the performers, the work felt curiously close to theatrical monologue.

In their double bill at The Studio, Smoking Gun and Family Hold Back, we experience even more powerfully the clash of cultures between US and UK with Leslie Hill and Helen Paris occupying that same elusive performative space.

Hill arrives onstage in the outfit of a Klansman, striking matches to light her way. What follows is a droll monologue that begins with an intriguing tale of genetic mapping. Seeking to find out “where we come from, where we’re going?” Hill traces her own lineage to Europe, realises she’s a “mongrel” and that everyone is related. In fact, she narrows us down to a grassland species that came out of the trees and drifted onto the savanna. She unpacks her own patch of lawn from a suitcase and takes off her shoes. Unfortunately, from here, her story is all association. She meanders into gun control, leading into a participatory segment in which audience volunteers get to wield a firearm as long as they conform to the Australian laws, ie sign a document in the presence of the licensed armorer who’s onstage to receive them. Her tale fans out to the UK, to twins, The 10 Commandments, which she says in the US, need to be re-written: “Thou shalt not kill (us).” We pass around glasses and a bottle of rum as she talks about Cuba and American isolationism. “Would you like to explain exactly what you were doing in France?” she’s asked when she returns home. There are coincidences aplenty and witty synchronicities and through it all Hill remains an ambivalent witness.

Though evoking some of the same spookiness of Smoking Gun, Helen Paris’ Family Hold Back is a more clearly theatrical, ritualistic performance. While the extraverted Hill is all loose talk, Paris, in pent-up persona, offers us a clipped British treatise on table manners and language. The skilful performance offers a fascinating lesson in code cracking. Vocally, the performer is all restraint and correctness. She talks about being constantly interrupted, displays suitably excessive gratitude (Thank you for serving me. Thank you so much for taking my money. Oh, thank you for giving me my change.) In the British manner, she is expert at the profuse apology. At the same time, Paris offers some striking physical images–notably, when having explored every surface of the table and its accessories (cloth, knives, and serviettes) she arches backward into a tabletop miraculously converted to rectangular pool. As in Smoking Gun, Paris’ monologue works associatively, spinning out from everyday observations (What exactly you might deduce from 16 bottles of Bacardi and one can of carpet cleaner in the shopping trolley in front of you at the supermarket) to The Last Supper. Some of the hardest hitting and hilarious observations come from the ghastly rituals of table manners including the secret code “FHB” of the work’s title, whispered to family members as a warning to restrain themselves in the presence of non-family. I’m hoping it’s not just me and that this one has yet to be unleashed on the big Family we’re all becoming. If so, let’s hope the Brits can keep it under their hats for a bit.

The Australian visit by Curious was hosted by Performance Space, The Studio, Sydney Opera House and ringside productions; On the Scent, performers Leslie Hill, Helen Paris, Lois Weaver, performed in a suburban house in Tempe, Saturday 19 February; Smoking Gun & Family Hold Back, Leslie Hill, Helen Paris, The Studio, 23-25 February

RealTime issue #66 April-May 2005 pg. 45

Owen Leong, Second Skin

Prospectus is a collection of 9 works from 8 Australian new media artists grappling with nuances in digital media and culture. In their catalogue essay, curators Dougal Phillips and David Teh draw attention to the recent disbanding of the Australia Council’s New Media Arts Board, which aided many of these artists. The Board’s dissolution threatens the reputation and agency of Australian art’s most interesting developers.

The title Prospectus should be interpreted as a dreamy, speculative sketch of our digital destiny and how it may unfold. At the same time it is a concise delineation of what is happening right now, a repertoire of video work that brings insight to how a digitised perspective, connectivity, alteration and immersion have transformed the way in which we learn and create.

Digital culture has taught us that power lies not in our nodes but in our connections–it’s not how you think, it’s what you link. This is not to say that Soda_Jerk and Sam Smith don’t think, but their message is in what they connect. The Dawn of Remix fixes the opening sequence of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey with LL Cool J’s hip-hop classic Can’t Live Without My Radio. This deftly dovetailed sequence offers a re-evaluation of history; anyone born post-1970 is likely to have come across LL Cool J long before they sourced Stanley Kubrick. As Soda_Jerk and Smith’s chimps taunt us (“rock the beat with my hand”), they are demonstrating our new ability to construct and tweak history based on personal extractions from our collective pop-cultural whirlpool.

Tweaking in a more sickly sense is Owen Leong’s agenda–we can tell from his Second Skin. Under superbly crisp studio lights, honey softly streams onto Leong’s head and is smeared over his face. After several minutes the viewing experience becomes less sweet and more nauseating as Leong’s facial manipulation seems never-ending. Reminiscent of Zheng Huan’s 12 Square Metres, in which the honey-coated artist caught flies on his skin in a male urinal, Leong’s work centres abjection on the body. But instead of immersing himself in flies and excrement, he is contemplating the infinitely airbrush-able digital sanitation of Photoshopped bodies in popular print and screen media.

Over time, variations in perspective have effected our comprehension of our surroundings. Sumugan Sivanesan’s Landslide is a minute-long scan of the city skyline. Through the sun’s glare and a harsh, cicada-like digital buzz, we decipher a rippling urban horizon, its solid, geometric structures wavering and fluid.

The excerpt from Daniel Crooks’ On Perspective and Motion–Part 1 renders a prominent street corner in Melbourne in a new way, invigorating the old dialogue concerning photography and what we see–or do not see. Daguerre’s 1839 Le Boulevard du Temple was an attempt to capture one of Paris’ most lively streets. However, due to the long exposure time, the figures moved too quickly to register and the street appeared empty. Crooks draws related conclusions about analogue’s successor, although his distinctive ‘time-slice’ technique works to reverse the effect: the faster figures move, the more conspicuous their visual presence.

Sivanesan and Crooks nudge our ability to contend with dimension: street grids are compressed, figures stretched, buildings are like water, and school boys darting in front of trams look like dragons. Perspective here is no longer about the observer’s position; it’s our connection to the whole. In a second work by Sivanesan, Seismic, eloquently-timed, glitchy pauses leave figures spasming as they pass an unaffected, motionless Falun Dafa demonstration. This kind of digital acuity reveals a connectedness between figures and time with a duality of political and nearly comical implications.

An artist enjoying the constant stream of visual data is Wade Marynowsky. His Apocalypse Later is a freakish visual and aural binge of grunting footage gathered from Sydney’s recently closed theme parks, and a recording of what is called ‘live cinema’–the manipulation of sound and image in real time. There is a level of passivity required from the viewer; instead of contemplating relational aesthetics, you must let the experience wash over you and wriggle in the data flow.

The question of what will replace the Australia Council’s New Media Arts Board will determine Prospectus’ role: a projection of things to come or a relic of Australian new media art.

Prospectus: Projections in New Media, blank_space gallery, Surry Hills, Sydney, January 23-26

Prospectus was part of the 1/2doz. festival

RealTime issue #66 April-May 2005 pg. 32

Martin del Amo, Under Attack

photo Heidrun Löhr

Martin del Amo, Under Attack

Solo Series #1

Following his Unsealed of 2004, Martin del Amo’s Under Attack is another utterly engrossing solo, the second part in a trilogy, this one moving in even closer on the first part’s grief (the artist’s for the death of a lover) and the impasses of ambition (in the first del Amo’s desire to sing, here a female dancer’s career thwarted when she lends her skill to a virtual performer–an animated cartoon dragon). The grief here is the kind that can pull your legs from beneath you: an animating force, love, has left you or the moves you thought were yours have been copyrighted away. If you were a marionette, your strings would have been cut. There’s a strong sense of that cut in Under Attack, but who’s done the cutting? Del Amo ponders the biblical story of Jacob wrestling the angel, asking if it was really an angel or something else, something denied or unacknowledged, our own puppetry, our own string cutting? This performance had me re-reading Victoria Nelson’s wonderful The Secret Life of Puppets (Harvard University Press, 2001).

In the beginning a neat, still, white-suited del Amo stands in the distance against a wide cream curtain, amidst a machine pulse that sounds curiously organic. As in Unsealed, he walks and walks, but less purposefully this time, goes to speak to us, then doesn’t. The walking is interrupted by a burst of neat leaps. Finally he speaks, initiating the series of reflections on Jacob and the angel, the dancer and the dragon, and on a death. Between each episode his walking is breached by sudden involuntary movements, a kind of escalating possession, its force thrust up through the body into the arms and into the head racked side to side. He discards his clothing piece by piece. He is ever more the puppet, perpetually propelled, awash with sweat, legs dropping away from beneath him.

The tales continue to be calmly told. Grief is addressed. The grim details of a postmortem uttered. The dancer gets more work as the dragon, but no one will employ her to dance–her moves too much like that famous cartoon character. Del Amo puts his clothes back on, but it’s not easy, a sock, for example seems determined to move away from the foot. The self is dressed, reassembled and still once more, but with one bare foot, like Oedipus (‘wounded’ or ‘swollen foot’, or ‘limping’). Tragic. There’s a burst of leaps to live, bracing violin sawing. Control has returned, but everything has changed.

Gail Priest’s sound design is a more extravert presence in this part of the trilogy. In the first it was more a subliminal amplification of the performer’s body, here it’s pulse and impulse, but is it driver or driven, puppeteer or puppet, angel or inner devil? Whatever, Under Attack is a sublimely moving and highly integrated creation.
Narelle Benjamin in Cordelia Beresford's I Dream of Augustine

Narelle Benjamin in Cordelia Beresford’s I Dream of Augustine

Reeldance Installations#01

Interval allows just enough time to take in a couple of One Extra’s Reeldance Installations#01, a significant intiative, installed in the Performance Space galleries. The Julie-Anne Long and Sam James collaboration, The Nun’s Picnic (RT65, p13), combines a wardrobe-cum-dressing table replete with photographs, tiny videos, clothing, books and a few intimate possessions that might belong to a nun, all framed by a subjective video journey through a forest screened on the adjoining walls. The delicate, almost sombre ambience is a foretaste of Long’s performance, Nun, next on the dance program that night. In another room is Cordelia Beresford’s installation, I Dream of Augustine featuring dancer Narelle Benjamin in 2 finely crafted black and white films. One has Benjamin performing between 2 chairs in acts of suspension and elevation deploying the magic of both film and a dextrous body. The other is a thing of beauty, a visual litany of simple if sometimes mysterious texts (“A beautiful woman rearranged by anonymous hands”; “not her, she is not real”), antique body diagrams and an intense movement vocabulary set in an old machine shop, their juxtapositions yielding lateral reflections on dance, the body and language. To be seen again, and again.

Breathing Hole

In the second part of Solo series no. 1 Nikki Heywood speaks and moves through a dark, claustrophobic reverie, adopting the persona of “a woman in a chilly zone…obsessed by a man trapped below the ice.” The image fans out to include the Russian sailors who a few years ago went down with their nuclear submarine and even further to the fate of all of us as the polar caps melt and we all go under. The persona seems to be of “a girl who didn’t know the weight of things” (program note), but for whom the performance represents perhaps an expansion of empathy. I write “seems” and “perhaps” because on one viewing the verbal and aural density of this work, the brevity of images and the heightened expressiveness in the delivery worked against contemplation. This is atypical of Heywood’s usual attention to detail, the power of sustained images and avoidance of the literal. It’s worth noting that Heywood, a major artist in my book, has been consistently denied serious funding for many years while investing her talent in supporting other artists and doing them proud. It’s time that changed and Heywood was honoured with the time and space that creation requires.

NUN

Julie-Anne Long steps inside a habit, adopting a nun persona but without characterisation, just generating an “essence…something to do with the elusive and complex feelings of the eroticism of being alone” (program note). Like the Reeldance installation this a serious work. There are flashes of humour as the nun dances to Elvis (Take My Hand Precious Lord) or Tammy Wynette (You’ll Never Walk Alone), but each says something more about the moments of freedom in a sequestered life that might seem ordinary to us (or perhaps just as liberating). And some of those moments are ecstatic, as in the Wynette, as the nun leaps and swoops and the light turns white. As in the installation there’s a sense of entering someone else’s private space, this time from a distance, the nun glimpsed at domestic duties through a small window on the Performance Space proscenium arch. But as she draws near the audience, the projected image of the house slips into the distance, the forest around it enlarging, inviting her into free space, ever private even in such openness. But it’s the smallest movements, the little images glimpsed through windows and doors that are the most memorable, declaring the nun’s otherness and self-contained aloneness.
Brian Carbee, In the Dark

Brian Carbee, In the Dark

photo Heidrun Löhr

Brian Carbee, In the Dark

In the Dark

This work, presented mid-February in the same venue, has it all: talent (performers Michael Whaites, Narelle Benjamin, Julie-Anne Long, Brian Carbee and UK director Wendy Houstoun) and movie-making. The wobbly but enticing governing conceit comes replete with an opening trailer (“what they got was the dance of a lifetime)”, various takes, calls for closeups and long shots and episodes of direction (Carbee drolly calling the shots in front of finished film). Scattered in between are gameshow antics (Whaites as a wonderfully startled host), distracted political diatribe with a smile (Long wearing a huge feathered head dress) and over-determined dance (Benjamin to a set of ridiculously demanding instructions). Performed with engaging ease amidst a sense that anything could happen, the work immediately recalls the UK’s Forced Entertainment with their penchant for imploding monologues, epic list-making, impro, gruelling durational turns and post-pomo theatre-wrecking (once upon a time mislabelled as ‘deconstruction’). Same, but very different, after all these are dancers, and a great night was had by all, though exactly what we had left me a little in the dark.

One Extra & Performance Space, Solo Series#1, Martin del Amo, Under Attack; Nikki Heywood, Breathing Hole; Julie-Anne Long, NUN; Performance Space, Feb 23-March 6

In the Dark, a movement & video performance, director Wendy houstoun, performers Julie-Anne Long, Narelle Benjamin, Michael Whaites, Brian Carbee, lighting Neil Simpson, sound Drew Crawford; Performance Space, Feb 3-13

One Extra, Reeldance Installations#01, curator Erin Brannigan, works by Cordelia Beresford, Samuel James, Julie-Anne Long, Narelle Benjamin, Heidrun Lohr; Performance Space, Feb 10-March 6

RealTime issue #66 April-May 2005 pg. 33-

In a significant development for Australian artists wishing to access key works, Contemporary Arts Media (CAM) has established an impressive catalogue of international performances, documentaries and training films on DVD and VHS cassette, and is actively seeking to increase its Australian content. The range of artists, among many others, includes Robert Wilson, Robert Lepage, Odin Theatret (an extensive gathering), Julie Taymar, Cirque du Soleil, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker (an excellent selection) and Nederlands Dans Theater. The catalogue also includes visual arts, music, film, dance screen and media studies. Jonathan Marshall met with CAM’s director Kriszta Doczy to discuss the range and market for her catalogue.

After teaching theatre for several years Doczy founded the WA-based company Contemporary Arts Media (formerly Hush Videos) in 1993 to distribute materials which could be used for contemporary arts instruction at schools and universities in Australia and overseas. The collection now comprises around 1,500 documentary and instructional videos, DVDs and books. Doczy notes, “I was practicing in the performing arts in the 1970s in Europe”, and CAM’s current catalogue reflects, to some degree, the chief influences to which she was exposed at that time. She cites the Polish avant garde of Tadeusz Kantor and Jerzy Grotowski, Japanese Noh theatre and the revival of the early Soviet avant gardism of Vsevold Meyerhold as some of the chief forms she encountered during her career, all of which are now featured in the CAM catalogue. The collection constitutes an implicit canon of contemporary Western and world theatre focusing “on alternatives to realism”, she explains, “and this is why much of the Kabuki and Asian theatre is included.”

Non-Western styles exerted a critical, formative influence on Western theatre makers such as Antonin Artaud (Balinese dance), Bertholt Brecht (Beijing Opera), Eugenio Barba and others. As such, these styles are now a crucial part of the Western contemporary theatre heritage, their significance extending beyond any patronising anthropological interest. In keeping with CAM’s non-realist focus, the more readily accessible Naturalist theatre does not make up a significant part of the collection. “We have some material on Konstantin Stanislavski and his successors but not much”, Doczy says. A video on playwright/director David Mamet and another documenting an early Edward Albee production are rare exceptions.

Doczy herself is passionate about the need for artists to be exposed to historic avant garde sources and training methodologies. “Sometimes I see shows by young people”, she explains, “in which they are repeating lots of inventions, lots of elements which have already been widely used over the course of the last 40 years. These students need to come up with an original idea. So they have to see what the generations before have done so as to be able to grow out of it, to step further, and to find their own theatrical or aesthetic language. They must study these works and make their own voice. So it is very important to have this documentation available. How else can you build up a culture?”

Doczy’s background–combined with the availability of extant materials–has caused CAM to focus more on international, rather than Australian, arts. However, the catalogue currently includes audio-visual materials on Melbourne improvisers Born in a Taxi, Brisbane’s Zen Zen Zo, Jimmy Chi’s Bran Nue Dae, mechanistic body artist Stelarc, WA-based performance artist Domenico de Clario, a collection of the 2004 ReelDance Awards finalist and several WA dance makers like co.Loaded and Chrissie Parrott. Probably the most significant new title distributed by CAM is Shifting and Sliding: The feminine psyche in performance, an edited collection of video interviews and production excerpts featuring the work of writer/director Jenny Kemp and choreographer Helen Herbertson, focusing particularly on their collaboration Still Angela (2002). A video of the full production is also on sale. Although some discussion of Kemp’s work is already available in Australian Women’s Drama (Peta Tait, Elizabeth Schafer eds, Currency, Sydney, 1997) and several of Kemp’s published scripts, this is the first widely accessible audio-visual title to deal exclusively with her career.

In order to expand the collection, CAM has also moved into small scale video production. The Chrissie Parrott title, for example, was edited at the company’s Fremantle offices. It features a new interview with Parrott recorded by CAM, edited with extant documentation of productions from Parrott’s own collection. The limited funds available, coupled with the typically low financial returns for such specialist films, means that the audiovisual language and aesthetic of CAM’s documentaries tends to be straightforward. Talking heads intercut with production stills and segments of audio-visual documentation remain the standard format.

Doczy herself attributes this entirely to issues of cost: “The ideal documentary would cost about $100,000 or more to make. So companies tend to team up with broadcasters to produce them and then sell them for television broadcast. But we don’t have a choice. We make low budget, educational documentaries for which $5,000 is the absolute maximum. Otherwise these films wouldn’t be available.”

The most recent development for CAM is Doczy’s push to have the company move beyond distributing materials to educational institutions and teachers. She hopes to create a shop where artists and other interested parties can obtain some of CAM’s products, as well as establish a public library. One such open access collection is about to be established in Budapest where the librarians of the Palace of Culture have decided to add CAM’s entire catalogue to their public holdings. Doczy is putting out feelers to found a similar establishment in Australia, most likely based in Melbourne. In the interim she is happy for students and other curious people to make appointments to view selected materials at CAM’s Fremantle offices. “I tell people all the time that they can come here and curl up watching what we have,” she says.

Contemporary Arts Media: www.hushvideos.com

RealTime issue #66 April-May 2005 pg. 35

Gantner at PS122

It’s 4 months since Melbourne’s Vallejo Gantner beat 300 other applicants to be announced as the new Artistic Director of PS122, New York’s famed centre for innovative performance. He took up official duties on January 31, appointed on a platform of bringing an international focus to the venue. Gantner proved his qualifications in his tenure as Artistic Director of the Dublin Fringe Festival over the last 3 years, using his broad knowledge of contemporary arts practice and entrepreneurial spirit to transform a relatively minor festival into an important gathering of some of the most challenging emerging artists from around the world. The board of PS122 would no doubt have been particularly impressed with Gantner’s success in bringing to Dublin 3 of New York’s most innovative young companies, the irreverently titled National Theatre of the United States of America (NTUSA), Radiohole and Elevator Repair Service, the latter to work in collaboration with emerging Dublin artists.

Gantner faces a daunting task at PS122. His predecessor, Mark Russell, had been in the position for 21 years, was well loved, and instrumental in the early development of some of New York’s most successful performing artists including the late Spalding Gray, Karen Finley and Eric Bogosian as well as more recently established companies. For many, PS122 has always been not so much a New York Institution as an East Village neighbourhood venue. The artistic community of the area has a sense of ownership over the space and Gantner’s directorship will be subject to extreme scrutiny.

Gantner intends to encourage “an environment that creates a 2 way bridge between emerging New York artists and emerging international artists” in order to challenge what he sees as an “isolationist tendency in American arts.” The manifestations of this dialogue are yet to be seen, but there is certainly the potential for initiating fruitful conversations between New York and Australian-based artists.

But what is the shape of the New York experimental theatre and performance scene today? Where is the next generation of Richard Foremans, Wooster Groups and Mabou Mines? These are questions I had very much in mind when I visited New York last year for the first time. I was there for a month, presenting The Black Swan of Trespass with Melbourne-based Stuck Pigs Squealing Theatre as part of the New York International Fringe Festival. Four companies in particular caught my attention: Radiohole, Elevator Repair Service, Richard Maxwell’s NYC Players and NTUSA. None of these companies have been to Australia, although most have toured in Europe.

NYC Players

Richard Maxwell has been creating performance in New York since 1994. He moved to New York to seek out the Wooster Group with whom he interned before establishing the NYC Players. Over the last 10 years Maxwell has developed a particular brand of performance where “acting” is eschewed and “being” is the goal. “If my style is anything, it’s anti-style. It’s about coming as close to neutrality as you can.” He works with a combination of trained actors and people who have received no specialist training at all. His interest in non-performers is based on the unique vocabulary they bring to the stage, each one with their own set of rules of engagement. Maxwell believes this disarms the audience and calls for a new way of seeing. His plays, with titles like Burger King and Drummer Wanted, chart the ebb and flow of the everyday in the lives of ordinary people, finding beauty and metaphysics in the miniscule rhythms of human interaction.

Showcase played to audiences of 15 in a hotel room at the Holiday Inn in Philadelphia as part of the excellent Philadelphia Live Arts Festival. It is a simple story of a man, played by Maxwell regular Jim Fletcher, who encounters his shadow in a hotel room while on a business trip. His shadow is an actor covered head to toe with a tight black body stocking–a striking and disturbing image. At times the shadow offers a facsimile of the actor’s movements with great precision, at other times he seems not to be bothered and at one point he even leaves the room, through the audience, to the bathroom. For half an hour the actor talks quietly, with little intonation, giving voice to his interior monologue as audience members lean against a wall or sit awkwardly on the bed. He often addresses the audience directly, yet with an odd solipsistic detachment. He suggests, without judgment, that we are not welcome: “I close the door of the hotel room behind me, and the only thing I want is to feel myself completely alone.” As the monotony deepens, the audience members are called upon to assign emotional valencies to words and phrases in the absence of any clear distinctions. The lack of ‘characterisation’ also acts to remove the utterances from fixed moral and social codes, and the audience becomes complicit in the character’s amoral universe.

The piece ends with a song. It is not beautifully sung, and the melody meanders in the way that a conversation might. The backing music, a sequence of slowly shifting chords, is played on a dictaphone held in the actor’s hands. This is a device used by Maxwell in earlier pieces, and it creates a sense of extreme fragility and vulnerability.

Radiohole

Radiohole is a New York company which has been investigating innovative approaches to the notion of acting since 1998. There are 3 permanent members and a host of occasional collaborators. Radiohole’s early work was presented at the Performing Garage on Wooster Street and at Richard Foreman’s Ontological Theatre, and the influences are evident. For the past 4 years their base has been at the Collapsable (sic) Hole, a (barely) converted garage in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Here they are able to develop their work over long periods, usually 18 months to 2 years. I saw their most recent creation, Radiohole is Still My Name, on my last night in the US, and it was a fittingly excessive and vertiginous experience.

Radiohole Is Still My Name is aptly described on the company website as “a spaghetti docu-drama guest-starring Guy Debord.” Guy Debord, Situationist philosopher and author of The Society of the Spectacle, was an influence on the punk movement, cited by artists such Malcolm McLaren and Jamie Reid. And there is more than a little of the punk aesthetic in Radiohole’s work, in its intoxicated interweaving of dense political commentary and pure libidinal excess. In this show, the cast of 4 indulge in bitter personal arguments, gun fights (using party poppers for sound effects), beer guzzling, binge eating as they reflect on the current financial and moral woes of the company. The actors play versions of themselves, answering to their own names.

By the end of the show, which ran for an hour, the space had been completely transformed by the actors. As they cleaned up the mess of food, beer, props and discarded costumes, most audience members hung around for more beer and music. I left high on the buzz that only a rich blend of deconstruction and drink can induce.

NTUSA

NTUSA has been presenting work in New York since 2001, predominantly in non-theatre spaces including a basement beneath a 42nd Street shopfront, a Brooklyn bar and a tiny room above the Henry Miller Theater. I saw their most recent production, Placebo Sunrise, at Dublin Fringe where it was included as part of the focus on theatre of the Americas.

Set on a nightmarish cruise ship, all the action of Placebo Sunrise takes place in a long corridor that extends back from a tiny semi-circular thrust. The form is surreal vaudeville, a 2 act pastiche of cheesy Broadway dance numbers, Beckettian expressions of existential isolation, slapstick and music hall. Yehuda Duenyas and Ryan Bronz as Garvey and Superpant$ perform a kind of Vladimir/Estragon double act with the one constantly battling to understand the nature of his predicament while the other is quite happy to be taken on a wild journey, no questions asked. There is an ontological slipperiness to the form that bears a family resemblance to Radiohole and Foreman. It was an impressive production, very assured, conceptually tight and very funny.

Lineage

My experiences seeing the work of New York based emerging independent companies was really invigorating. These companies share a spirit of adventure and critical inquiry combined with a range of skills developed over years of continual engagement. The companies have no doubt benefited from support, in the form of mentorship and resources, from the previous generation of experimental companies. This kind of industry mentorship is something that is only possible in theatre cultures where conceptual, process-orientated companies have a shot at longevity and stability.

I hope that we are able to see some of this work in Australia in the near future and look forward to the possibility of a productive dialogue between independent New York companies and their counterparts in Australia. Hopefully such trans-Pacific exchange will be facilitated through Gantner’s appointment in New York.

Romeo Castellucci’s Genesis, From the museum of sleep (Melbourne International Arts Festival, 2002) was the apex and the conclusion of a meta-narrative of theatrical thought from Castellucci’s company, Societas Raffaello Sanzio. In 2001 the company embarked on a major new project, a cycle of 11 episodes/productions called Tragedia Endogonidia, an open system of representation that, like an organism, changes and evolves with time and geography, with the name ‘Episode’ assigned to each phase of its transformation. This system forces a radical re-thinking not only of creation, but also of the whole theatrical system. The aim is to represent a tragedy of the future. The graphic emblem, and one of the aesthetically consistent throughlines of the cycle is a representation of Man and Woman (Adam and Eve), originating from the third planet (Earth), orbiting a star (Sun). This is an image which is being carried by the Voyager space ship launched in the 1970s in search of extra-terrestrial life (and still en route).

The word Endogonidia refers to those beings which are made up of, or have within them, gonads–organs such as the testis or ovary which enable them to reproduce unceasingly. Endogeny implies immortality. Tragedy, to the contrary, involves an inevitable end. The figures living on the stage of Tragedia Endogonidia do not resemble any recognizable myth or history; instead they follow each other in frames that are themselves separate, and the thread joining them is not a narrative, but rather a synchronic memory, where images alternate according to alogical and simultaneous sequencing. Each figure refers to its own frame. No biographies emerge, rather biological instances: fundamental elements consistent to all life, free of context, hierarchy or narrative, addressing questions about humanity in relation to animals, machines and even extra-terrestrials.

These bio-political themes may have been present in Castellucci’s work for a number of years, but in Tragedia Endogonidia they are organised in such a way that the inevitability of any kind of classical tragic narrative becomes impossible. Fragments, images, echoes and remnants can be deciphered, and these are titled and presented to a specific community. The often non-sensical and yet related and familiar way these remnants are organised, both within episodes and as repeated figures throughout the cycle, points to the relationship the episodes have both with each other and with the city which hosts them. In any particular episode then, one will neither be getting the ‘whole thing’ nor a fragment of a totality. It is useful, in this case, to think of a remnant, as “neither the whole… nor a part… but, rather, the non-coincidence of the whole and the part…” (Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive).

Tragedia Endogonidia has developed over a period of 3 years with a total of 11 episodes in 10 cities, each an interdependent episode but a complete production in itself. Episode names are acronyms of cities and the number of the production in the evolving work. I observed rehearsals of P.#06 (Paris), R.#07 (Rome) and C.#11 (Cesena) for 3 weeks (on 2 separate occasions) in Cesena, and the rehearsals in the theatre in both Paris and Rome.
Tragedia Endogonidia

Tragedia Endogonidia begins with fragmented images and metaphors based on sequences and patterns from the chemical and biological elements of life on Earth. While the vocabulary of the score and the scenography is structurally determined by the movement of sperm and the growth of fundamental elements and minerals, the random patterns of the behaviour of a goat (the derivation of the name of tragedy) determines the linguistic properties of the work. Tragedia Endogonidia connects with each city where the work is presented, the focus being on the tragic remnants of the community’s relationship with life on Earth, and even the possibilities of a future on a new world. Consciously or not, the episodes reveal the various stages of their evolution within the cycle, including the influences of the cities which host them. Likewise the actions, props and other objects which form the vocabulary of the cycle evolve and mutate as they reappear in numerous episodes. Like letters in an alphabet, they can be arranged to make sense or not, but they always belong.

In Cesena and Avignon there is a gold box, a child, blood and milk, core elements. In Berlin, the front rows of the auditorium are filled with life-size rabbits, and the stage 3-dimensionally transformed from black to white. In Brussels, the space is a marble cube with fluorescent lights, where the head of a robot tirelessly recites the letters of the alphabet to a newborn baby, to begin the show. In Paris, Carravaggio’s Sacrifice of Isaac is recreated over 2 washing machines; Jesus breaks into the space (which by now has become a kind of museum) through a window; and 2 cars are dropped from the ceiling. In Rome, there is again a cube room–the same as in Brussels–but this time white and, instead of a baby, a chimpanzee. Here Catholic priests force the confession of Mussolini, and while they play basketball, the whole set comes apart and is flown off as an Italian clown breaks into the theatre through the floor. In Strasbourg, the back of the stage is left open, exposing the real European Parliament; a group of actors arrive by bus and watch Hitchcock’s Psycho; and a tank drives into the theatre through the exposed back stage. In London, a variety of spectacular stage transformations and extraordinary figures includes scores of cats, while in Marseilles there are 2 parts at 2 separate theatres. One is a strange representation of a banquet as a photographic still life with extreme stage mechanics representing the photographic revolution, while the other is a sensational sequence of huge screens with macro-projections, a refined music score and opera singer performing towards the end.

The final episode, C.#11, back at the company’s home town is also made up of 2 parts, but in the same building. One is a bedroom with a cleaner, a boy, a cat, 7 men dressed in 1940s suits (including Castellucci himself) and a solid flat which descends and blocks the action to the point where only the feet are visible and pre-recorded voices heard. The audience is then led to the second, larger space veiled by a screen onto which a film of sperm is projected. The raised screen reveals a huge, real forest. Men with torches (very little is visible) find and appear to behead a boy who has been hiding from them, but then present the head of a cat.

These extraordinary stage events are not effects, they are all mechanically real, there is no scenic art. The connection to the city, which gives each episode its name, is obscure or subtle or vague, often no more than a passing image which signifies a specific event or characteristic.

The theatrical and representational essence of Tragedia Endogonidia is the possibility, the impossibility and the inevitability of language. This is a theatre which–acknowledging the relativity of past, present and future–exists within a history which is before, within and outside culture and mythology. By portraying extreme and confronting remains of cultural representations, Romeo Castellucci’s theatre allows for extraordinary juxtapositions and can have a profound and emotional effect. Collectively and individually, the audience possesses conditioned and developed reactions to images and ideas which, in some way, quote or distort cultural references. The core of the distortion is the clash of sacred and profane, cerebral and banal.

The burning images and breathless atmospheres in Castelluci’s creations are inspired by fundamental and original cultural references (drawing on biblical, Renaissance and contemporary iconography), meticulously rehearsed and then re-arranged in a multitude of ways, until ultimate potency has been reached. Therefore the ‘real’ work of rehearsal is not developing the theatrical ideas and images for meaning and interpretation, but rather working and tuning the representation of these ideas to have the maximum sensory, emotional and physical effect on the audience. The arresting power of the imagery and the sound of Castelluci’s theatre invites rich psycho-emotional reaction, happily bypassing rationalism, plunging the viewer into a space which is at once foreign and familiar, a space which is a type of core, a fundamental where the intellect and the senses are neutralised.

In 2004 the Sydney Festival at last foregrounded innovation and got some heat for it, and praise. In 2005 it reverted to form, wide-ranging and generalist with lots of interesting shows. A couple of the less heavily produced events proved festival highlights–the address by director-performer Robert Wilson, made possible by an initiative from the Centre for Continuing Education, Sydney University, and the Came So Far for Beauty celebration of the Leonard Cohen canon as performed by a wonderful array of largely Canadian and British singers directed by the American music producer Hal Wilner. The Shen Wei Dance Company from China excited audiences and reviewers and is rumoured to be returning to Australia. Thanks to the festival’s stingy press ticketing I didn’t see it, and I’d already parted with $128 for a ticket to The Black Rider!

Robert Wilson

Wilson was in town for the staging of The Black Rider, a minor if commercially successful collaboration with William Burroughs (libretto) and Tom Waits (a bevy of nice enough tunes without the magical weave of an opera or musical) but replete with enough of the maestro’s sublime design (a rich technicolour expressionism), theatre trickery and lateral vision to satisfy. For some young afficionados raised on videos of the classic Wilson oeuvre in performance studies courses, this briskly paced showbizzy Faustian tale looked too much like a Rocky Horror Show for the intelligentsia. For others it was an entertaining and accessible introduction to Wilson’s universe of improbable transformations, signifiers that really do float and a theatre in which the object is as important as the performer, and the performer just as much an object for contemplation. These characteristics were in evidence in Wilson’s engaging 90 minute talk where he spoke with relish of the exquisite stillness of untrained performers, the unexpected wisdom of the autist and the power of slowness–telling us the exact number of minutes (26) it would take for a tortoise to cross the stage in his theatre of image.

Delivered in his characteristic drawl, a slowing of time in itself, Wilson joins the long list of American performative autobiographers (from Mark Twain to Will Rogers to Spalding Gray) in his expert, seemingly off-the-cuff blend of anecdote, re-enactment and illustration (here in felt tip pen on paper and projections). He began at the beginning, a life without art until his late teenage years, and then detailed his earliest influences–architecture and dance (Balanchine, Cage and Cunningham)–and their non-narrative transformations of space; and the boys he adopted (one actually, one symbolically), one deaf and one autistic who became performers and collaborators in his work and helped shape Wilson’s re-visioning of time and space in the theatre. He described the evolution of works of 7 and 12 hours and more on grand themes, often created with untrained performers, sometimes drawn from communities or from the street (just as much a community for Wilson, he said). He demonstrated the art of being on a stage (as opposed to acting-being-on-stage) and elaborated on the space around the performer. He spoke of the images that consume him and which he creates on stage, refusing to interpret them; of the beam of light that thrills him as it takes 16 minutes to cross the stage–”the light is written from the beginning.” He is at times stentorian but also funny, reproducing the phone exchange with his grandmother in which he invites her to come to Paris to play the non-speaking role of Queen Victoria (A Letter to Queen Victoria, 1974-75), and she accepts as calmly as agreeing to a cup a coffee.

Already Elsewhere

Contemporary photographers like Gregory Crewdson and Bill Henson and video and filmmakers like Bill Viola and Matthew Barney create works that look like and sometimes actually have the resources of a small feature film or a major stage work and the credits to match. Crewdson’s large, colour photo series, Twilight (1998-2002; published by Harry N Abrams Inc, NY, 2002) exhibits a kind of magical realism in which distracted figures in suburban USA find themselves in rooms that have sprouted flowers, or are caught in shafts of light from the night sky. A giant cone of flowers appears in the middle of a street, a man scales a jack-and-the-beanstalk column also covered in flowers. People find themselves naked in public places. A woman floats like a Pre-Raphaelite Ophelia in her flooded home. Often there’s a sense of disaster, particularly of the moment after–a tree crashed through a ceiling, an overturned bus, houses and cars on fire or things more mysterious. In her new work for the Sydney Festival, Kate Champion and designer Geoff Cobham pay tribute to Crewdson with a simulation of his art transformed into dance theatre in a series of haunting tableaux and surreal actions that add up to no narrative in particular though suggestive of some, all enveloped in that long, shocked moment that follows disaster.

In the sustained, claustrophobic opening blackout we hear what we soon take to have been the sound of the disaster. Lights sweep up from behind an immaculately realised house, sunken to its window sills. It’s almost all roof. Security guards with torches and real Alsation dogs pass through. The light brightens. Limbs can be seen protruding from windows. Bodies come to life and drag themselves onto the lawn or from over the top of the roof. The survivors gather loosely, assist one another but show no sign of affect, like the numbed townspeople in Werner Herzog’s Heart of Glass who have lost their heritage and all meaning with it, or the citizens under the threat of the chemical cloud in Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise.

Like Crewdson’s images, Already Elsewhere is eerily beautiful to look at and complexly suggestive, but whereas you can linger over a photograph as long as you desire, Champion’s creation involves a greater number of images, along with micro-narratives, voiceovers and video projection passages. It’s a very busy work and although sometimes generating the power peculiar to Crewdson it rarely gives itself time to make the most of any one image or set of movements. While the work steers clear of a narrative through line, nonetheless some of the performers manifest character traits and obsessions and form uncertain relationships that provide recurring motifs. In Champion’s previous work, Same same But Different, these manifested in a lucid structure with mounting intensity and powerfully sustained dance images often entwined with projections of the dancers that enabled them to perform with themselves. The structure of Already Elsewhere is elusive, the personae of most of the performers slender, the video projections insufficiently integrated, the spoken texts dominated by a wearying list-making poetic and too little relationship between word and image. In attempting to give literal voice to what Crewdson-like characters might be thinking (the inner self unseen by parents; guilt fantasies; wish lists; a litany of bitter dislikes) Champion risks undercutting the power of both her visual imagery and her dancers.

There are wonderful and haunting moments scattered across the work–sudden madness as the community races dangerously up and over the roof, taut passages where care could turn to kill (Champion is adept at the embrace that turns to tangle, tussle and wrestle), bodies possessed by itching or convulsive shaking, still in shock, and collective stillnesses, the watching as a plane passes, the final quiet waiting. So too do single images linger with photographic intensity: a strange light emanating from the house; a woman burying herself in the lawn; the tiles of the roof flying off in a late, apocalyptic moment that takes this community no closer to salvation, either in the form of rescue or redemption as characters threaten or withdraw. Already Elsewhere is a great idea, beautifully realised in its design, but otherwise needing radical reconception.

Otherwise

Came So Far for Beauty filled the Concert Hall of the Sydney Opera House thrice with audiences astonishingly young and predictably getting on. Brett Sparks (of LA’s The Handsome Family), Nick Cave and Jarvis Cocker provided the requisite baritone vocals, with the rest ranging through the embracing mezzo of Beth Orton on to the wonderfully idiosyncratic, folk inflected voices of the McGarrigle Sisters and Linda Thompson, Martha Wainright’s rich, raw twang, to the tenors of Teddy Thompson and Rufus Wainright and the soaring vibrato of Antony, along with the classic harmonies of veteran Cohen backing singers Perla Battalla and Julie Christensen. The great band included the UK veteran guitarist Chris Spedding and an amazingly effective deployment of the musical saw in the hands of David Coulter. Singers sang solo, in duets and trios and in chorus, and proved the durability of the Cohen repertoire. With concert curator Hal Willner, the performers offered an incredibly generous program gratefully received by a passionate audience.

Elision Ensemble’s Visionary Landscapes was a small scale festival highlight, but the works it presented were conceptually grand with the intimate Opera House Studio allowing close observation of some virtuosic playing. At the end of the concert we were rewarded with a repeat of the opening work, Brian Ferneyhough’s Terrain for solo violin and ensemble (1992). With such a complex work, seeing was learning, in fact seeing was believing, and Graeme Jennings on violin was utterly persuasive in his demonstration of the work’s dynamic cogency. Works by Liza Lim, Michael Whiticker and Timothy O’Dwyer (my second experience of his remarkable Sight and sound of a storm in sky country for saxophone and live electronics [2003]) completed an exhilarating and exemplary program.

The Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet brought to the festival an astonishing fluency and fullness of tone with their unflinching embrace of Ligeti’s 10 Pieces for Wind Quintet and 6 Bagatelles for Wind Quartet along with the sombre and richly inventive Winter Songs for tenor and wind quintet set to e e cummings’ poems by the festival’s chamber music series curator, Brett Dean, and adroitly sung by Gregory Massingham. Also on Dean’s festival program was more popular fare in the form of 12 Angry Cellos, a gathering of fine cellists (including the UK’s Robert Cohen and Australia’s David Pereira) with works by Xenakis (a fine Retours), Pärt (yes, Fratres) and Villa-Lobos (yes, Bachianas Brasileiras No 5). Dean’s own Twelve Angry Men proved to be the most intense of the works. Although the voice of reason (from the famous American stage play which inspired the work) wins in the end the argument is a hard and bitter one, the flurries and storms of entwining string voices more remembered than the resolution.

Sydney Festival Artistic Director Brett Sheehy now moves on to the 2006 Adelaide Festival. Let’s hope that his occasional flare with Sydney’s small scale festival takes fire with Adelaide’s big budget and, for the greater part, its uniquely courageous programming history. In the same year, Lyndon Terracini will launch his first Brisbane Festival after doing great things across the state with the Queensland Music Festival. Kristy Edmunds, with a solid background in programming contemporary dance and avant garde performance in the USA, presents her first Melbourne Festival in October 2003. See our interview with Edmunds in RealTime 67 (June-July).

Already Elsewhere, director/choreographer Kate Champion, designer Geoff Cobham, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House; Elision Ensemble, Visionary Landscapes, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, Jan 9; Robert Wilson TALK, The Sydney Theatre, Jan 10; The Black Rider, Tom Waits, Robert Wilson, The Sydney Theatre, Jan 17; 12 Angry Cellos, City Recital Hall, Angel Place, Jan 15; Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet, Program 1, Verbrugghen Hall, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Jan 27; Came So Far for Beauty, An Evening of Leonard Cohen Songs, Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, Jan 28-30; Sydney Festival 2005, Jan 8-30

Deported to Danger (2004), a report by the Edmund Rice Centre, found that of 40 asylum seekers deported from Australia to 11 countries, only 5 were safe. Another 10 were found to be in so much danger that it was not safe to interview them. There are other stories. Ardeshir Gholipour, an Iranian artist and democracy campaigner, faces deportation after being detained for 5 years in Australia. By deporting him to Iran, the government is exposing him to reprisal, if not immediate killing, by the Mullahs for his work as a writer for the democracy movement. Alvar Moralez sought refuge in Australia in 2001 to escape the paramilitary in Columbia. He was deported and murdered shortly after his arrival in Bogota. An anti-narcotics campaigner, Ahib Bilal fled Pakistan in 2000 due to threats from a drug smuggling group. He was deported from Villawood Detention Centre and was murdered within 2 months of returning to Pakistan.

These case histories are frightful indictments of government policies and help to contextualise 2 recent productions by the Queensland Theatre Company. The first was last year’s Far Away by English playwright Caryl Churchill (RT64, p45), written before 9/11 but prophetically making the point that the current chill is undermining struggles for social justice everywhere. In the opening act a young girl, Joan, challenges her aunt Harper with childishly persistent questions regarding horrific events she has seen taking place outside, in which her uncle is implicated. Her aunt obstinately defends her husband and warns Joan to ask no more questions, or she will be branded a traitor.

This caution was echoed in real life when the spokesperson for the California Anti-Terrorist Information Centre recently proclaimed: “If you have a group protesting a war where the cause that’s being fought against is international terrorism…You can almost argue that a protest against such a war is a terrorist act.” Millions of dollars spent on the brutal security crackdowns at the November 2003 Miami FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas) summit and the 2004 G8 Summit in Georgia came from a US Congress Iraq Appropriations bill.

In the second act of Far Away a march constitutes a grotesque fashion parade of condemned prisoners wearing ornately stylised hats which have been entered in a competition. The ominous staging instantly recalled photos of the degradation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Here a remark by another prescient writer is pertinent: “Where liberty has been promised most, they had the biggest, worst prisons” (Saul Bellow, Mr Sammler’s Planet, 1970). The final act suggested an absurdly apocalyptic, horrifying conclusion in which nations, plants and animals were at war: the foxglove is as murderous as bleach, the cats come in on the side of the French, and the mallards are in alliance with elephants and the Koreans.

QTC’s initial offering this year was a remounting of Company B’s production of Melissa Reeves’ The Spook, directed by Neil Armfield. If Churchill’s was an intense, surreal fable, Reeve’s work was a sometimes uneven mix of comedy, farce and drama set in Australia in the late 1960s, when the White Australia Policy and Robert Menzies’ legacy still held sway, and Australians were embroiled alongside US troops in Vietnam. Despite stylistic differences, the 2 plays are based on the familiar premise that when there is a war on enemies are everywhere, and the protagonists are obliged to extirpate them. Hypnotised by rhetoric into a false focus on who’s on the right and wrong side, they don’t ask questions about who’s getting killed.

A naïve young working class man, Martin–Damon Herriman in a spirited and sensitively modulated performance–is recruited by ASIO agent Alex (Steve Le Marquand) to spy on the South Bendigo branch of the Communist Party. Kerry Walker as Martin’s conservative, acerbic mother, Trixie, and Anna Lise Phillips as his bouncy, put upon wife Annette, are splendid comic foils for his sense of mission, while also subtly communicating their sense of betrayal by Martin on other fronts.

By the late 60s the Communist Party was a spent political force due to splits. The 1968 Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia hastened its demise. In the irascibility of the Party hack, Frank, splenetically portrayed by Russell Kiefel, Melissa Reeves suggest it’s become a holding operation. The incisively written parts played with such complete dignity and humanity by George Spartels as the Greek fish and chip shop proprietor, George, and Eugenia Fragos as his wife, Elli, convey the attraction of progressive Communist ideals for some of the best people of the era. Their warm embrace of Martin leads to the tragedy of their deportation to Greece with the expectation of George’s murder by the Junta. We are back to the future.

Melissa Reeves’ script is brilliant in the small clinches. She maintains a light touch, choosing to eschew allegory. Both Spook and Churchill’s play serve satisfyingly contrasting functions in QTC’s brave, alternative programming.

The Spook, writer Melissa Reeves, director Neil Armfield, QPAC Playhouse, Brisbane, Feb 15-March 5

Far Away, writer Caryl Churchill, director Leticia Caceres, QPAC, Brisbane, Nov 11-Dec 4, 2004

From the version 1.0 bunker, David Williams, one of the makers of A Certain Maritime Incident, which provocatively rewrote the verbatim theatre idiom and pulled huge audiences eager to chew over Australian evil, reflects on the motivation for the company’s new show, The Wages of Spin.

The Wages of Spin charts both the War on Iraq and the culture wars. In poring over the documents from the war and its electoral aftermath, we were struck by two things. Firstly the outrage about the torture of kittens on a Sydney railway station makes national newspaper front pages, erasing ongoing revelations about Abu Ghraib abuses. Kitten torture is widely regarded as a more significant sign of catastrophic moral decline than the torture of Iraqis under the power of Coalition forces in ‘free’ Iraq. The kitten saga sucks all the media oxygen from the Abu Ghraib stories. We the people are happy to move on.

Secondly, we were struck that out of a year’s worth of newspaper front pages, Delta Goodrem appears to be on every second one. Delta has cancer. Delta has romances. Delta is ditched. Meanwhile Falluja is being obliterated and the piles of uncounted Iraqi dead grow larger. These are obviously the real issues, and it’s time political theatre got real. Some of us have been mugged by reality, and it’s an uncomfortable feeling.

It’s clear that no decent Australian citizen truly believes that Australia’s good name has been dragged through the mud entering a war under false pretences, and then failing to adequately prepare for the peace. So we’ve got to get with the program. Performance makers have a responsibility to provide bang for buck. Can’t be wasting taxpayers’ money at a time like this. We’ll need it for our boys on the front line, fighting for our freedom. In this ‘real’ context, freedom means compliance and democracy means silence. The silent majority are the only people worthy of citizenship, but only if they stay silent. We read between the lines in Gerard Henderson, Miranda Devine et al, and hear the call to shut up and let real Australians get on with the business of being comfortable, relaxed and proud.

Version 1.0 promise problems for the converted. As our dramaturg Paul Dwyer puts it attacking the hypocrisies of our representatives is “like money for jam.” We have to find another bit of purchase on the slippery surface of the spin machine. Everyone knows that Australia went to war on a lie. But so what? Freedom and democracy are worth fighting for, aren’t they? We are good people, aren’t we?

We hope The Wages of Spin, like the plaintive meows of the kitten, gets under the skin. We think it’s dark and dangerous, and completely not the show that we expected to make. Join us for the rollercoaster ride. There may be casualties.

version 1.0, The Wages of Spin, Performance Space, Sydney, May 20- June 5 Bookings 02 9698 7235; The Street Theatre, Canberra, July 20-30, bookings 02 6247 1223

There’s something gothic in the Brisbane zeitgeist. Running counter to the anodyne stainless steel and blonde wood aesthetic currently bedevilling architecture in the new ‘smart’ Brisbane, it seems as though the city’s artists are scrambling to uncover a sinister underbelly where it doesn’t officially exist. Priding itself on comfort and liveability (“laze and languor” as Jane Austen might have it), Brisbane doesn’t really ‘do’ seaminess. But in the absence of a state fostered culture of oppression post-Bjelke-Petersen, or a ready-made culture of cracks-and-fissures creepiness (á la Adelaide’s urban ‘Family’ mythology), writers, musicians, dancers and performance artists seem to be turning to gothic fable as a way of framing the corrupt past, or hankering for a more dynamic and romantic alternative to the present preoccupation with antiseptic urban veneers.

Norman Price, Angela Betzien and Errol Price have made recent gothic contributions to theatre discourse; Christine Johnston and the delightfully mordant Kransky Sisters celebrate the gothic in cabaret form; and Frank Theatre have danced with the devil in the guise of Nick Cave. Now a collection of the city’s most exciting young performance, multimedia and sound artists has come together under the auspices of Western Australia’s John Burtt and Katie Lavers (skadada) to create Alchemy, a theatre/dance performance that celebrates “the magical and surreal world of Grimm’s fairytales” in a refreshingly wry contemporary urban setting.

Funded in the dying breath of the Australia Council’s New Media Arts Board, the Alchemy workshop was presented at Brisbane’s suitably gothic Powerhouse, the ensemble including a range of freelance and company-trained (Polytoxic, Vulcana Women’s Circus, Frank Theatre) practitioners.

This work-in-progress presentation depicted the twisted goings-on inside a tiered brick veneer home that could ostensibly have been in any city. Marika Sasnowski’s grand edifice projections onto translucent scrims of floor-to-ceiling fabric created a strong sense of a universal gothic, but still seemed somehow anchored to the Powerhouse’s industrial carapace. Three grotesque Ugly Sisters primped and preened in grubby corsets and knickers in the attic, while Pearson’s Cinderella toiled with mops and buckets in the cellar. As she began polishing the anodised metal teapots, the sisters transformed into rat-like ghouls and descended to torment her in a unison dance sequence that owed as much to Beetlejuice and Thriller as it did to the Brothers Grimm. As the frenetic polishing unleashed a distinctly sensual and urbane genie (Fez Fa’anana), I couldn’t help but feel we were back in the bowels of the Brisbane psyche, with the anarchic spirit as the city’s collective urban repressed.

The disorder and dis-ease insinuated itself through the building’s floors and helped loosen up its anally retentive inhabitants to joyful effect. A narcissistic dandy and a stitched up English spinster found groove in their respective cloisters, then found love in a teacups-to-the-wall ritual of eavesdropping and sublimation. The Ugly Sisters transformed momentarily from slatterns to starlets in a wish fulfilling aerial display that nodded camply to the Follies Bergere. Then it all abruptly ended with a ‘to be continued’ teaser.

For a developmental showing, the piece was incredibly rich, and the performers clearly relished the opportunity to indulge in personal flights of fancy (away, perhaps from the dictates of more established company or ensemble aesthetics). Indeed, part of the joy of watching this enchanting work lay in the exuberance with which its team of performers embraced a sense of play. Under Burtt and Lavers’ assured and irreverent directorship, the ensemble exemplified some of the finest principles of capital ‘P’ performance: in abandoning spoken-word, the team were still committed to embracing rich characterisation; while in exploring innovative ways of communicating and abjuring linear narrative structures, they still maintained a patent respect and affection for storytelling. All this charm and ebullience was ably helped along by a manipulative and cheeky Astor Piazzola nuevo tango accordion score and Lawrence English’s atmospheric soundscape. Alchemy gave us a fine taste of things to come.

Alchemy, artistic directors John Burtt, Katie Lavers; performers Lisa Fa’alafi, Fez Fa’anana, Amanda-Lyn Pearson, Leah Shelton, Sofia Woods; Brisbane Powerhouse, March 9-12

Abductions was an ambitious mixed bill mounted by Perth’s Artrage, featuring 5 new playlets from emerging artists. The program was characterised by the usual highs and lows of mixed bills, and despite best efforts, the unforgiving concrete bunker design of the Bakery Theatre was not always equal to the technical demands. Dividing the venue into 6 with curtains led to some less than ideal speaker and lighting placement. Despite these rough edges, Abductions contained gems from artists who look likely to produce impressive work in the future.

Patti Pied, for example, was an assured monologue from writer/performer Vinyl M’shell. Beaming at the audience, she revelled in enunciating a mixture of dirty realist details of sexual escapades and drug taking, blasphemously seasoned with a rich Christian iconography. M’shell powered through the largely nonsensical tale of a grubby Goth chick reborn as the new, sexually alluring “chosen one” and sister to Christ. This spoken word performance was accompanied by an equally symbolically overloaded background video projection, giving the show something of a careening punk cabaret ambience. While this rich melange did not amount to much conceptually, the energy and poetic craft underlying the monologue promised great things for the future. Compared to the mad energy of Patti Pied, Xavier Mitchelides’ more coherent one man show, Loving the Alien, came across as simply fine stand-up comedy: a funny work within a well-established format (right down to Mitchelides’ Eddie Murphy impersonations).

The wild card of the season was writer/performer Tomás Ford’s improvised Difficult Second Novel. For this bizarre work, an audience member was chosen to act as ‘God’ for the night for a struggling writer and his wayward, cocaine-snorting muse. The audience member had to suggest a genre in which the artists might craft a story and adding various ‘pressures’, such as fear of losing readers. In addition to the madness of this conceit and the visible struggle of the actors to cope with its demands, much of the piece’s appeal lay in the incongruity of having these characters represent the classic artist and muse. The latter was weaselly, whining and generally not very inspiring, spending most of his time trying to escape his author, while Ford as the writer was a volatile mixture of brooding anger and down to earth, no nonsense logic. He behaved more like a truckie taking a break on the Birdsville Track than any idealised sensitive writer in his garret. Although the ‘novel’ produced on the night I attended was stupid in the extreme (an endless Western gunfight between Bob Dylan and David Bowie), the crass illogic of the piece and the way it endlessly threatened to collapse under its own conceits made for absorbing viewing.

The highlight of Abductions was Afterwards We’ll Go Away. This wonderful, comically existential production drew heavily on the aesthetics of David Lynch, with a greater emphasis on overt humour. It also featured some particularly striking surrealist stage images at the beginning and end of the performance. Ineffectual, love-struck detective Dennis Moon pined for retired jazz chanteuse Mary-Lou Bakerman as he tried to find out what happened to her departed pianist lover. Moon’s office became a field of combat for Francine Hopscotch, the delightfully shy and dorky secretary pining for Moon, who was replaced by Mary-Lou’s venomous, beehive hairdo afflicted sister. Meanwhile the strange couple of singer Baby Red Shoes and her subservient pianist took over from Mary-Lou and her partner at the local jazz club. The group devised script moved deftly between these multiple romantic entanglements and each character was given a space to propound his or her take on the world and the woes inherent in it.

The well balanced, 3 level day-glo and tulle set was rich in an ironic 1950s American aesthetic, with neon-like glowing blocks of coloured light. Afterwards We’ll Go Away embodied not only a sharp, controlled sense of staging and dramaturgy, but also a delightfully amusing sense of the absurd–while also serving as an excellent showcase for the cast. If these modest, clipped pleasures were not sufficient, the final image of Mary-Lou’s returned shock-haired pianist, his gigantic, hairy foam hands waving in front of Mary-Lou before she vengefully severed them from his wrists to release cascades of red cloth, was pure Tristan Tzara. This Dadaist moment provided a suitably melodramatic conclusion to this hot-house comedy of manners.

Artrage, Abductions, coordinator/curator Sam Fox; featuring: Loving the Alien, writer/performer Xavier Michelides, director Adam Mitchell; Patti Pied, writer/performer Vinyl M’shell; Afterwards We’ll Go Away, cast devised, director/designer Zoe Pepper; Difficult Second Novel, writer Tomás Ford, director Claire Boreham; Bakery Theatre, Perth, Feb 3-19

co.loaded: Aqueous

The 2005 Perth Festival premiered the newly reformed dance group co.loaded, led by Margrete Helgeby and Stefan Karlsson. Though established for mature artists along the lines of the Nederlands Dans Theater III, the choreography in Aqueous was sharply classical in its nuances, with no visible accommodation for less virtuosic bodies. Indeed, much of the appeal of the series of pieces comprising Aqueous was the way they collectively showcased the exceptional technique of Karlsson and particularly Helgeby whose clean turns and poses were flavoured with subtle hints of emotional expression.

This somewhat odd collection included Mar, an exaggerated, ballroom dancing style duet from choreographer Jon Burtt in which Karlsson’s hands powerfully manipulated the compliant body of his female partner. Like witnessing a reincarnation of Gene Kelly performing the sexy but nevertheless sexist aesthetics of a Parisian Apache tango, this seemed a bizarre inclusion–though sequins and feminine submission never go out of fashion in ballroom dancing. Natalie Weir’s contemporary ballet Every Moment was less jarring, the restrained ebb and flow of black clad groups of 5, 3, 2 and 1 constructing pleasingly abstract geometric sequences, far removed from Weir’s somewhat melodramatic earlier works.

The most choreographically distinctive work was Paea Leach’s Wan. Being new to Western Australia, I was struck by the way Wan’s visual design and music recalled the pop-influenced staging of other Australian choreographers such as Obarzanek, Stewart and Guerin. However, despite the similarities of a dark, ambiguous tone, an initial glitchie electronica score from Sydney’s Pretty Boy Crossover, and an almost brutal, minimalist visual design of blocks of white light and clearly delimited spaces, Leach’s physical language was distinctive. The resemblance was dramaturgical rather than choreographic. For me, Wan produced an intriguing sense of familiarity and scission.

The haunted air of the space was established by dramaturgical dichotomies. Glitch music depends for its affect on punctums and caesura, on clicks and errors that cut up and contaminate silence. The stage was similarly dissected by light and movement: a wide, open floor deliberately circumscribed by the few squares and shafts of light which the dancers were permitted to enter. This was further enhanced and made concrete by a small raised platform upon which much of the tangled duet was enacted. Leach’s dancers were not constrained by the twisted forms or harsh muscular contractions which characterise the choreography of Obarzanek, Stewart and Guerin. These were nevertheless cramped and cribbed bodies, curling in upon themselves, or reaching up and out only to deflate and hold their position. The limp, half collapsed body was a particularly marked image, its ambivalent energies encapsulating both defeat and striving, summing up the dense minutiae of physical gesture which Leach explored in movement and breath.

Tura Events: Rothko Chapel

US composer Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel provided the musical highlight of the festival. Performed in the foyer adjacent to the Seeking Transcendence exhibition, it was eminently satisfying to see Marc Rothko’s paintings and other pieces immediately after the concert, enhancing the critical and contemplative edge of the event. Nestled about and upon the gallery’s stark, coiling spiral staircase, with fierce, dramatic light pushing up from floor level, the awesomely restrained sound masses produced by the Giovanni Consort Choir and the local Q8 Ensemble were in keeping with the utopian aesthetics of late modernist post-World War II art. The principal of cutting away extrinsic ornamentation to reveal only the underlying, essential, universal structures of sound, light, architecture and visual form united these installed works. The subsequent loss of confidence in neo-Supremacist visions of unifying all peoples, faiths and experiences through the discovery of an irreducible human aesthetic also gave the event a wistful tone. Artists are more likely now to respect and celebrate the particular, a point reinforced by Gaurav Mazumdar’s wonderful sitar recital following the Feldman piece. Though both performances evoked a contemplative response, the extruded, floating psychokinetic affect produced by Rothko Chapel had little in common with the increasingly fast and playful beat patterns or excited absorption in the music elicited by the sitar and tabla improvisation.

Feldman attempted to reflect Rothko’s use of large slabs of colour with a composition characterised by slow, quietly resonating extended notes, chord clusters and gently sustained choral hums into which were integrated lonely repeated notes or instrumental sequences, as well as some solo vocal lines. These slight leading motifs gave the piece its elliptical drama and an endless sense of becoming, rarely reaching a crescendo or building to a full resolution. Rather, there were plateaus and groupings which, like Rothko’s paint, spread across the aural canvas to produce an effect neither epic nor modest. The quietness and lack of forte in the playing further enhanced the impression of a series of soft sound blocks gradually cycling across the work–the opposite of György Ligeti’s almost fervid choral layering and confluences. This requirement for restraint in the execution was masterfully achieved by conductor Iain Grandage and his performers. The closing section featured the piece’s only lengthy rhythmic melody: a simple viola line supported by a glowing vibraphone beat, said by Feldman to have “the sound of the synagogue about it.” This gave the performance a particularly beautiful, emotive conclusion.

Akram Khan: Ma

The jewel of the Perth Festival was Ma by Anglo-Bangladeshi dance artist Akram Khan. Citing his experience as a teenage performer in Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata as a critical influence, Khan has also identified himself with the current generation of Asian diaspora artists who are less concerned with publicly defining their cultural roots and distinctive identity. His use of multiple cultural forms within an ostensibly placeless dramatic space certainly recalled Brook’s ideal of a universal acting method. However, this model is destabilised by Ma’s highly ambiguous meditation on place and identity. Like Melbourne’s Not Yet It’s Difficult performance company, Khan prefers to characterise his process of cultural assimilation as “confusion” rather than fusion.

There was much within the production which suggested that Ma’s aesthetic echoed the familiar model of Indian subcontinental identity as uncomplicated, earth-bound and mythic in its qualities. The dancers performed in earth coloured costumes and much of the choreography drew upon Kathak and yogic forms which placed the body close to the ground. Deep squats and wide leg shifts at low level spun the bodies about as the hands delineated virtual curves across both the stage and the cosmos surrounding the performers. The familiar tones of Indian percussion supported and dramatised much of the early choreography as the performers introduced a particularly ground-based physical metaphor. Bodies rested on their heads, arms outstretched like branches before 2 female performers relating stories about trees. The first of these was of a barren woman who was given seeds by God. The seeds were planted and grew to trees, which God explained were this woman’s children–an image of maternal continuity fixed and sturdily embodied by forms whose roots ran deep in the soil.

Woven among these motifs were complications and discontinuities which eroded the metaphoric ground upon which much of the work was established, interrupting the cultural logic of the piece much as the second female storyteller constantly interrupted her partner. The Hindu mythological dramas of Kathak are traditionally performed to the northern Indian tabla, for example, but here the more hollow sounding southern Indian mridanga was employed, alternating with the soaring vocal lines of Moslem Pakistani Sufism and a variously textural and vocal use of European cello. Glitchie musique concrète from the Ictus Ensemble later replaced these live musicians altogether. The second narrative presented by the dancer who had interrupted her partner was that of the baobab, this tale providing a more comprehensive metaphor for the overall dramaturgy.

The baobab was cited as a tree whose stubby branches suggest it has been ripped from the earth by an angry god and placed upside down, its roots waving in the air. This was precisely the sensibility evoked by the broadly associative scenes and familiar yet displaced cultural motifs. A sense of place was conjured–one of earth and land and spirit–yet it was neither nowhere nor somewhere. It was distinctively Asian and mythic yet abstracted and dissociated, with cultural forms waving loosely like roots in the wind. Between sections of rapid-fire rhythmic foot stamping and tala (the vocalisation of Indian percussive patterns), bodies suddenly slowed, arched like bridges, leant against each other for stability, and then were carried off, supine, their cultural specificity and associations suddenly stripped or arrested, leaving them as bent, abstract, branch-like forms.

Like Pina Bausch’s dancers, Khan’s fellow performers frequently asked the audience if they could tell us a story or a dream–a desire to spill the contents of one’s head like Khan in the childhood story he told of hanging upside down from a branch in Bangladesh. Often, however, this offer was deliberately withheld, leaving one with the impression of cultural identity as an illusory yet unspoken, recurrent dream.

Perth International Arts Festival, 2005: co.loaded, Aqueous, various works, Playhouse, Perth, Feb 19-25; Tura New Music et al, Rothko Chapel, Art Gallery of WA, Perth, Feb 17; Seeking Transcendence, Art Gallery of WA, Feb 13-March 24; Akram Khan Company, Ma, choreographer/director/performer Akram Khan, His Majesty’s Thetare, Perth, Feb 16-19

The Big Con

2001’s Your Dreaming: The Prime Minister’s Cultural Convention brought together the acerbic political wit of Guy Rundle and the latex-laden parody of major Australian figures embodied by Max Gillies. An unofficial sequel (or perhaps series of out-takes), The Big Con is less successful: a buckshot spray of vitriol that only occasionally hits its targets.

Joining the Dreaming team is young artist Eddie Perfect who, it must be said, has matured as a consummate cabaret performer, slipping easily from debonair compere to unobtrusive backing pianist, maintaining an implacable demeanour throughout proceedings. He is the perfect foil to the grotesque hyperbole of Gillies’ satirisation which eschews subtlety in favour of the long-clawed swipe. His characterisation of Alexander Downer as an effete geographical dimwit is hilariously exaggerated; on the downside, his rendition of Amanda Vanstone as a KFC-scoffing glutton lowers political comment to the level of obscene fat jokes.

The layers of irony ultimately undermine the efficacy of The Big Con: Perfect and Gillies repeatedly stab at the notion of chardonnay socialism to an audience digesting the 2 course meal they ate before the show, their wallets more than $80 lighter. To feel a sense of self-satisfaction simply because one buys The Big Issue or attends a play about refugees is, according to Perfect, ‘so September 10’, yet alternatives are not forthcoming. The line between despair and complacency is warily trod here, and the underlying rage propelling Guy Rundle’s script too frequently spirals into labyrinthine self-referentiality.

Perhaps the most poignant, if disturbing note is hit when Perfect exhorts his audience to join in the chorus of his (we hope) parodic far-right anthem against homosexual marriage, and actually gets voices chanting along: “Gay people shouldn’t get married!” The enthusiastic bawl of several attendees had this viewer squirming; when political theatre takes on a South Park ethos (“It’s funny because you’re not allowed to say it!”) then we are in troubled times indeed. As a clamorous broadside directed at the foibles of major Australian rubbery figures, The Big Con aims true; as a spur to political enquiry, it hobbles itself at every turn.

Chika

Mayu Kanamori’s Chika is a beast of a different stripe. Billed as a “documentary performance”, it blends live music, dance, photo and video footage with performed narration to tell the story of Chika Honda, a Japanese tourist jailed for over a decade for the alleged importation of heroin. Kanamori, a documentary photographer, regularly visited Honda during her incarceration and, though her subject was initially reluctant to be photographed, gradually developed a kind of visual diary conveying her experiences. This reticence, it appears, is part of the reason the resulting documentary is largely impressionistic: the projected images of clouds or wire fences suggest the hand of an artist rather than an objective recorder of facts, and Kanamori eventually acknowledges that at some point she moved from documentarian to friend. The record of injustices portrayed thus takes on a personal hue: Kanamori’s plain narration from the front of the stage does not suggest artifice, but neither does it pretend to offer the facts from an impartial standpoint.

Supplementary material on offer in the foyer (a letter from Honda’s pastor and a religious statement from Chika herself) hints at stories untold. What Chika does provide, in the end, is not so much the story of one person’s life gone awry as the story of a sensitive and sophisticated artist’s response to another person’s pain. This is apparent in Kanamori’s decision to invite Butoh artist Yumi Umiumare to perform several interpretive renditions of themes suggested throughout the piece. At the same time, Kanamor’s journalistic kudos is affirmed with police video and television news footage. Tom Fitzgerald’s musical direction and erformance alongside musicians Anne Norman (shakuhachi), Satsuki Odamura (koto) and Toshinori Sakamoto (wadaiko) is an astonishing complement; a concert-level performance that adds immeasurably to the emotive power of this intimate unfolding. Chika is an impassioned plea for justice that speaks well of its creator, and records an otherwise unnoticed travesty of the Australian justice system.

Pugilist Specialist

Red Stitch Actors Theatre has made a name for itself through solid productions emphasising psychological realism and dynamic staging; recent productions have expanded this brief to include less naturalistic works. The decision to stage US playwright Adrian Shapiro’s Pugilist Specialist furthers this expansion, with mixed results. Certainly, the work is a powerful if problematic intervention in the field of contemporary US politics. Four marines prepare to assassinate an unnamed Middle Eastern personality. We witness their training and eventual raid on the victim’s mansion, but action here takes a backseat to dialogue. Shapiro’s polemic against US militarism is fettered by a curiously verbose, almost Beckettian rendering of language which prevents engagement. Characterisation remains static, circling endlessly around the basic conflicts between team members. Certainly the ensemble deserves applause for seeking out new directions; in this instance, though, the limitations of a complex but confounding script are too apparent.

Rainbow’s End

I approached Ilbijerri’s production of Rainbow’s End warily—media materials and other press had focused on the work’s nostalgia. True, its creators include Stolen writer Jane Harrison and director Wesley Enoch (Stolen, Conversations with the Dead, The Sapphires), but the pre-press mentions of the 1950s setting, including the Queen’s visit to Australia, radio’s Pick-A-Box and the Melbourne Olympics, connoted a staid if not conservative view at odds with the stated subject matter. Surely the story of 3 generations of Aboriginal women couldn’t be so retroactive? Thankfully, this wasn’t the case.

Rainbow’s End emanates joy. Its trio of female leads face horrific hardship (rape, dislocation, poverty) but the sense of triumph they generate is well nigh overwhelming. Early in the piece I sensed I was viewing a musical without songs: the characters and situations were painted with broad brushstrokes, emotions were over the top and the pace was rapid. Secondary characters were given less depth: Gareth Ellis’encyclopaedia salesman who falls in love with Tammy Clarkson’s Dolly seems a little too innocent to ring true, and Lionel Austin as Dolly’s attacker is a constant though rarely acknowledged presence at the stage’s periphery (fitting, as he also acts as the assistant stage manager). However, this technique of generalised typing only heightens the effectiveness of particular scenes of acute psychological intimacy; when the 3 women are forcibly moved to a concrete housing block the simple act of searching for change to feed the failing light meter represents a far more pervasive desperation.

Pauline Whyman as the family’s core, Gladys, manages to transcend the script’s generalities to produce a remarkably touching and sophisticated character. Grandmother Nan Dear (Beryl Booth) and daughter Dolly occasionally suggest more superficial characterisations, but once again this is perhaps in keeping with the script and the style of the work. Rainbow’s End is a gently involving piece that merits acclaim for its many creators.

The Big Con, writer Guy Rundle; directors Aubrey Mellor, Denis Moore; performers Max Gillies, Eddie Perfect; The Arts Centre, Melbourne, Feb 23-March 12; The CUB Malthouse, Melbourne, March 13-April 3

Chika, writer Mayu Kanamori; director Malcolm Blaylock; performers Yumi Umiumare, Satsuki Odamura, Anne Norma, Toshinori Sakamoto, Tom Fitzgerald, Mayu Kanamori; The CUB Malthouse, Melbourne, Feb 23-26

Pugilist Specialist, writer Adrian Shapiro; performers Kate Cole, Dion Mills, Richard Cawthorne, Kenneth Ransome; Red Stitch Actors Theatre, Feb 2-March 5

Rainbow’s End, writer Jane Harrison, director Wesley Enoch; performers Beryl Booth, Tammy Clarkson, Gareth Ellis, Pauline Whyman; Sidney Myer Ampitheatre, Melbourne Museum; Feb 21-March 5

A feather falls to the street: a message from a disembodied hand to one of the waiting audience. She is sent up the stairs into West Space, alone, with the fallen invite. At the top, a young man greets her warmly–as if she has arrived at his party at last–and directs her to a room on her right. She opens the door and inside finds those sent before her, waiting in darkness.

And so Strangers and Intimacy begins, with each audience member suddenly engaged in a disarmingly intimate scenario. There in the dimness, among strangers, there is the accidental touch of hands, shared breath, a ripple of anxiety, the joint anticipatory wait for something more.

Strangers and Intimacy is a 3 part exchange project between Australian artists (Alice Hui-Sheng Chang, Brian Fuata, Madeleine Hodge and Sarah Rodigari) and artists from reader, a collaborative performance group with bases in Glasgow and London (Eilidh Macaskill, Robert Walton, Pete Harrison and Lalge Harries). The project began last September, when 8 artists were assigned a pen pal on the other side of the world. Weekly letter writing engaged the artists in a process of exchange that revealed personal locations, contexts and intimacies. After the artists had met and sorted through the materials and ideas came stage 2–the performance in Melbourne. It is a highly innovative excursion into performance in which the audience is strangely part of the act.

In fact, the term ‘audience’ is rendered useless–the work engages everyone so deeply that no-one and everyone is ‘watching.’ We, who were not part of the letter exchange, enter a world in which we develop intimacy; suddenly we are paired with another audience member, dancing slowly, closely, repeating a forced echolalia of “My darling, I love you, I have always loved you. I always will.” We are thrown into a bizarrely intimate situation with a complete stranger: we feel ‘close’ to them, bound perhaps by a mutual sense of discomfort and awkwardness. It’s not real intimacy, but a re-enactment of it.

Then we are seated on the floor of a room where we listen to Madeleine Hodge tell us about dating etiquette. We laugh at her act, engaged momentarily in the traditional audience/actor theatre dynamic. Gently, Alice Chang places her hand on my elbow and whispers “come with me.” I am led to another room to be seated at a table and offered a glass of water. Soon I am joined by Pete Harrison and Sarah Rodigari. Suddenly, the theatre dynamic is broken. I am sitting at a table, sipping water, while 2 of the ‘actors’ discuss a day at the zoo and a lost friend. There, thrown into the act itself, I am suddenly eavesdropper, participant, dinner guest, audience (maybe) or even ghost. I watch and listen to the intimacies of 2 strangers, but the intimacy itself might or might not be real, just as the glass of water might well be a prop.

And so the night unfolds, room to room, activity to activity. Essentially, Strangers and Intimacy strives to conjure the sense of closeness that develops as people reveal themselves to one another. At the same time, in the context of a ‘performance’, the intimacies developed within the hour or so at West Space are in themselves feigned. In a way the piece successfully imitates the real experience of human connection and the development of relationships.

There is no narrative, more a series of moments strung together, each delivering a particular experience to the audience. There is no driving personal drama. Eilidh Macaskill writhes and strips and orders us to declare love to our dance partner, and then all at once we are shifted toward the doorway, where in a disjunctive and unrelated scene we watch Sarah Rodigari and Pete Harrison farewell each other in an hysterical and anxious goodbye. There is no sequence, no storyline and no characterisation. The strength of this work lies in its ability to stimulate a series of emotions in the audience while the actors themselves remain strangely like machines set to elicit our feelings.

The party is over. Again, a hand on my elbow and a jacket thrust to me; “Thank you for coming, I do hope we see you again”, says Alice, staring deep into my eyes. She leans in for a hug, and in this moment of farewell, I am suddenly unsure whether I have really known anyone in the room. With one foot on the landing and one in the theatre, I am hazy with confusion–am I still in the act or is this a real goodbye? “Thank you so much for having me,” I say. “I hope we meet again.”

Strangers and Intimacy, co-ordinator Madeleine Hodge, West Space, Melbourne, Jan 28-Feb 5

In the dark of the Greenaway Art Gallery 4 digital video projections generate Transcriptions, a collaboration between Australian Dance Theatre (ADT) artistic director Garry Stewart, and digital video and installation artist David Evans (see cover image). The projections feature ADT dancers animated as textual forms in a landscape of text. Cars wrapped in words zoom through city streets inscribed with “neither this way nor that” in a metropolis of skyscrapers made up of giant letters which spell out “this” and “way.”

In this virtual landscape the dancers gain superhero powers. A figure reminiscent of the archetypal earth mother Venus of Willendorf is covered in the word “fragile.” She manifests a cape and flies through the city of “this way and that” out into the open plains where the earth is labelled “time” and the sky is “moment.” Here she stands her ground, battling with a giant cartoonish fist wielding slapstick weapons such as a rolling pin, fighting a shape-changing whirlwind of fragmented text that shakes the ground and sprays out random letters.

In Zeros and Ones (Fourth Estate, London, 1997), Sadie Plant discusses the digital space of a computer as being made up of logic or logos (the structured order of language and code) and the nomadic or nomos (the virtual space which is without a fixed state). Transcriptions features both these elements, most obviously embodied in the 2 superheroes fighting it out on an open plane.

Transcriptions plays with dualities of language/body, good/evil, weak/strong by presenting them together on the one plane. The result is “this” and “that” and “neither this nor that” at the same time. The solid earth mother figure is illogically inscribed with “fragile” but in the virtual plane we can all realise our will to power, reaching Nietzsche’s overman status if we want it.

However, the overman, the Superman, is still a product of language, just as “I understand the world through touch” (text from Transcriptions video projection) is still communicated using the laws of language. Does Transcriptions present me with the limitations of what I can be? Are we always acquiescent to language, even on the virtual plane?

Playing with the sci-fi ideal of leaving the body behind and existing on the virtual plane of endless possibilities, Transcriptions presents this as an obscene world in the sense that everything is present and anything is on offer. Somehow this reads as banal. As I watch the videos looping I begin to feel that in an argument in which all sides are equally valid, there is no opposing position to take. Transcriptions is an endless loop; a closed system which successfully places the viewer as Other to itself.

The beauty of the text dancers, in particular a couple writhing on the open plane, resides in the feeling that they are timeless, that they will always be entangling and disentangling, movement for movement’s sake, nothing to be said. The earth mother moves like a doll, legs and arms twisting in their sockets, the only figure representing action. The music track evokes superhero epics, but without passion, as if it is just playing out.

If to transcribe is to copy into another medium, it seems that transcribing our strengths and weaknesses onto the virtual plane has not freed them from the binary demons of Western representation. Rather, Transcriptions appears to revel in this binary representation by taking it to its ultimate form and displaying it in all its gaudy colours. The text characters are figures of odd beauty, but in their obviousness they also seem enclosed, separate, as if we can never feel what it is like to be them.

As I leave the viewing space I notice 4 digital images on the wall just outside. Strangely, the earth mother is no longer “fragile”: now her body somnambulistically proclaims “forget”…

Transcriptions, creators Garry Stewart, David Evans, Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide, Feb 22-March 1

It’s long been a Mardi Gras tradition to program a New York drag performer. Back in the 90s, being more a stalwart of local queer shows like Performance Space’s cLUB bENT, I never made it to the imported divas, who seemed primed for a more exclusively gay male audience. So come 2005, with the more humble and ‘sweet hereafter’ feel of the New Mardi Gras program, I wondered: Who goes to drag now? And does New York still hold sway? Or has everyone moved to Massachussets, where gay marriage is legal and “you should see all the masculine couples walking down the aisle in matching tuxedos, and that’s just the lesbians”–boom boom.

The audience for Varla Jean’s Girl With a Pearl Necklace was primarily middle-aged gay couples, the mood one of familiar camp cabaret, the central theme the search for love. Out here to look for her “very own Peter Allen”, Varla has always “wanted to perform in Austria.” Standing on the small Studio stage, she remarked that the Opera House looked so much bigger from the outside. Relying heavily on New York shtick, she showed home video shot in Provincetown (where she had lobster cunnilingus) and Coney Island (involving obligatory jokes with Nathan’s hotdogs). The sausage theme continued with a yodelling wiener (“the wiener takes it all”). Reworked numbers, such as If We Could Talk to the Genitals (“Are you speaking clitoris? I’d say no shiterous, can’t you?”), were interspersed with shlocky video footage, including an 80s Heart power ballad.

Varla’s persona is a lisping, Southern big boned belle, who reminded me of Marcia Cross (Kimberly of Melrose Place and now Desperate Housewives). Famous over the years for her ‘fat’ drag (she has been compared to Divine) you get the sense that Varla’s alter-ego, Jeffrey Roberson, has lived the experience of being outside the buff gay culture, which is then paralleled in drag through engagements with celebrity diet culture. In her current incarnation, however, Varla is far from frumpy and was resplendent in bright campy frocks, making it clear to Vermeer that pearls are nature’s bling bling. Classically trained, her Crazy in Love medley coupled Beyoncé with Puccini. And a Hello Kitty obsession took her to Japan where she discovered a vending machine selling “beer water.” There wasn’t a single Scarlett Johansson reference, and, rather than Girl With a Pearl Earring, the show became Lost in Translation, as Varla showed footage of herself wandering around the Tokyo subway to cheap cultural effect. The show’s piece de resistance, however, was an act in which she yodeled while tipping her head back and downing the contents of an aerosol can full of cheese (only in America).

It’s funny, yes. A very crafted camp. Loony and tightly-timed. And weirdly virtuosic. Yet grating. It’s ‘bad’ drag, but somehow conventionally so. Nothing deeply queer, or underground, it’s more surface bad taste. Being in the audience felt a bit like going to a cultural zoo to see some exotic endangered species. Is drag now a requiem for a dream?

In a documentary on cross-dressing my partner saw, she told me there was footage of 18th century ‘pansies’ running around in dresses and giving birth to rounds of cheese. The birth theme was there in Varla’s opening number–it seems the drag repertoire has always been pretty set. So why hope for more?

Perhaps context is all important. Once drag is taken out of the drag bar, club act or toured, what happens? Perhaps the most interesting insight for me was how heavily the show relied on the parochial side of New York life, and that in a globalised world this is what travels.

Varla Jean Merman–Girl With a Pearl Necklace, writer Jeffery Roberson with Jaques Lamarre and Michael Schiralli, performer Jeffery Roberson, director Michael Schiralli, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, Feb 19

For its first venture into Sydney, the National Institute of Circus Arts (NICA) is presenting third year students under the direction of renowned Brazilian circus director Rodrigo Matheus in The New Breed. It’s also the first NICA show to feature an international director. Rodrigo has worked with companies and schools in Brazil, the UK and France, and in Australia with Circus Oz and the Flying Fruit Fly Circus.

The performers range in age from 18 to 25, their backgrounds an intriguing catalogue of professional circus, youth circus, archery, Olympic standard gymnastics, street performance, extreme push-biking, dance, music, athletics and kung fu. Along the way careers in computing, cabinet-making, graphic design, professional sport and ballet have been discarded for juggling, slackwire balancing, hoop diving, bowl spinning, flying trapeze, unicycling, poles, bars, handstands, spider bungy, tissu, foot juggling, sky-walking, cloud swing, diabolo and German wheel. Their ambitions include a life in the circus, movie stunt work, creating solo works, forming their own companies and joining Moulin Rouge.

The show’s producer, Jeremy Gaden, describes The New Breed as more physical theatre than circus in format, though rich in circus routines and tackling the problems of communication in an urban setting. The show includes spoken word, choreography for the 19 performers, and a cross-cultural score from Circus Oz musical director Chris Lewis.

Given the Australian penchant for circus and physical theatre and the international success of its practitioners, The New Breed offers a fascinating opportunity to see a new generation nearing their graduation from a relatively new institution uniquely dedicated to the circus arts. The show will tell us as much about NICA as about its young artists. RT

NICA, The New Breed, director Rodrigo Matheus, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, May 4-15

White Australia has a lot to learn from South Africa about reconciliation between its black and white peoples. While black playwrights in Australia create works that pave the way to understanding, their white peers largely write of other things. In my younger years, South African Athol Fugard was an inspiring and courageous writer-director-performer. In the 70s he brought black performers with him to Australia to perform Sizwe Banzi is Dead and The Island; the actors’ presence, their craft and their power were revelatory. Now one of those actors, John Kani, returns to Australia with his own play, an intense domestic drama, Nothing But the Truth, about his murdered activist brother. For Kani, the journey to reconciliation is a long way from over.

As Christopher Breyer has written, “The mere existence of The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1996-2001), much like the peaceful end of apartheid itself, is so miraculous that we tend not so much to overestimate as misapprehend the commission and gloss over its complications, compromises and limitations as well as its true purpose…The TRC in no way attempted a comprehensive portrait of apartheid–its focus was gross human rights violations (murder, attempted murder, torture, assault) committed between 1960 and 1994; it did not explore the structural, endemic oppressions and exploitation of the apartheid system. It did however create an overwhelming public record of the worst horrors of four decades” (Performances Magazine, 2001. SOH press release, Feb 23, 2005).

Kani himself writes, “In 2000 I began to long for my favourite pastime, storytelling. I decided to write a little story as a tribute to my younger brother who was a poet of the struggle against apartheid, and was shot by police in 1985 while reciting one of his poems at the funeral of a 9 year old girl who was killed during the so-called riots…” This telling became a play, Nothing But the Truth, “a story of 2 brothers, of sibling rivalry, of family secrets, of truth and reconciliation , of exile and the perplexities of our freedoms and democracy.”

Nothing But the Truth, won the 2002 Fleur du Cap Award (South Africa) for Best New Indigenous Script, Best Actor and Best Director. It has had sell-out seasons in South Africa and North America. Now it comes to Brisbane and Sydney.

John Kani, Nothing But The Truth, Brisbane Powerhouse, April 14-23; The Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, April- 28 May 21.

Wars of the Roses

The Bell Shakespeare Company has given itself a wonderful birthday present in celebration of its 15 years. The 3 Henry VI plays have been judiciously and joyously compacted into a single work to play across 4 engrossing hours. The economy of the editing is a delight in itself, unleashing an epic sweep and baring the bones of Tudor propaganda but at the same time revealing the young Shakespeare’s ability to brilliantly hone the dramatic moment and to create unexpected emotional complexities amidst the one-dimensional drives of ambition and vengeance that govern these plays. This is a brutal world of opportunism and pragmatism, fatally wrong turns and betrayal, with little or nothing by way of metaphysical compensation: Joan of Arc here is more warrior than saint, appealing to the earth rather than to the heavens. Among the many fine performances Greg Stone shines as the Duke of York, his ambition for himself and his thuggish sons steadily escalating. Finally trapped and thinking the sons dead he lashes out at his captor, the king’s wife, Margaret of Anjou, raging against her as the most unnatural of women. But Stone plays York’s grief at the same pitch; the sense of loss is unbearably palpable and this for a character with whom you’d not expect to empathise. It’s also testimony, at this late stage in the play, to the despair that comes with the appalling accumulation of evils, misjudgments and deaths that blur the moral boundaries in a grubby civil war made more complex by the yoked history of England and France.

The majority of the performers play numerous roles, switching with great ease from soldiers to courtiers (with hilariously appalling Franglish) to rural upstarts, coming together for the battle scenes as well as playing key if short-lived characters throughout. Georgia Adamson as Joan of Arc is brusque and driven with swordplay dexterity straight out of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Christopher Stollery plays the Bishop of Winchester made mad by his complicity in murder, the yokelish rebel Jack Cade and the deceptively bland Buckingham. Joe Manning as Henry VI is suitably ethereal, out of touch, stubborn at the wrong moments and accepting advice only when it’s too late, his withdrawal tantamount to a deathwish, and displaying precious few moments of insightful interiority. Darren Gilshenan as Richard III-to-be, plays out the classic deformities of body and soul with vigour and his own take on the wheedling and insinuating, ever inviting the audience’s complicity. Blazey Best as Margaret of Anjou plays the queen as outrightly sexual and manipulative, leaving not a lot of room to move, but somehow she convinces because Margaret is often irritatingly right, however base her motives, and her loyalty, if erratic, makes her an implacable force.

Wars of the Roses is spendidly paced, full of pertinent jokes and beautifully voiced. The poetry is always musical but never the plummy sing-song that can still be encountered. It’s enhanced by the steep ampitheatre setting by Stephen Curtis in a huge steel curve. It’s a work of art in itself that has us looking into a stage that looks back at us and where characters gather and observe, climb and fall, the whole framed with shipping container walls hinting laterally at SS Tampa and our own crises, just as the images of capture calculatedly suggest Abu Ghraib. Only the costumes seem to lack a conceptual through line, a rag bag of type dressing that fits the play’s broad characterisations but has little thematic weight beyond the suggestion that things are pretty much the same wherever you’re placed historically.

Like the jigs reputedly danced at the end of Elizabethan tragedies, we are entertained here by Richard, fresh from murdering Henry, microphone in hand singing his way to the throne atop a mountain of bodies in anticipation of a play to come with his own name in lights.

Bed

In Brendan Cowell’s new play, developed in the Sydney Theatre Company’s Blueprints program, another kind of Vice figure is on display. He’s Phil, a big city business man-cum-artist-cum-psychopath. Built from short scenes, propelled by an often acid wit and cyclically structured to systematically go back over a life and reveal the making and unmaking of a man at key stages, Bed is certainly engaging, though the initial effect is more powerful than that which lingers. For all its viscerality and frankness, Bed is curiously abstract.

Betrayed by his mother, loved by a fellow school boy, oppressed by his first female lover, Phil is deserted by his beloved wife who cannot compete with his success (even after he’s given up his job to look after their children so she can work). Subsequently dissolute and sadistic, he is served by a homosexual slave whom he incinerates before dying in the arms of an older woman in whose large breasts, he tells her, he finds solace. On a set that’s a cross between bouncy castle and mattress, Phil’s life comprises a series of bedroom encounters that sketch his trajectory, the looping back through his life an interesting structural device which works well enough in the relationships between the 2 boys and then the men, but there’s little if anything that’s revelatory in the soapy scenes with the women. A larger problem is that however well played (and Dan Wylie suggests more than the script proposes) Phil is an abstraction, a generic businessman, an unidentifiable artist, so everything depends on love, sex and power, with art and work as mere ciphers. It’s not a long play, so there’s room for Cowell to expand his vision of his central character, but also to rise above the epigrammatic pulse of too much of the writing, albeit a reflection of Phil’s admiration for Oscar Wilde. Cowell directs his own play ably with Thomas Campbell evoking power and then pathos as Drew who will be murdered, a punishment for all the wrongs visited on a man incapable of turning such force on himself.

The Permanent Way

Just as bookshops are now placing their non-fiction stock at the front of their stores and feature length documentaries are filling cinemas, so too has verbatim theatre made a comeback. Productions include version 1.0’s A Certain Maritime Incident (based on the Senate hearings on the Tampa incident), Ros Horin’s Through the Wire (the relationships formed between refugees and visitors to detention centres; currently touring regional centres where it is much in demand) and, a couple of years ago in Sydney and now in Melbourne, The Laramie Project, about a gay murder in a US community. David Hare’s The Permanent Way (created with actors from the National Theatre, Out of Joint and director Max Stafford-Clark) documents the disastrous consequences of the privatisation of British Rail. The content alone is deeply alarming with not a few parallels with smaller but just as devastating rail crashes in NSW in recent years in a public system. Although clearly opposed to the way the railways are operated, the play throws you into the complexities of what happened to the people involved (from management and politicians to victims), the contrasting responses between the survivors and the families of the dead in the campaign for justice, and why the British continue to let such things happen. The latter is the big question which the show begins with but never really answers except rather facilely at the end when one of the characters suggests, “In England we’ve never been very good at the communal thing.” The play asks why the public is not really upset by such disasters, nor by 3,500 dead on the roads each year. Why aren’t they furious that the privatised railways draw more heavily on the public purse than when they were public? Why isn’t there a legal category titled ‘corporate manslaughter’ given cutbacks in training, appallingly poor safety records and cover-ups with government and police complicity? The answer is partly evident in the range of responses to the train crashes: here is a public that is divided, confused and misled, while the government and management can form a united front, and an executive, for example, move on from an awkward position post-accident to a much better one without recrimination.

The Permanent Way is presented conventionally with deft multiple role-playing, and tautly edited material wisely and compellingly run without an interval. The literalness of the playing, the banality of some of the miming (recalling the old theatre-in-education days) and occasional overacting didn’t detract from the work’s raw documentary power. The much touted multimedia effects were less impressive: some nice opening animations of old rail travel posters, a poorly projected automated train timetable signalling the crashes, and a big one-off special, for the second accident, of an animated train racing towards us and flying off the rails, accompanied by a grating, noisome crash. Although the latter effect was impressive it is typical of the failure in the mainstream performing arts to make anything of multimedia other than background or momentary diversion, and one from which the performers are tastefully removed. Otherwise, The Permanent Way was rewarding, and, for those who wondered why we’d want to see a play about British railway accidents, it’s not so far removed from our own experiences of life under neo-liberalism with its attendant feelings of civic helplessness.

Constellations

I just managed to catch the last night of PACT’s contribution to the New Mardi Gras Festival, Constellations, an exquisite gem of a performance sparkling with perspectives on queer life on the cusp of late adolescence and early adulthood presented as monologues and small encounters framed by the night time anxieties and reveries of a wonderfully poetic insomniac. This is a show about getting through the night or life’s dark passages and emerging intact and even triumphant. That might be pride in being a male Palestinian belly-dancer and finding the like-minded; or discovering that the bicycle used for escape has become a tool for championship racing; or looking back into one’s Aboriginal or Asian heritage as a way of moving forward. Finely crafted video images (Sean Bacon) and audiotracks (Gail Priest) lent the words greater resonance and coherence, while director Karen Therese choreographed the movement between individual and group, between still image and action (sometimes as simple as gathering before the glare of a television set or circling the stage on bicycles), between light and dark with effective simplicity. The performances were physically assured and vocally firm, the writing often admirable, and the overall mood satisfyingly reflective.

Bell Shakespeare Company, Wars of the Roses, director John Bell, Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, March 5-April 16; www.bellshakespeare.com.au

Sydney Theatre Company, Bed, writer-director Brendan Cowell, performers Dan Wylie, Sam leis, Hayley McElhinney, Caroline Craig, Thomas Campbell, Annie Byron; design Genevieve Dugard, lighting Damien Cooper, composer Nick Arnold; Blueprints, Wharf 2, from Feb 12

Sydney Theatre Company: Out of Joint/National Theatre, The Permanent Way, writer David Hare, director Max Stafford-Clark, set, costume and video design William Dudley; Sydney Theatre, from Feb 19

PACT Youth Theatre, Constellations, direction Karen Therese, dramaturgy Chris Murphy, performers/writers Alexis Armytage, Kath Bicknell, Ghassan Kassisieh, Sarah Jane Norman, Tatea Reilly; PACT, New Mardi Gras Festival, Feb 23-March 6

In the last 7 years the Australian experimental music/sound scene has undergone a huge explosion in production, promotion and audience interest. Sydney alone is host to 2 large experimental music festivals: What is Music?, the longest running and most influential at 10 years; and 4 year old The Now now. In addition Sydney also holds a number of regular events and by late 2004 there were 5 such nights: impermanent.audio, if you like experimental music we like you, Disorientation, 1/4 Inch, Sound No Sound plus the long running Frigid (also 10 years old) which occasionally features experimental music.

Not long ago there were a few irregular evenings and one-offs that attracted large crowds of people mostly interested in catching up with each other. The experimental music scene was focused on one yearly event, What is Music?. Directed by Oren Ambarchi and Robbie Avenaim, it brought together the local and national community, providing the only major outlet for performance. In addition the festival brought a few international (often Noise-based) musicians who provided a reference point, introducing new ideas but, perhaps more importantly, proving that the local scene was as good as anything happening abroad. The importance of this festival in the past cannot be overstated–it simply generated an entire scene.

This scene is now at a turning point. Events, performers and audiences have been established but due to their experimental nature, the events are always going to form at the edges of music, performance and art and as such the audience by its very nature is small. Without funding support it is impossible to pay musicians and organisers. How far can this funding stretch to allow new festivals and regular events to enter the fray?

To their credit the funding bodies do support some of these endeavours. What is Music? is a key organisation with the Australia Council and has been funded by Arts Victoria and the NSW Ministry for the Arts. Over the years it has expanded to become a travelling festival, touring to Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. It also has support from a number of venues including The Brisbane Powerhouse in 2004-2005. However in 2005 What is Music? was unable to raise the requisite funding, a situation that required a major rethink of the festival.

The Now now 2005 run by Clare Cooper and Clayton Thomas was also affected by lack of funding support. Three successful festivals had previously been staged on a shoestring in Space3 and Lan Franchi’s, though neither venue suited the music. For the fourth festival no funding was received, a short-sighted decision given the event’s strong history of success.

Two very different strategies were taken up by these events to cope with this situation. The Now now found an extremely supportive venue, @Newtown, a location accessible to a major part of the event’s audience, and attempted to sell enough tickets to make the venture possible. They did this by producing an almost 100 percent local, Australian music festival. The audiences included the usual suspects but most excitingly a new group of curious patrons, perhaps attracted by the ‘above ground’ nature of the venue with its comfy chairs and air con. What provided the most excitement for the future of the scene was the willingness of this audience to try something new–4 nights of Australian experimental music with no ‘big names’, simply the promotion and celebration of Australian improvised musics. The Now now has taken over from What is Music? as the focus of the experimental music year in Sydney, from the point of view of both musicians and audience.

What is Music? made some drastic decisions in the face of its funding problems, albeit in drastic circumstances. The producers sought industry support from outside the experimental music scene through The Big Day Out promoters, resulting in the ONATHON. While this appeared to be part of the festival, the event was run separately and was not produced by What is Music?. On paper this seemed exciting–a mega experimental music festival with the possibility of stacks of locals and high profile internationals. However, it was not What is Music? but a privately funded event that was costed out of the market at $80 a ticket. The producers of What is Music? were distanced from their own festival, a loss of control that was felt in the scene. In Sydney What is Music? staged only 2 nights of music, more of a mini-festival. The biggest problem for the event was that exactly the same acts, bar 3 local performances, had featured the previous night at the ONATHON. There was little reason for most to attend both events, but those who did venture to the Gaelic Club witnessed a much better listening environment.

The first show was more akin to a metal theme night than a new music festival. It started out with the fantastic local trio of Peter Blamey, Jim Denley and James Heighway, a first-time outing combining 2 mixing desk performers with Denley’s wind improvisation. This was a gratifying performance filled with texture and focus. The drone metal of Reverend Kriss Hades followed. The size of the sound and the virtuosity of his guitar playing was exciting providing an intelligent juxtaposition of metal and experimental music. However with Sunn O))) (USA) also on the same program we heard 2 performances that were similar, and a DJ playing more metal.

The Dead C (NZ) is a band I hadn’t seen for 12 years and I was way too excited to be objective. They lived up to all hopes showing what the combination of Flying Nun style pop and Sonic Youth guitar noise could produce. There were no surprises here, simply a band that has been playing brilliant noise-pop for 18 years. The night ended with Sunn O)))–loud beyond belief with a row of Marshall guitar amps, 4 musicians playing electronics and 2 guitarists. The performance included electronic drone, massively slow strum guitar and monks’ hoods. The combination of subterranean metal and experimental drone was bliss: my ears will never forgive me.

The second night was more what we’d expect of What is Music?, but the environment could not support the focused listening required. Brendan Walls played a set of resonant cymbal feedback, a slow drone, which I found extremely difficult to listen to in the rock environment. Black Dice (USA), looking like cool American indie kids singing along to noise (though the singing was itself noise), performed a set which was either brilliant or kinda terrible. I still can’t decide. The night ended with a virtuosic display of minimal dance meets noise in the duo Pan Sonic (Finland). The simplicity of their oscillator projection and the stripped back rhythmic noise was sublime.

The Now now and What is Music? have been forced to take creative steps to solve the problem of under-funding. What is Music? has turned to the private sector, but in doing so duplicated its program, pushed up ticket costs (for ONATHON), diminished its support for local and emerging musicians and alienated its audience. The Now now on the other hand has turned to what it knows, calling on local musicians to support a festival that is fully behind their practice. The outcome of The Now now approach was a large audience, an exciting vibe and a community feel. That musicians were not paid is an unsustainable outcome, but hopefully this year’s success will encourage the funding bodies to recognise that the scene is large, vibrant and highly creative, and that it needs and deserves support. If festivals such as What is Music? are to be maintained at the standard they themselves have set then arts funding bodies need to wake up to what is actually happening in contemporary practice and come to the party.

After spending more than a decade as a viola player at the top of his profession–in the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and as a soloist and chamber musician–Brett Dean started composing. He began with forays into Berlin’s improvisation scene, substituting a leather jacket for his orchestral tux and “slamming the crap out of the viola.” Since then his ascendancy in the world of composition has been meteoric, sparking interest and commissions from the Melbourne, Sydney and BBC Symphony Orchestras, the Los Angeles and Berlin Philharmonics, the Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Australian Chamber Orchestra. He is currently writing an opera based on Peter Carey’s novel Bliss for Opera Australia. I spoke with him during his recent visit to Sydney in which he curated the chamber music program for the Sydney Festival.

What might your initial idea for a piece be? Is it sometimes a texture or sometimes a motivic idea?

Mmmm. Definitely with 12 Angry Men [for 12 cellos, inspired by the American stage play and film] I had the title long before the piece was written. The Berlin Philharmonic cellists thought it was about them when I first gave them the piece.

Your program notes seem to focus on the inspiration behind the works, such as works in other artforms and contemporary events, but a lot of your titles don’t directly refer to those inspirations. If someone doesn’t read the notes, what do you hope their experience of the piece is?

I must say as far as writing program notes about a piece or talking about a piece, one thing I really couldn’t stand in Germany was this heightened sense of having to go into what a composer is doing technically in a particular piece. It’s so boring. Go and put your underwear back in the drawer, we don’t need to see it. If you’re writing about it for a musicological journal that’s different. I find that it’s led to a kind of over-intellectualisation of music. Which isn’t to say that those techniques aren’t valued and aren’t worthy–and I’m using a lot of the same techniques myself–I just think that’s got nothing to do with what a listener needs to know about a piece.

The listener may not need to know the story behind the emotional side of the piece either. And for that reason I’m always hopeful that, although most of the pieces have some sort of a story behind them, ideally that’s just for me to know how to shape the piece. It’s very useful to have when you’re in the process of writing. But I’m always fairly confident that the pieces can stand on their own, that hopefully they’re musically interesting enough just to follow and see how the ideas unfold.

Vernaculars and syntheses

Do you feel that process is possible because although you’re using an expressive language which is certainly unique, some of its elements come from musical language that’s more widely known?

A vernacular? Well to some greater or lesser extent everyone feeds at the same trough, human experience as seen through sound or as heard through sound. And that can also be something you might hear at the What is Music? festival–on one level you might think that’s as removed from that vernacular as it’s possible to be and perhaps also consciously endeavouring to make a new vernacular. But I think also its strongest moments are when there’s a synthesis of something forging ahead in a completely new direction that’s still making somehow the remotest wink or nod at some kind of formal structure or something from the past. That, I find fascinating. And I would argue that it’s not even possible to completely remove oneself from what sound has been before. Even the sound world of the most avant-garde sound exploration is also bound up in some sort of pre-existing language. Which isn’t to say that it’s not a desirable thing to forge ahead and find something entirely new, I’m trying to do that myself in some way or other too. But I think there’s just this common thing in the way humans respond to all sound, some sort of accumulated reservoir of sonic experience.

I’m quite fascinated actually in the whole soundtrack-soundscape thing, which isn’t to particularly forge a new direction. However, I do find that the combination of that with an orchestral ensemble is something that no one else I know of is doing in quite the same way as in [my orchestral piece] Moments of Bliss, for example. So I find there’s a new avenue I’m wanting to explore there.

So I’m as interested as the avant-gardists to find something new, it’s just that I have come from a much more conservative musical background and upbringing. I played in the Philharmonic in Berlin, you can’t get more conservative than that! There were things about that that were incredibly frustrating and that was probably what made me turn into a composer. I just couldn’t stand some of the conservatism. And I got bored playing in the Philharmonic to some extent. I was getting to a point where I thought, “Mahler 9 today, ho hum.” But that piece of music is too magnificent to get to that point.

Having lived with a visual artist I guess there was always this niggling desire to do something creative myself. I felt that it was all very well to play the viola in the Philharmonic but that couldn’t be it, could it? On the other hand there were parts of it that I loved and acknowledged because they were honouring a wonderful artform. If people don’t give their life to it, it would die, and that would be a tragedy. So I find that there are wonderful ways of reconciling all of these worlds.

A figurative expressionism

How would you describe your aesthetic? What do you want your music to do in the world?

Look, I want it to touch people. I think that musically and compositionally there’s hopefully enough interesting things going on for the pieces to be worthwhile from the musicological point of view. But I’d rather they be worthwhile from an emotional point of view, simply because that’s always been my way of taking on music myself. I’ve always found it a particularly beautiful career to be involved in, a beautiful profession. And playing in the orchestra was a very emotional thing, it was very cathartic to be in that kind of sound and really dig in. That real hands-on gutsiness of playing in an orchestra like that was incredibly emotional and I guess that went over into how I’ve written music.

My wife Heather talks of her work as being a particular type of figurative expressionism and I think that that also relates to my music. It is figurative in that you can recognise figures in it, you can recognise motives in the way that if you’re looking at an artwork of figurative expressionism you’ll be able to see what the story is that’s being told. It might require the viewer/listener’s imagination but it’s not entirely abstract. It’s got its moments of sonic onslaught and can sound quite ‘new’ at times, but basically it still has an acknowledgement of the whole musical tradition behind it. I think I’d most like it to somehow touch a nerve somewhere.

ACO interludes

Can you tell me about the piece commissioned by ABN AMRO that you're writing for the Australian Chamber Orchestra to be premiered in July?

It’s for an ACO tour with the flautist Emmanuel Pahud playing an array of 6 Vivaldi concerti which will then be recorded. In each concert 4 of the 6 will be performed. They wanted some little, spicy sorbets to be played in between, so I was asked to write interludes. It’s a good challenge because most of my music so far has been in fairly major statements with movements at least 10 minutes long. I’m intrigued by the idea of limiting myself to one musical idea per piece. Each interlude will explore only one sonority.

In my works I sometimes revisit things from previous pieces that I would like to extend. In the string quartet Eclipse, for instance, there is a particular sonority of very high arpeggiated pizzicato chords that I could revisit in a string orchestra setting. The ACO was keen to be able to perform the interludes as a freestanding piece on other occasions, so this is my first purely string orchestra piece.

Brett Dean, Three Interludes (world premiere), Breath Taking Vivaldi, Australian Chamber Orchestra, July 2-13, www.aco.com.au

Jodi Rose is a self-proclaimed nomad, travelling the world in pursuit of undiscovered songs. But unlike a traditional ethnomusiclogist Rose is not looking to capture the voices of people but rather of bridges. What started as a “throw away idea” in 1994 has developed over the last decade into what can only be described as an obsession. However, rather than narrowing the scope of her artistic investigations, her fetish serves as a springboard for a multitude of ideas and future projects.

Rose’s epic journey began on a bus on the way to art school, watching the construction of the Anzac Bridge spanning the city to Glebe. Her lecturer at the time, sound artist Nigel Helyer, set the project of imagining the ultimate public artwork, unconstrained by practicalities of money or technical feasibility. Rose says that at the time, “Joyce Hinterding was tuning us in to listening to sounds in space, and I looked up at the bridge and thought ‘I wonder what those cables sound like? I can make a global bridge symphony of cables around the world’.” While telecommunications are only now developing to where this might be affordable and possible, Rose acted upon the initial idea and approached the construction company as well as Ros Cheney, then head of ABC’s The Listening Room, in order to make the first recording. The project took on a momentum of its own. The recording was broadcast by the ABC, a 4-track mix by Rose (the opening track on the CD) was included in Alessio Cavallaro’s Sounds In Space Audioteque at the MCA in 1995 and Douglas Khan then included the work on the Leonardo Music Journal Vol 6 CD in 1996. In 2000 Rose enrolled in a Masters degree in the Media Department of Melbourne University and decided to put all her effort and resources into realising the global idea. By 2002 she had gathered her own funds to embark on a bridge odyssey.

“I was away for 7 months. I made an itinerary of particular bridges I wanted to go to for various reasons and cruised around and recorded them, with varying degrees of success. The one in Vietnam was stressful because it was the first one I’d done and I couldn’t get any sound from the vibrations of the cables, so I just banged on them to get that metallic bell sound… [But] Joyce Hinterding gave me fantastic advice when I started, she said ‘Jodi, it doesn’t matter what the sounds are like–the fact that the sound is there is what it is’.”

Rose’s recent CD release Singing Bridges offers the results of this adventure. A double set, the first CD Vibrations is mostly unadorned field recordings. Compiled in chronological order it offers a strong sense of the journey itself from the Anzac Bridge recording in 1994 to bridges in Vietnam, Holland, Finland, Germany, UK, USA, Spain, Geelong, Tasmania and back to Finland by the end of 2004. While on the surface the sonic palette of most of the bridges offers a booming, clanking similarity, several of the recordings stand out as significantly different. The Brooklyn Bridge piece presents sonorities that are deep and ponderous–a world weary under-rumble with metallic shivers and rolling rattles–concluding with an evocative siren in the distance. In contrast the Golden Gate sample is full of fast, high pitched zaps and snaps with a natural flange effect conjuring the sci-fi sonicscape of William Gibson’s bridge colonies from Virtual Light and All Tomorrow’s Parties. The MacIntyre Bridge in Geelong has tuned cables that can be played like a crossbred harp and gamelan, and the recording of the Heureka Silta bridge in Tikkurila Vantaa (Finland) provides a minimalist electronic static reminiscent of the finest no-input mixing.

Rose’s process is mostly one of selection and editing with little intervention, effects or overlays. The exceptions are the original Anzac Bridge piece that was manipulated on 4-track tape and included some reverb, and the F6 Coalmining Bridge in Germany–not a suspension cable bridge like all the others–in which she uses small loops to create a post-human industrial scape.

Through her extensive travels Rose has also developed a significant international network which she draws upon for the second CD Variations. Artists such as Fransico Lopez (Spain), Ed Osborn (US/Germany), Gintas K (Lithuania), Melbourne artists Steve Law and Jacques Soddell and others, all have a crack at making music out of the rich source material with some very satisfying results.

Rose sees the CD as the culmination of the research phase of her obsession. In that time she also undertook the ABC-Australia Council Listening Room residency, making 2 works. The first was a radiophonic piece concentrating on the lives and stories of people in, on and around bridges; the second a series of improvised instrumental pieces with Trevor Brown, Ion Pearce and Ben Fink based on visual scores comprising drawings of the bridges themselves melded with technical diagrams of electronics. Another manifestation of the material was included in Ros Bandts’ Hearing Place, part of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology in which Rose crafted small model bridges to accompany some of her audio pieces.

As ideas for future phases just keep on coming, it’s clear that Jodi Rose has found herself an ouevre. She has been invited to work with a Swedish engineer to record the cables on a bridge in Bangkok while they are being tensioned. She is also in conversation with Denzil Caberrera and Michael Bates from the Acoustic Research Lab at Sydney University Architecture Faculty to investigate different recording techniques such as industrial vibration monitoring equipment in order to pick up the lower frequencies that her current piezo contact mikes are not registering. And of course there is the global bridge symphony that she is still keen to realise.

At the time of this interview, Jodi Rose was packing to head off to Finland to start preparations for a trial performance of a live streamed performance mixing several bridges in Finland. She is also going to run Particle Wave (with Sophea Learner, a fellow Australian now based in Helsinki), a program of workshops and discussions on experimental radio practice which will be part of Pixel Ache in April 2005. It appears that the nomadic life certainly agrees with Jodi Rose and her practice.

Jodi Rose, Singing Bridges–Vibrations/Variations, Sonic Artstar, 2005, SAS001, www.singingbridges.net

The 19th century interior of The Apothecary 1878 wine bar–dark red walls, chandeliers, mirrors, innumerable drawers with arcane inscriptions–contrasted sharply with the resolutely minimalist work presented in Project 2. Composer and concert promoter Michael Yuen assembled performances and installations by Adelaide artists whose work is little known outside the city. To these he added works by Lawrence English and venerable members of the avant garde, Gyorgy Ligeti and Steve Reich.

Entering the cellar of The Apothecary required an adjustment from the bright lights and noise of Hindley Street to near darkness and low level sound. Michael Yuen’s sound and light projects a cone of light that also functions as a movement detector. Once inside the cone, the viewer can influence the sounds that emerge from piezo speakers on a glass table top. This is a continuation of work with specially mounted piezo speakers that Yuen has been doing for several years. As is often the case with works of this kind, one must question the purpose or significance of the interactive elements. It is not an act of communication, unless with an alien, machine intelligence, but it is unlikely that even the most ardent proponents of artificial intelligence would push the boundaries of metaphor so far at the present level of technological development. The most successful interactive installations involve an element of play, with a concomitant possibility of gain (however broadly defined) once the rules are understood.

It is precisely the playing of a game that lies at the heart of CONflict, a collaboration between composer Luke Harrald and artist Hugh McLean. Eight software agents adopt various strategies of cooperation, defection and betrayal within the context of the Prisoners’ Dilemma, one of the text book cases of game theory. Realised in real time using a program created in Max by Harrald, the agents control sound and visual output. The visuals (created by McLean) have a blurred, lo-fi quality that makes them akin to peripheral or hypnagogic vision (Stan Brakhage said the best movie show in town can be seen when you shut your eyes). The images were projected onto ornate mirrors covered with material, precisely filling them and illuminating the intricate frames. The slowly evolving, richly coloured, abstract visuals were accompanied by monochrome sound developing through unpredictable harmonic fields. Although both were controlled by the same process there was no mickey-mousing of sound and image. The Prisoners’ Dilemma can be used to explore social dynamics in highly volatile situations, but the result here was meditative, a glass bead game rather than Aussie Rules. CONflict was presented as a performance (the agents being the performers), but it hovers on the boundary between performance and installation.

In the darkest corner of The Apothecary’s cellar was projections, an installation by Tom Szucs. Lights glow between bottles of vintage wine, a plastic tube hovers in mid-air while sounds emerge from an unseen source. The result is enigmatic but engaging. Upstairs in a room with tea chests was Ghost Towns, an audio-visual environment by Lawrence English. Iconic images of the outback–flat, parched landscapes, abandoned farm buildings, windmills–are accompanied by sounds that originate within the pictured environment. The common enough outback sight of a ruined piano, explored extensively by Western Australian composer Ross Bolleter, appears in the video and provides some of the most interesting sonic material. Once providing a tenuous link between the pioneers and European culture, ruined pianos have become symbols of rural decay, not quite mute witnesses to the transience of culture and its technology.

Gyorgy Ligeti’s Poeme Symphonique was created for 100 clockwork metronomes, mechanical rhythmic devices that have tortured generations of music students. The choice of this useful but reviled mechanism is evidence of Ligeti’s musical wit. Closely related to Steve Reich’s Pendulum Music and other classics of early minimalism, the elegance of the concept lies in its easily grasped illustration of a fundamental technique of musical minimalism: phase relationships. The very unpredictability of the metronome (some of which are completely crazy, according to Erik Satie) leads to chaotic polyrhythms of great complexity. For this performance 10 actual metronomes were used, the rest being realised through software modelling.

Ligeti led naturally into Steve Reich’s New York Counterpoint, played by clarinettist Stephanie Wake-Dyster. The multi-track accompaniment was realised by Wake-Dyster and Tom Szucs, and for once actually sounded like an ensemble of clarinets, from baritone upwards. The live clarinet part was played with complete assurance and the performance had an infectious jazziness.

In the dusty heat of Horsham strange things were happening to the showgrounds. Two oversized silhouettes of bright yellow dogs sniffing each other were fixed to the historic gates, the skeleton of an enormous eel trap was being constructed by the river, and the finishing touches were being added to a sculpted stone fire pit. The Meeting Place 2004 Regional Arts Australia conference was about to begin.

As Artistic Director of the “part festival, part conference”, performer Donna Jackson lent her signature style to the event: great art and ideas minus the waffle. The focus on frank discussion of meaningful issues carried throughout the conference, as management tried to steer away from topics that had been done to death and to concentrate on questions relevant to the artistic program and, more importantly, today’s regional arts environment.

Keynote presentations included The Great Koala Debate, a satiric discussion of the merits of the Giant Koala on the Western Highway; the Ladies Committee Address by comedian Tracy Harvey, which looked at the role of the Ladies’ Pavilion in Australian show culture; and a presentation by Rick Farley on leadership in regional Australia. Meanwhile, the majority of the debates and discussions were held in the numerous participatory Showdown sessions, where invited guests, including artists, academics and arts managers, discussed a range of topics with the delegates.

While the majority of the conference looked at issues involving the broader arts community, there was a particular focus on regional arts. The large artistic program of Meeting Place was testament to the fact that great art is being made outside Australia’s cities. A large proportion of the work came from the vibrant community in Horsham and nearby Natimuk.

Space and Place, a hybrid performance work featured interactive animation, music, aerial dance and shadow play on the 27m high Natimuk silos, attracting an audience of 2,500 to a town of 480 people. The work was directed by Jillian Pearce and performed by physical theatre company Y Space, with animations and still projections by Dave Jones, puppetry and shadow play by young people from Natimuk led by local artist Mary French, choral music and sound by Warburton artist Santha Press and the Wallup Mara Indigenous dance group directed by Farren Branson. Another striking work on the program, Fire Dog–Smoke Lizard combined sculpture, neon, fireworks and sound on the Wimmera River and its banks. It was created by visual designer and artistic director Catherine Larkins with pyrotechnics by Philip and Rachael Aitken, sound design by Vincent Lamberti, art fabrication by Delta Neon, neons by Dean Phillips and pontoon design and construction by Glen Critchley.

Working the resources

Methods and strategies to support the development of regional arts were examined in a number of sessions. One suggestion was greater utilisation of existing community resources, such as Horsham’s showgrounds. While unconventional, the venue was ideal for a regional arts event, combining history, character and the beautiful, natural surroundings of the Wimmera River.

The role academic institutions play in the survival of regional arts was also discussed. Professor Peter Matthews of Ballarat University argued that art schools have a responsibility not only to their students but also to provide experiences for the community, and to advocate on behalf of the arts. Gippsland-based artist Catherine Larkins explained how the establishment of the Gippsland School of Art in the 1970s allowed “a network of artists to be created that otherwise may never have met, exhibiting works that may never have been seen.” In the current climate of extreme funding shortages in Australia’s educational institutions, arts resources which once enhanced and enlivened communities may soon disappear entirely.

Rick Farley’s inspiring address drew on his experience coordinating major projects in regional areas, such as the development of Landcare and the Cape York Land Use Agreement. His contention is that without extensive consultation and research there can be no ownership of the outcomes of a project, leaving the parties involved disenfranchised and unsatisfied. This scenario can easily be transferred to any arts or cultural project involving government, business, community or Indigenous groups where a consensus must be reached between stakeholders.

Whose art?

One of the challenges of Meeting Place was the definition of art? Who can make it, and who is it for? The inclusion of wearable ‘hair art’ and a new take on the show tradition of the Ladies’ Pavilion were prime examples of the blurring of the boundaries between art, craft and other creative activities not traditionally viewed as art, such as hairdressing and body piercing. Lisa Eltze’s towering hair sculptures were cunningly created to blend in with the wearer’s natural hair and were worn to stunning effect at the Dinner Dance. The Ladies Pavillion exhibition featured works by local artists and guest artist Yvonne Koolmatrie looking at the ideas surrounding women’s traditional show entries, such as handbags, preserves and quilts.

In a session entitled “Who is art for?” the complex topic of disability and the arts was tackled, particularly by a number of delegates who were simultaneously involved in the Awakenings regional arts and disability festival. When is a performance about an experience for the audience, and when is it for the benefit of the performers? How can the audience know what standard of performance to expect? Back to Back Theatre Artistic Director Bruce Gladwin expressed his frustration at having to prove the professional status of his company which involves artists with disabilities. The company sees itself as part of the community but, at the same time, different in its aims from amateur groups. The argument was intense, and little was resolved in the time allocated.

There was a push towards the notion that anyone can make, and be involved in, art. Singer-songwriter Fay White explained how through involvement in Vocal Nosh sessions of singing and sharing food (http://cmv.customer.netspace.net.au/stuff_vocal_nosh.html), an audience is not so much ‘developed’ as invited in to discover. Following this logic, if more people had the opportunity to be engaged in significant arts activities, the notion of audience development would become redundant. Taken a step further, this idea suggests that audience development resources should be redirected from publicity campaigns and instead target specially conceived, participation-based arts projects.

The issue of popular culture in art was raised and passionately debated, down to the very definition of the concept. Next Wave director Marcus Westbury in particular was adamant that there should be no distinction between high and pop culture, but that we should be supporting, sharing and driving the existing culture. It was claimed that the current funding bias towards high culture has its basis in cultural cringe, but may also be due to the fact that capital ‘A’ arts are ‘safe’ and ‘known’, both for funding bodies and audiences. This argument comes down to a fundamental issue around government funding: by favouring certain projects or companies, some censorship inevitably occurs. “Let’s not prostitute ourselves to bureaucracy”, shouted one delegate. “Funding does not equal culture!” It seemed that a majority of delegates were in favour of broadening the definition of art, taking in elements from the wider world.

Useful art

Another question running through many of the discussions was ‘what is the point of all this art?’–what can it do, and what purpose does it serve? The answers were many and varied. PhD student Kate MacNeill was a proponent of the ‘art can be subversive’ argument, awakening people to new possibilities and changing patterns of thought. According to Di Shaw, the City of Greater Geelong’s Arts and Culture Manager, art was successfully employed to help change the public’s perception of Geelong’s waterfront when the council redeveloped it. A large number of distinctive bollards developed by local artists were installed, changing the image and ambience of the area for both locals and tourists.

Tom Zubrycki explained how his documentary film, Molly and Mobarak (RT 60, p15), used art as a means to understand our culture more fully, even if the consequent insights were disturbing. The film focused on the recent integration of Afghan refugees into rural Australia. Zubrycki highlighted that the humanising aspect of the film made it important in the debate over Australia’s intake and treatment of refugees, enabling asylum seekers to be seen as people rather than just government statistics.

For many delegates it seemed the process of creating art was as, or even more, important than the end result. Community arts practitioners promoted the fact that making art can also facilitate healing, self-understanding, confidence building and celebration, both in individuals and communities. Even back in October 2004, it was recognised that the Community Cultural Development Board of the Australia Council was narrowing its definitions, making funding applications more difficult. Now that the board is to be dismantled, the funding for broad-based community arts projects is likely to become even more fraught.

The concept that art making can be used, alongside other activities, as a means of identifying, maintaining and sharing local culture was generally agreed upon. Yet it appears that it is being underutilised in some regions. The symptoms of this manifest in a number of ways, but as one delegate announced, “If I see one more menu in Australia with focaccias on it, I will vomit!” In terms of cultural tourism, there was a general understanding that each region must find what makes their area unique in terms of arts, food, wine and any number of other elements in order to reflect an authentic cultural experience to locals and visitors, rather than relying on the bland, homogenised fare symbolised by café culture.

Looking at all the functions that art fulfills within our society, it became increasingly obvious that for many people, art and culture are inseparable from other daily activities. Meeting Place was an up-beat event, full of positive energy and motivational ideas underscored by serious exploration of the state of regional arts.

Meeting Place—Regional Arts Australia National Conference 2004, Horsham, Victoria, October 21-24, 2004

Like a visit to a foreign land, You Must Have Been in Strange Places requires adaptation to new concepts in a perilous theoretical topography, an ecology where contrasting narratives co-exist like different species in a re-envisioned Australia.

Andrew Best’s Knox Elements I-III (2005) crowds the space like lantana with a large thick vine curling around the centre pole of the gallery. Hallucinatory objects are reflected in a mirror on which lines of cocaine have been cut, a looking glass wonderland portraying an interior world of the imagination where reason is emptied of any currency. Curator Jeff Khan has cleverly placed this challenge to notions of time and narrative to create the introduction to an exhibition that needs navigation.

Kate McMillan’s Lapses in Judgement (2005) presents disparate sites of turbulent history as the tourist attractions they have become. The images conceal history with an unsettling stillness. Sunlight filters through trees in a video of a peaceful Rottnest Island, the site (the catalogue explains) for a mass Indigenous grave. The concrete bear pits of Switzerland are pictured in a typical snapshot. A tree with sawn-off branches impotently reaches for the sky, whilst the bear remains impassive in its surroundings. Understatement generates emotion without crossing into activism.

Helen Johnson’s mural, Super Natural (2005) diagrammatically deconstructs the history of Australian settlement to reveal how European culture has reconfigured the environment. At its beginning, a girl stands viewing a landscape through the lens of painterly abstraction. At the other end, the landscape is romantically depicted as undeveloped wilderness. Drawn into the mountain peaks are the faces of explorers who made claim to the landscape through hardship and sacrifice but whose utopian yearnings have seen negative consequences.

Bec Dean adds a Freudian dimension to the exhibition. Rebecca (2005), the work and the artist’s namesake, is also the tile of a novel by Daphne DuMaurier, written in 1938, and made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1940. In this work the artist explores how the fabrication and the myth of Rebecca contribute to her own identity. The work is like an echo, evoking more than one narrative.

In the film, an ominous memory of Rebecca haunts the house of Manderley — like a horror film without a ghost. The memory of this legend torments the second wife of Maxim de Winter like a taboo. Instead it remains repressed as an elemental force represented in the treacherous coastline of Manderley and the roaring ocean heard from the house. It is only when secrets are told, that their power disperses.

In the enigmatic work by Dean, a woman (which of the Rebeccas, we do not know) appears in every frame of a series of cinematic light boxes, each a liminal sphere conflating myth and reality, landscape and memory. Surrounded by swampland, in Victorian period dress, she appears like the ghost of our heritage. Preserved photographically, her aura remains to remind us of a secret she keeps. The series of light boxes offers us a kind of 3-dimensionality, so that we may circle her but never get too close.

Her secret is one bound in national identity, underplayed, but emphasized by her presence in the Australian landscape, but far from cliché of the outback. Rather, like those traumas and turbulent histories featured in McMillan’s work, it shows what remains hidden in our national identity. In its gothic character, it refers to mysteries that cannot be solved, nor neatly packaged in museum format, such as The Picnic at Hanging Rock and the disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain. It is also in this unresolved nature that it allows the audience to stake claim to historic narratives, as if they were puzzles to be completed by each of our own answers. Cleverly illustrated and tightly curated, this is the way the exhibition suggests we take claim of our heritage: to map it for ourselves, and alllow alternative narratives to converge with the past.

You Must Have Been in Strange Places, curator Jeff Khan, Getrude Contemporary Arts Spaces, Feb 2-26

The work of Regan Tamanui is refreshing even in the innovative world of contemporary art. I first encountered this Melbourne graffiti and stencil artist last year when he gave a public forum at Hobart’s Art School and had the predominantly youngish audience eating out of his hand. His laid-back, iconoclastic attitude, combined with a dry, laconic wit is echoed in his artmaking which is resolutely anti-big business and against conformity, multinationalism, conservative politics and the police state.

Tamanui has been working in Melbourne’s underground stencil and street art scene for more than 5 years and is arguably the most prolific stencil artist in reputedly largest street art city in the world. Yes, that’s Melbourne and Tamanui and his colleagues have succeeded in raising graffiti and stencil art from low to high culture status. Going by the tag name of HA-HA, Tamanui has ‘graduated’ to formal gallery walls. He also has a liking for exhibiting in disused warehouse spaces.

At the Criterion Gallery, his work consisted of 6 installations or composites of enamel on board, all characterised by the strong colours of the commercial spray can. The signature image for the show was the clichéd logo, ‘I © NY’. In a simple and funny gesture Tamanui slashes out the NY and sprays in the word ‘HOBART’, a play on popular culture and parochialism.

All of the works at Criterion were witty, and most were informed by more serious social and political criticism. Tamanui addresses Aboriginal rights, the David Hicks saga, the ‘Australian Dream’ and notions of Australian citizenship. The Iraq War makes an appearance with stenciled faces of Bush, Blair and Howard (The Meltdown of the Axis of Evil). Then, in the upbeat, large scale work, Identifiable, resembling the pieces of an unfinished jigsaw, Tamanui stencils dozens of iconic faces over a white surface.

Tamanui's work is also notable for the seductively appropriate shape each piece assumes. The David Hicks piece (The Australian Dream) is an angular, stylised Eureka flag, while in The Real Australia the Aboriginal flag appears in a rounded, 1960s daisy-like format (or is it a pool of splattered blood?), with the Aboriginal colours sharp and bright and the words “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie” graffitied across the centre.

Regan Tamanui is a fascinating character and a gifted, self-taught artist dedicated to his artform, producing work that excites and challenges. A newspaper vox pop asks “Is aerosol painting art or just vandalism?” It’s art.

This production is an exchange of surreal and fragmenting stories performed by the improvisation group, The All Audreys. Drawing on collective skills in music, dance, free form improvisation, clowning and visual art, Exchange was devised by these mature performers as a sequence of solos, duos and quartets.

Leigh Tesch, Sally Edith, Helen Swain and Andrea Breen interact across the starkness of the Backspace performance area. They reminisce, observe and comment, sometimes standing or sitting against blank walls that function as a reference point for alienation, fear, and despair. The unembellished space also accentuates the recurring theme of exchange.

The All Audreys’ narrative invokes the 1950s Menzies’ government family of conformity and religiosity. The performers unashamedly refer to the political and cultural stirrings of the 60s that became embedded in 70s theoretical frameworks.

Andrea Breen’s viola bow slices the air like a lure, strongly suggesting the Pied Piper of Hamelin. She beckons and entices children, while her words “Jesus loved little children” offers a discordant play on a text resonant with familiarity.

Exchange provides a panoply of oral and aural histories. The highly interactive imagining, physicality and intermittent craziness creates an interpersonal dynamic informed by aloneness. These stories shift from the personal and spill into the malleable and abstract realm of culture. While Exchange makes this connection apparent, the impact is occasionally lost in glib references to contemporary issues including the Cornelia Rau case, the Asian Tsunami and Dafur.

Lea Tesch’s physical improvisation is uncompromising in its evocation of paranoia, highlighted by television images of faces screaming “ratbags” and “communist.” The All Audreys’ emphasis on this aspect of their collective storytelling re-creates the fears of the 1950s that infiltrated and oppressed many Australian lives. Such scaremongering remains a potent force in John Howard’s Australia, but The All Audreys diffuse the fear of uncertain times by surreally linking families with animals. The question, “are you a dog family or a cow family?” counteracts the impact of sloganistic threats.

Exchange continually hints at the impact on people’s lives when individuals and a society are unable to embrace diversity. Despite some of our more infamous racial policies, no culture can remain mono-cultural.

The All Audreys situate their perceptions of self and the world through a cacophony of stories that inlcude the restraining events in the lives of the performers. Exchange evokes memory as present tense. “Anyone there?” asks Sally Edith. “No I’m not and I never was” comes the response.

The All Audreys, Exchange, performers Leigh Tesch, Sally Edith, Helen Swain, Andrea Breen, Hobart Fringe Festival, Backspace Theatre, February 12-13

Attending the Mobile Journeys forum at Sydney’s Chauvel Cinema in February, it was fascinating to watch the tensions playing out between new media practitioners excited by the aesthetic and financial possibilities of mobile phone art and telco representatives apparently interested solely in company profits. The presentations ran the gamut from market surveys featuring endless figures and pie-charts, to a hyperactive address from Fee Plumley and Ben Jones of the-phone-book Limited (UK) urging us to seize the medium and push aesthetic boundaries: “It’s like the early days of cinema–we’ve got to cross the line to find out when crossing the line isn’t good.”

The forum was part of the FutureScreen Mobile program of masterclasses and forums run by dLux Media Arts between September 2004 and February this year. It’s too early to say what will eventuate in the ground between the commercial and artistic poles represented at Mobile Journeys, but if the ‘MicroMovies’ commissioned for Hutchison’s ‘3’ network shown at the forum are any indication, don’t expect innovative content from our telcos. Short animations like Tightarse Tighthead aren’t exactly exploring a brave new audio-visual frontier.

Mark Pesce of AFTRS’ Digital Media Department argued that telcos will never understand the aesthetic or commercial potential of mobile phones until they start providing content that treats users as social beings first, and consumers second. Pesce’s claim is supported by Anna Davis’ feature report examining global developments in phone art. Installations such as Blinkenlights (Chaos Computer Club, Germany) employ phones as points of interaction in works that directly address a wider community. In other words, they treat phones as network devices rather than delivery points for pre-made content.

Having said that, at least some of the local interest in mobile phones has come from filmmakers desperate for any outlet in a media landscape increasingly bereft of Australian content. My AIDC report details some of the alternative funding models presently being discussed to address the general downward slide in Australian documentary and drama production. But even the mixed public-private structures outlined by the Canadian delegation at AIDC require a governmental commitment to the industry. An essential part of this is content regulation: in another short-sighted move at the end of March the federal government rejected the Australian Broadcasting Authority’s recommendation to introduce local content rules for the 10 documentary channels on Australian pay TV. Locally made documentaries comprise just 4.9% of the content on these channels, with the vast majority of programs repeated from free-to-air. Without regulation, this figure is expected to decline; a familiar story of Australian talent being stymied by the limited vision of our political and corporate leaders.DE

There have been some benefits flowing on from discussions around the proposed restructure of the Australia Council. Consultation took place after being initially off the agenda, new peak organisations have been formed (the National Arts and Culture Alliance, focused on community cultural development, and New Media Arts Australia), current funding structures maintained in the short term, and community cultural development and new media arts are to be the subjects of reviews. It’s a pity that the reviews didn’t predate the restructure given the utter absence of research and consultation evident in the restructure documents and in the Task Force opinions that passed for considered thought. The consultative meetings were valuable, if frustrating in many respects, nevertheless initiating what we all hope will be an ongoing dialogue in which the new peak organizations play a key role. Unprepared for the impact of the restructure and too loosely allied, new media and hybrid artists and producers have learnt much in recent months. The workshop representatives (selected by the Australia Council for 2 meetings) were Lyndal Jones, Mike Stubbs (1st meeting), Caroline Farmer, Sarah Miller, Francesca da Rimini, Rea, David Cranswick, Kim Machan (1st meeting), Julianne Pierce (2nd meeting), Rachael Swain, Daryl Buckley and myself. Task force members included Michael Snelling, Terrey Arcus, Ian McRae and Council CEO Jennifer Bott plus members of staff.

An opportunity lost?

At the consultative meetings, Task Force members iterated their claim that they had acted out of the greatest respect for new media and hybrid artists, that they saw greater opportunities for these practices under the mantle of traditional artform funding categories. These arguments were less than convincing given that Task Force didn’t see these practices as constituting artforms, that they would no longer have their own funding categories, that they would not have a voice on Council and that the quarantining of their funds would have a limited life. So much for respect.

What became clearer was that the Task Force sees the restructure as an opportunity to force onto the other artform boards responsibility for emerging practices resiled from with the establishment of the New Media Arts Board. New media arts it seems is to be sacrificed for the greater good of contemporary art practices.

But just how long will these boards commit to new practices? And with what expertise, what accumulated knowledge of a rapidly changing field of complex practices that have such significance in many aspects of the lives of all Australians? That the Task Force cannot see the value of having a board capable of publicly fronting the engagement of artists with new technological tools, new means of distribution, of audience development and income generation, as well as partnerships extending beyond the arts, is one of the most shocking aspects of the restructure. It is the sign of a great opportunity lost. See the open letters from Brendan Harkin and Dennis Del Favero and other signatories on these pages.

A half-baked restructure

From time to time in the consultative meetings, we were accused of being fixed on a label, new media arts, as validation of our practice. It was also suggested that we were against change. Far from it. A number of us argued that the restructure was half-baked. Why hadn’t the opportunity been seized to review the structure that entails all the artform boards, not just new media arts and CCD? (See the 5th paragraph of Jennifer Bott’s letter.) Did we need artform boards at all? Why wasn’t the struggling Dance Board recognised as a critical example of a small board inadequately funded and better merged with the Theatre Board? Wasn’t there a bigger problem to be addressed, the expenditure on heritage arts at the expense of contemporary arts? Isn’t that the real issue, and right across Council? And, as Daryl Buckley cogently argued, peer assessment by Arts Minister-vetted board members is no way to support contemporary arts practices. As is being proposed for ABC Board appointments, it is time that Council and artform board members be independently nominated and selected, and strictly in terms of their appropriacy. This must be fought for and along with it increased core funding for the artform boards, so that contemporary practices are properly resourced.

Heritage salvation

While we were fighting for the standing and proper resourcing of contemporary arts practices, the Strong report on the state symphony orchestras was released, recommending diminution of player numbers (outside of Sydney and Melbourne), and the Sydney Dance Company announced a deficit of $600,000. Within days, instead of the issues being seriously grappled with by politicians, the media and the public, these organisations were rescued by Prime Minister Howard and Deputy Arts Minister Kemp in the face of backbencher fear of a voter backlash(!). I have sympathy for the state symphony orchestras and the Sydney Dance Company, their collective plights illustrative of the failure of governments to commit to long term planning (how long before like crises emerge again?), but I am horrified at the ease with which the heritage arts are so quickly accommodated.

Peerless future?

One of the major concerns raised at the meetings with the Task Force was how new media and hybrid practices would be adequately assessed in the new structure with its Inter-Arts Office (no longer ‘triaging’ clients to the artform boards, but conducting ‘referrals’) and a limited number of new media expert peers distributed across the artform boards. Where would the collective knowledge and current experience of the field be shared and analysed? One worrying response came from Jennifer Bott who argued that we should regard Australia Council staff members as our peers given their experience and knowledge of the arts. Was this a forecast of even further diminution of peer assessment and the adoption of an Australian Film Commission model, where staff are a part of the decision-making process?

A related matter is the status of the Inter-Arts Office which will all too soon swing into its referring role. The interim CCD division (as part of a reconstituted and retitled Audience & Market Development Division) will be set up under section 17A of the Australia Council charter, allowing Council to appoint members, rather than the Minister. Surely the same should apply to the Inter-Arts Office while it works out exactly how it is going to operate, especially in the matter of peer assessment. Under the proposed model, peers in the Inter-Arts Office assessment meetings will make recommendations for funding, but not final decisions–these will be made by the Director of Arts Development, currently Ben Strout. Strout argued that this signing off was just a technicality and would not interfere with the judgements made by the assessors. Bott argued that other divisions of Council, like Audience & Market Development make funding decisions all the time. But, as Rachael Swain pointed out, those are not grants for the fundamental making of work, they are about its marketing, a very different matter. It would seem a major breach of Council legislature to have a staff member make the final decision on a grant, at whatever remove, however much a mere technicality, without the legality of the action properly addressed or changes to procedure formally instituted. After all, the structures put in place with the establishment of the Australia Council were meant to protect staff from accusations of impropriety of any kind.

What’s in a name?

Briefly, at the end of the second meeting and after an exacting 4 hours of discussion, the issue of relabelling the Visual Arts Board was raised. Various titles like Contemporary Arts Board (too broad), Media Arts Board (confusing) and the Visual Arts Craft & New Media Arts Board (too elaborate) were tabled. I argued that it would be hypocritical of the Task Force to put new media art into a title if they couldn’t recognise it for what it was. But I did ask whether or not the grants booklet would clearly specify new media arts as an area of practice under the visual arts banner–I was assured it would. Until a proper review of new media arts in Australia is conducted (and sooner than late 2005 as planned) and New Media Arts Australia puts a strong case for the return of the New Media Arts Board–or the creation of a cross-industry equivalent outside the Australia Council–we need to closely monitor how the artform boards handle new media and hybrid arts.

The big picture issues of the funding of contemporary art practices, the status of peer assessment, the viability of the current artform board structure, the appropriacy of Board appointments and the precise nature of Council’s role (as it appears to be moving into producer mode), all need our attention.

While noting the Australia Council has ‘done much to acknowledge and nurture new media and hybrid arts’, Keith Gallasch’s editorial (‘Australia Council unplugged’, RealTime, Feb-Mar 2005) implies that the Council’s planned organisational changes will leave this vibrant and growing sector out on a limb. Our intention and our belief is quite the opposite.

Rather than seeing new media and hybrid arts ‘erased or relegated to the small print’, they will be placed on a much stronger financial footing which will, in turn, boost their standing and influence in the arts sector. We have stated categorically that not one cent less will be spent on new media and hybrid arts under the new model, which we have designed to enhance funding opportunities.

Keith raises the issue of ‘loss of status’ by dissolving the NMAB. I would make two points here: that the status of any group depends on the art they create, not on the taxpayer organisations that fund them; and the (harsh) reality is that artists–including those in new media and hybrid arts-need money to keep going. As I said at the Paddington RSL, Sydney meeting on January 24, there has been a significant reduction in value of grants over recent years, a fact not lost on applicants, successful or otherwise. In the name of ‘status’, are we to sustain a system and structure that will diminish their funding?

It’s important to note that the planned organisational changes to the Council are not solely about new media and hybrid arts. We support artists and arts organisations working across the spectrum, and the challenge has been to shape a new organisation that meets a complex range of needs, many of them increasingly interconnected ‘out there’ but still ‘siloed’ operationally under the existing Council model.

New media is an integral and rapidly growing expression of contemporary arts practice. The underlying need is to move away from a 30-year-old, rigid model of grants and services towards one that generates ideas and partnerships. Our role needs to be increasingly about building bridges between various arts sectors, with wider society, business, government and other statutory authorities at all levels. Nobody has suggested this would be easy, but if we don’t address the issues now, the problems will multiply.

Since Keith’s editorial appeared, the Council has conducted numerous forums and workshops on the reorganisation, with robust debate, and we have employed substantial input from all arts sectors in refining the new operational models. As a direct result of these discussions, the Council intends to:

• -support a new media practice conference in September, in association with RMIT and the Australian Film Commission

• -conduct a scoping study of new media/hybrid art following the September conference, with terms of reference agreed by a reference group of new media arts leaders and Council staff

• -offer the normal closing dates for new media art on 1 November 2005 (New Work, New Work (R&D) and Residencies). This is to help the field with the transition to the new structure, and will be assessed in the same way as proposed for the 1 May 2005 closing date.

The Council has applied itself rigorously to what was always going to be a difficult task, and has outlined what it regards as the best model for supporting new media and hybrid arts. After the Council considers that model at its meeting in early April, we look forward to briefing interested parties at meetings around the country from May–a schedule will be available at www.ozco.gov.au/future_planning.

We the undersigned are most concerned about the proposed restructuring of the Australia Council entailing amongst other matters the dissolution of the New Media Arts Board (NMAB). Applying a deep, specialist knowledge of the complexities of New Media theory and practice, the NMAB has played a critical and foundational role in:

• -fostering the institutional embedding of new media arts across the disciplinary spectrum of visual art, dance, music and literature

• -exhibiting and publishing benchmark experimental arts work both in Australia and internationally

• -providing leadership in articulating the development of cutting edge new media research and practice bringing together collaborations between the very best in Australian art and science

• -bringing these collaborations to the mainstream through its groundbreaking co-operation with the Australian Research Council by means of the Synapse Program

• -ensuring a broad range of critical national benefits for contemporary Australian experimental arts

It is noteworthy that the Federal Government, through its “Backing Australia” Policy, has earmarked “Frontier Technologies” as a Government National Priority for funding. Included in this National Priority is “multimedia, content generation and imaging” requiring collaboration between artists and scientists, a core focus of the NMAB.

Australian experimental artists are at the forefront of developing these areas for Australian ICT and infotainment culture and industry. The ability of Australian culture and industry to measure up to and meet the global challenge in the digital media and experimental technology domain necessitates proactive support by Federal agencies in supporting research and development. Countries such as Germany, France, Italy, UK, Sweden, Norway, Canada, not to mention the extraordinary investment in this area by Singapore, make it clear that focused and scaled support in this domain are fundamental to Australia’s future.

Rather than undermining the domain’s official recognition, standing, accrued peer knowledge and voice on the Australia Council, the Council needs to be assessing the ways and means to enhance and magnify support, both financial and organizational, to ensure Australia’s long term artistic, scientific and technological position at the international level.

Professor Jeffrey Shaw
Executive Director
iCINEMA Centre for Interactive Cinema Research
The University of New South Wales

Dr Dennis Del Favero
Executive Chairman
iCINEMA Centre for Interactive Cinema Research
The University of New South Wales

Professor Neil Brown
Co-Director
iCINEMA Centre for Interactive Cinema Research
The University of New South Wales

Professor Ian Howard
Dean, College of Fine Arts
The University of New South Wales

Associate Professor Jill Bennett
Director of Postgraduate Research
College of Fine Arts
University of New South Wales

Professor Ross Gibson
Professor of New Media & Digital Culture
University of Technology, Sydney

Professor Mark Burry
Professor of Innovation
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology

Associate Professor Nikos Papastergiadis
Deputy Director
Australian Centre
University of Melbourne

Dr Scott McQuire
Senior Lecturer
Media and Communications
University of Melbourne

I write to you as a long-time admirer of your outstanding professionalism, and your enthusiastic commitment and devotion to the arts communities especially in the areas in which I operate, the digital media industries. As I have been involved in many major public initiatives in digital media, across government, industry, commerce, and culture, for over a decade I feel that I am at least qualified to offer you, with every due respect, my professional perspective on the proposed changes at the Australia Council concerning “new media” art.

I strongly and sincerely believe that a commitment to a formal, specific, new media entity within the Australia Council, explicitly denominated as such and with a dedicated budget for funding “new media” initiatives, is absolutely necessary for the successful development of Australia’s commercial new media industries.

Within the project teams and small businesses that have participated in X|Media|Lab every team and project has, or is looking for, the creative difference that changes mere technology into a feasible business proposition. For example, the Director of Programming at Foxtel told me “nothing is going to happen in this industry [interactive television] until the creative people have the chance to play with the new technologies and start coming up with great ideas. If I hear from one more technical person with a great creative idea, I’m going to scream! It has to be the other way around”.

The Digital Media Arts are clearly one of the essential nodes in the new media economy. The art, skills and creativity of digital media practitioners is a decisive input, probably the decisive input, in the successful development of national, sustainable new media industries. Because of digital convergence, these industries include not only the entire span of traditional entertainment, film and television, but also now shape all educational content, electronic publishing, the entire information industries, the internet and broadband content, the music industry, computer games, animation and the whole future of mobile telephony and telecommunications.

The issues involved are of national critical importance, and are recognised as such. The Commonwealth government has committed to the development of a fully-scoped Digital Industries Action Agenda. This Agenda will certainly contain recommendations concerning the creative skills, training, and national innovation systems needed for Australia to succeed in these vast new media industries. The Australia Council’s input into these considerations is vital and anything less than a full-scale commitment to the new media arts will appear, in my opinion, inexplicable.

An explicit, full-scale commitment to developing and funding the new media arts is perfectly consistent with the cross-support mechanisms between the Digital Arts and Commercial Media industries I have seen in the past year in Singapore, Canada, the UK, the US, throughout the European Union, and, most strikingly, in China. The explicit commitment and support for the value of the Digital Media Arts is not only front-and-centre, it is the subject of significant increases in both financial support and visibility.

One small recent example amongst dozens: within two weeks of returning to Los Angeles from the last X|Media|Lab in Melbourne, where she was one of the international Mentors, the Director of the American Film Institute’s (AFI) Enhanced TV Workshop changed the name of the AFI’s entire undertaking to the “Digital Media Creative Lab” in direct response to her Australian experience, whence she saw how we assume the inclusion of digital media artistic skills, perspectives and sensibilities in the development of commercial new media projects. Creativity is the heart and soul of success in the new media industries.

The future of the new media industries does not lie in technologies and gadgets; it lies in creative skills. The Australia Council’s explicit commitment to new media arts, artists, skills, projects, experiments and collaborations, internationally and between art and commerce, is a vital contribution to Australia’s immediate and eventual economic development in these industries.

Recently I have been involved with a number of industry bodies in having the interests of new media producers and practitioners included in any proposed Cross Media Ownership law changes. Our goal is to work towards a new media industry framework that: 1) enables satisfactory commercial opportunities and returns for Australian media and creative professionals, and that also 2) provides access to capital and funding for media producers, 3) creates demand for quality local content, 4) fosters skills and industry development as part of an overall creative economy agenda, and 5) provides careers for practitioners, along with 6) the chance of export success in the global media marketplaces.

The Australia Council has a role to play in every one of these objectives. But without explicit recognition, without funding and resources, without opportunities for professional development, and without the prospect of meaningful, successful careers as new media artists, not only will the creative practitioners in these ascendant new media industries wither and disappear, so will the prospects of developing local new media industries, and, along with that, any chance of Australia’s economic success in these vast, pervasive industries.

Australia has an excellent and steadily improving reputation in these emerging industries. Whenever a round of international mentors comes to Australia for X|Media|Lab (and there have been more than 30 of them now, from all over the world), I make sure that they all receive the latest copy of RealTime. The response is always the same–straightforward and genuine admiration. Not only for the obvious world-class quality of the publication, but also for the extent of Australia’s engagement, the high standards of work, the level of intelligent analysis and self-criticism, and the creative excellence of new media arts in Australia.

Regarding the organisational form of the existing New Media Arts Board, I have no comment. If it needs to change, by all means change it. It’s not the Board per se that counts; it’s the extent and the explicitness of the Council’s commitment to the art form that counts, both financially and formally.

To be frank, the extent of funding for new media arts in Australia is truly appalling! By international standards, funding for new media arts in Australia is virtually non-existent. If we compared new media arts funding in Australia to any European Union nation, to Canada, the UK, or anywhere in Asia (including, for example, even Thailand and the Philippines), our record is abysmal. As the primary advocacy body to government, the Australia Council needs to review its whole discourse on new media arts. Quite simply, Australia should be investing magnitudes more funding support into new media arts.

The Australia Council should consider investing in some hard statistical research into: 1) comparative national funding levels for new media; into the nexus between creativity and the innovation industries; 2) the economic importance of the digital media industries (in their ever increasing scope and reach); and 3) into developing appropriate strategies for investing significantly in innovation systems which productively combine scientific, technological, and artistic experimentation, on both grand and small scales, and which may eventuate in things which find markets and audiences.

I am convinced that we could radically alter the funding commitments to new media by re-casting and re-presenting these kinds of understandings and perceptions. We, the practitioners and the industry, really must work together with the Australia Council to reformulate a whole, new, invigorating discourse that is heard and understood in Canberra.

Viewed strictly as economics, these issues become even more potent. Australia runs an ICT trade deficit in excess of $16 billion per annum, and a Cultural Products trade deficit in excess of $4 billion per annum. To put this into the perspective, this means that we will spend the entire proceeds of the proposed T3 sale on our ICT and Cultural deficits alone in just 18 months. It is vital that we give the new media industries and new media arts their proper weight in this knowledge economy, based equally on skills and creativity.

In summary, I ask that you take into your consideration the views of someone who has chosen to work deliberately betwixt the strictly economic requirements of the commercial new media industries, and the creative skills and talents upon which every success in these new industries depends. Australia does not manufacture hardware or equipment; it manufactures talent.

As far as I can judge, removing the specific new media focus and its associated dedicated funding mechanism will inevitably come to be regarded as a poor policy choice, and a poor legacy. The only places it will be welcomed are in those economies and markets that are pouring investments into developing creative skills in the new media industries much faster, and with far greater determination, than we are.

May I conclude by saying, with all due respect, I know that you personally, and the Australia Council Board, undoubtedly possess the fair-mindedness and the rectitude to re-consider this particular aspect of the proposed organisational changes if you believe that you should do so. I therefore ask, that after you take all submissions into account, and with the benefit of your recent consultations, you conclude the consultant’s report to be in error on this particular matter; and that you make a commitment to the formal establishment of an explictly denominated new media entity within the Australia Council, with its own budget dedicated to funding new media initiatives. Such a decision will be welcomed as sensible, responsible, and forward-looking by all; and it will be a victory, not only for genuine leadership, but for the prospects of Australia’s economic and cultural future in these new media times.

Destiny Deacon, Adoption (1993/2000), Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

The lift deposits visitors to the exhibition on the fourth floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA). A printed introduction to the right and lithographed tea-towels to the left are lost on the perimeter, to be read and examined on the next pass or exit. The little fish in the tank filtering the backwash of sunlight draw the visitor to the living/dining room that is modelled after Destiny Deacon’s own. She has, in fact, been living out of boxes since her furniture was exported for the show. The carpet was created to her design and resembles the mess of dolls, Twisties and crayons that might litter her own floor.

The living room seems almost miniature, dwarfed by the bric-a-brac with its vivacious clutter of colours. With so many playthings beckoning it’s like a dollhouse. Most unexpected are the wires at shin level restricting entry. A television set faces the couch, so viewers have to stand uncomfortably against the wires to watch some of Deacon’s earliest film works in soap opera style developing in complexity and quality. The first are shot in the artist’s even more cluttered living room and kitchen, depicting narratives such as a mother’s life in disarray as she drinks through the loss and kidnapping of her child. Later storylines have more developed characters with sets and camera work that mark a sharp increase in budget. The casts include actors and friends like David Page and Lillian Crombie, playing respectively, a transvestite and a grandmother.

On the wall over the television are 2 frames with collages of ideas for films that probably should be made, if only irony sold! On the dining room walls are posters from earlier exhibitions which anticipate the work around the corner, a retrospective of Deacon’s work spanning the last 15 years or so and informed by the activism she was involved in prior to launching her artistic career.

Back past the fish tank, the corridor is hung with blown-up photographs. Deacon blames her unique grainy style on technophobia, and it works to her advantage. The Polaroids, printed on a consumer level bubble jet printer, pull the viewer into the colour, action and emotion of her blurry images, many involving dolls brought to life by their environment. Anyone who knows Deacon’s work will be familiar with the black dolls used throughout her pieces. True, as she claims, they are easy to manipulate and they never complain; even truer is the incredible emotion that she elicits in her use of them.

Marcia Langton, in her 1997 essay “Black humour and the art of Destiny Deacon” (Walk and don’t look blak, MCA, 2004), says that Deacon’s work is “irritating” because of the artist’s ability to push the right buttons, kick-starting “memories, smells and emotions.” Langton describes the work as being able to “resurrect the images of our oppression, position her favourite dolls or people in her stage sets, and eke out discomfort.” Langton wonders whether the work irritates white people in the same way.

In her art, Deacon has explored her own history as depicted in photographs, matching them with portraits of her young mother as she grew up and moved south. It is a journey in which Deacon has simultaneously gathered a stockpile of insulting paraphernalia, reminding the viewer of the tough history of black Australia. This got under my non-Aboriginal skin and gnawed at me as I came upon pieces in the exhibition that mediate on Indigenous life in Australia now. Is it any easier?

The piece titled Adoption is a photograph of plastic baby dolls inside paper cupcake shells. It’s kitschy and humorous but full of irony in the connections it suggests with “shopping” for black babies at orphanages. “Humour cuts deep”, says Deacon in the catalogue. She is not so much baring her own soul as cutting deep into the world around her. From her first photograph, Koori rocks, Gub words (1990), to more recent films projected on a big screen in a dark alcove just past the cupcakes, Deacon’s art seems largely a reaction to what irks her. Both the film, Over d-fence (2004) about nosey neighbours (a pet peeve), and the photographic series depicting graffiti on a sacred site with the striking painted words “My Rock”, record and simultaneously reject acts of disrespect.

The jet print from the Polaroid, No need looking (A) (1999/2004), appears to indicate that there is so much for a black woman in Australia to contend with that even a UFO is no distraction. Further along the wall is a flat screen looping a short film from 1999 entitled, No place like home. The film’s eerie soundtrack includes clips from The Wizard of Oz featuring Dorothy whimsically repeating “There’s no place like home”, and more urgently “Oh Toto, come back!” This same soundtrack remained audible as I stood at the screen watching the silent Forced Images (2001) on the opposing wall. There it quietly (almost subliminally) increased my awareness of the 2 little 4 year olds resisting and at the same time searching for their own identities as they argued and then tried on masks of Indigenous faces. The soundtrack to No place like home matches the trance-like state of the character whose back we follow through city streets as she searches for safety and home. As Natalie King writes in her catalogue essay, “Episodes: a laugh and a tear in every photo”, there are “phantasmagoric apparitions inhabit(ing) Deacon’s funny and unnerving compositions” which match the interests and research that the artist has undertaken on the supernatural, cinema history and popular culture. As Deacon rhetorically asks on the placard explaining her period of work in 1999, “Why be a contemporary artist if you don’t know or care about what is going on?”

Deacon furthers a pointed interaction with the work of other artists by making the historical and the contemporary interact in her portraits series. In a striking self-portrait, Me and Virginia’s doll (1997), Deacon poses like Frida Kahlo except with cigarette in hand and a doll. It’s irreverent. She slouches on the bench comfortably. The photograph is grainy, suggesting that the shadows and light of the composition are more important than any crispness of face or figure. She looks down the barrel of the camera, but the focus is too blurred to imagine that the soul is laid bare. And the cigarette alight in her fingers, glowing and smoking, adds to the feeling that Deacon’s portrait is for herself.

Waiting for the lift and reading the description I missed on the way in, it feels like I know Destiny Deacon well enough from her work to see that these words are not her own. I imagine instead she might have written something like: “Fuck it. I made this. You’re welcome to figure it out for yourself.”

When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, Mona Hatoum responded to the conflict with a performance piece entitled The negotiating table. As in many early works, Hatoum used her body to explore universal notions of violence, oppression, confinement and displacement. She lay curled on a table for several hours, blindfolded and enclosed in a body bag covered with entrails, blood and bandages. The table, illuminated by a single bulb, was flanked by 2 empty chairs; the silence of the interrogation room jarringly punctuated by news reports of the war and leaders in peace negotiations.

Born in Beirut of exiled Palestinian parents, Hatoum has long been familiar with political unrest and environments in which cultural acceptance is uneasy at best. She found herself further displaced when civil war broke out in Beirut while she was on a short visit to London in 1975. Unable to return to her adopted home, Hatoum used the British citizenship claimed by her parents in Lebanon in 1948, and has since lived in London. Here, in a state of double exile, she commenced the exploration of cultural and physical dislocation with performance, video and installation while studying at the Byam Shaw and Slade art schools.

At the core of Hatoum’s performance and installation work is the experience and corporeal investigation of the ‘exiled’ as physically, culturally or emotionally displaced. Hatoum comments that the exiled ‘other’ exists in a space removed from their own skin, dislocated from their own culture. Her work implicates the spectator in this disrupted position of spatial discord, displacing the viewer’s preconceptions. Several performance works have focused on situations in which the body is confined and challenged: in Under siege (1982) Hatoum struggled for 7 hours to stand in a glass container full of wet and sticky clay, while Suspended (1986) saw her confined in a chicken coop at the Laing Gallery.

Early performance and video works used the effect of surveillance and audience participation to create scenarios in which the spectator alternately becomes the watcher and the watched. The voyeuristic nature of these performances continuously puts the audience in a state of unease and disturbance. In works that she has called “endurance performance”, Hatoum uses video as a third eye, collapsing the power usually afforded the voyeur. In Matters of gravity (1987) she was enclosed in a cell and could only be viewed through a spy hole that used a camera obscura lens to project her upside down. This affected complete visual disorientation for the viewer as Hatoum moved around the space and created a converse sense of place.

For the exiled the measure of distance is always in relation to their origin; what remains there and what is lost. In 1988 Hatoum explored the painful reality of distance in a video work entitled Measures of distance. During a visit to Lebanon in 1981 she recorded conversations with, and footage of, her mother. She layered the imagery of her naked mother in the shower with letters sent to the artist in Arabic, while Hatoum read the words aloud in English. This was further interwoven with segments of their conversations. The result is a narrative of Hatoum’s life as an exile that attempts to recall the intimacy of a relationship, memories faded by time and distance, and failed attempts to recapture the physicality of a kiss or the touch of a body.

In changing from performance and video work to installation and sculpture, the focus on Hatoum’s body as the vehicle for a political message shifted to an emphasis on the absence of the body: “Originally when I did performance, I used the body–my body–as a metaphor for social systems. Now I’m trying to set up situations where the viewer has a direct physical experience with the installation and becomes completely implicated by it.” (Anastasia Aukeman, ‘The body politic’, World Art 3, 1995). The viewer becomes the surrogate body caught in an in-between space, engaged in an exchange between the centre and the periphery, object and subject.

For Hatoum, space is fundamentally about its relation to the body. As an exile, her cultural space has always been discontinuous, at a point of disjuncture–neither here nor there. Her work has been about negotiating a position for the body within a state of simultaneous presence and absence, a body in conflict with extreme physical and spatial disruption. Light sentence (1992) forms a space which constantly changes as a light moves up and down, casting shifting shadows from steel lockers onto the surfaces of a room.

Corps étranger (Foreign body) (1994) represented a return to the body with the artist’s internal organs–respiratory tract, digestive system and intestines–projected onto the floor of a small cylindrical space. Upon entering, the viewer becomes trapped between the edge of the cylinder and the projected corporeal void. An edge or barrier is often used in Mona Hatoum’s work to define a space of separation, representing the “impossibility of communication across the social, political, race, class and gender divides” (interview with Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, MCA Press Kit, 2005).

The human endeavour to locate a place on this planet is explored in a piece inspired by Manzoni’s work of the same title, Socle du monde (Pedestal for the earth) (1992-93). A large cube comprising magnets with opposing poles creates conflicting orientations for iron filings drawn into a writhing and wriggling mass on the surface. Each iron filing battles for its own space, pushing and pulling to form patterns resembling entrails.

Hatoum chooses materials that create contradictory expectations and turns “the object into something dangerous or something that is unable to fulfil its function” (Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, 2005). These contradictions inform her swings made of glass, placed precariously close and facing each other, indicating potential collision; or her wheelchair that not only has sharp knives in place of its handles but also threatens to tip its occupant onto the floor. Many of the works from the late 90s are installations or sculptures that include domestic objects set apart from their familiar surroundings. Sculptures such as Mouli-julienne x 17 (1999), Grater divide (2002) or Cage-à-deux (2002) bring everyday objects such as a vegetable cutter, grater or birdcage into a sphere of danger, confinement and torture, with their extreme scale adding to the uncanniness of the work.

The domestic nature of much of Hatoum’s work undermines our initial reaction of familiarity and safety, as we recognise that what appears to be safe is in fact dangerous, sharp or foreign. For the exiled, this situation is understood, felt and breathed. For Hatoum it is a daily reality expressed in her work as a metaphor for the politics of location and dislocation.

Mona Hatoum: Over my dead body, selected and curated by Elizabeth Ann Macgregor from the Hamburger Kunsthalle solo exhibition, 2004; MCA, Sydney, March 23-May 29

You enter past a wall of coloured stills–spoon, book, bed, guitar and camera. In a plinth in another part of the room, a CD-ROM invites with its image of a Super 8 viewer–itself containing an image of a railway line leading into a tunnel. On the tracks, a mattress and a book lie abandoned.

Touch the mattress and you’re transported to a recreation of the room once inhabited by Eric Warburton whose disappearance is the focus of Vivid Fragments, the CD-ROM installation created by Mahalya Middlemist in collaboration with Justine Cooper and Joshua Raymond. A young man who lived in and around inner-city Sydney for over a decade, Eric Warburton hung out with squatters and street kids and with artists such as Geoffrey Weary, Milton Read and writer Henry Johnston, many of whom, at some time or other, included Eric in their work. John Conomos, whose essay accompanies the exhibition, recalls his own transitory acquaintance. “Eric’s presence was silent, ghostly, understated. All those twenty odd years ago in a city that was seemingly abundant with creativity and cultural and social experimentation.” Middlemist was also a friend. “When he went missing in 1987,” she remembers, “he was a ‘nobody’, his disappearance barely rating a police search or a mention in the press.” She was amazed at how little of him was left once he’d gone.

We enter a squat that friends remember as Eric’s shifting habitat. At one time, the mattress leans against a wall. In another it’s strung on ropes from the rafters. The meagre possessions now offer themselves to our curiosity. I pick up one of the books Eric liked to have around the place, though he was illiterate. Apparently, he disliked people reading in his presence; they appeared to him to be blankly staring into the pages. Touching these objects triggers fragments of memory manifest in a tiny film, a snatch of music (created by Derek Kreckler) or a spoken recollection from some of the people who knew this strange young man. There’s one precious trace of his voice. Each trajectory takes you back into the room, onto the tracks and into the tunnel.
Mahalya Middlemist & Justine Cooper, Vivid Fragments

Mahalya Middlemist & Justine Cooper, Vivid Fragments

In the early 90s, Mahalya Middlemist began compiling material for a documentary, a biography constructed from non-linear impressions and anecdotes. She started looking for traces of Eric Warburton’s life in photographs and on 16mm and Super 8 film. Then her footage and stills were stolen. Luckily, she’d made copies of some of it and this accounts for the texture of the work she describes as composed from “fragments of fragments.”

The experience of Vivid Fragments lies somewhere between meditation and séance and, like the best new media art, the materials are well suited to their subject matter. Middlemist observes that the people she interviewed all claimed a singular memory of this person but they were frequently conflicting. Here the artists give credence to them all while the non-linear architecture of the technology allows for random associations to connect in the interaction. Vivid Fragments is a deeply personal work that also highlights the power of collective memory and of a seemingly fragile community of transients, friends and casual acquaintances. The coloured photographs on the wall are the mute objects of disappearance. From the carefully rendered still, film and sound fragments, the visitor is invited inside this circle to reflect on a life which was, in Middlemist’s words, “marginal in every way.”

Vivid Fragments, CD-ROM by Mahalya Middlemist and Justine Cooper in collaboration with Joshua Raymond, sound design by Derek Kreckler with additional sound by Glenn Remington, Peloton Gallery, Chippendale, Jan 20-29

From the city’s maelstrom of activity, I ducked down a minor street into a minor laneway, past industrial rubbish bins and hospitality drones sucking back cigarettes and into the eye of the storm: the pure white dungeon that is Spacement. The noises and smells of the city disappeared as I entered Self Made Man. Curator Kerrie-Dee Johns’ motif is the dandy, and with it artifice, subversion and celebration. The dandy has an identity thrust upon him that cannot be refused, only presented back to the world in exaggerated form. Overacting, the dandy demonstrates that identity is always a playing of roles, seducing his audience with suggestive irony and meticulous attention to detail.

In Chris Bond’s The Hitchcock-Feldmar Affair the 8 glass-framed memoranda from Hollywood studio executive Warren Feldmar to Alfred Hitchcock appear aged and worn. Each memo, a day or 2 apart, contributes to a narrative culminating in the death of a woman. The clues are at times hilarious and at others disturbing, sometimes both. Alfred becomes AH and then “that man.” Fingerprint smudges appear–is that blood? Feldmar grows aggressive to the point of paranoia. Is he the killer? Veiled behind this story of rapid psychological disintegration is Bond’s meticulously constructed mockery of the ‘dream factory.’

The modest dimensions of Melanie Katsalidis and Jonathan Podborseck’s 10100 10010 00101 00101 hide its larger significance. The shape, not much more than a foot high, is of a tree, but it’s also an icon, divided into 3 segments which seem to represent the natural world (or rather our response to it), the scientific quest, and cultural endeavours. Approaching this serene work, I felt as I did with Ricky Swallow’s Killing Time–the skill is breathtaking, while the emotional weight of the work is its focus. 10100… is more explicit in its intentions–the self that it expresses is indistinguishable from its political and cultural context. One segment includes a richly ironic quotation, a poetic meditation on trees and their meaning, but also haunting in its broader application: in part, it says, “Civilisation grew from exploiting, destroying, venerating and looking back…”
Christian Thompson, The Gates of Tambo [Tracey Moffat], (2004)

Christian Thompson, The Gates of Tambo [Tracey Moffat], (2004)

I carried this reflection with me to Garrett Hughes’s My Vestige. In the centre of a display of stuffed birds, a framed bird skull and small Victorian side tables is a large photographic print of a man and a woman, behind them a screen like patterned wallpaper or carpet, behind that, an English country estate. The man’s hand is plunged into the woman’s bloody side. She is mostly naked, with the half-drugged look of the archetypal victim. As with Peter Greenaway’s films, the imagery is unnerving, almost overwhelming. Hughes, like Greenaway, insists on closing in on visceral realities, showing our civilised icons up to their wrists in blood. As I inched closer and examined its details–the faces as unaffected as any portrait, the bodies composed of re-collaged parts in a kind of Frankensteinian jigsaw–I grew more and more aware of the constructed nature of the image. Hughes whispers to the viewer that the idea of man as hunter and penetrator is not the only construction of power.

In the 3 four-foot square photographs included here from his Gates of Tambo series, Christian Thompson poses as Andy Warhol, Tracey Moffatt and Rusty Peters (a Gija man from the Kimberleys who took up painting at age 60 after a working life as a stockman). In their embodiment of fame, recognition and cultural heritage, these artists might be Thompson’s natural role-models. He plays them straight, casually, as if expressing an affinity. But, especially as Moffatt, in profile, taking a photograph, wearing lipstick, he simultaneously becomes the focus. As an Indigenous man, Thompson knows that art is never considered merely on its own merits, but also by reference to the artist’s personal history and the way the dominant culture permits and shapes each 15 minutes of fame.

The ‘dandies’ of Self Made Man secure positions from which the foundations of our identities can be glimpsed–the dread of an ever-proximate madness, the flight from nature through its destruction, the compulsory and regulated nature of fame. Leaving this composed but disturbing space, I re-entered the city-storm on the lookout for turbulence.

Shimmer’s apt title serves to neatly describe Christian Lock’s holograph and resin wall pieces, Bianca Barling’s richly coloured video and the smooth sleek surfaces of Akira Akira’s sculptures. But the title might also be extended into a more encompassing descriptor, conveying the sense that Shimmer is really about appearances rather than substance.

The works are, for the most part, formally attractive. Christian Lock’s 7 large wall pieces consist of slabs of smooth, richly coloured resin laid over thick swirls of paint smeared on holographic paper. While certainly the most ‘shimmering’ of the works, their interest is more than merely surface, the brush-streaked paintwork providing a 3 dimensional tactility and creating an interior world of infinite detail, despite being impervious inside its resin casing. The works exhibit Lock’s ongoing interest in both the appearance of a material and the material itself, although they replace the previous austerity of colour and frugality of design with gluttonish and lustful over-abundance.

By contrast, the surfaces of Akira Akira’s Snow White I and II are coolly impenetrable. Each curved form lolls on a low plinth like a long white tongue, speaking of the reduction of modernism to a formal template which seems to encompass its aesthetic but not its spirit. Previous work by Akira included subversive touches–objects were shattered and included intriguing details–but these seem docile, blunt, empty, dumb.

In a more literal manner Clint Woodger’s video Sleeper Hold also separates manifestation from its reason for being, combining imagery from the climactic scenes of action films, including explosions, balls of fire, and people leaping, running and being hurled through the air. Deprived of build-up the scenes are also denuded of their power, demonstrating not only Hollywood’s often castigated manipulation of the viewer, but also its reason: without an understanding of the rhythms of time-based work, even ‘inherently’ exciting imagery is dull.

Bianca Barling more successfully builds a completely enclosed world within her film Forever. Visually beautiful and well produced, twin screens are used to depict 2 lovers performing the pain and suffering of love and its end. In their raspberry red rooms, they speak on the phone, look pained and cry, before the girl fires a gun and the boy collapses, clutching his heart. Though its stylised look might be cloying, the romantic watches aghast as the lovers go through their painful motions, heightened by an almost hysterical operatic score in a pantomime both thrilling and heart-breaking.

Sarah CrowEST’s video Globe for Strolling depicts her stumbling about a (soon to be abandoned) local art school campus, sometimes sitting on, sometimes dribbling a large, thigh-high globe, while wearing an identical globe on her head. It’s almost an illustration of the stereotypical indulgences of contemporary art. Rather than being any sort of comment on one’s relationship with self and others, as suggested, its comedy descends into farce as CrowEST struggles to hold her headgear on while blindly staggering along, kicking the globe past a group of students or into a consternated passer-by.

A valiant and powerful essay by Katrina Simmons goes some way towards validation of the works shown. In it, she explains the trials and tribulations of making art and the pitfalls of risk, confusion and failure inherent in the process. Simmons speaks of the artist’s need to discover certain things for themselves, and the inevitability of stumbling a little during the search. Reading it you almost question whether you are wrong for dismissing works as lazy or uninspired. The essay pre-empts other possible criticisms, such as the erosion of a sense of objectivity or meritocracy created by the constant circulation of the same names (CrowEST’s and Barling’s film credits include Akira Akira, while Shimmer’s curator Mimi Kelly also contributed to Barling’s work). Simmons states that Kelly “makes no apologies” for this. A defiant stance? Or a shortcoming celebrated as strategy? Either way, theory doesn’t make up for the oddly self-congratulatory yet dispassionate nature of the works, their reliance on re-visiting old themes and concerns, and the assumption that what is of interest to the artist will necessarily translate into an interesting work of art.

We are deprived of strength when we feel pity. The loss of strength which suffering as such inflicts on life is still further increased and multiplied by pity. Pity makes suffering contagious.

Bagryana Popov’s Subclass26A leaves little doubt about the liberal aspirations of Australian society: when it comes to our refugee policy, don’t bother looking for any. Find instead countless petty cruelties dressed up in diaphanous civility. Subclass26A is a mixture of motion, text, speech and sound. As a work involving dancers and movement, it dramatises human relationships through abstraction. As a textual character piece, it mixes dialogue with naturalism. It also addresses the way in which the nation state imagines and practises its right to exclude.

Grey bodies interact in the grey space of detention. Some of them are prisoners, hapless immigrants, others their guards. A few guards are nice, others are less so. Whatever the case, the language is the same. It is designed to destroy people. Bodies jostle over a single musical chair, each sitting and speaking only for a moment. Who are you? Can you tell us in no time at all? Simon Ellis repeats a mesmerising set of gestures. He is at the head of a queue, articulating his self. Inmates wait for their interview, not knowing when it will occur. A man’s face is delicately mauled. One body is able to shirtfront another, to assert an invasion of the other’s personal space. How is it that one person can do these things to another with the sanction of the state?

Is passivity the response? No, there is aggression, frustration, despair, rejection, friendship, withdrawal. Each inmate has an identity. One is from Iraq. He has a story–not that it’s believed. But we believe him. He searches our faces, speaking a language we do not know. His energy pierces the gap between us. Majid Shokor, the man playing an Iraqi is an Iraqi. The real underpins the imaginary. His grace–not dancerly grace, something else–is arresting. In fact, each of the performers is skilled, well chosen.

Despite my sympathies, despite my politics, I find all my perversities come to the surface prior to experiencing Subclass26A. Perhaps I have been reading too much Nietzsche of late. Subclass26A is about our stupid and cruel treatment of refugees, a source of national shame. So why resile from an artwork which addresses such matters? Perhaps it is because I imagine that this work will manipulate its spectator towards some end, that I am to dance when my strings are pulled. However, a work like this operates at many levels. Its differences of style and form are quilted together. The use of percussion throughout the work gives it a Brechtian character in that the drums announce the drama. Yet we identify with the people depicted. Many of the texts used are drawn from Federal Government documents–form 866C, Application for a Protection Visa; a DIMIA draft letter to Iranian detainees; lists of boat arrivals, nationalities–nothing could be more ‘real.’ Yet there are sections which are silent and stylised. Some scenes pin you up against the wall, others let you circle them from afar. The audience strides off knowing that others shuffle towards an unknown destination.
Paul Romano, The Smallest Score and more

Paul Romano, The Smallest Score and more

Paul Romano’s The Smallest Score and more consists of 2 pieces: Rapid, performed by Elissa Lee and Paul Romano, and The Smallest Score, a solo work for Romano. Rapid is in sections. The dancers move separately: Lee occupies Dancehouse’s little proscenium stage towards the back, while Romano roams the space of the floor close to the audience. Eggshells crackle as Lee emerges, snaking across the stage: embryonic throbbing. Her looking is phylogenetic, an organism beginning to see the world.

In contrast, Romano simply offers his back to the spectator, crouched low on his haunches: skull-hips-heels. Time passes, he stays. Lee reappears standing, articulating her arms with a percussive, jointed motion, circling her head. She is against the wall, rather than sharing weight with it, beginning to move, arching, turning. She indicates the expanse of her stomach with her hands, a flat square, then twists away, her spine at an occult angle. She is quite beautiful, a see-saw dipping. Light infuses the movement with a quiet quality, sepia-black, contemplative, fluid. Romano performs an incredibly fast series of movements very close to the audience. His limbs, his head, flung in a flurry away from his centre. Repeat, repeat, his speed and proximity a gust of wind that tails off into a chant of panting as he catches his breath. Finally, Elissa Lee is upside down against the wall. We look as if from above, the wall is her floor because, this time, she pours weight into it.

Both Rapid and the ensuing solo proceed as if constructing movement from the limbs, their joints providing the mobility which arises from the gap between bones. The Smallest Score offers Paul as a person, not merely the subject of movement. Here, as before, his sense of flow arises in the joints as he establishes a lexicon of movement possibilities. Although these actions would seem to create machine-like motion, he turns this into fluid movement. Small moments of spinal continuity punctuate an angular succession of gestures. For the spine is intensely mobile, offering a veritable wealth of vertebrae. How is it that the whole of movement is greater than the sum of its parts?

In The Smallest Score Romano reveals his self, allowing us to watch him, engaging us directly with his look. Gobbledygook softens the atmosphere of this serious endeavour, for The Smallest Score and more represents sustained labour on Romano’s part. He asks questions of his work, finding a kinaesthetic through investigation, opening out that process through performance.

Subclass26A, director Bagryana Popov; performers Natalie Cursio, Simon Ellis, Nadja Kostich, Majid Shokor, Rodney Afif, Ru Atma; Fourtyfivedownstairs, Melbourne; Feb 15-25

The Smallest Score and more, choreographer Paul Romano; performers Elissa Lee, Paul Romano; Dancehouse, Melbourne; Feb 23-25

The dance works produced under the amorphous Chunky Move aegis are often characterised by a certain quality, regardless of their subject matter, which can only be described as party. Not celebration, not carnival, but party. From the chaotic, fragmented colour of Arcade to the dark no-tomorrow roar of Tense Dave, there seems to be a regular undercurrent of mad fraternisation which threatens to spill over into uncontrolled mayhem (ironically, last year’s I Want to Dance Better at Parties was their least party-like show). It’s fitting then that Jo Lloyd’s party-themed dance/installation High Maintenance was presented in the Chunky Move studios.

Lloyd graduated from the VCA in 1995 and has been spoken of recently as one of the “most likelies”of the current generation of young choreographers. In the past 7 years she has been developing a distinctive style which takes the nervy freneticism displayed in her work with Chunky Move and Balletlab to a level of more meditative introspection. High Maintenance is billed as a collaboration between Lloyd and fellow dancers Luke George and Tim Harvey, along with designer Shio Otani and composer Duane Morrison.

Audiences are issued with cardboard hats and party whistles as they enter the studio. We are instructed to line the periphery of the space, sitting on mats strewn with streamers, balloons, empty pizza boxes and cartons of beer. Shio Otani’s design appears consciously low key, the festive debris an appropriately haphazard mess. The atmosphere is boisterous and the audience enters into the spirit of things with gusto, filling the studio with chatter and cheer.

When the dancers enter the space we are presented with 3 bodies trying to piece together the events of the preceding night’s party. They shuffle wearily or slip into simple routines. Soon enough they begin to play out echoes of the party’s excesses, reconstructing key moments before returning to their hung-over torpor. Morrison’s dark, beat-heavy soundtrack is densely textured and the performers admirably work with the music without subsuming their movements to its dictates, falling in and out of phrases proposed by the aural soundscape. The lighting design is almost non-existent: house lights remain on for the duration, which detracts considerably from the ambience of the choreography at its most expressive. This is not a work about bodies in pure motion; where it aims to conjure a mood it does so in spite of the dull glare of the studio lights.

There are repeated suggestions of a love triangle, a betrayal, a gunfight, but these are only ever hinted at in stylised form and do not add up to a coherent series of events. The recurrence of certain sequences gestures towards the mutability of memory the morning after. One of the closing images is of Lloyd and George lying half-undressed upon a pile of lurid green streamers, shifting their hips and their centres of gravity to suggest a half-conscious post-coital discomfort without physically touching. Certain images such as this linger after the performance has finished, and though High Maintenance has difficulties adding up to more than the sum of its parts, the striking inventiveness of individual moments is somehow appropriate to its subject matter.

Ultimately, like the characters themselves, we are left doubtful about what really occurred. What is less uncertain is the potential Jo Lloyd and her collaborators display in this original and evocative work.

High Maintenance, concept Jo Lloyd, Shio Otani; choreographers/performers Jo Lloyd, Luke George, Tim Harvey; sound Duane Morrison; design Shio Otani; Chunky Move studios, Melbourne; March 4-5

Perhaps it was the sunny Adelaide weather, the film festival up the road or the post-election sense that serious work is required if the film industry is to survive the Howard era, but in marked contrast to the “air of gloom” reportedly hanging over last year’s Australian International Documentary Conference (RT60, p16), a generally optimistic tone was maintained throughout this year’s event. South Australian Premier Mike Rann kicked off proceedings in an up-beat fashion by announcing an extra $750,000 in state funding for the South Australian Film Corporation (SAFC) and a $600,000 deal between the SAFC and SBSi to fund documentaries with a significant broadband component. The initiative reflects an interest in the multi-platform possibilities of documentaries that dominated AIDC 2005.

Premier Rann’s launch was followed by an identity-affirming keynote address by American writer and academic Richard Florida. His thesis, as detailed in his 2002 best-seller The Rise of the Creative Class, is that the West is currently undergoing a transition to a ‘creative economy’, as significant and far-reaching as the 19th century shift from agrarian to industrial society. Prowling the AIDC stage like a slick self-help guru, complete with head-set microphone and well crafted off-the-cuff comments, Florida argued that the creative class flourished under the Clinton Administration in urban centres such as San Francisco, New York and Washington. In the process, however, blue collar workers in those cities and other parts of the United States felt increasingly threatened by, and alienated from, the new economic order. The Bush Administration is the manifestation of their resentment. Florida argued passionately that the creative class must regain the initiative, but to do so we must work towards a more inclusive creative economy that has a place for everyone.

Not having read Florida’s book, I’m not sure to what extent his speech represented a distillation of ideas more fully developed in print. In broad terms his description of the rise of the creative class and the associated political shifts of the past 15 years contains some truth, but he failed to acknowledge that the concurrent process of economic liberalisation has had as negative an impact on many ‘creatives’ as those in more traditional industries. Many Australian academics, researchers and arts workers of all kinds suffer exactly the same forms of economic disempowerment, instability and exploitation as blue collar workers–as many of those at the AIDC could testify. The so-called creative class is in fact a sector comprising several economic classes, some of whom are a good deal worse off than they were 15 years ago.

Figures cited by the AFC’s Rosemary Curtis later in the conference demonstrated that the kind of creative economy described by Florida is precisely what is missing from Australia’s cultural landscape. Only 36% of Australian documentary directors in the past 13 years have made more than one film. Wages and fees have remained static or declined, and most filmmakers lack stable employment. It wasn’t news to anyone at the AIDC when industry researcher Peter Higgs stated his recent study of the local documentary sector revealed an extremely fragile ecosystem with a tiny capital base rendering it highly susceptible to shocks. But Higgs also reaffirmed a point that recurred throughout the conference, and provided a glimmer of hope for Australia’s struggling sector: online platforms will shortly revolutionise the way we produce, distribute and consume audio-visual material. The Australian media industries need to seize the opportunity to create a sustainable production sector in the new environment or risk being permanently excluded from the 21st century media landscape.

New distribution models

In her AIDC 2004 report for RealTime, Carmela Baranowska identified the off-stage discussions between younger filmmakers about alternative modes of production and distribution as one of the event’s key points of interest. In 2005 some of these filmmakers moved centre stage. The story of how Time to Go John (TTGJ) came about in the lead up to last year’s federal election has already been related in RT65 (p18). The team behind the film conducted an inspiring panel session at the AIDC highlighting how much can be achieved by a motivated group committed to change.

The session was enhanced by the on-screen presence of US filmmaker Robert Greenwald whose internet and DVD-distributed documentaries Outfoxed and Uncovered were key inspirations for the TTGJ project. Greenwald’s real-time image was transmitted from New York via the internet using ultra cheap i-chat technology, allowing him to listen, take questions from the audience and reply with a delay of just seconds. The set up was further evidence of the pan-national lines of communication opened by accessible digital technologies such as those employed by Greenwald and the TTGJ team in making and distributing their films. The session’s encouraging tone was rounded off by Melbourne’s OPENChannel Executive Producer Liz Burke announcing the launch of a Political Film Fund created with the profits from TTGJ. The fund will allocate grants of up to $2,000 towards the completion of political film projects.

Canadian inspiration

In terms of new technologies, the real buzz at the AIDC centred on a series of presentations by representatives of Canadian production companies specialising in interactive content. In marked contrast to Australia, where independent producers lurch from project to project and find it almost impossible to build an ongoing capital base, many Canadian production companies are able to function as viable small businesses with a salaried staff of 2 to 5 people.

This situation has been made possible by regulations introduced a decade ago aimed at creating an economic base for Canada’s creative industries. Whenever a broadcaster changes hands, 10% of the price has to be contributed by the purchaser to the Canadian industry through production funds, investment in training or funding of community-based media. Over 10 years this has created several massive monetary injections. Additionally, all TV channels in Canada must meet quotas of locally produced content and cable channels have to contribute 5% of their gross revenue to the local industry. Generally, 4% goes to the Canadian Television Fund, a private-public initiative with an annual budget of around $237 million (all figures are given in Australian dollars), while the other 1% is usually put into private funds established by the broadcasters themselves. The broadcast company is permitted minority representation on the fund board, but essentially the fund must operate at arm’s length from the parent company.

There are now about 20 private funds which have invested approximately $65 million in the industry. One of the most successful is the Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund, which receives around $5 million annually from the Cable TV company Bell ExpressVu. The fund primarily backs interactive projects associated with a broadcast property (usually a television series) through grants covering up to 75% of production costs. The interactive content generally operates on an online platform. The budget for interactive components of TV series in Canada is typically the equivalent of one broadcast episode.

A range of innovative documentary-related projects underwritten by Bell Fund grants were presented at the AIDC, several of which were aimed at the youth market. Online audiences in this demographic frequently outnumber those tuning into broadcasts. Nathon Gunn of Bitcasters Inc discussed a project in which the website actually generated a broadcast component. Bitcasters were initially commissioned by Canada’s Family Cable Channel to create a site through which children could join a ‘kids’ club.’ Bitcasters created a game-based website that managed to generate a membership of 100,000 with no on-air promotion. Recognising the immense potential of this audience, Bitcasters developed the site with Bell Fund money into an online chat service featuring animated characters who will also feature in a broadcast series.

Patrick Crowe of Xenophile Media discussed 2 projects illustrating the diversity of work backed by the Bell Fund and the flow-on effects created by a funding arrangement that fosters a complementary relationship between television and interactive media production. Toronto’s Rhombus Media, who specialise in music and performance films, required extra funds for a documentary about a lock of Beethoven’s hair. The lock has gone through many hands and had a surprising influence on various people’s lives since it was snipped from the composer’s head on his deathbed. Adding an interactive component allowed Rhombus to apply for Bell Fund money. Xenophile Media were commissioned to create the interactive content and they in turn employed new media artist Alex Mayhew to design an interactive website containing a wealth of material unable to be included in the one hour documentary.

Xenophile Media also received a Bell Fund grant to create an interactive element for the broadcast of the Genie Awards (the Canadian equivalent of the AFI’s). This took the form of a live quiz tied to the content of the broadcast and extra information on award nominees. Interaction took place via the viewer’s television using a window similar to that used in Sky TV satellite services. The interactive component could also be accessed online.

Bell Fund Executive Director Andra Sheffer made the point that projects such as the Genie Awards interactive broadcast attract relatively small audiences and are primarily experiments. The Bell Fund’s mandate is to advance the Canadian broadcasting system, which includes funding untested innovations in interactive media, so that when these experiments evolve into viable revenue streams Canadian practitioners have the expertise, experience and technical infrastructure to become world leaders in providing interactive media content.

Instructive comparisons

The effect of Canada’s funding structures on production activity is starkly revealed by a comparison with Australia, especially on the documentary front. Funding for Australian documentaries represent 3% of the total amount spent locally on audio-visual production; in Canada it’s 12%. Even more telling are the amounts involved: 3% of Australian production spending represents $38 million, while 12% in Canadian represents $416 million. And while domestic box office returns for Canadian feature films in recent years have been even worse than those in Australia, Canada is now the second biggest exporter of television in the world after the United States. They are also positioned to become a world leader in providing interactive content for convergent technology platforms.

UsMob

There was an abundance of Australian talent and innovation on display at the AIDC, and one of the major failings of last year’s conference was remedied with an extensive screening program. Typically, Indigenous filmmaking shone with films like Dhakiyarr vs the King (directors Allan Collins, Tim Murray, RT61, p22) and Rosalie’s Journey (director Warwick Thornton, RT62, p23). Indigenous media was represented by the Warlpiri Media Association and the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA). Veteran filmmaker Bob Connolly was also on hand, reading excepts from his new book about the making of Black Harvest (1991), a fitting tribute to his late partner and fellow filmmaker Robin Anderson. Dennis O’Rourke confirmed his role as everyone’s favourite agent provocateur, appearing on several panels and making fellow speakers nervous with every question. O’Rourke’s Landmines–A Love Story and several other local documentaries premiered at the concurrent Adelaide Film Festival (see p21).

One of the most interesting panels on new Australian content focused on the fruits of the AFC-ABC Broadband Initiative. Several practitioners previewed interactive web-based works which will be rolled out over the next few months, the most outstanding of which was David Vadiveloo’s UsMob (usmob.com.au). This project is based around 7 short films, each with 3 different endings exploring the consequences of particular choices. The films were created and shot by Vadiveloo in collaboration with Indigenous children living in a township on the edge of Alice Springs. Vadiveloo has worked in the area intermittently for a decade, initially as a lawyer on a Native Title claim, then as a filmmaker. His documentary Beyond Sorry (RT63, p17) screened at the Adelaide Film Festival.

UsMob emerged from a request by local Indigenous elders for Vadiveloo to create an online space where Aboriginal kids could see their lives represented. The elders also wanted to encourage engagement with digital technologies, as they fear that the digital revolution will simply represent another barrier for Indigenous kids. The UsMob films were developed from the children’s own stories, with the actual shoots largely improvised on location around pre-planned ideas. The cast comprised the kids and members of their community. Every stage of the project’s development and production was vetted by the community.

The UsMob films are to appear on the web over 7 weeks from late February. The site also contains games, scrap books compiled by the kids during the shoot, and an interactive feedback area where users can respond to the films and upload their own stories and images. The site will not only provide a space for Indigenous kids online, but also link them with children outside their own environment, forging what Vadiveloo calls a virtual “community of consequence.”

The challenge

Unfortunately, the AFC-ABC Broadband Initiative was a one-off round of grants. The projects showcased at the AIDC were as impressive as anything the Canadians had to offer, but it’s difficult to see how the groundbreaking work of our interactive media producers can continue and develop without serious, ongoing investment. This extends into infrastructure: apart from their innovative funding models, Canadians have a major advantage over Australian producers in the area of broadband take-up rates. Nearly 70% of Canadian households have the broadband connections required to carry advanced interactive content; the figure in Australia is around 14%.

There was much talk at the AIDC of campaigning for the establishment of a private fund based on the Canadian model with profits from the Telstra sale. Given the depressing trajectory of the Australian film industry, and the financial strangulation of our traditional funding bodies by the Howard government, structures which provide a degree of long term economic stability for small producers are desperately needed. For all the stimulating talks and great films, for many delegates the AIDC boiled down to one thing–money. I got the distinct impression that the real action was taking place off stage in the lunches and tea breaks, with frenzied card swapping, desperate attempts to solicit broadcaster representatives’ time and nervous corridor pitches to sceptical commissioning editors.

A week after the AIDC, the Canadian delegation appeared at a Sydney forum organised by X|Media|Lab and the Australian Writer’s Guild, focussing on new funding models for Australia’s media industries. Federal Liberal MPs Bruce Baird and Bronwyn Bishop were in attendance, and in his summing up Baird expressed a keen interest in the Canadian models. His positive tone was somewhat undercut by a frank admission that Treasury is determined that all profits from the Telstra sale will go towards servicing debt. Long term investment in creative, informational and educational industries is essential if Australia is to become an exporter of 21st century commodities. The alternative is to become an increasingly irrelevant old economy based on natural resource exports and consumption of overseas goods, generating an ever-growing current account deficit.

The way forward

The insights provided by the Bell Fund delegation provide some working models around which discussion and long-term lobbying of the federal government can coalesce. As Domenic Friguglietti of ABC New Media and Digital Services commented at the AIDC, Australia’s existing funding structures generate tension between an interactive media community and film industry competing for the same scarce resources. The Bell Fund model fosters an artistically and financially complementary relationship between interactive media and traditional film and television production.

The primary message to emerge from the discussions at the AIDC and the Sydney forum was the need for a long term industry strategy and a united voice when lobbying government. The cultural justification for subsidised media production is valid, but holds no sway with those in Canberra. However, the Canadian experience demonstrates that well planned economic structuring by government can create a viable domestic and export media industry not reliant on a constant stream of individual government grants. The Free Trade Agreement with the US is already in effect and there is only a tiny window of opportunity left before the Coalition’s takeover of the Senate and the consequent Telstra sale. It remains to be seen whether Australian documentary makers, and media producers in general, have left it too late to persuade the government to create the necessary economic structures that might allow an Australian creative economy to flourish in the 21st century.

Australia Council restructure

By the time you read this the Australia Council will have met to consider its Future Planning Task Force’s recommendations. Now, after a period of intense debate and hurried consultation, these are weighted with new perspectives, concerns and possibilities (see pages Gallasch, Bott, Harkin, Shaw et al). What Council initially announced as an internal restructure just had too many implications for the future of artform practices, especially in new media, hybrid and community arts, to go unchallenged. The New Media Arts and the Community Cultural Development Boards seem most certainly on their way to oblivion, but various guarantees, quarantinings and reviews will keep in place, at least in the short term, support for the vision and momentum of these fields. The proposed restructure has generated a more vigilant arts community with the formation of new peak organisations coming out of the many meetings held across the country by new media and community cultural development practitioners and organisations. It has also unleashed critiques of the limits of the restructure, specifically its failure to fully address the overall situation for contemporary arts practices, the further erosion of peer assessment, problematic appointments to the artform boards, and the little discussed changing role of the Australia Council, an area of serious concern. On the upside, a welcome dialogue between artists and Council has commenced; lets hope it continues.

For theatre watchers

RealTime’s commitment over the last decade has been to contemporary performance in all its multiplying, hybrid manifestations, and that includes, from time to time, plays. If we had the space we’d cover more, but our attention is on productions of cultural and formal significance that break with the predictable. Theatre has not had the benefit of a dedicated national magazine; a few valiant, short-lived attempts (Theatre Australia, New Theatre Australia, Theatre Australasia) did not get the support of either the industry or audiences that they warranted. It’s a mystery, one that perhaps could be addressed in the larger context of public and press attitudes to Australian theatre by Currency Press’ Platform Papers, provocative essays on the the state of the arts. (We’ll be taking take a close look at the series to date in RT 67.) In the meantime, there’s more theatre than usual in RealTime: Melissa Reeves’ Spook, David Hare’s The Permament Way, Ilbijerri’s Rainbow’s End, Red Stitch’s The Pugilist Specialist, Max Gillies’ The Big Con, Mayu Kanamori’s Chika , Brendan Cowell’s Bed, Bell Shakespeare’s Wars of the Roses, and, coming soon to Sydney and Brisbane from South Africa, John Kani’s Nothing but the Truth.

And from those in contemporary performance who are expanding the notion of what is possible in and beyond the theatre, we have Romeo Castelluci, New York’s NYC Players, Radiohole and NTUSA, the UK-USA duo, Curious, Sydney’s version 1.0 and the UK-Australia collaboration Strangers and Intimacy at Melbourne’s Westspace. Movement-based and dance theatre is a critical component of this expanding vision and in this edition we report on Alchemy (Brisbane physical theatre artists working with John Burtt and Katie Laver’s of Perth’s skadada), the dance theatre of In the Dark, Martin Del Amo’s Under Attack, Kate Champion/Force Majeure’s Already Elsewhere and Bagryana Popov’s Subclass26A.

Welcome

The Editors welcome the many new writers who have been joining RealTime over the last 12 months. Some have emerged from the RealTime-BEAP (Biennial of Electronic Arts Perth) Writers’ Workshop, some are in our mentoring program (a labour intensive business; we’re working our way through the list of patient mentorees), others come recommended by our Contributing Editors and some from the many emerging talents who contact us every month, sending examples of their work and knowing exactly what they want to write about and where it fits in the RealTime scheme of things. As always, a large number of these writers are practising artists. KG

As I spent a week moving between the Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC) and the Adelaide Film Festival, the contrast between the 2 events became stark. While AIDC was all money, funding structures, frenzied networking and industry talk, the AFF was unabashedly a cultural event, complete with gala opening, premieres and international guests. In initiating the festival in 2003, SA Premier Mike Rann set out to differentiate the event from others here and overseas with a film investment fund, allowing the AFF to help produce as well as screen new works. This lent an extra charge to opening night, as the festival unveiled the first feature film made partly with AFF money.

Look Both Ways

Look Both Ways is the debut feature from Sarah Watt, previously known for her darkly original animated shorts. Set in Port Adelaide, the film revolves around the mysterious death of a young man under a train. Rather than constructing a tight linear narrative, Watt’s story follows various characters as they orbit around the man’s death, creating a snapshot of life in an Australian suburban milieu. The camera lingers on the streets, parks and wastelands that characterise the edge of all Australian cities, capturing the sense of Port Adelaide as an in-between zone that’s neither white picket fence suburbia nor dense urban space. The characters also convey a sense of being caught ‘in-between’, trapped in a position of stasis in their private lives and careers.

Look Both Ways is also notable for a degree of formal innovation, with Watt’s background evident in brief passages of animated watercolour fantasies bursting forth from the mind of one of the protagonists. The meditative pace is further punctuated by sequences of rapid fire editing unleashing impressionistic flashbacks. Watt’s mixed approach to film form, the nuanced performances and wholly convincing dialogue make for a quietly evocative film that manages to depict contemporary Australians without ever lapsing into crudely drawn stereotypes.

Documentary

The opening night of the AFF also saw Australian documentary auteur Dennis O’Rourke presented with the Don Dunstan Award for his outstanding contribution to the Australian film industry. Landmines–A Love Story, his latest account of a personal encounter with the world’s dispossessed, premiered at the festival (see p25). The AFF’s other key documentary debut was Cathy Henkel’s I Told You I was Ill: Spike Milligan. As one of the AFF Investment Fund recipients, Henkel’s film received considerable hype and the premiere was a festive affair, with Mike Rann and members of Milligan’s family on hand to introduce the film before a capacity crowd.

I Told You I was Ill was an enjoyable and intimate portrait of the Milligan clan, but I was less convinced it fulfilled Henkel’s promise to “show us a side of Milligan we have never seen before.” The extensive home movie footage was fascinating, but the film as a whole revealed little about the comic that hasn’t been said elsewhere, and the use of animated characters drifting across screen during interviews came over as twee rather than Milliganesque. In the midst of festival fever it was hard to judge the extent to which the film suffered from over-promotion; one of the dangers of an investment fund is the enormous weight of expectation placed on the festival products. In fairness to Henkel, it must also be said that an unfortunate technical problem meant only part of the soundtrack was audible at the debut.

On the international documentary front, one of the most remarkable films was Kim Dong-won’s 3 hour epic Repatriation, detailing the fate of “unconverted” North Korean spies living in South Korea. The film’s subjects were imprisoned in the early 1960s and endured harsh conditions until released in the early 1990s during South Korea’s transition to a civilian government. With no access to support or medical services, and cut off from their homeland, the North Koreans eked out an existence performing menial jobs. When one of them moved into Kim Dong-won’s neighbourhood, the filmmaker began recording their interactions, and the ex-spy introduced him to a wide network of comrades trapped south of the border.

Repatriation is part verité study of individuals caught in the currents of history and part cinematic essay on the tragic history of modern Korea. Having been raised on a diet of rabid anti-communism, Kim initially finds the ex-spies’ devotion to North Korea simultaneously puzzling, endearing and disturbing. Their refusal to countenance talk of North Korean atrocities is troubling, but their treatment by South Korea is hardly an advertisement for capitalist ‘freedom.’ In extended interviews they detail the brutal torture they endured in prison as authorities tried to forcibly convert them. Kim tracks down ex-prisoners who did renounce communism, and in contrast to the proud “yet-to-be-converted” (South Korea’s term for recalcitrant prisoners), finds them deeply traumatised by their betrayal of the socialist cause. Ironically, Kim also finds himself persecuted by South Korean police for talking to the former spies; at one point his office is raided and all footage is confiscated.

Far from being brainwashed ideologues, the ex-spies come across as men of principle, deeply committed to socialist ideals and genuinely distressed by the selfish competitiveness of South Korean society. Their desire to return home was so strong that I found myself dreading the deep disappointment, disillusionment and possible persecution that they would surely endure if repatriated. Eventually they are allowed to return home during a brief period of détente at the turn of the decade, and Kim attempts to visit North Korea to report on their fate. An opportunity to visit Pyongyang as part of a delegation covering official celebrations does arise, but he is prevented from leaving Seoul by South Korean authorities–he is still under investigation for his contact with the North Koreans. A friend is able to make the journey and bumps into the ex-spies as they are being transported to partake in the celebrations. They appear radiantly happy and in markedly better health than the aged, harassed figures we see earlier in the film. The work’s most poignant moment sees one of the men speaking directly to camera, declaring Kim Dong-won to be like a son. “I miss you” he says. In this one scene the entire tragedy of the Korean peninsular falls into focus; like Kim, we feel the yawning chasm of political, cultural, and military barriers separating us from men we have come to know. Repatriation achieves a compassionate humanism without ever sidestepping the complex cultural and ideological divisions that plague post-war Korea.

Machuca

An historical theme was also evident in one of the festival’s feature film highlights: Andres Wood’s Machuca. Dramatising life in Chile’s capital in the months leading up to, and immediately following, the bloody coup of September 11 1973 that deposed Salvador Allende’s elected government, Machuca captured the sense of unrest that characterised the period, and the disquiet Allende’s empowerment of the poor caused Chile’s middle-class. It also doesn’t shy away from portraying the middle class’ complicity in fostering the air of reaction that led to the coup.

Machuca does not, however, demonise the wealthy, nor canonise the poor. One of the film’s most revealing aspects is the middle-class horror at the brutality of the military crackdown when it finally happens, and the extent to which all Chileans suffered under the repression. The film’s portrayal of military violence was a surprise given the still-contested nature of the period in Chile itself. Machuca was Chile’s biggest ever domestic box office hit, perhaps signifying the country is ready to begin exorcising the lingering trauma of the Pinochet years.

Café Lumiere

Finally, on a more peaceful note, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Café Lumiere provided a centre of calm in the festival. A young woman attempts to locate the spaces inhabited by a Tokyo jazz musician of the 1920s which have long since been erased by bombs and redevelopment. Her friend obsessively travels the Tokyo subway, recording its sounds in order to find the system’s ‘essence.’ Hou constructs a beautiful film about space with minimal dialogue and narrative development, and obsessive framing of the highly urbanised environment through which the characters move. Tokyo becomes a network without beginning or end, in which people’s lives casually intersect and move apart in an endless, seemingly random pattern. An intertitle dedicates the work to Japan’s master of on-screen spatial relations, Yasujiro Ozu.

Festival identity

There were many other gems among the sample of films I caught at the AFF; space precludes mentioning all of them. Director Katrina Sedgwick created an innovative program and has worked hard to give the AFF all the trappings of an international festival. It was deeply refreshing to see Premier Rann not only providing financial backing for an Australian cultural event and the making of films under the festival’s aegis, but also lending support through his enthusiastic presence. However, the fact the festival is so closely identified with Rann raises the question of its fate when the Premier eventually leaves office. If the AFF is to succeed in becoming an important date on the international film calendar it needs the kind of sustained support and investment that has seen Pusan become Asia’s key film festival.

How does anyone learn to be a visionary? It’s one thing to make the notion of “visionary filmmaking” a rallying cry, as Peter Sainsbury did in his wonderful 2002 speech (RT53 & 54) urging filmmakers and members of funding bodies alike to take more risks and trust their individual judgement. But it’s quite another for a government organisation to put this philosophy into practice in a systematic way. If you believe the publicity, this is the Australian Film Commission’s aim with their new IndiVision initiative, which draws on the $15 million promised last year by the federal government to fund low budget features.

Besides funds for script development and production, the program incorporates an annual Project Lab (held for the first time in February) where 8 filmmaking teams get to discuss their projects with local and international advisors. According to the AFC’s Director of Film Development, Carole Sklan, one aim of the Lab was to encourage participants to try new approaches, in an exploratory rather than prescriptive fashion. Thus the workshops were accompanied by a touring program of recent international low budget features (most from first time directors) meant to illustrate the range of stylistic and dramatic options possible on a low budget. The blurbs for the screenings even hint that lack of resources can benefit a film by stripping it down to essentials like script, performances and a strong basic concept–though Sklan stresses that it’s films, not just scripts, which are being developed.

Some cracks in the IndiVision approach start to become visible here, and while the screening program was a worthwhile experiment, the actual films shown proved less than inspiring for this viewer. It’s easy to imagine Australian equivalents to Tully (Hilary Birmingham, USA, 2000), or The Station Agent (Tom McCarthy, USA, 2003) but by the same token they don’t add much to the local tradition of understated naturalism. A tasteful heart-warmer about misfits bonding, The Station Agent is the kind of movie where a set piece consists of the main characters taking a stroll along a railway track, eating some beef jerky and coming home (“That was a good walk!”).

Other selections register as more hip but not necessarily more substantial. Heavily reliant on post-production effects and attractive young faces in close-up, Reconstruction (Christoffer Boe, Denmark, 2003) is a lightweight metaphysical enigma, typical of one brand of current European art cinema in its reality shifts and musings on the contingency of love. Stylistically the most thoughtful of the bunch, Mon Tresor (Keren Yedaya, Israel/France, 2004) shows a teenager’s descent into prostitution in long takes that lend a classy austerity to the sordid subject matter. But by the end it’s hard to see what purpose was intended, unless the spectacle of misery is taken to be fascinating in itself.

Asked about the weaknesses of current Australian cinema, Sklan cites “a certain emotional timidity” as a problem to be addressed. “Audiences want to laugh and cry…they want a special, unique, transporting experience.” Though I wholeheartedly agree, her words suggest a potential difficulty with the entire initiative: the ‘visionary’ aesthetic outlined in Sainsbury’s address is basically a refurbishment of modernism, hence reliant on ambiguities that often block easy emotional response. Yet the evasion of direct feeling tends to be experienced by at least some viewers as a betrayal. This may explain why the screening program steers away from the zanier and more wilfully baffling trends in modern film narrative, from Gerry (Gus Van Sant, USA, 2002) to Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand, 2004). As professional performances and well written scripts aren’t priorities in films like these, it’s unclear how far they’d be aided by a craft-based development process, while the maximalism of a film like I Heart Huckabees (David O. Russell, 2004) might be problematic in a different way.

Of course there are approaches allowing filmmakers to combine emotional directness with unobtrusive formal experiment–some of Mike Leigh’s recent films are exemplary here. It’s easy to see why the program flashes back a few years to include Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen (Denmark, 1998), the best-known example of the supposedly gritty, truth-telling Dogma style. But as Lars von Trier’s antics made clear at the time, there was always a satanic side to the Dogma pact. Paradoxically flaunting its lack of artifice, Festen’s camera work mocks the ‘transparent’ innocence of home movies, while its shock-horror revelations remain close to the conventions of the well made play [the post-film stage version of Festen is playing internationally, including Australia in 2005. Eds].

Though this gloating duplicity is undeniably ‘modern’, later works that draw on the Dogma idiom tend to indulge the craving for raw emotion without irony–as in the mawkish if sometimes affecting 16 Years of Alcohol (Richard Jobson, Scotland, 2003), also included in the screening program. Again, it’s hard to see what purpose is served by this emotional button-pushing, apart from “working through” personal trauma which here as elsewhere arises from the family, with broader significance implicit at best. But in a postmodern, anything-goes context, it’s hard to find the shared vocabulary which would even allow such issues to be debated.

More easily discussed are the challenges of economics. It’s little wonder that local filmmakers are reluctant to take risks given the restrictions imposed by low budgets, the difficulty of attracting audiences to any kind of Australian cinema and the ongoing need to locate additional funding sources to stay in the game. Yet in the ever expanding international marketplace there’s no way anyone can sustain an art film career by playing it safe. In Australia today, it takes all the ingenuity of a Rolf de Heer to walk this tightrope, and while his shifts and dodges command admiration it’s questionable whether his movies have gained as a result.

Still, one can hope that the would-be filmmakers who consulted with him at this year’s Project Lab picked up a few tips. As Sklan ruefully admits, whatever can be done to facilitate ‘vision’, everything ultimately comes back to the resources of the individual. “We set up a low-budget initiative but it came from us, the AFC. It should have come from the filmmakers themselves. All we can do is set up the possibilities and say, ‘What do you want to do with them?’”

The next deadline for AFC low budget feature production grants is July 15. Applicants can apply for up to $1 million. The next deadline for the IndiVision workshop and development funding is September 2. The workshop is open to filmmakers of all levels. See www.afc.gov.au for details.

Louise Curham is at the forefront of Australian moving image art. As well known for curating innovative expanded cinema events in non-traditional exhibition spaces as for provocative Actionist performances, Curham is highly regarded in the experimental film world for her work using “obsolete media.” Her hand-worked Super 8 films reinvent the home movie medium of years gone by.

Her new film, Tenho Saudades, showcases Curham’s continuing (some would say consuming) obsession with physical mark-making and intervention in the filmmaking process. The work consists of Super 8 footage which has been subjected to a range of interventions (hand painting and other ‘direct animation’ techniques including scratching, bleaching, and collaging) along with a male voiceover. Some found footage (including a millisecond of a bemused looking Bert and Ernie!) and pieces of optically printed and re-shot film strips are interpolated with treated footage shot in Brazil by collaborator Peter Humble. The layered soundscape carefully juxtaposes various pieces of music–a Bach fugue, Brazilian drumming, club techno–with traffic and street noises. For most of its 18 minutes, the male voice narrates, unusually in the second person, a visiting male performer’s encounter with the gay underbelly of Brazil: “You have a map. In red pen you mark the location of gay clubs. The first one you can’t find. The second one, it’s packed. Groups of guys, drinking, laughing, dancing. Are gay clubs the same all over the world?”

This voice-over may not be to the taste of all avant-garde film lovers. Viewed without the sound, it is certainly pointless to construct much of a narrative from seemingly random images of a South American city collaged with hand-processed film. Screened silent (as many avant-garde films are, to avoid the melodrama inherent in what Stan Brakhage famously termed the ‘grand opera’ of narrativity), the film is–typically of Curham’s work–nothing short of a visual orgasm of sublime colours, textures and forms. The intense sensuality of the bands and strips of film bleeding, weaving and colliding with each other is exquisite, as are Curham’s signature jewel colours–explosions of amethyst, emerald, amber and sapphire, the result of her alchemical explorations in hand-processing.

With the sound added Tenho Saudades joins an international conversation with other experimental films that explore themes of gay identity and interracial romance. It invites comparisons with Karim Ainouz’s Paixo Nacional (1994), a beautiful 16mm film about a young Brazilian man fleeing homophobic persecution in his homeland, intercut with touristic images of Brazil as a land of sexual license. It also brings to mind films by the highly acclaimed German queer artist Matthias Muller, whose works such as The Memo Book (1989) also evoke emotions through complex manipulations of film material and lyrical abstraction.

Contextualising Tenho Saudades in the field of gay experimental film/video, which emphasises masculine subjectivity and formal manipulation, perhaps ameliorates some of the ‘pure film’ concerns about the voice-over, since it functions as an aesthetic genre marker.

Curham famously ‘performs’ her film works with noise orchestras and other musicians, darting between multiple projectors, adjusting them, turning them on and off. This suggests that there may be multiple ways of seeing Tenho Saudades: as a gay experimental film, as an aesthetic object evidencing its maker’s fine art training, and, given its poignant title (which means ‘I miss you’), as a hymn to a dying medium. Whichever way you see it, Tenho Saudades is an extraordinary film.

Tenho Saudades, images by Louise Curham, voiceover written and performed by Peter Humble, 2005

This year’s Festival of German Films presents a culture increasingly engaged with the political, economic, social and personal problems that have emerged in a reunified Germany at the epicentre of the trans-national experiment that is the European Union. The reunification theme is most extensively addressed in Heimat 3, one of this year’s highlights. There are also the latest insider reflections on the Nazi period, controversially addressed in the festival’s other key film, Downfall.

Hitler the human

Directed by festival guest Oliver Hirschbiegel, Downfall (Der Untergang) has been a commercial, if controversial, hit in Germany. This first German account of the last days of the Nazi regime inside the Chancellory bunker has attracted criticism for treating Hitler’s inner circle as ‘human.’ Besides Goebbels (who appears pathological), the military and political leaders surrounding Hitler are recognisably ordinary; they could be the servile, if tense, senior advisors surrounding any multinational’s CEO. Downfall refuses to metaphysically ascribe evil to the Nazi regime. The benefit of such a prosaic portrayal is that Nazism can be seen as an exaggerated playing out of radically regressive elements within other historical and political moments in Western culture, including our own.

Although in theory an important advance, the film tends to overplay its demythologising strategy. While it is valid to undermine a view of the Nazi period which pretends that present-day politicians, business leaders and ordinary people wouldn’t or don’t collaborate with the power elite of the day (no matter how appalling its ideology or actions), the film seems to assume that the only recognisable humanity is a redemptive, ‘positive’ one. Hence there are often overly sympathetic portrayals of Nazi figures, belying their complicity in the horror of Nazism, the war and the Holocaust. Professor Schenk, for example, is portrayed as a selfless medical doctor tending the wounded, even though in reality he was a senior SS and Wehrmacht officer implicated in experiments using Dachau concentration camp prisoners.

The most controversial figure is the seemingly ‘passive’ or even sympathetic witness through whose eyes the film unfolds, Hitler’s 25 year old secretary Traudl Junge. She looks on with blank bewilderment and apparent compassion for her boss as the Nazi facade implodes. The film ends with the real-life aged Junge describing her realisation that ignorance and naivety are no excuse. Meanwhile the presentation of Hitler himself is far more complex, and truly disturbing. As played by master Swiss actor Bruno Ganz, the Fuhrer looks like a fallen hero shaking with Parkinson’s disease and a mercurial temper wrought from the failure of his warped dreams–”a would-be Siegfried who has collapsed into Alberich”, as David Denby puts it, invoking the Wagnerian mythology of power-deformation (The New Yorker, Feb 7, 2005). In a horrible and darkly moving performance this Hitler is both atrocious and almost humorously pathetic.

In the film’s determination to bring Hitler’s regime down to earth, Nazism has never seemed so banal. But while this may resonate with Hannah Arendt’s seminal analysis of evil in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), in Downfall it often seems to result in a kind of subdued reassurance, as yet again we see the 20th century’s central monster resuscitated and satisfyingly killed off. This is emotionally understandable, but seems more the product of fear and ritual catharsis than analytical insight. Downfall is definitely worth seeing and arguing about–it is far preferable for a nation to over normalise or de-mythologise the darkest moment of its history than to re-write or avoid it entirely.

Heimat: intimate epic

Weighty themes are played out on a much larger canvas with the latest instalment of the Heimat series, written and directed by Edgar Reitz. This is the third cycle of Reitz’s films around the theme of 20th Century German cultural identity and ‘heimat’ (the closest English translation is ‘homeland’). The first 2 were released in the 1980s and 90s respectively. Heimat 3–A Chronicle of Endings and Beginnings (Heimat 3–Chronik einer Zeitenwende) comprises 6 films covering the period from 1989 to 2000.

The emphasis is on personal and small-scale layers of social history as the films follow the fortunes of famous conductor Hermann (played by festival guest Henry Arnold) and singer Clarissa, who meet on the night of November 9, 1989–the evening the Berlin Wall came down. They impulsively rekindle an ancient affair and buy an old cottage outside Schabbachm overlooking the Rhine River near the Luxembourg border (Hermann’s fictionalised rural hometown from the first Heimat series). They then set about rebuilding their blatantly symbolic house once occupied by a German Romantic poet. The first film in the series proceeds to set up both the hopefulness and one-sided economic and political reality of a reunified Germany, with East German builders and engineers coming to the West to rebuild the house.

Like its predecessors, Heimat 3’s intimate approach to epic themes is both a central strength and weakness. Sometimes I was yearning for a more ‘big-picture’ context to glean a deeper, more politically engaged historical analysis of post-reunification Germany, but also to nullify criticisms that Reitz soft-pedals the more politically problematic aspects of the notion of ‘heimat.’ Although representing ultra urbane values, Hermann is very tolerant of his family and the village from which he once fled, and his character is rather bland, too perfect. One angst-ridden visit to a brothel accounts for the only time in which he appears anything but a successful yet sensitive, attractive and highly cultured German man who wants to enjoy the bucolic charms of the Rhine Valley when not conducting in the concert halls of Europe. His profession could have been more thoroughly utilised to comment upon Germany’s cultural heritage and the role of art in social, cultural and political change. Then again this may have detracted from Reitz’s rural vision of reconciliatory ‘heimat.’

As it develops, Heimat 3 becomes more adventurous, dark and complex in its intimate yet epic portrayal of post-reunification Germany. While the whole enterprise at times plays out as high-class soap opera, it is definitely worth devoting a day to see these films. The sheer ambition and scope of the entire Heimat series makes for a substantial dramatic engagement with contemporary European history and culture. That such an engagement comes from a filmmaker working in Germany, a modern yet tradition-obsessed country that has been home to the very best and very worst of Western culture, makes for compelling viewing.

While it is not as immediately concerned with reunification as Heimat 3, the union of East and West is also a theme in last year’s most commercially successful German film, Go for Zucker. Directed by Dani Levy, it tells the amusing story of a pious rabbi from the former West Germany who meets his much poorer, ‘Godless Communist’ brother from East Berlin when their mother dies and they have to resolve their differences before her will can be read. Described by the festival as “the first post-1945 German-Jewish comedy made in Germany”, the film offers a humanist, reconciliatory message while making some telling social points about a self-described “loser of reunification.”

Other films to screen at the festival this year include: Agnes and His Brothers, another humanist comedy about siblings (centred this time around sex and politics); Kebab Connection, in which a young Turkish hip-hopper aspires to make the first German kung-fu film; Napola (directed by festival guest Dennis Gansel), the story of 2 boys in 1942 who attend a training school to become elite Nazi soldiers; And I Love You All, a documentary about a Major who worked for the GDR’s Stasi secret police for 20 years; and Música Cubana (produced by Wim Wenders), the semi-fictional tale of the formation of a band made up of younger generation Cuban musicians.

Festival of German Films 05, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra; April 14-May 1

It has become a cliché to describe veteran documentary maker Dennis O’Rourke as a “controversial” filmmaker. He welcomes the tag, but not its negative implication: “In this frightened country of ours, some people use the word controversy as a pejorative term; to me it’s not a pejorative term, it’s the most apt adjective to apply to an artist.” O’Rourke’s record of commercial and artistic success, passion for the art of documentary and ability to speak frankly qualifies him to provide a unique anatomy of contemporary documentary practice.

O’Rourke believes that an aversion to revealing uncomfortable truths lies at the heart of a particular malaise: “Sad to say, most documentary films are bogus. The documentary does attract a certain kind of earnest artist manqué. They’re less concerned about the art, which is where the true revelation can occur, than in being on the right side of things, and making statements to the converted. But what they never allude to and inscribe in their work is the fact that there’s always a contradiction, another side to the story. It’s almost like you’re supposed to be a social worker with a camera.”

After the altercations surrounding The Good Woman of Bangkok (1991) and Cunnamulla (1999), nobody will mistake O’Rourke for a social worker. While his latest work, Landmines–A Love Story, is destined to be less of a hot button film, it remains topical and urgent. It is one of a spate of recent Australian documentaries connected to Afghanistan. Others have including The President versus David Hicks (directors Curtis Levy, Bentley Dean, 2003, RT63, p23), Molly and Mobarak (director Tom Zubrycki, 2003, RT60, p15), Letters to Ali (director Clara Law, 2004, RT64, p20) and Anthem (directors Tahir Cambis, Helen Newman, 2004, RT62, p18). Each of these films tangentially links Australia with the Afghan war or the oppression of the Taliban regime and the consequent refugee crisis.

While O’Rourke likes some of these works, he says they’re different from his because the subjects are “already media types in an external situation”, allowing viewers to still think of Afghanistan “as a place where life is so repressed, and not quite as human as we know it.” In contrast, in Landmines O’Rourke was “able to destroy that whole stereotype of what it means to be an Afghan man and an Afghan woman.” Adhering to a template he has developed over the past 2 decades, mixing intimate portraiture reliant on interviews with observational footage, Landmines evokes a strong sense of personality and place. The film was shot in Kabul immediately after the American invasion of Afghanistan.

On his first day, O’Rourke came across Habiba, a burka clad woman with a prosthetic leg, begging in the streets. Shrugging off his translator’s attempts to divert him, O’Rourke made contact with her. Thus began a collaboration which led into Habiba’s home where she could remove the burka and talk intimately about love, men, family, politics and the day her leg was blown off by a Russian landmine.

According to O’Rourke, he didn’t begin with the intention of having a female protagonist. “I didn’t know what sort of a love story it would be. All I had was the title. I thought that with such an amorphous title it could end up being a triptych, because there’s love of different kinds. The Russian and American military love their landmines, then there’s all the love in ordinary people like the teachers in the de-mining classes.”

Ultimately though, it became Habiba’s film. O’Rourke’s depiction of her is loving, but in no way anodyne. He reveals a feisty, flesh and blood woman who occasionally goes crazy when stuck at home with the kids, gets lippy with a policeman trying to move her on while she begs, and glumly suffers a lecture from a health professional about the need to re-train or find a job. The image presented as the camera pulls back from this final encounter achieves a special resonance-–Habiba’s interrogator and her colleagues are all amputees. It’s a moment that recalls the level of surreal pathos in Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Kandahar (Iran, 2001) when landmine victims rush across the desert to collect limbs parachuting from the sky.

Of all O’Rourke’s work, Landmines… most resembles Half Life, his 1985 film tracing the legacy of American H-bomb tests in the Marshall Islands through a synthesis of interviews, and observational and archival footage. We see Soviet landmines being assembled and laid, surgical operations to save legs torn apart, and US cluster bombs being dropped. Perhaps the most mind-boggling moment, reminiscent of Dr Strangelove, comes when an American military official acknowledges an unfortunate oversight that has seen the US dropping food packages the same colour as cluster bombs. Framing this material with glimpses of mine awareness classes for young Afghans and interviews with Habiba and her husband moves Landmines beyond any narrowly political agenda.

Habiba’s husband Shah, an ex-Mujhadin soldier, is nothing like the conventional image of a rabid ideologue. Like Habiba, he has never been to school and earns a pittance repairing shoes on the street. Yet he is capable of calm reflection on Afghanistan’s history of being traded between, as O’Rourke puts it, “so many dirty hands”, and the responsibility of all parties for the devastation wrought by landmines in his country.

Summing up the film’s appeal, O’Rourke observes: “This couple are so interesting. Wouldn’t you want to have them at your Saturday barbecue? And the sexuality that subsumed that house–they were a sexy couple.” If that’s more compelling than controversial, it was reassuringly provocative to hear O’Rourke say towards the end of our interview that documentary “does attract, especially at the level of academia, a certain level of really anal aficionado.” I’ll wear that like a badge of honour.

Landmines–A Love Story, director and producer Dennis O’Rourke, 2005, distributed by Ronin Films. Landmines premiered at the Adelaide Film Festival in February and will be released in cinemas nationally on May 5.

For artists like myself born in the 1970s, the activities of that decade can seem elusive, utopian and fascinating. Seemingly uncompromised by the pull of the art market, 1970s projects were remarkable for their clarity of intention and simplicity of execution. Concepts travel across time and space to the present, carried only by rudimentary texts and a few grainy black and white photos. The remnants of the processes of artists like Vito Acconci, Valie Export and Stephen Willats continue to inspire current generations who utilise and plunder their work as models for political, aesthetic and social action. But how much do we actually know about what went on? Can we trust the documents left behind?

My own particular interest in the 1970s has recently revolved around a ‘movement’ called Expanded Cinema. I use the term ‘movement’ loosely because, like minimalism or conceptual art, Expanded Cinema describes plenty of different activities in many different countries, and was not always a term used by the artists themselves. However, it is relatively safe to say that Expanded Cinema refers to that field of art in which artists and filmmakers sought to ‘expand’ the terms and conditions of what film could be. In addition, many artists were concerned with making transparent the components of the cinematic apparatus, and creating a live experience with the viewing audience, rather than merely replaying pre-edited footage. In that sense it sits quite comfortably in the company of much avant garde art of the 1960s and 70s which was redefining its own limits: paintings became sculptural and vice versa, and each of these began to incorporate performance, and the merging of art and life. Expanded Cinema, for its part, utilised multiple simultaneous projections, the incorporation of the ambient space (installation) and live performance elements. Thus, Expanded Cinema is a legitimate, although (in this country) little known, precursor to today’s ‘new media’ art.

Many artists who embraced Expanded Cinema, including Anthony McCall, William Raban, Malcolm Le Grice and Valie Export have said that they came to the form as a response to the comparatively stable nature of the Hollywood-run film industry. Le Grice, in a lecture accompanying a recent Export retrospective exhibition in London, referred to the film industry of the 1920s as having “contracted” cinema’s potential. The Expanded Cinema artists saw themselves as restoring the dynamism and experimentation cinema had possessed prior to being standardised in a feature-length narrative form.

The experiments they carried out often involved fragile and ephemeral situations: light bulbs that flashed in front of the screen, puffs of smoke which illuminated the cone of light from the projector, and performances involving ‘mini-cinemas’ utilising the sense of touch rather than sight. Like other manifestations of performance art from the 1960s and 70s, some of these were so specific to time and place that it is impossible to experience them ever again. Many, however, contained certain ingredients–prepared film material and a set of loose instructions–which might enable a re-enactment. It is partly this potential for reproduction which first drew me to Expanded Cinema. Like many Fluxus events, which borrowed from music the concept of the score, I figured it might be possible to re-experience the actual work by carefully following the recipe.

In late 2003 I visited London to meet some UK Expanded Cinema artists and delve into the rather extensive archives kept by David Curtis at the Central St Martins College of Art. I found myself in good company; there has been, in the past 5 years, a growing interest in the idea of re-enactment. Fortunately, many artists associated with the former London Filmmakers Co-op (LFMC), like Raban, Le Grice, Gill Eatherly and Annabel Nicolson, are still very much alive and kicking, and more than willing to participate in the re-presentation of their pieces. In Whitechapel Gallery’s 2000 survey of British art from 1965-75 entitled Live in Your Head, these 4 artists recreated 28 of their Expanded Cinema works from the period (www.whitechapel.org/content382.html). These were documented on digital video and are now in the St Martins archive. For myself, and my collaborator Louise Curham (see p22), these ‘digitally enhanced recipes’ are essential for enhancing our concept of the originals, given that for geographical reasons we were not physically present at the events.

Some exquisite works, sadly, will go to the grave with the artist, and cannot be re-enacted by other artists or archivists. For me, one of the more poignant works in this category is Man with Mirror by Guy Sherwin. In this piece the artist, standing in the beam of a Super 8 projector, holds and tilts a square mirror painted white on the reverse. The mirror/screen reflects back into the room, or catches and reveals the Super 8 footage shot in 1976 showing Sherwin tilting an identical mirror/screen outdoors. As the film is projected, the live performer attempts to ‘mirror’ his own earlier movements, with confounding results. Which is the real Guy Sherwin, which is the projected image? Each time Sherwin attempts to re-enact his own movements from 1976 the passage of time is further marked by his ageing body. As he has written, the work’s “subsequent enactments…have now become a sharply focussed document of transience.” Video Documentation of Man with Mirror is available at www.luxonline.org.uk/work/id/603536/index.html.

Fortunately for us, other pieces can be presented in the absence of the artist. In 2002, film curator Mark Webber hosted a night of English Expanded Cinema at the Melbourne and Brisbane film festivals as part of his Shoot Shoot Shoot program (www.luxonline.org.uk/tours/Mark_Webber/mark10.html; RT51, p33). Webber presented pieces such as Raban’s Take Measure (1973) in which the filmstrip snakes its way through the audience en route to the projector; Anthony McCall’s Line Describing a Cone (1973), a ‘sculptural’ film which draws attention to the projector’s cone of light through the use of smoke; and Castle 1 (1966) by Le Grice which is interrupted/illuminated by a naked light bulb flashing right in front of the cinema screen.

For our part, Louise Curham and I have been experimenting with unauthorised re-enactments of various pieces of Expanded Cinema, including works by Australian artists such as David Perry, at recent Sydney Moving Image Coalition events. Although inevitably peppered with errors and misinterpretations resulting from our geographical/temporal distance from the points of origin, Curham and I believe our re-enactments have (at the very least) educational value, and we have attempted to be true to the spirit of the original works, even where some of the technologies used (16mm film for instance) are no longer convenient or accessible. As Malcolm Le Grice has said, “I have always been interested in technology, but it is the idea of ‘present experience’ which appeals to me more.”

The striking thing about Dreams for Life the first feature film from Melbourne short filmmaker Anna Kannava is the sensual sunniness on the one hand of Firouz Malekzadeh’s cinematography, Jayne Russell’s production design and Zed Dragojlovich’s costuming of the film’s central figure, and, on the other, the monochromatic psychological intensity of this spare 75 minute narrative. The contrast makes for a curious, sometimes compelling dialectic between a closed life and the potential for something more. Like an Eric Rohmer heroine, Ellen (Maria Mercedes) can be at times profoundly irritating, her passion for a lover she has lost, or rejected (“he was a truck driver”), reads like a stubborn commitment to the impossible. She is pursued by and is attracted to his younger brother but resists what looks like a great opportunity, persisting with her waiting to be duly if somewhat strangely rewarded in what might be a happy ending, depending on how you read it. However, unlike a Rohmer ending it’s neither revelatory nor redemptive Ellen remains opaque; interpret her as you will.

Kannava gives her film a leisurely pace, allowing time for highly textured attention to detail–faces, changing patterns of light, Ellen’s collections of shells and art objects. The mood is contemplative, of a state of being quietly played out to its full extent. But there are ample unexplained references to secrets, a death and illicit behaviour hinting at a barely submerged melodrama which sometimes surfaces: having spurned the younger brother, Ellen calls after him “I love you.” But does she? It’s news to us.

I liked the ending for what I took to be sustained pathos; perhaps the filmmaker sees it as happiness. The older brother turns up out of the blue, post-marital breakup, just out of treatment for depression, and falls fully dressed into Ellen’s bed, wordless and exhausted. With a self-satisfied half-smile, Ellen slips slowly into bed after him, doubtless ecstatic that she’s waited for and got the right man. The concentrated duration of the scene places a question mark over that thought. Or does it?

Dreams for Life has enjoyed considerable critical praise and is steadily finding its way into festivals. I found its dialogue awkward, the plotting loaded and Ellen’s opacity too limiting. Gillian Leahy’s My Life Without Steve (1987), a reverie on loss in which no one appears and the objects of a life are surveyed, is for me a more potent meditation on loss. But Dreams for Life certainly has its moments and a visual language to relish. KG

There’s nothing like Super 8 to connote memory. It might be the ubiquity of the form until the 1980s and its recording of younger days. It might be that, as an almost obsolete medium, it belongs to the past. But it’s also inherent in degraded Super 8 film itself; it shows its age, continually threatening disintegration with its graininess, scratches and stilted movements. And in the intensity and saturation of the reds, the blues, the greens, it evokes the selectivity of visual memory.

SBSi’s Homemade History is a series of 13 episodes comprising Super 8 home movies (and one 16mm movie) narrated by those who shot the footage or are in some way related to it. Sourced through advertisements and word of mouth, the films were constructed using footage the owners were discouraged from viewing prior to being interviewed by the Homemade History makers, in order to capture their spontaneous reactions. Some had not seen the films for over 15 years.

As far as history goes, there’s priceless footage and material here: wonderful family gatherings in the Syrian and Maltese communities from the 1960s to 80s; Leon Isakson’s road movie of Dig Richards and the RJays’ 1959 outback tour of Queensland; footage of Noel Elliot and Barry Martin performing their acrobatic Trapinos show in Tokyo, London and Copenhagen in the early 60s; and striking footage of an airport tarmac crowded with wheelchair-bound people waving off athletes on their way to one of the very first Paralympics. There’s also the beauty of the past in its material form: the clothes, the hair, the cars, the vistas, the way people move. We are given glimpses of a democratic history as recorded by those who lived it: an intimate history.

This is not to say that these histories are not subject to treatment. Episodes are deliberately crafted so that the stories reveal themselves. Don Watson’s episode begins with what looks like a family travel movie with Don when he was “rugged and handsome”, pulling the kids along in the water. As the film unfolds we are drawn into the struggle of Indigenous Australians as we return with Don’s mother-in-law to a Queensland station in a very discomforting and saddening moment.

Ken Garrahy’s film also starts quietly; a turning point emerges with the statement “I was always aware I was different.” We begin to realise we are watching rare footage of the social gatherings that grew in a groundswell to the establishment of Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.

The films can be particularly poignant when disjuncture occurs between the image and what we hear. In Joe Gauci’s film we see a boy playing gently with a powder blue budgie. Gauci’s narration tells us this is the last time we see his brother before he dies, aged 14, in a riding accident. Suddenly the story of migration slips: the promise of a better life through hard work is punctured by tragedy and the narrative of migration subverted. In real life things happen differently.

The Super 8 spool, very much shorter than contemporary video tapes, produced a very different kind of recording. Shots were short and usually taken at important or representative moments. In the ordering of material that occurs in Homemade History, footage was edited by the series makers: first an hour long version, then after the interviews, to 5 minutes of carefully constructed footage designed according to the revelations of the interview and the demands of storytelling. However, with these films there’s friction between our tendency and ability to narrate and narrativise our lives, and what happens on screen. Mary Wilkinson’s footage of cats was, she says, originally meant to form a story but, “no possible way…it’s just cats.”

The only 16mm footage is older, taken by Les Petty some 30 years prior to Super 8’s introduction. Featuring Doncaster (now suburban Melbourne) as a farming district, there are remarkable shots showcasing the era and its rural life. The film features quite stunning, classically composed scenes. It looks professional, which again alerts us to the democratic nature of Super 8: it’s grainy, amateur, intimate, hand-held and imperfect.

Homemade History, director Robert Herbert producer, Sophie Jackson, Arcadia Pictures, broadcast Feb 3-March 31 on SBS

Despite persistent rumblings from the scientific community that our brains are mutating, and the cries of long-suffering commuters forced to endure infuriating, one-sided conversations, it seems that mobile phones are here to stay, with global handset sales predicted to reach 730 million in 2005. The latest must-have gadget for consumers is the ‘3G phone’, or third-generation wireless phone, designed to receive and send high-speed multimedia. Its popularity has increased as handsets have become cheaper, with bigger screens and better cameras. The incredible uptake of ‘moblogging’ has also fuelled sales. The humble blog has evolved into the ‘moblog’ (mobile web log) which allows people to instantly publish texts, photos and videos online from anywhere, at anytime, using nothing more than mobiles connected to the internet (moblogs.com.au/). Moblogs, 3G phones and other technologies that allow easy creation and publication of media are pushing a phenomenon called Life Caching, defined by Trendwatching.com as: “collecting, storing and displaying one’s entire life, for private use or for friends, family, even the entire world to peruse” (www.trendwatching.com/trends/life_caching.htm).

Art as content

This new trend has left telcos with wallets bulging and an eagerness to take advantage of the growing demand to create and consume ‘mobile content.’ But it’s not only the commercial sector that’s getting excited. The potential for making art designed for or using mobile phones was recognised early by artists. Sections of the business community are now looking at this art as potential downloadable content. Nokia for example has a ‘Connect to Art’ site where consumers can download works by artists such as Nam June Paik straight to their mobiles.

Watching artists and telco marketing executives happily mingling at the Mobile Journeys forum in Sydney, I had the feeling I was watching 2 worlds collide. There was definitely something in the air, that distinct whiff that often accompanies new media and its colonisation by various interest groups. Perhaps mobile technology will be the catalyst for that ever elusive link between media artists and a permanent income stream? Money was certainly on everyone’s mind judging by the chatter overheard during forum breaks. One artist to another: “People are making mobile phone web sites in Japan and being paid 80% of every download profit by their telco. There are over 44 million mobile subscribers there; can you imagine the money you could make if you made a cool site?” One telco executive to a marketing executive: “In Japan there are over 44 million imode subscribers all paying download costs to their telco NTT docomo. Imagine the dollars we could make here if we could just harness some decent content.”

Art as an earner

The-phone-book Limited is a UK group determined not to let commercial interests monopolise the mobile revolution. Their mission is to educate artists on how to create innovative content for mobile phones and maybe make a dollar while they’re at it. Ben Jones and Fee Plumley of the phone-book were recently invited to Australia to participate in a series of interstate forums and workshops by The Mobile Journeys Consortium, a group of not-for-profit bodies interested in developing mobile content skills in Australia. Having attended one of the phone-book’s Sydney ‘Making Movies’ workshops organised by dLux media arts, I can tell you their enthusiasm for mobile-phone art is infectious! The workshop’s participants could only watch bleary eyed as Fee and Ben launched into high gear at 9am on the first day, so excited about sharing their goals for sustainable mobile technology artistic practice that they completely forgot to do their planned ‘get to know you’ exercise. Their approach to teaching mobile content creation was direct, practical, fast paced, accessible and fun.

“Right now is the perfect time to experiment, while the area is still yet to be fully developed”, Fee enthused. “It’s like a chicken and the egg situation”, Ben suggested, “people think there’s no market for their content, but sometimes there’s no market because there is no content being produced yet.” One of the phone-book’s key tenets is that the mobile platform is a new interactive display format, different from cinema, television, video and computers. It needs new content created specifically for its particular parameters. “It just doesn’t make sense to re-purpose old materials”, said Ben, “mobile video must have its own grammar!” He suggested we are at a point similar to the beginnings of cinema, before film’s grammar was standardised.

Phone art manifestations

Film festivals have begun including sections for mobile-movies in their programs (eg Adelaide and St Kilda Film Festivals) and numerous ‘mobile’ art exhibitions, festivals and ‘locative media’ events are being held worldwide, including last year’s ISEA with its themes of networked, wearable and wireless experience (RT63, pp34-35). ISEA2004’s introduction declares that “mobile devices are turning from communication media to become expressive media, sites for arts, social engagement, and…entertainment.”

Mobile phone art (like new media art) is diverse. The term covers many modes of art practice and is not necessarily used by all artists to describe their work. It includes art made using the mobile phone handset as a production tool but not necessarily for exhibition on mobile phones. The most obvious example in this category is camera-phone photography and video, but it also includes ring-tone creations such as Dialtones, A Telesymphony by Golan Levin (USA), a concert in which sound is produced by choreographed dialing and ringing of the audience’s mobile phones. There is also art using the emerging language of text messaging. KeyPadPomes by Australians Lucas Ihlein and notsusan involved the collection of hundreds of incoming and outgoing SMS poems which were then transcribed and hand typeset before being silk-screened onto cardboard, cut into postcards and hand distributed with a mobile phone number attached so more messages could be collected for a growing archive. This work explores the intersections between old and new writing technologies and asks how the ‘miniature space’ of SMS text messaging informs and alters our used of language.

Mobile phone art also encompasses works made using other media that are then exhibited or distributed on mobile phones, such as games, music, screen-savers and mobile-movies. Mobile or micro-movies are often made with high quality film and video production values and then downsized for tiny mobile screens. Mobile phone art also entails large installation works like Phonetic Faces by Jonah Brucker-Cohen (USA), which allowed people to contribute their own digital photos to a public video display, and then influence the dynamic collage of mixed images using their mobiles.

Mobile phone technology is used in mixed reality gaming, as seen in works by Blast Theory (RT60, p26) and is prevalent within ‘Locative Media’, an emerging field of creative practice that explores place, location and social networks using portable, networked and location-aware devices (such as mobile phones) to create social interfaces and artistic interventions. Examples can be seen in the social experiments of Aware (Finland), who were also recently in Australia as part of Mobile Journeys.

Beyond the handset

My own favorite form of mobile phone art escapes the constraints of the handset and moves into the cityscape, enveloping remote and local participants inside socially networked yet anonymous performative actions and architectural installations. Blinkenlights (2001-2003) by the Chaos Computer Club (Germany) transformed a building in Berlin’s Alexanderplatz into a giant interactive screen. Each of the building’s windows was made into a pixel using lights turned on and off by computer. People were able to send text messages or play a game of ‘pong’ on the huge screen using their mobile phones. Blinkenlights created a deep sense of community and local pride in the downtown Berlin area; a huge party had to be organised so the “friends of Blinkenlights” could farewell their beloved installation.

Amodal Suspension, Relational Architecture 8 (2003) by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (Mexico/Canada) was another large-scale, city-based work utilising mobile technology. During November 2003 people could send short text messages to each other using a mobile phone or web browser. The messages were then intercepted and encoded as a flashing light beam sequence using 20 massive, robotically controlled searchlights. Over 10,000 messages were sent and the project had over 400,000 online visitors from 94 different countries during a single month of operation. The sheer volume of public participation turned the sky over Japan’s YCAM Center into “a giant communication switchboard.” This light show could be observed locally, as a video or as a series of still images on a networked screen.

Sky Ear (2004) by Usman Haque (UK) is a mesmerisingly beautiful, event-based work that consists of 1,000 floating helium balloons, each one embedded with a mobile phone and 6 coloured LED lights. Enclosed in a huge net attached to the ground with long cables, the balloons are allowed to float into the sky forming a giant glowing cloud. Each balloon’s phone listens out for electromagnetic waves, communicating these signals to other balloons using infra-red technology. This causes fluctuating patterns of undulating colour to sweep across the balloon network. Viewers can use their phones to dial into the cloud and listen to the sounds of the sky. In doing so they change the electromagnetic environment, which in turn affects the colour and brightness of the balloons.

These art works explore the simultaneously public and intimate characteristics of mobile messaging. They scratch the surface of what’s possible with mobile phone art and related technologies. Each work allows the public to directly and discreetly participate in a dynamic visualisation of the information network that has infiltrated every aspect of our lives.

More information about Mobile Journeys and FutureScreen Mobile can be found at: www.mobilejourneys.com and www.dlux.org.au.

Building on festival themes of previous years, transmediale.05 set out to explore the ethico-aesthetic contours of digital technologies. The festival’s theme–‘basics’–operated as a sort of equivalence for real needs beyond the bare conditions of life in a world increasingly permeated with digital techniques of organisation, reproduction, control and expression. But as noted by Florian Cramer, chair of the conference on basic security, there’s no such thing as a basic concept of security. Nor can there be an operative concept of basics. Any concept of security co-exists with its dialectical other; insecurity. As Konrad Becker, Wendy Chun and McKenzie Wark unravelled the diverse and often contradictory means and precepts by which security takes form, it became clear that complexity more accurately encapsulates the diverse conditions, institutions and practices that underpin life within information societies and media cultures.

It was with a sense of complexity that I encountered the festival as a whole. Since 2002, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures)–referred to with a kind of sceptical fondness by Berliners as ‘the pregnant oyster’–has been transmediale’s principal venue, with other events staged throughout the city. The 5 day festival comprised screenings, conferences, lectures, exhibitions, performances, workspaces and workshops. My technique of engagement consisted of impulsive wandering. Here’s a sample of the work encountered.

Taking the opening line of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-philosophicus as its title, Eva Teppe’s digital video Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist (The world is everything that is the case) appears a study of accumulating horror. Bodies cascade from an undetermined height. The fall of women, children and men slowly pass by the steady frame of the camera. Their transient clarity is offset against the soft blur of figures in the background. This is the world as it appears. And herein lies the ambiguity that haunts the sense of veracity so frequently attributed to optical devices. I wondered if this was footage I hadn’t seen from the collapse of the Twin Towers. The artist’s statement functioned as a corrective: this was reworked TV footage of Spanish athletes engaged in that peculiar hobby of constructing human pyramids. What I took to be a descent toward nasty injury, if not death, was something far less ominous: these were bodies caught in the moment of collapse. Here we find it is not the digital media form that is unstable so much as the mediation of perception.

While the text demystified Teppe’s video, it had the obverse effect on Thom Kubli’s installation Stationsraum für Assimilativen Zahlwitz. Ten amber coloured gelatine cubes with concave sides are laid out in 2 rows in the middle of a small white room. Each cube is about 10cm square, their translucent mass enclosing an assortment of what look like rotting organs. I’m reminded of jars of formaldehyde containing mutant babies, preserved brains and frog stomachs that I once saw at les Galerie d’Anatomie Comparée et de Paléontologie in Paris. Upon closer inspection, there appeared to be a half-crushed, aluminum-like speaker component partially encased in silicon supports. “Eins, zwei, drei…”–the cubes are counting to 10. They never stop.

I read the exhibition blurb in the catalogue: “An interactive audio installation… the speaker whizzes past you…step back…the shock wears off…don’t get too close!” So where’s the interaction? When am I going to be blasted? I retreat to the safety of the nearest white wall. As I edge around I hear the sound of doors creaking open, slamming shut, voices wailing, instructions or commands being issued. I’m becoming increasingly anxious as I wait for the ‘interactive’ component to kick in. I test the release of sound against my movements. I can’t detect any motion sensor at work. I place my ear close to a cube. I’m genuinely puzzled. A few people enter the installation and proceed to repeat more or less the same routine. Perhaps the installation’s malfunctioning.

Frustrated, I re-read the catalogue. Amazing–I’ve been reading the wrong exhibition statement! In fact, I’m supposedly listening to “atmospheric sounds from a psychiatric ward.” Mistaking the text made for a substantially different and, as far as I was concerned, much more interesting encounter. I probably would have spent a fraction of the time with the work had I matched it with the correct entry.

Run Motherfucker Run! provided an interactive experience in a most literal and basic sense. A large screen is located in front of a moving conveyor belt. A jogger is required to activate the screen. One of 2 possible scenic options is selected by moving to one side of the conveyor belt and accelerating toward the screen. I start off with a jog through dockyards at night. Street lights illuminate the alley. I pass a ship waiting for crates to be loaded. I’m starting to enjoy the rhythm of movement. I’m supposed to be able to “explore the movie” and “experience a thriller-like adventure”, but it seems I can only ever run in a straight path. This is not an embodied version of Grand Theft Auto. The scene ends and I’m required to jog to one side of the conveyor belt in order to make the next selection. I avoid the Olympic stadium running track.

A wonderfully uncoordinated jogger takes my place. Her movements express uncertainty, hesitation and physical ineptitude. After 5 minutes of stuttering from one side of the running platform to the next, never quite managing to sustain the necessary speed to fully activate either possible scene, the screen and conveyor belt simultaneously pack it in. Superb. An exemplary “fuck you!” moment. Realistic and nausea-free as this virtual reality experience is, ultimately it doesn’t amount to a lot more than a heavy-tech, low-option arcade game. Artist-designer Marnix de Nijs opted out of exploring the sonic possibilities offered by this kind of installation.

Untitled 5 by US artist Camille Utterback was one of 3 co-winners of the transmediale Award competition. I pass by a large chinoise-expressionistic style picture of flowers on a wall with a soft rectangular light in front of it. When I return, a child is gently moving in a random manner across the blank surface of the lit floor. He watches the data projection on the wall. His movements are a catalyst for the algorithmic expansion of roots, tentacles, cells, lines and brush strokes of colour. I’m fascinated. I enter the light and shuffle about. I’m mesmerised watching the mutable textures of light respond to the sweeping gestures of my feet. There’s a distinct correspondence between this installation and what I take to be its precursor: the brilliantly annoying Etch-a-Sketch toys popular in the 1970s. But unlike the now kitsch apparel of self-absorbed youth culture, the generative system of Untitled 5 is not based on movement alone; stasis too registers as transformation in the organic composition of the digital image.

The problem with international art events like transmediale.05 is the tendency for projects to become abstracted from the conditions in which they were initiated. This isn’t a claim for the virtues of authenticity or a valorising of origins. Abstraction, after all, operates as a plane of expression. But as with any abstraction, the noise-signal ratio is altered. This can often be the case for politically and socially motivated projects such as Public Netbase (www.t0.or.at) and the Disobedience and Hack.It.Art partner exhibitions. Such a predicament is amplified with an event like transmediale, which declares an interest in the basic sociality of media culture but doesn’t go beyond the social occasion of the festival itself. However, transmediale.05 was many things. The performances, conferences, installations and the seemingly impromptu Salon and projects in the Basement ensured that this was a festival in which the symmetry between experience and production was frequently internal to the temporal rhythms of the event.

Mark Cypher, Biophilia (2004), interactive semi-immersive environment, courtesy of the artist

Paul Thomas, Director of the Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth (BEAP) and BEAPworks curator, wants industry to include artists “as part of their creative team on research projects.” This seems a humble ambition at a time when artists are increasingly requiring ‘code-bearers’ and software developers to provide the technical know-how that will turn their ideas into realities. Perhaps Thomas’ approach is a creative response to the current financial reality of limited funding, particularly for new media artists. The cultural capital artists may lend to industry and to researchers in other disciplines is certainly evident in BEAPworks. The works have come from a research and development grant program facilitated by BEAP with ArtsWA, showcasing 6 projects at the John Curtin Gallery as part of the 2005 Perth International Festival of the Arts.

The Little Optimum, created by Cam Merton, with Yvette Merton, is insidious in its socio-political commentary and perhaps an exemplar of the aims of BEAPworks. On the wall of the installation is an animation with enough well mown green grass, white picket fence and neighbourly conversation to make any Tidy Town proud. From the unsettling familiarity of a ‘puke’ coloured ‘well-loved’ couch I watch two men talking in drawling American accents. It’s a little like watching American male versions of Kath and Kim. I laugh and I cringe. Not that it’s really a dialogue. No real communication occurs, but as long as some kind of clumsy social agreement is achieved, it doesn’t matter. Cars drive past. Neighbours barbecue, mow their lawns, clean their fences. The conversation changes with environmental pressures. A weather vane displays the various directions of ‘intolerance’, ‘paranoia’ and ‘obsession’ dictated by real time wind data gathered from a gallery mounted anemometer. When I revisit the work I feel frustrated at not hearing the same conversation. I have no control over the content. I can only watch and listen from the couch as an unseen force affects the animated neighbourhood.

From the sensoring of meteorology we move to biology, where it’s goldfish calling the shots. Jo Law’s re:-, with 3D compositions by Hilary Bunt and Raoul Marks, re:-creates the grammar and subject matter of Marcel Proust. As I sit in the installation space, commas seem to form between the 3 large screens. On the central one, there’s a black and white magnified view of the goldfish swimming in the tank behind me. I experience a moment of disorientation as I see the back of my head pictured among the fish. On the screen to my left a hand holding a pencil writes, “Is there a history you wish to retrace?”, “Is there a decision you wish to revisit?”, and so on. Paradoxically, the sensored movement of the goldfish in the tank is responsible for these prompts to memory. Sometimes the fish swim more vigorously, initiating a series of unfinished questions. It feels like interrupted thought. The screen on the right moves through a virtual urban landscape: buildings, car parks, trains. It seems familiar. Sometimes I hear traffic or footsteps. At other times the sound of rain fills my ears. Proust and other references aside, the immersive aesthetic of re:- is totally diverting: unsuspecting gallery visitors may arrive late at their next appointment.

Cynthia Verspaget assimilates the audience’s virtual travels into the terrain of Terrasinda (RT63, p25). The audience is also tracked as they enter Creation by Nina Sellars in collaboration with Iain Sweetman and Gareth Lockett. Viewer movements and sounds activate 3 figures on the screen. The confines of the body are challenged as wireframe versions covered in drawn ‘skin’ merge and re-merge. In Cat Hope’s Pickpocket a gilt picture frame surrounds a surface of dense grey foam holding rows of silver recording devices–consumer end ‘readymades.’ These 48 devices play in no discernable order, leaving the audience to track the sound as it moves from one device to another. More than the ears are active in Mark Cypher’s Biophilia. I watch 2 audience members move about on mats in front of a large white screen. Their onscreen shadows are joined by projections of growing, plant-like phallic shapes. Sometimes they emerge from the arms or shoulders, at other times the head. It’s a little like Day of the Triffids in there.

It’s heartening to see these research projects shown in an established Perth gallery otherwise increasingly inaccessible to local postgraduate students. There is comfort too in knowing that even as those fish swim and neighbours shoot the breeze that we can already look forward to the next round of BEAPworks in 2005.

BEAPworks, curator Paul Thomas, John Curtin Gallery, Perth Festival, Feb 11-Jun 12

George Poonkhin Khut is an electronic media artist whose immersive sound installations have been exhibited in Australia and the UK. The acclaimed video installation, Nightshift, created with dancer Wendy McPhee was exhibited at Arnolfini (Bristol, UK) as part of the Breathing Space exchange program with Performance Space and PICA (see www.georgekhut.com). Khut is presently engaged in post-graduate research at the University of Western Sydney School of Contemporary Art, creating installations using biofeedback–the process of electronically measuring changes within the body and displaying these to the person being observed so they can learn to influence the behaviour being measured. Cardio-morphologies was installed at Performance Space, July 21-Aug 7, 2004.

Khut’s new biofeedback-based work, Drawing Breath, will be shown at Sydney’s Gallery 4A, April 14-May 14. Later this year it will be part of a touring concert program of the same title with The Song Company in a selection of motets, madrigals and contemporary songs, from Ockeghem to Oxygène–and the breathing rhythms of the audience.

Skin

My father came here in the 60s from a Chinese family in Malaya. My mother’s family is Anglo-Celtic Australian, and it was through her that I gained most of my early exposure to contemporary art. [Dad’s] been practicing martial arts since childhood, so there’s been an awareness of mind-body interconnections via the various internal energy and self-cultivation approaches implicit in traditional martial arts techniques.

Yes, and encouraging me to do so as well but I just didn’t have the fighting spirit! I went to Kung Fu classes every week, for many years. It’s only recently that I’ve started to get some glimpse into the significance of some of these techniques. There was also an understanding that meditation and related traditions of self-cultivation were a part of our East Asian cultural heritage and something to be proud of.

Our family culture was essentially atheist, though as time went on, it grew to include an element of ancestor worship. Although my sister and I were both educated in Christian schools, there was an open hostility towards traditional Western mythology–original sin, a God that answers your prayers, going to heaven or hell when you die, or bodily functions being somehow sinful. I think things like this really sowed the seeds for my present interest in how we represent and ‘practice’ our embodiment.

Breath

I moved to Sydney [from Tasmania] in 2001 and intentionally immersed myself in a creative crisis. I thought ‘If I’m going to do this [art practice] it better be worth my time and energy!’ I wanted to work with very basic physical materials, in a very minimal way, being very inspired at the time by artists like Wolfgang Laib and James Turrell. But I was also deeply interested in the suggestive power of electronic sound: trance-like ritual practices and the altered states of consciousness they can induce. I was also reading about fringe media practices like accelerated learning techniques, subliminal advertising and brain-wave biofeedback–the various ‘back door’ approaches to subconscious exploration. Biofeedback interaction seemed to combine both these interests very neatly.

I looked though a listing of biofeedback practitioners in New South Wales and sent out an email to all of them asking for help with learning about biofeedback! Dana Adam of the Active Learning Centre responded and enabled me to try a variety of biofeedback interactions out at her clinic. I had initially proposed working with brainwave biofeedback but it’s hard to get psychologists and psychiatrists to say on record that it’s completely safe without appropriately qualified supervision. They recommended breath and heart rate biofeedback as a safer option, and one that sat well with my interest in more ‘whole of body’ approaches like breath-based meditation. There has already been a lot of art work developed from the 70s up to the present exploring brainwave biofeedback. The idea of breath and heart centred interactions seemed relatively unexplored, and I was interested in the contributions these functions make to our overall experience and self-image.

I realised that with my early work Pillow Songs (RT24, p46) I was very interested in how people respond when they are lying horizontally in a darkened space. Later I learned that just lying down will tend to increase parasympathetic nervous system arousal [our internal rest-relax-regenerate reflex]. I’ve been interested in how various cultural practices intuitively involve this process of parasympathetic arousal. I’m thinking here about devotional practices such as prayer, chanting, meditation and trance-dancing, and the kinds of ritual architectures designed to accommodate these activities–the effect these practices have on your cardio-respiratory state, and the role of these unificatory experiences at a bio-social level.
George Khut, Drawing Breath (detail)

What are unificatory experiences?
Experiencing your self as deeply connected to a larger reality, that ‘all of nature speaks to me’ feeling. It’s curious that these sorts of experiences are usually taboo in contemporary arts practice–we tend to annex them off to dance parties, yoga classes or chronic illness treatment programs.

The gist of my doctorate proposal to UWS was “how do you develop multimedia systems that in some way enable people to navigate through their bodily experience?” For me personally it was also a response to the disembodying qualities of a lot of popular virtual reality iconographies–this idea that we will download ourselves into a computer and do away with our bodies forever.

This [biofeedback] technology provides a point of entry into aspects of bodily experience in an age when so much of our body is being left out. I’m exploring some of the functionalities we see in Eastern traditions, in a way that feels authentic to me. Rather than importing some exotic taxonomy for mind-body inquiry and cultivation, could we attempt to develop cultural practices from our own personal and immediate experience of ourselves? Biofeedback is a tool that trains our ability to sense and respond physically to our experience of the world. As an artist, I have to ask ‘how do I connect these sensations and abilities to my existing mix of cultural histories and practices?’ I’ve recently been studying the Feldenkrais Method of sensory-motor education, and it’s had a significant impact on the direction of my work. These kinds of ‘somatic’ methodologies have developed very concrete ways of investigating mind-body organisation and the body, based on lived personal interactions.

Biofeedback enables us to work with categories of experience that aren’t easily accessed by representational or symbolic forms of communication. By consciously eschewing symbolic imagery and representation…artists can foreground the physical presence of the observer. The observer’s perceptual system becomes the figure against the void-like ground of the design of the work.

Immersion

My interest in immersion relates to this process of foregrounding your own perceptual processes–processes that are usually taken for granted. Sure there’s the whole VR tradition where you immerse yourself in a panoramic imaginary landscape/narrative, but personally I’m more interested in the processes taking place inside the participant.

What I find challenging in a work like your Cardio-morphologies is that it takes some degree of training and commitment to move past the interface and achieve the full body immersion.

In terms of the interface design [by John Tonkin], you’re building an instrument and it does require some skill from the user. At the same time, I have been struggling with the idea that these works are instruments that people then express themselves through. I’m much more interested in people learning to listen to the voices of their own bodily experience, which is such a rare event in our culture.

My main expectation would be that the audience give the work some time–half an hour to 40 minutes is ideal. And a big part of what I’m doing in this work is saying there are experiences and forms of understanding that won’t unfold in 5 minutes, and there are forms of understanding and communication which can’t take place in a normal symbolic/language centred context. I want to make the learning phase [for Cardio-morphologies] shorter and let people feel confident to make correlations–which is pretty fundamental to effective biofeedback. It must be clear to the audience ‘oh that’s my heart, and that’s it changing’, and I have to manage that in terms of interface design.

Affect

People say ‘why is this art? Why not do it in a yoga studio?’ My response to this is that in presenting this work in an art gallery I’m placing that experience in a context that invites a certain spirit of inquiry and speculation–I hope. My understanding of art is that it provides people with ideas about other ways they can ‘be in the world.’

So your work is purely formalist in that it’s not about content or subject matter?

No not really. I would say that its subject is not a subject that we are used to considering as ‘subject’–that is, ourselves and our own somatic being. And maybe it’s time we started to consider that as a subject. Part of the tradition of our Western mind-body split is the separation of subject from object whereas most contemporary philosophy and psychophysiology refutes this separation. So how do we start to acknowledge that in terms of our cultural practices and representations?

Find