Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

June 2006

June and July offer multiple sonic extravaganzas across Australia. The new festival on the block is Sounds Unusual happening June 8-25 featuring 13 multi-platform events in venues and sites all over Darwin. Highlights include Touch the Sound—2 evenings of sound based film works at the Deckchair Cinema including Philip Brophy’s Aurévélateur project (see RT 72, p21); improvised and electronic performance evenings with local and interstate artists including Jim Denley, Ross Bolleter, Tos Mahoney, Philip Samartzis and singing saw player J9 Stanton; a symposium at Charles Darwin University; installations at Darwin Visual Arts Association, 24 HR Art and the NT Centre for Contemporary Art; an outdoor surround sound concert at the Old Town Hall Ruins; Off The Page with sound poet Amanda Stewart and local speakers; and all this topped off with an appearance by Japanese artists K.K.Null. www.soundsunusual.com

Infiltrating the east coast is Liquid Architecture 7, feauring Erik M from the “new generation of French musique concrete,” Greg Davis (Kranky/Carpark labels), Jeph Jerman field recordist and atmospheric musician, Martin Baumgartner beat deconstructionist from Switzerland and Dean Roberts from New Zealand, as well as a plethora of Australian artists including Ross Bencina—creator of the innovative Audio Mulch software, Donna Hewitt, Speak Percussion and Fabre Castell. Presented by RMIT Union Arts sound art collective ((tRansMIT)) in partnership with interstate promoters and venues Liquid Architecture starts in Brisbane June 30 – July 1, followed by Sydney July 5 – 9, Cairns July 13, Townsville July 14, rounding off in Melbourne July 13 – 16. www.liquidarchitecture.org.au

The 2006 ACMC (Australian Computer Music Conference) is hosted by The Elder Conservatorium, Adelaide. Under the theme Medi(t)ations: computers, music and intermedia, this years conference will feature presentations, workshops, artist talks and an extensive performance program exploring the inter-relations between computer-based musics and other artforms. Keynote speakers include klipp.av (Fredrik Olofsson + Nick Collins) who explore interactive and generative processes to create audiovisual performance allowing for improvisation and input from the performance location; and Australia’s own academic, writer and artist Mitchell Whitelaw. With onsite concerts co-ordinated by Stephen Whittington and off-site events by Michael Yuen (Project1-3, see RT72, p29), it looks well worth the jaunt to SA. http://www.acma.asn.au/

On the regional front, members of Central Victoria’s undue noise collective will be in residence at Allan’s Walk Artist Run Space Inc, Bendigo inlcuding Jacque Sosdell’s s-edition (s for silence) exhibition May 28 – June 17 and a performance evening June 17. www.allanswalk.com

And if you’re wandering around Sydney in June you may encounter TERMINUS 2006 curated by Clare Lewis with installations secreted into public spaces including work by David Haines at Central Station Tunnel, James Lynch at World Square, Haymarket, Caroline Rothwell at First Fleet Park, Circular Quay. The Postal Project by Jay Ryves can be found around Redfern/Waterloo and Michelle Outram’s Not the Sound Bite will be at Speaker’s Corner, The Domain which also includes performances Saturdays and Sundays 11-3pm in June. www.terminusprojects.org

RealTime issue #73 June-July 2006 pg. 39

Ian Haig, The Dirt Factory

photo Andrew Curtis

Ian Haig, The Dirt Factory

Innovative, insightful, significant. These are some words that may come to mind when thinking about the appellations artists crave to hear about their work. Ian Haig, it seems, is an exception to the rule. For Haig, revolting barbarous and shameless would appear to be favorites in the ultimate lexicon of recognition. During the exhibition of his most recent work, The Dirt Factory, he was the recipient of that most sought after grail, a full page of free publicity in the Melbourne Herald Sun, courtesy of our lyrical orator of all things cultural, journalist Andrew Bolt. The scourge of artists and cultural funding bodies, Bolt pilloried Haig in his inimitable “your taxes paid for this” style of bellicose belle lettrism. The excremental theme of The Dirt Factory clearly wasn’t to Bolt’s taste and after describing how Haig’s work stinks, he likened him to a pig frolicking in its own filth. Art, it seems, must always be uplifting and enlightening, steering away from the darker less palatable realities of the human condition. If Haig is indeed a pig, then he is in good company. One of the greatest artists of abjection is also of the porcine family, by name Francis Bacon. Not to mention those other spurned artists who have plumbed the depths, among them Samuel Beckett (whose centenary was celebrated last month), Shakespeare and Dante. I took some time out to wallow in the mire.

The Dirt Factory continues the theme of a number of your recent exhibitions, such as Sick at Conical Gallery in Melbourne.

The Dirt Factory is a development of some of the ideas I explored in Excelsior 3000, Super Interactive Toilets [2001]. However with this new project I have tried to push the idea of the body a lot further into a more perverse, psychopathological realm of abject material like dirt and shit. I’m interested in dirt as transformative material, as a metaphor for bodily decay and uselessness.

I like the fact that The Dirt Factory is kind of ugly and fucked up. It needs to be because the material I am dealing with in the exhibition looks at the story behind Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, which is quite strange. Dr John Harvey Kellogg was obsessed with the proper functioning of one’s bowels and there are parallels with that and the whole contemporary detox industry; this idea of cleansing and cleaning as a kind of transformation of the body. Philip Samartzis did the soundtrack for the show, with a soundscape of the human body as a form of plumbing. So in addition to the sound, there are lots of drawings, animations and various installations.

While these are familiar themes in your work, The Dirt Factory and Sick also evidence a rather dramatic shift in your practice away from interactive media to mixed media installation, with a strong emphasis on drawing; in other words, low tech, hand-made media.
Ian Haig

Ian Haig

I’ve always drawn. Most of my installations began as drawings first. Over the last 5 years I’ve been incorporating drawing into various exhibitions. I’ve always worked across media and I am interested in hybridity in a pluralistic and expanded sense. It’s really more about what services an idea at a particular time. This new body of work is exploring notions of fanaticism, so it seemed crude sculptures and drawings would be well suited to such a theme.

Everyone likes to classify artists, maybe this is prescribed from the way cultural funding works in Australia: you’re either a visual artist, a performance artist, a media artist or a video artist. I’ve never subscribed to these categories. I am an artist; when I am drawing I am the same artist as when I am making an interactive installation or when I am making a video or whatever. Working across media you challenge that classification, so no one really knows what you are, which I like, in a perverse way.

Does this shift away from interactive media reflect an attitude to the concept of interactive art?

Interactive art is really about foregrounding the control the artist has over the user. In this sense interactivity is really a fiction I think. I have always found the notion of choice in interactive media quite odd. It’s art, not online shopping. As an artist I want to impose my aesthetic and sensibility onto people, I don’t want them to have a choice about it. My take on interactivity, therefore, has been very different from other artists. I’ve always tried to screw with it a bit as I had problems with this whole idea of a digital imperative, of technology and the computer leading the art. This new work is a bit of a break from that.

You’ve raised the thorny issue of arts funding in Australia. What is your sense of the current state of media art, from a curatorial and institutional perspective?

Media art exhibitions can appear like a Sony showroom. It’s often about a ‘sophisticated’ and tasteful aesthetic experience with video works exhibited on plasma screens and interactive works that sometimes look more like demonstrations of software. It’s become more about interior design and presentation. I can’t help thinking this excludes more challenging and experimental ideas in media art. For example I can’t imagine ACMI going for an installation featuring a pile of grungy old 386 PCs from Cash Converters displaying crude ASCII art animation. It wouldn’t look ‘impressive’ and it would look out of place with the design of the place, which is absurd. I feel institutions and curators play it safe, they need to be less concerned about pleasing an audience and more open to work that is challenging, experimental and difficult to categorise.

The Dirt Factory has a strong satiric and ironic force about it. Humour is clearly an important part of your work.

Humour and satire provides for a powerful form of cultural critique in ways that you can’t possibly achieve otherwise. Many of the works deal with notions of caricature and the idea of the amplification of a feature into something highly exaggerated. The by-product of that of course is humour, which doesn’t mean that the work is any less serious. Also on another level, as an Australian, humour is a big part of our vernacular so it actually makes sense for art to be satirical.

How would you respond to the assertion that you may be in danger of ‘type-casting’ or stereotyping yourself in relation to the scatological nature of The Dirt Factory?

I have produced only 2 works that deal with the bowel, so it’s hardly typecasting. A lot of contemporary art deals with very familiar, what I would label generic and validated art themes such as memory, consumerism, globalisation, which are very stereotypical. I am more interested in taking the audience somewhere else, somewhere they may not be used to going in a gallery.

If people have a problem with this kind of material or these themes I don’t really care, that’s their problem. Art should be provocative; it should challenge you. This is fundamentally one of the roles of contemporary art, which we don’t see enough of. The work isn’t about shocking anyone; it’s attempting to deal with themes that have been deemed culturally unsavoury and of no value. I am saying such themes are loaded ones and as such have value as cultural artefacts.

No cornflakes were consumed during the course of this interview.

Ian Haig, The Dirt Factory, VCA Gallery, Melbourne, April 20-May 6; Sick, Conical Gallery, Melbourne, April 7-29

RealTime issue #73 June-July 2006 pg. 29

Artist Barbara Campbell describes 1001 nights cast as “a durational performance.” It began on June 21, 2005, and will continue until March 18, 2008. Each morning she seeks out newspaper reportage on the Middle East; chooses a phrase from a current story and uploads it with its citation details to 1001.net.au the project website. She may email the phrase directly to a particular writer who has agreed to generate a response to this ‘prompt’ as a short story before sunset (Campbell’s local time). At the appointed time, she performs the new story in a video broadcast of 5 minutes or so via the website.
At the time of this interview, I had contributed on 5 occasions to 1001 nights cast. On August 21, 2005 staying back in my office at work in Melbourne, I wrote anxiously through the winter night to submit my first story for broadcast at sunset in Paris (Campbell’s location at the time). Prior to the performance (number 62), several emails flew between Paris and Melbourne concerning the story—details of pronunciation, feedback, reassurance. The noiseless, paperless effort to meet Campbell’s deadline was intense, necessarily collaborative, involving concentrated energy and candour. The atmosphere and anonymity of the darkness outside lent the experience a faintly dreamlike quality.

On April 28, 2006 at Casey House in East Melbourne, I met with Campbell to speak about the imperative of 1001 nights cast; its imagery, logic, and trajectory so far. Earlier she had posted prompt number 312, “war of words.”

* * *

When I first accessed 1001 nights cast to watch the story-telling at sunset, I was surprised by the choice of frame for the video, centred on the image of the mouth in close-up. I’d anticipated a performance ‘scene’, providing a more descriptive context. The image clearly challenges romantic notions of the female storyteller, for example, as a source of consolation and positive fantasy.

In my mind the project is very much about the West’s conception of the Middle East, through its reference to the original text of the Thousand and One Nights. What we see when we look at any version of it is really ourselves; the West’s own conception of itself in relation to the Middle East. We often picture the Middle East through the purdah, specifically through the woman’s veil and what is fostered by that piece of clothing: a mystery of the eyes. We love to conceptualise the Middle East in terms of this particularly feminine image. The Western corollary to that theatre of the eyes is a theatre of the mouth. The West is always speaking on behalf of someone else—

—invading on behalf of someone else?

At the diplomatic extreme, yes. We’re so comfortable imagining what other people should be doing, and whether we articulate this in spoken words or written words, it forever seems to be about words and speaking. When presenting such a severe image of the storyteller, I hope that 1001 nights cast will at least encourage the question ‘why?’ To have the question always present is important to the work.

So the choice of frame for the video is conceptual, and an effect: if you think of the mouth as an eroticised space, then what’s the difference between that kind of eroticised space, which seems to be so open, viscous and corporeal, compared to the eroticised space of the theatre of the eyes, which seems to be about mystery and denial and ‘closedness’?

There’s another, practical reason for the choice of frame. When I have a story to tell every day I can’t possibly memorise it, and I don’t want the audience to see that my eyes are scanning a text, to be distracted by the realisation that I’m reading. My reading needs to have a more invisible aspect.

Following the broadcast, the stories will be accessible in the 1001.net.au archive as text, but you’re especially interested in what happens when the stories are narrated—

told—

—told in real time, through the camera and the Quicktime streaming server.

Obviously there’s a difference between the stories as texts and as performances. If I have a role, it’s simply that of the storyteller. I am a channel, if you like, for these stories to pass through. They come through me from the writer to the audience.

As you describe it there’s a ritual aspect to your role. The live storytelling at sunset is the culmination of a set of connections. These are digital connections, literally, but also connections with journalists’ reportage on the Middle East through which you create the prompt and the connections of relationship with a writer or writers, who take up the prompt to compose a story. In a way, the performance is an affirmation and a release from the hold of such connections with the wider world. Each day is a miniature cycle of the larger cycle of your project over nearly 3 years. At that level, and in the classical sense, it could be understood as a cathartic effort, to ensure refreshment for the next day.
Barbara Campbell, images by Glen Stace

Barbara Campbell, images by Glen Stace

As well, in the ritual of broadcasting there seems to be a motivation to try to guarantee others’ connection with the poetic of the prompt and the resultant story.

Yes, the story’s not just told, but ‘told at a certain time.’ The ‘certain time’ comes back to the fact of my being alive. The whole project is set up as a survival story: that we are in fact alive has to be proved again and again. This is why people can see the video only as it’s happening—why the live moment can’t be accessed after it’s passed. I’ve refused to archive the broadcasts, not just for technological reasons, but very much for conceptual reasons. My audience will just have to wait to be assured that I’m still there the next day. I hope that some sort of transference happens then: if I’m alive doing this performance, then you too must be alive, watching and listening. 1001 nights cast is about the things that bind us to this world. All of us constantly have to make this mutual commitment to keep ourselves here.

It seems that each day is an experiment with the potential of the internet to witness human connectivity through presence. You’re opening out the definition of presence to embrace the technologies in real time, and in conjunction with real time.

That’s true. The importance of the telling of the tale probably has much to do with the fact that I’ve been a performer of live works to live audiences for the last 20 years. From this perspective, to pull back so far as to become almost completely invisible is a big change for me. I did want to test the limits of the ‘liveness’ of this medium, one which gives an impression of being quite ‘cold.’ When there’s always the computer screen, what kind of a trace of the corporeal can there be?

In relation to your theme of survival, the mouth frequently serves as an image for consumption. From its beginnings, 1001 nights cast has involved structuring your time and place of residence around its parameters: thus far, have there been occasions when you’ve felt consumed by the project? Perhaps by the thought of its duration until March 2008?

Honestly, no. Fairly early on, maybe after the first 100 nights, I felt that in fact I had consumed it; that it was now completely incorporated within me.

You’d adjusted your physiology to its demands?

Yes, it genuinely lives inside me somehow. My other image of the project is that of a home; as such, it could actually precede me. It could always exist as a home-space, and one that I could inhabit quite comfortably rather than drag around like a burden.

By ‘it’ I mean the timeframe and the connection with the writer or writers on any particular day. There can be emotional aspects, depending on where I put my mind. For instance, I might be very aware of the writer’s constraints; she or he might be up at 1am on the east coast of America trying to submit a story.

Of course the project doesn’t consume all my waking hours, but at the point when I send him or her the prompt I fall into the writer’s space and when the deadline is approaching, to some extent I’m with the writer then too. That we do meet up somewhere in an undefined space is actually the traditional conception of cyberspace.

The tongue stud is the other aspect of the project that I carry around. I got this piercing for the 1001 nights cast because I wanted to have something in my body, my mouth, that would change me physically in the task of performing the story. Actually, the stud is quite a challenge to wear.

Because of the discomfort of the intrusion?

Yes, the tongue in particular wants to heal itself quickly, all the time, and I do feel like I’m struggling with it. By retaining this piercing, I’m preventing myself from healing.

There’s an irony in that, since the website explicitly introduces 1001 nights cast as a project for healing across time. This is conveyed, for example, by the line “Every night at sunset she is greeted by a stranger who gives her a story to heal her heart and continue with her journey.” And indeed by the first story.

I recognise the irony, or contradiction.

Yet perhaps in the broadest sense you’ll be aware of the healing process in relation to healing that’s not occurring as well. The tongue stud is like your own daily prompt to yourself, to observe the change; maintain awareness.

It certainly is an awareness, and the most physical aspect of the project as I live it.

Your readers are immediately encouraged to imagine the heritage of the Thousand and One Nights and to cleave to the mythological space. However, during the project’s first year, you’ve been personalising your rapport with the writers, especially through cultivating a sense of collegiality, if not friendship, with many who submit stories. Obviously this doesn’t preclude the mythologisation of self, but your approach appears to be much more about cultivating authenticity of self in relationships, rather than pursuing the potential of the internet for masquerade.

That’s interesting, yes. Regarding my relationship with the writers, I don’t question the projection of the authentic self—'authentic’ is a problematic word of course. It simply seems to be part of the contract that I don’t dissemble to these people. I continually recognise the incredibly generous commitment that they make to the project. I think that the least I can do is be as honest as possible with them, at every moment.

This impulse comes back to the realisation that I’m playing to two distinct groups. One group is the writers, with whom I consciously propagate a personal relationship. I want them to feel that they’re part of something much bigger and ongoing; that they’ve knitted themselves into a global community of writers. And there is the community of the audience. I’m happy for the audience to remain at a distance from the more personal background and process and for them to remain in that compelled questioning mode, asking, ‘how much of this is real?’.

RealTime issue #73 June-July 2006 pg. 30

Circa, Timepieces I-IV

Circa’s Timepieces I-IV represents the company’s latest attempt to physicalise the metaphysical. Building thematically on their most successful show to date, The Space Between (currently touring Europe), the new work takes place in the cavernous main auditorium of the Judith Wright Centre. The move from Circa’s studio to the larger space presents a welcome chance for more people to experience this beguiling series of confrontations between performers and time. A dense work of multilayered sequences, Timepieces allows audiences to take from them what they will. The bodies of the performers (Louise Deleur, Darcy Grant and Chelsea McGuffin) yield one beautiful image after another, asking ‘What is real about time?’

Grant’s Chaplin-esque cat and mouse game opens the show, setting the tone for the production’s clever use of a strikingly spacious set design. A pair of LCD screens, sitting like footlights and an as yet blank, floor-to-ceiling rear wall projection screen leave the performer ample room to chase an elusive spotlight around one half of the space. From this simple prologue the entirety of the stage quickly comes alive as the scene evolves into a backlit, tumble-athon with performers attempting to outdo one another in a series of cross-stage exchanges. It is McGuffin’s static trapeze routine, though, that epitomises this production’s clever engagement with both the technical and the physical in the attempt to materialise the immaterial. A geometric projection and an industrial soundscape cleverly syncopate the routine to analogise the framework that time accords our daily lives.

A tightrope struggle and a hula hoop dance each make an appearance while McGuffin’s bed of nails routine provides an early highlight. Deleur’s en-pointe disjunctive, industrial ballet makes clear the employment of dance as both illustration and exploration of the temporal plane of existence. A largo somersault to a tick-tocking metronome is almost too painful to watch while the honesty and resolution of a well-crafted pop song (in this case, the Streets’ Dry Your Eyes) and a waltz between lovers provide stark examples of the neighbourly intrusion of time in our lives.

By physicalising time’s ethereal presence in the everyday, Circa’s production represents that which we cannot see. Like the time-lapse footage of a turn-of-the-century city building’s demolition and replacement that accompanies several transitions in Timepieces, Circa’s latest palimpsest deftly invites its audience to reflect on the time signatures of their own lives.

Circa, Timepieces I-IV, concept, direction Yaron Lifschitz, performers Louise Deleur, Darcy Grant, Chelsea McGuffin, sound design Lawrence English, video loops Kirsten Bradley, programming Robin Fox, choreography by the company, additional material Natalie Cursio, Lucy Guerin, costumes Louise Deleur; Judith Wright Centre for Performing Arts, April 3-8

RealTime issue #73 June-July 2006 pg. 31

Clowns are a dubious bunch at best. They can be frighteningly atavistic and their naked need for love and attention can be as inopportune as that stranger at last night’s party. Yet clowns are seemingly for our times. All manner of motley, zanies and bobos are contributing to a Brisbane charivari. But if red noses are becoming ubiquitous, the masqueraders are hearteningly heterodox.

The Clown from Snowy River celebrates the 8th birthday of deBASE Productions working in Queensland and was devised in consultation with Kooemba Jdarra Indigenous Performing Arts Company. deBASE has created a following for its madcap clown shows, comedy sketches and political satire, and this work is a well considered amalgamation of all these. Aimed primarily at young audiences, the show also underlined the clown’s natural propensity for anarchy and disruption as a welcome social tonic.

The publicity poster already hinted at subversion. An Aboriginal clown (Daz) wearing a red nose and replete with cork-dangling bushie hat conveyed a cheeky miscegenation of cultural icons. The metaphysics of black face/white face evoked Genet’s The Blacks but with an intentionally disarming Australian gaucherie. As Daz declares in the show: “Nobody waltzes Matilda like me”.

The work is a new departure for deBASE in that, according to the program notes, “it aims not only to make people laugh but to make people think”, particularly in regard to notions of national identity. This is timely. Historian Henry Reynolds differentiates a decade of reconciliation leading to the historic Mabo decision from the amnesiac drift of the Howard government after their election in 1996 when Land Rights and the Stolen Generation were dropped from the agenda. This is the sorry substance of the ‘history wars’ triggered by Keith Windshuttle’s revisionism.

A larrikin nod to World War 1 made clear that deBASE is acutely aware their clown-eye view is that of ordinary soldiers head down in the trenches. At the beginning of their show within the show, controversial reenactments of the Children Overboard or Corby affairs are rejected. The radical bent of their project lies in the clown’s innocence. The extraordinary achievement of The Clown from Snowy River is that Aboriginality is naturalised so seamlessly that the clown’s world in itself is sufficient critique of mediated history. The smug Strine expert falters into silence when called upon to translate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island lingo by Indigenous clowns Daz (Mark Sheppard) and Sprinta (Nadine McDonald-Dowd).

There were the old standards, and some new standard-bearers deflated by the clowns into pocket-size vignettes of Australian history: The Dreamtime, Captain Cook’s arrival, Burke and Wills, Ned Kelly, Anzacs, the Sydney Olympics, Cathy Freeman, Kylie Minogue, Shane Warne. The action is played out in and around the clowns’ shared house (a sly dig at Big Brother by designer Clare McFadden). deBASE espouses a loose pantomime form, but the individual clown personae were so sure footed and idiosyncratically Australian that it worked as if it were inspired improvisation. Their sweaty vigour and democratic relationship with the audience was a reminder of early Circus Oz.

Amongst a multi-talented cast the physical colossus Footsy (Allen Laverty) as gymnastic footballer cum ballet dancer was noteworthy for his provocative forays into the audience. Swagman is differentiated in this world sans red nose. This mythical democrat is entertainingly deconstructed by Jonathan Brand in all his humourless authoritarian guises. He wants to tell his story—and play all the parts! He can’t say s-s-sorry.

Male dominated history limited the scope for independent female clown performances until in a moment of exhilarating girl gang jouissance they hold their own and remind the men that ‘women are mates too!’. Netball girl Spaz (Laurel Collins), dizzy blonde Shaz (Liz Skitch) and murri guide Sprinta (Nadine McDonald-Dowd) were versatile and dexterous in slipping in and out of myriad roles. A consummate piece of ensemble playing was achieved during the re-creation of Cathy Freeman’s lighting of the Olympic flame in slo-mo.

St Chrysostom formulated the definition of a clown as “he who gets slapped.” When Swagman and Footsy as white settlers set out to clear the land, Daz, while embodying a kangaroo, is ‘he who gets shot’—an action replicated under different circumstances as a running gag. In the previous scene, Daz stands in for both Captain Cook and an abashed Aboriginal child. This highly successful Brechtian gambit establishes Daz as consummate player of shifting status rather than sacrificial victim. Mark Sheppard delivered an impressive performance to suit.

Daz first arrives on stage in farcical drag costume as if he were Dionysius at the gates of Thebes/Kylie at the Emmy’s. But Swagman as the self-appointed ringmaster repeatedly refuses Daz a chance to do his act only to be defeated in the end by mass strike action by the other clowns. If the most successful clown is ‘he who is none the worse for his slapping’, Daz earns his final acclamation. But even so he remains equivocal, darting quizzical smiles at the audience while being lauded/loaded with ridiculous consumer goods as the glittering prizes, perhaps, for having survived. In bittersweet clown fashion, Dionysus (and Kylie) are reborn again and again without dying.

deBASE has mounted a tour de force within modest and intelligent limits. If Australia wants to send people overseas in the future, please send in the clowns.

deBase, The Clown from Snowy River, writer-directors Bridget Boyle, Liz Skitch, clowns Jonathan Brand, Laurel Collins, Allen Laverty, Nadine McDonald-Dowd, Mark Sheppard, Liz Skitch, choreographer Nerida Waters, designer Clare McFadden, sound Ian O’Brien, lighting Andrew Meadows; devised in collaboration with Kooemba Jdarra Indigenous Performing Arts Company; Judith Wright Centre, Brisbane, May 2-6

It’s intriguing to contemplate whether Claude Gauvreau—Quebecois poet, author of the original text Faisceau d’épingles de verre and inventor of the automatist language, Exploréen, in which it is written—had ever envisioned this work being performed at all. And if so, whether it might have taken the form of a multidisciplinary performance work encompassing live audio and video, dance, and text-to-speech technologies.
Ray of Glass Needles

The challenge of performing this never before attempted text has been taken up by P: Media Arts, a young Canadian organisation founded by Martin Renaud and Philippe Pasquier. They have transformed a text from non-sensical surrealist experimentation into a powerful and evocative piece of media art performance. Despite the extremely alienating script, the work is so well composed and well integrated that it’s hard to not find meaning, even if it is the sense of alienation itself. The seamless blend of sound, video and dance creates an atmosphere of extreme estrangement with which we can’t help feel some unsettling affinity.

Visually, the work contrasts Orientalism with Occidentalism, offsetting the dancers’ ceremonial theatre masks with the laboratory-like sterility of the set. All stark black and white, the splashes of red in the projected images add a very visceral element, like dispersing blood inside a viscous atmosphere. A wall of lifeless arms with rubber glove hands hangs limply behind the dancers through the first half of the performance, creating a haunting presence, then tilts backwards causing the arms to reach out like a mass of lost souls, disturbingly evocative of so many human genocidal tragedies.

Within this environment the dancers, covered in shapeless white, barely move. Their painfully slow and awkward jerks are the movements of a different species with a different experience of lived time. The impressive performances by Mike Hornblow, Dani-ela Kayler, Soo-Yeun You and Tomoko Yamasaki require an intensity of focus and concentration. They are like biological test subjects at some point in a post-apocalyptic future, with human form yet not human—the abandoned failures of human experimentation. It’s difficult not to feel some sense of culpability for the existence of these beings, so like the products of any one of our possible biogenetic engineering futures.

Philippe Pasquier’s semi-industrial, electronic sound fills the space in a way that is often as physical as it is aural. Like a constant filtering, at times screeching, of noise and psychobabble inside a high-powered air-conditioning system, the harsh scratching of the audio intensifies the confusion and pain of the dancers’ movements. The script penetrates through this in digitised voices of text-to-speech software as a kind of synthetic communication between creatures we have no way of understanding. This use of technology further abstracts the unintelligible language and re-emphasises our complete alienation from these creatures, casting us in the position of observers as they move despairingly inside their dehumanising cell.

The video imagery created by Lionel Arnould and Matthew Gingold is projected on and through multiple screens both in front of and behind the dancers, creating a submersive environment from which it’s hard to escape. Pools of floating liquid and explosions create dramatic landscapes that envelope the dancers within an environment that shifts from extreme violence to sudden calm, sometimes almost womb-like in effect.

It’s inspiring to see such a powerful work in which the synchronising of audio, video, dance and digital technology produces a strong performance that leaves a lasting, if somewhat unsettling, even threatening, impression.

P: Media Arts, Ray of Glass Needles (Faisceau d’épingles de verre), writer Claude Gauvreau (1925-1971), creators Martin Renaud and Philippe Pasquier, director: Christian Lapointe, performers Mike Hornblow, Dani-ela Kayler, Soo-Yeun You, Tomoko Yamasaki, designer: Jean-François Labbé, video Lionel Arnould, costumes and masks Danielle Boutin, technical director Bernard Hellier, live video manager/designer Matthew Gingold, live, audio manager/designer Philippe Pasquier, lighting Christian Lapointe; Dancehouse, Melbourne, March 22-26

There’s a certain kind of person who likes to ride in the bullet proof car, look out on the squalor and the roadside lifers, the trash pile pickers and the sump-oil gleaners and think—that’d be me if I wasn’t so good. Terry Riley is from the other end of the distribution. Grew up in a nothing special place, loved music as a kid. Went to uni around 1960, was buddies with LaMonte Young, the guy with the original minimalist vision. Got into Jazz—Monk, Coltrane, Miles—20thC classical—Schoenberg—then wrote In C in 1964 and started the whole modular pulse based style that later hit the bigtime with Reich and Glass. Travelled, smoked dope, performed all nighters, was on the edge of pop-crossover stardom then went to India to study music with Pandit Pran Nath. Family man, teaching, to and from India, composing, performing, the quiet culture-hero. Turns up in Australia not a moment too soon.

Solo

Two night concert series: first night—Terry Riley solo piano improvisation. Up on the Powerhouse stage is the Steinway, 3 mikes lined up along the length, not much else. Terry Riley strolls out, smiling grandpa with beard, little brimless cap, shirt with a somewhere from Asia type pattern. Sits down, slow bass riffs start and then a few isolated jazz chords drop in over the top. Gentle warm-up, sort of early ECM Keith Jarrett without steroids. Arpeggios start rolling out—big ones, full width of the keyboard. Rhumba action, happy ragtime boogie then enter the singing, Indian drone style, and segue into world music scat improv, Tuvalu horseman at the piano bar.

End first half. Post the interval and a more contemplative second half begins with Riley reaching into the piano to play the strings. It looks and sounds like he is using an eBow, a device for magnetically driving strings into oscillation. The sound is like the tampura, the instrument that typically supplies the droning tonal centre for a lot of Indian music. Riley often played tampura when accompanying Pran Nath. Back to the laying of hands upon the keyboard and jazz again, and what about a few show tunes with singing on the side to weird things out even more. Oops, back to the roots with a hippie blues refrain for a couple of bars before slouching into dark moods for awhile until Riley goes upbeat with Bessie Smith meets Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Back to club-style and a song about ‘stories of love, money and intelligence’—a hipster code for every screenplay out of Hollywood.

Notes fade away, harmonics pulse and wash, the keyboard gets plucked, hammered, stroked and droned. The first night had been a couple of hours and it didn’t seem that long at all. But it wasn’t what I expected. First up I was a little surprised, even disappointed, not to be hearing grand and charismatic revelations from a master of 20th century composition. No sweat, no charisma, nothing showy from the old guy on stage. Instead Riley delivered Beat into Hippie and out the other side. More like seeing Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg all those Adelaide Festivals ago rather than seeing Glass or Reich—not so Rock, not so singular of purpose. Just great touch and virtuosic improvisation. Stamina and agility. One great memory leading to another.

Collaborations

The second night is a mix of Terry Riley performing with others, and works by others performed in celebration of Terry Riley. The first piece is an improvisation between Riley on piano and Lawrence English and Keith Fullerton Whitman. (Trivia insert: Fullerton is the town where Leo Fender was born and invented the first commercially produced solid body electric guitar). English and Fullerton are on laptops and processing. Both excellent musicians in their own right, English and Fullerton are in many ways the inheritors of the punk do-it-yourself cassettes through the mail revolution of the 70s. Annoyed, disgusted and indifferent to the major transmission modes of the culture industries, punk went for a down-home distribution of both music and design aesthetic, exploiting the cheap postal system and the new possibilities that cassettes offered as a recording and distribution medium. In much the same way, the work of English and Whitman (CD labels, online artist presence, festival/concert organisation), illustrates the possibilities of current production and distribution technologies. The music and aesthetics have changed but it’s still do-it-yourself community building.

Riley starts up with sparse and spiky minimalist riffs—these are great riffs, but what sets them apart is the transitions from one riff to the next. As with last night, always smooth and if not smooth then surprising. Harmonics smear around as the laptops pick up the piano and echo phrases into layered drones. But the playback doesn’t always work, clicks and pops extend the piano sound in an uninteresting way—more disruptive than glitch, more like bad looping. I get the impression the laptop side was having a hard time adding something of interest. It’s a hard ask—go on young processing chaps show suitable reverence while improving modern piano style of guru composer.

The piece ends, stage goes dark, and the roadies start to disassemble all the electronica. A competition sets in—the audience is waiting and quiet, and the quieter they are the quieter the roadies have to be, which makes the audience quieter still, which makes the roadies…

Next follows a set of pieces by Sarah Hopkins. Of all the composers working with Riley at this concert, it is Hopkins who most overtly identifies a spiritual component within her musical practice. Her first piece starts very gentle with didgeridoo then cello on sad melody—sounds like the intro to Within You Without You by the Beatles. More build up, some harmonic singing, the effect a bit too much like bringing in one new ‘spiritual ‘ device after another. Then comes a piece with Topology and Eric Griswald on piano—a sort of American Civil War melody done minimal. Next, a choral piece for a women’s choir, Robert Davidson on bass, a bit of scat jazz amongst the drones. Gets a bit earnest and new age-ish. I start looking for the ghost of Joan Baez, and she isn’t even dead yet. A big upside of Hopkins’ pieces though is their sense of community and sociability in performance. Anyone can apply to join.

After the interval comes A Rainbow in Curved Air, Riley’s 1968 second album after In C. It’s a slow and steady jazz classical groove again, like so many other pieces, but then you realize that it’s more the case that so many other pieces are like it. Then everything speeds up. Cue the ecstatic singing, courtesy of Riley’s years of training and performance with Pran Nath. Amazing playing as the musicians fade in and out of synch. This is the music that started a whole genre—where the riff came from in The Who’s 1971 hit, Baba O’Reilly. A great work brilliantly played by Riley, Clocked Out Duo, Topology and Iain Grandage.

Pause, and Eric Griswold starts one of his compositions, deliberately clumsy fiddling about with a music box until strings come in with a little phrase, fingered bass, more short phrases, nothing actually developing, strange groans as the bass gets bowed, a few percussive bits and pieces on the glockenspiel, move into piano tinkles and the glockenspiel again. Sort of aimless, then Bang! jump into the whole band pumping. Great contrast. Finishes back with a different music box.

Another by Riley, Salome’s Excellent Extension. Cinematic, very distinct sections, like cuts to different scenes of the action. Jerry Goldsmith TV titles, Streets of San Francisco or any other 70s show—maybe all of them. And then back to the jazz club, a 60s caper movie, John Steed and Mrs Peel.

Finish the night with a new work. Moorish beginnings, slow mournful singing, then up-tempo, like triumphing over sadness. Builds up and flops around. Strange, free form post-Beat hippie lyrics. Nice blending of instruments and part following. Great modulation between feels and, if you don’t like one bit, don’t worry a new bit is coming.

Riley bypassed the whole let’s get domesticated, big buddy corporate collectivism, cowardice is the strategic positioning of the risk averse, and stayed true to the building a better world one personal transformation at a time individualism of the Hippies. He improvises. Spontaneous, looking outward, intellectual and humble, each phrase gives rise to a new phrase and that phrase to another again. 50 years of listening shuffled in a bag and dropped onto the keyboard to hear this now.

PULS8, A Festival celebrating the music of Terry Riley; Terry Riley in Concert, Solo Piano Works, April 21; Collaborations, Terry Riley with Keith Fullerton Whitman, Lawrence English, Sarah Hopkins, Elwyn Hennaway, Iain Grandage, Clocked Out Duo, Topology, Brisbane Powerhouse, April 22

Jean Lee was the last woman to be hanged in Australia, in 1951. Her life was a complex pattern of bad choices, abuse and negligence; she is not a wronged woman in any simple sense, but nor did executing her solve anything, let alone confirm her guilt for murder or the accuracy of the police investigation.
<img src="http://www.realtime.org.au/wp-content/uploads/art/3/343_greenwell.jpg" alt="Jean Lee is escorted to the City Watchhouse on November 8, 1949,
by Detectives Ronald Kellett and Cyril Currer”>

Jean Lee is escorted to the City Watchhouse on November 8, 1949,
by Detectives Ronald Kellett and Cyril Currer

Music theatre, music film

Andrée Greenwell chooses strong subjects for her music theatre works: gluttony, suicide, murder, the hard lives of early 19th century white Australian women and, in Medusahead, a decapitated soprano.

Sweet Death, an opera for Melbourne’s Chamber Made, has a heroine who gorges herself to death on gourmet pastries and sweets. Conceived and composed by Greenwell to a libretto by playwright Abe Pogos, it was based upon the novel by Claude Tardat, premiered at the 1991 Melbourne International Festival of the Arts and was broadcast on ABC radio in 1992.

Medusahead, described by Greenwell as “a video opera clip for decapitated soprano and 3D animated snakes” was made at the Australian Film and Television School in 1997. Composed and directed by Greenwell it screened nationally and internationally and was purchased by Kunst Kanal, Germany.

The haunting staged concert work, Laquiem: Tales from the Mourning of the Lac Women, based on writings from Kathleen Mary Fallon, premiered at The Studio, Sydney Opera House in 1999. It was memorable for the range of voices and musical forms it brought to Fallon’s texts, merging them into a collective meditation. Greenwell adapted Laquiem to the screen in 2002. Ravishingly shot in 35mm with Dolby Digital Surround, it screened at film festivals in Australia and around the world and also on SBS TV.

Greenwell’s Dreaming Transportation, Voice Portraits of the First Women of White Settlement at Port Jackson (2003) was a larger, if still intimate work, virtuosically deploying folk and classical idioms and rich imagery from Australia’s past. A Sydney Festival commission for 6 singers, 7 musicians and digital projections, it was based on Jordie Albiston’s Botany Bay Document. Greenwell directed all aspects of the production as well as composing the music. After its launch at the Paramatta Riverside Theatres it enjoyed a season at the Sydney Opera House, a radio account for the ABC, In Studio-Dreaming Transportation, which won the Prix Marulic in Croatia in 2004, and the title song was awarded Best Classical Song at the MusicOz Awards, 2003.

Jean Lee

Greenwell was inspired by Jordie Albiston’s poems about Lee’s life and death, but cautious as well. “I was a bit frightened by the material and it took me a year or 2 to come at it. Eventually I thought, it’s scary but I can go there.” Greenwell had studied with Albiston at the VCA in the 80s where they both played flute. She set Albiston’s wonderfully spare and often imagistic poems to music for her wonderful Dreaming Transportation.

What Greenwell finds attractive about Albiston’s poems is that they are “texts that suggest an open form, that allow me to compose colourful music, use eclectic techniques and set up meanings through juxtapositions between words and music and between episodes.” What was particularly attractive about the Lee story “was its emotional power. Music allows you to approach difficult territory that other forms don’t.”

I ask if The Hanging of Jean Lee is a test of empathy, will its audience if not sympathise actually come to understand something of what the woman is going through. “That’s the razor’s edge of the piece, Jordie hates what Lee did, the bad choices she made, but there’s empathy.” What Jean Lee endures for her crime, Greenwell says, makes the material very operatic, especially the waiting to be hanged.

Musically, Greenwell made a firm decision not to go down the roads of nostalgia or re-creation. “There is nothing of the 40s or 50s in it. Nor do I use jazz, I don’t understand it and it’s not true to me or to Jordie’s language.” That said, “there are beatnik and Nick Cave-ish touches, moments like Weill and Brel. There’s more rock’n’roll than anything I’ve done. It’s a work for an extended rock band.”

Greenwell has taken 30 of the 50 poems on Lee by Albiston and ordered them in collaboration with the Melbourne playwright Abe Pogos. As well she committed herself to research and was helped by Don Trebl, co-author with Paul Wilson and Robyn Lincoln of Jean Lee, the Last Woman Hanged in Melbourne (Random House, 1997), who gave her access to his research. As well, “the Victorian police were enthusiastic and gave permission for use of Lee’s prostitution charge record.”

Also aiding Greenwell is experimental filmmaker Janet Merewether who revealed a flair for the melding of documentary, recreation and fantasy in her award-winning Jabe Babe (RT 68, p18). Merewether is “advising on image development and stylistic cohesion, drawing on a range of visual techniques similar to the music.” Unlike Dreaming Transportation, which featured enveloping moving imagery, The Hanging of Jean Lee will mostly use still images, many of them fascinating photographs and clippings from the period.

Dan Potra will design the set, Tim Maddock will direct the performers and Greenwell will oversee the production which features 4 strong, idiosyncratic vocal and stage presences: Max Sharam (ex-Sydney, now New York), Hugo Race (orginal Bad Seeds member, now with True Spirit in Europe), the renowned Jeff Duff and actor and backing singer Josh Quong Tart (All Saints). The format, says Greenwell, “will be staged concert, not a narrative journey but an emotional exploration using music and text, not all of it sung, so that the poetry can stand on its own.”

Jordie Albiston’s works include Nervous Arcs (Spinifex,1995), Botany Bay Document: A Poetic History of the Women of Botany Bay (Black Pepper, 1996), The Hanging of Jean Lee (Black Pepper, 1998) and The Fall (White Crane Press, 2003).

Elision, the Brisbane-based new music ensemble, with a core ensemble of 20 players, has had 19 tours to 14 countries, 34 international composer commissions, partnerships with Ensemble Modern (Germany) and CIKADA (Norway), and been programmed at some of the world’s leading arts festivals and venues, including Wien Modern, Philharmonie Berlin, Hebbel Theatre, Saitama Arts Centre Japan, Agora Festival Paris, Milano Musica, Zurich TheatreSpektakel, Pro Musica Nova, BBC 3, and the Huddersfield and Liverpool Festivals.

Elision is a unique venture with an wonderful record of explorations of cross-cultural and intermedia composition and performance, engagements with architecture, medicine and science, and enjoys a capacity to develop unique and successful international collaborations. It has changed the face of Australian music, not only in its support for talented composers and musicians, but in ways of presenting music for new audiences. Elision has also cleverly developed an international market for its work by commissioning composers from other countries and by partnering overseas ensembles in productions. It has achieved a remarkable touring record.

For 20 years the ensemble has been led by the indefatigible and wickedly funny Daryl Buckley. Buckley might be alone at the helm, but not lonely. Elision is intensely collaborative. As he says, “Some people are afraid of collaboration. It’s fraught with risk. But very rarely has it ever been problematic in my experience. You invite people into your life and you share something. It’s incredibly rich and dense in that moment. It’s great.”

I’ve been witness to much of Elision’s 20 years and always been inspired by what I’ve experienced, not just what I’ve heard, and that’s always challenging in the very best sense, but by what I’ve seen and very much felt in works that range from the visceral to the meditative, the epic and the intimate and bracing permutations of these. Whether it’s the architectural magnificence of the Australian-British-Norwegian Dark Matter (2001), with audience and musicians embedded in a massive installation that conjured cosmic reflections, or wandering the dark, reflective tunnels of Sonorous bodies (1999) to the sounds of Satsuki Odamura playing the music of Liza Lim to video images by Judith Wright, Elision offers unique experiences. Tulp, the Body Public (2004) was typically and magically hybrid, defying labels with its rich merging of documentary, chamber opera, sound art and digital imagery. I spoke to Daryl Buckley shortly before Elision’s birthday concerts in Sydney and Brisbane.

In the beginning

You started out as a young man and now here you are still seeking to realise your full potential—20 years on. Still looking like a young man.

Oh, thanks! The stress has kept me young. The birth of Elision had incredibly passionate energies behind it. It was a group of 7 students who were really committed to playing Australian new music, as we understood it in the 80s. We put an enormous amount of energy and belief into it. And I think one of the really great things is that you couldn’t have predicted what would happen. The ensemble that performed in Trinity College Chapel in the late 80s, or The Oresteia (1993) with Barrie Kosky and Liza Lim, or Bardo (1993), the Tibetan Book of the Dead installation with Domenico di Clario, or that undertook the transmisi project (1999) with Heri Dono at the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial, is not the same organization. So there is a sense of journey and evolution about the work we’ve done. Dark Matter (2001), would have been inconceivable back then. That’s one of the things I really, really want to keep alive about the ensemble because it does give you life-that sense of transformation.

…amongst a Melbourne music environment teeming with new music ensembles, there was at times a fierce aesthetic opposition from some within the new music community—simple anxieties and unarticulated fears of the European art world, even of the wider Australian situation itself: “You can’t have a national new music ensemble or an ensemble larger than 7”, or “Australian musicians will never play this kind of music”.
Daryl Buckley, Australian Music Centre, Update, No 143, May-July 2006

Originally it was a very clear group of 7 players of whom there are still 3, including myself. Then there were others who joined in the early 90s and stayed. They’ve also been integral to the development of a lot of other organizations since. So you find vocalist Deborah Kayser who went to school with Liza. One of her very first major professional appearances was in The Oresteia. Years later, Deborah performs a hell of a lot of other work in Melbourne. It’s the same with Jeffrey Morris, Carl Rosman and a host of others. So it’s that thing of providing something of a platform from which people can either bounce their careers or their creative endeavours into other areas.

In the ensemble the core is always there but you can get major generational change, bringing in other people who totally challenge the predictability of the artistic experience within the group, and the way you work.

Music re-staged

You rarely use conventional concert formats, you’ve got a couple of major music theatre works under your belt, you use installation and multimedia. Where did that all come from?

Again, it’s an evolutionary process. When we began, we played notated chamber music with a conductor and we would play more or less anything as long as it was Australian. After a certain point it became unsatisfying, a service organization, if you like, to help a community that will have, to put it politely, varying capacity to actually engage with what’s being offered. Earlier, people like Simon De Haan who formed Pipeline had issues with that way of working too. So we weren’t unique. And you’ve got limited resources. You don’t have the money to pay everyone. You don’t have the funding to work as a nationally representative organization effectively. So what I decided to do was I thought, okay, this group’s gonna be fucking great. We’re going to focus, develop some strategies, build some core repertoire, really work on that and get to a serious standard. So we focussed on recent Italian new music around the aesthetics of the composer Franco Donatoni and also on what came to be known as the English Complexity School around composers such as Richard Barrett, and Chris Dench in the way he was writing then. The idea was that we were going to carve out expertise in these aesthetics and, over concert after concert, build up our skill base.

The musician dances

I started to think about the way the vision of a choreographer impacts upon the musculature and the physical capabilities of a dancer and how the idiosyncracies of a particular dancer might trigger things for a choreographer. And that provided a basis for an even greater degree of specialisation. It became very interesting to me, within the chamber music that was being written at the time, how far and how deep an engagement with those two composers we might have, and how experimentations with performance, of pushing to the nth degree the most bizarre, extreme techniques, might impact on their imaginations and vice versa.

Absolutely. It’s not just how the notes might look on the page. You bring to the forefront a whole lot of ethical questions, what you can do, what you can’t do, your own input into the music as a creative person, the physical possibility of actually doing it. Then you start to notice these really interesting composers have relationships with other people who are not composers. At that stage Liza had met Barrie Kosky and Domenico di Clario and that provided the impetus towards doing The Oresteia, our opera, and then The Bardo, the durational work which we performed over a week. It became an exercise in spatialisation and duration performed as an installation on a farm outside Lismore and then a year later in Perth. Richard Barrett was working with a UK visual artist, Crow, and that became Elision’s The Opening of the Mouth (1992) in the 1997 Festival of Perth.

Out of the desert…

It then became really apparent that Elision was working in ways that our peer ensembles in Europe were not. Now, of course, Ensemble Modern does works with Heiner Goebbels like Black and White, but in Europe the cultural infrastructure is there to encourage you to do the work the way you’ve always done it year after year. Of course, there are new technologies and ways to utilise them, new experiences bring change, but the basic core also encourages a lot of stability.

In some ways I think of Australia as a desert where you have the law of the minimum. I think people running ensembles before me have found Australia to be an incredibly frustrating environment because the ceiling is there, the desert is there. I was very conscious of using these limitations. We still do concerts, but they’ve become more rare. I still think it’s good to do them. They can be really subversive. One of the hardest things to do is to stick somebody in a hall and ask them to listen to something really actively, to listen to a piece of new music they have to concentrate on.

I think Elision and I think of vision. I think of an incredibly flexible entity, constant fiddling creatively with things-form, relationships, technology-going at it, but with a great consistency of purpose There’s a certain openness making the most of what’s there, in an arts ecology where resources are scarce.

We fiddle because we have to. There’s a really big element of necessity. And I think if you don’t you’re either an institution that has a degree of guaranteed security or you’re very frustrated. It’s also bloody hard. In the end, with all of the organizations in the small to medium sector, whether they’re doing well or badly, it still depends on having one person in there that galvanises or energises the whole thing. And if they’re not persistent, or if that person disappears, or gets tired, the thing collapses….or never emerges in the first place.

How much of Elision is your vision, steering things and you enjoying the creative collisions?

Artistically, you’ve spelled out the role. Organisationally, I help keep things together and powered along. As you get older you gather skills in dealing with government or people. You gain perspective so you don’t panic.

Is there a desire to use collaboration and working across forms and media to maintain openness?

Absolutely. For me the tension of reinvention is partly driven by the need to have new things, to mutate and evolve, but also at the same time to keep a level of stability. Successful mutations, I think, are those where there’s a tiny alteration in the gene. You don’t throw out entire biological history and understanding of the organism. That’s what collaboration offers.

One of the crucial things about any canon is that a new generation must learn it. And in any re-learning there’ll be a number of creative errors, misunderstandings that create a slightly new interpretation or another approach that’s contemporary to the day. So you have to have innovation within a traditional framework. Otherwise you’ve got a fucking museum and it’s dead and why would anyone bother? If you don’t re-think the canon you don’t have ownership, if that’s the right word; you won’t have absorbed it into your body.

Elision next

We’re bringing back Moon Spirit Feasting (1999) in a 6 night season for the Brisbane Festival. We’re working with the composer Maurizio Pisati who’s scored a soundtrack to a film by Hans Richter, Vormittagsspuk (Ghosts Before Breakfast, 1928). The soundtrack by Hindemith has been lost and the Nazis banned it because it’s one of those films where objects have free will and seem to act of their own volition. We’re doing a 20th birthday concert with a fantastic new work of Liza’s called Mother Tongue, a collaboration with the Melbourne-based poet Patricia Sykes who’s in her 60s now and started writing late in life. We tour to the UK at the end of the year. We have a creative development for a new project for the Liverpool European Cultural Capital of 2008. That’s Construction, by Richard Barrett and Brisbane new media artist, Craig Walsh. We’ll be doing some experiments with the construction of models of both real buildings and visionary designs out of organic material. They will be collapsed, rotted, decayed, exposed to various biological agents of change. Small cameras will record this and the knowledge we get from that will underpin a bigger creative work in 2008 in a sugar silo in Liverpool that’s about 35 metres high and 180 metres long.

In future I want the group to spend more time on the creative development side of projects. As time goes on, people spread out and our network extends to different cities and overseas. So the loss of hangout time can be a danger. It’s really important to bring people together and actually spend time, thinking, bouncing ideas off one another, exploring things and channeling the impact into the work. It’s really hard to do that in Australia. Funding agencies here are naturally dedicated towards outcomes—KPIs, reserves, volume of activity, distribution, a whole lot of stuff. But you need time. It’s vital for the life of an organization so you don’t become a yearly formula addressing the concerns of your grant application.

I’m lucky. Liza is a fantastic person; a wonderfully creatively gifted and brilliant person and we have a very strong understanding of each other and each other’s working process. We’re part of each other’s working process. And having a little child, Raphael, also gives you balance and perspective, or relief. It also offers another set of things to do. It keeps you thinking. I guess I’m still really optimistic.

Daryl Buckley will give the Peggy Glanville Hicks address later this year in Sydney.
On June 10 and 11, in concerts in Brisbane and Sydney, Elision celebrates its 20th birthday with Chris Dench’s Agni-Prometheus-Lucifer (2006), Timothy O’Dwyer’s Gravity (2006) and the Amor revised (2006) of John Rodgers for intertwined flute and oboe.

Elision, Moon Spirit Feasting, Brisbane Festival, Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, July 28-30, www.elision.org.au

Do walls have ears? What if they could record, process and play back to you what they had been exposed to in earlier years or generations? In What Survives: Sonic Residues in Breathing Buildings, curated by Gail Priest, 3 installations and 2 listening stations explore the memory of sounds embedded in buildings, perhaps through their material impact, perhaps in the echoes of distant events that re-impinge themselves through memory.
Nigel Helyer, The Naughty Apartment (detail)

Nigel Helyer, The Naughty Apartment (detail)

Sound occupies the Performance Space as though it were the remains of daylight. The late afternoon when I caught the show led me into a slowly revealed mystery. It seems very odd walking into an exhibition of soundworks where you can’t actually hear anything, but you have to listen and slowly things appear. It’s a show you have to work at; nothing is particularly obvious. Of course the problem with sound art is that the contents of one room can easily disturb the sounds of another. Thus headphones become de rigeur. And, as I rarely read the room notes before I look at a show, I am usually quite unprepared.

Each work deals with memory in some way: Jodi Rose’s memory of spending endless hours “guarding” a bridge; Nigel Helyer’s fragments of tales relating the memory of a mysterious event of momentous psychological power; and Alex Davies’ exploration of memory as the delayed re-presentation of things held in mind (memory), each as installation.

Nigel Helyer’s The Naughty Apartment presents chapters from a tale of mystery by the Russian author Bulgakov, which evoke a moment when a building itself comes alive. Entering the installation, the room is silent, small sculptures sit on plinths in an arc, and a jumble of complex looking tools lie on a table at the back. Walking up to the plinths I notice they all represent the same apartment space, each inhabited by tiny human models in one or other of the rooms, but still no sound, no apparent interaction. On looking at the apparatus on the table I discover that each contains a small induction coil wound around a magnifying glass, some kind of handle and some electronics leading to a headphone so, obviously, I put one on and walk back to the arc of apartments. Now they spring to life. As you peer into each one through the glass, the stories embedded in them are transmitted to your headphones; interludes in the story rising from each model, fragments of a mystery, paragraphs from somewhere in the progress of the tale, but can we ever have the full story? Or do we even need to as we make our own surmises, building on the characters and the behaviour of the cat from The Master and Margarita. The mystery remains, carried from room to room as though the apartment itself had become the gallery space.

In Jodi Rose’s installation, Playing Bridges, a collection of postcards covers the wall and Nick Wishart’s model of a bridge waits in the centre of the room; a single span of cables tensioned from one end via what turn out to be telescopic antennae (the once ubiquitous TV rabbit’s ears). Again, silence. Put the headphones on and … still silence. Having been informed that the bridge is “interactive” I go to touch it and the shrill sounds of a theremin break out, so I play with it for a moment and then try the span cables but they seem to do nothing. I find myself disappointed given that the theremin offers all sorts of possibilities by varying the lengths of the antennae and using its output to release other sounds. It is only with the small screen on the wall that we hear any of Rose’s bridge music. Her other room features an immensely still video of a castle high on a hill overlooking a river with but the merest flicker of change in the pixels arrayed across the projection screen. I come back a little later and the image has hardly moved but I chance to hear a short orchestral manoeuvre, which apparently only appears once in every 3-hours. Is this Rose’s view from the bridge that we are presented with?

Alex Davies’ Sonic Displacements were said to be spread throughout the gallery. Apparently the work gathered sounds of visitors to the gallery some hours before and reprocessed them, playing them back to us as long delayed memories of moments gone before. The paradigm is reminiscent of Davies’ work at Experimenta last year, which used video as well as incidental sound and to bring you face to face with yourself, and invented others, from prior moments in the installation. Sadly, I don’t think this sound only version worked. The main installation room was completely silent each of several times I entered it and the corridor sounds were a mere whisper of people talking in the background, they might simply have been in another room for all I could tell.

Not prone to hanging about in the gents’ toilet I found the Listening Station: Men’s Toilet set of short commissioned playback works disconcerting. On later listening they turned out to be intensely interesting. Sunugan Sivanesan’s The WC Overture, produced from “stealth recordings of toilet blocks” works the sprinkle of men pissing, the rattle of toilet roll fixtures and drains gulping into the elements of a rhythmical reflection on ablution and the sounds of the water closet. In Amanda Stewart’s Sign, imagination brings out the hiss of the gas and the boiling of a jug for tea, rendering the voice into microsound, bubbling up as the phase change starts on the way to boiling, bubbling up out of traces of words, teetering on the verge of pure noise. Like Stewart’s, Garry Bradbury’s two Untitled pieces present short vocal reconstructions, but of an entirely different order. In the first the repetitive frustrations of English domestic life through an old woman’s nagging and attempts to converse. In the second, obsession and a toy piano conspire to take Johnny Cash’s The Ring of Fire apart with devastating effect.

Listening Station: Stairwell provided a rather more comfortable environment. Aaron Hull’s Corroded Memories offers snippets of sound swelling into big rounded orchestral forms sweeping over you and vanishing abruptly; rich expanses of memory underlaid by the echoing roar of machines and the quietness of someone speaking. Somaya Langley’s out | side | in suggests isolation, wintry spaces, an increasingly dense soundscape, the wind, outside; inside, the breathing of the earth and the roar of time in a vast expanse of loneliness. In Radiation 3, Joyce Hinterding’s magic wand, the loop antenna with which she draws sounds from the walls and small extrinsic sounds from space that impinge on the earth, brings that most mundane and unavoidable interference, hum, out from the backdrop of everyday life and gives it an unaccustomed beauty.

What Survives: Sonic Residues in Breathing Buildings, curator Gail Priest, Performance Space, March 25 -April 22

The last few years have seen something of a resurgence in performances that could be described as offering a kind of apocalyptic interiority. Works like Chunky Move’s Tense Dave or the more current Singularity, Malthouse Theatre’s A View of Concrete and Eldorado, Vanessa Rowell’s Can’t Leave Tomorrow Alone and a number of productions by Red Stitch Actors Theatre and other companies, have all offered bleak and violent visions which employ insularity to amplify their effectiveness. There is no outside to these visions, no normal against which their horrors may be measured. Perhaps this mode of theatre, which last had its heyday in the late 80s and early 90s, can be seen as the postmodern response to psychoanalytic discourse: we’re not over our neuroses, but we’re over the idea that there’s something else beyond them.

Chamber Made Opera’s latest production, corRUPTION, is an excellent case in point. An impressionistic hyper-opera, it presents a series of images centred on a nameless woman who embarks on a destructive sequence of sexual encounters outside of the supposedly satisfying relationship she has with her equally nameless partner. The heroine, played simultaneously by Anna Margolis and Ingrid Weisfelt, is all we have to interpret this scenario: her self-sought corruption is never contrasted to any normative model of reality which might allow us to make some sense of the scenes we witness.

The grinding, dissonant score by composer and sometimes-DJ Sasha Stella offers an almost industrial, jarring soundscape, sometimes given depth through the incorporation of spoken word texts by Ania Walwicz. There are moments of more operatic singing by Margolis as “Her (vocalist)” but these are regularly subsumed to the more attention-grabbing horrors foregrounded onstage.

The piece begins with confusing scenes of jagged domesticity: “Her” is presented in a relationship with the robotic and passive “Him” (Inside), pitched as a model of contained repression by the bald and bespectacled Brian Lucas. Him is an alienated interlocutor to her sensuality, responding to her outstretched thigh with a childish wonder but mechanically bound by his soulless typewriter. These initial moments are at first jarring, since they seem to be the ‘real’ against which subsequent fantasies will be compared, but again offer no angle through which we might identify with the woman’s predicament. Instead, we are immediately tossed into the maelstrom of her subjectivity, no purchase at hand with which to anchor our response to the events on offer.

The ‘Him Out There’ (Colin Sneesby) whom the woman encounters outside of the safety of her relationship, is a grotesque, Pan-like beast, sometimes portrayed bearing a massive fluffy phallus and sometimes playing a more submissive role. She walks upon his buttocks in high heels, or fills a teapot with urine and pours it onto his thirsty face. It’s nasty stuff, and doesn’t get any lighter. By the end, after a lengthy and fascinating section in which He (Inside) comes to confront his own reactions to her infidelity (or is it a projection of her guilt?), we’re given a closing scene in which she is crucified on an upright table, blood pouring from her mouth and vagina, her former partner prostrate at her feet and the demon-god lover flinging something faeces-like over the lot of them. It could have been lentils. It made no difference. The audience is so thoroughly disconnected from the interior life of Her that by this point understanding is nigh impossible.

Ultimately, corRUPTION both succeeds and fails as a result of its intense insularity. Creatively, Chamber Made has produced a work which regenerates the rich and vital life of intensely subjective sensuous experience, but in doing so its audience must necessarily be denied complete access to or identification with that experience. Despite its best efforts, we’re never afforded understanding of its central character’s interiority, since to do so would be to violate the very subjectivity we are supposed to be witnessing. All we can do is spy glimpses through the curtain veiling an impossibly complex desire, but those glimpses are enough to have any audience member pulling their own curtains closed once the show is over.

Chamber Made Opera, corRUPTION, directors Douglas Horton, Michelle Heaven, music Sasha Stella, text Ania Walwicz, performers Brian Lucas, Anna Margolis, Colin Sneesby, Ingrid Weisfelt, choreography Michelle Heaven and ensemble, design: Philip Rolfe, lighting Paul Jackson; Chunky Move Studio, May 13-28

Tura New Music’s regular Club Zho gigs got off to something of a retro start this year with UK expatriate Mike Cooper. After an initial career in folk and roots music, Cooper moved to tape music and electronic guitar effects in the 1970s before producing his current genre of what has been called free jazz exotica. Dressed in Hawaiian shirt and with a steel guitar in his lap, he sat before a table covered with a bad batik drop-cloth, upon which rested a number of effects and tape loop devices.

Cooper strummed chaotically between delivering snatches of an unfinished narrative about the conflict between local islanders and the sailors of a tall-masted ship called The Dolphin—a fairly standard tale of paradise lost; part Gauguin, Captain Bligh, Fletcher Christian and Captain Cook, all rolled together. This rather problematic referencing of old colonial fantasies and battles served however merely as a prelude for Cooper’s principally musical performance. His blues inflected crazy psychedelia twanging—very John Hammond Jr meets Captain Beefheart or Frank Zappa—gave way to material developed mostly from the looping and processing of the original guitar material, which was then layered with tape sounds and old fashioned musique concrète tape-swipe noises. Watery dripping, washing and plashing elements, presumably intended to reference the initial seafaring narrative, moved about within a fairly dense but somewhat unstructured bed of electronic noise. Although some deeper tones and throbbing elements akin to early electronica bands like Cabaret Voltaire did emerge late in the piece, on the whole the gently moving skrunkle of effects produced an ambience very much in keeping with the Grateful Dead or the early Kool-Aid Acid Tests of the 1960s and other precursors to later rave culture. There was little new about Cooper’s performance, but it was interesting to see and hear a bit of good old fashioned head music in a live context again.

More arresting was US-based Keith Fullerton Whitman. Like Cooper, Fullerton Whitman used a guitar to generate most of his initial sonic palette which he then processed and played via a complicated series of laptop patches and program interfaces. While he has collaborated with some real hard noise merchants like Voicecrack and Hrvatski in the past, his generally minimal manipulation of a wide, filled soundscape made his Club Zho gig fit in well with the general ambience created by the stoner meditations of Cooper.

Changes were mapped by Fullerton Whitman over long time frames, creating a piece which one principally imbibed and experienced rather than following in minute detail or chasing after small returns and fragments. He began with a series of rather classic, spacey computer sounds which would not have been out of place in a Macintosh system sounds folder, or the early computer music faculties of MIT and elsewhere, scattering these zings and boings about the scales. These slightly retro materials soon clustered and grew into something else, though, generating an all encompassing sonic density and spread such as was created by Steve Reich’s use of multiple distinct lines playing the same motif. These wide, snarling layers soon accumulated into an intense, beat like pulsation, before turning into a noise-scape which impacted upon the whole body like a bath of sound.

Fullerton Whitman had also set up a microphone to capture the sounds in the room, gently feeding back these elements into his mix throughout his performance. This was therefore a literally additive composition which eventually produced a pure ocean of bass and noise. Fullerton Whitman took us out of this wonderful physical experience with a sequence of hard sonic splatters which bounced off the walls and about the room. The pointed distinction of these noises broke up the composition and provided a space for the artist to wind the sound down and bring the whole to a satisfying end. Although Fullerton Whitman produced a performance designed more to be experienced than intellectually monitored, this was nevertheless a highly satisfying showing and a fine start to Club Zho 2006.

Club Zho, Mike Cooper, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Tura New Music, Llama Bar, Perth, April 24

Sydney’s Seymour Group (formed in 1977) has been re-named the Sonic Art Ensemble and newly launched, opening with an engaging program, Southern Stars, focused on work coming out of Central and South America. Artistic director Marshall McGuire told his audience that the program was in part inspired by work he had encountered on his Churchill Fellowship travels in the USA, hearing the music of American Mason Bates, cuban-born Tania Leon (he’d enjoyed a whole evening of her music with its Cuban Rhumba swagger), and Argentinian Osvaldo Golijov. It was Golijov’s Passion of St Mark heard at a Sydney Festival that first alerted McGuire to the composer. The work had been conducted by Anthony Fogg, founding conductor of the Seymour Group.

Golijov is a contemporary music phenomenon, long supported by the Kronos Quartet (Yiddishbook), and more recently by the advocacy of soprano Dawn Upshaw in song settings, orchestral works and opera. The centrepiece of Upshaw’s Voices of Light (with pianist Gilbert Kalish), a collection of Messiaen, Debussy and Faure songs, is a lone, searingly beautiful Golijov composition, Lua descolorida (Moon, colourless, 1999), composed for its performers. Upshaw’s most recent CD features Golijov’s Ayre, music for soprano, small ensemble (The Andalucian Dogs) and electronics evoking the co-existence of Christian, Arab and Jewish cultures in Spain before the expulsion of the Jews in the late 15th century, as well as displaying not a little of Golijov’s own Russian-Jewish Argentinian heritage.

In Golijov’s Lullaby and Doina (2001), a folkish melody spreads gently from winds, to cello and bass to violin, notes bent klezmer style, the tone deepening in the viola vibrato, slow and heartfelt and darkening right across the ensemble. Suddenly, acceleration, clarinet and flute leading a gyspy gallop. This is a fluent, passionate and lyrical work, engaging faithfully with the idiom while slowing and stretching it out almost impossibly, without distortion, and then racing, but still sustaining a vivid sense of suspension—like dancing into that state of being where time stands still.

Like a knowing jazz improviser at work on a standard, in String Band (2002) Mason Bates starts at a remove from his bluegrass tune and works towards it. Out of long violin glides, piano stutterings matched by string pizzicato and then wailing, emerges a bluegrass tune against long cello glides and percussive pianism, until the whole thing is dancing with typical fiddle cries and yelps. But the violin soon converts to a Reichian minimalism, scaling rapidly against a pulsing piano. Long cello lines, taken up by the violin suggest langour against a tango-ish pizzicato and the percussive nulled notes of a treated piano, before slowly soaring to aetherial heights from which there is a long fall, the violin in and out of unison with its fellows, the piano gonging quietly. There is a brief surge of power as strings glide and the piano palpably vibrates. Applause for this cogent and, again, passionate performance is spontaneous and strong.

Melbourne-based composer Andrián Pertout comes from Chile, born to a Slovenian father (“There are 100,000 Dalmations in Chile”, he quips). The Slovenian heritage is important for Pertout. He asks the flautist to play the key tune from the work for us “at real speed”, explaining that it will be much slower when we next hear it. La flor en la colina (The flower on the hill, 2003-04) has the surging power of a suspenseful movie score with a driven piano underpinned by a humming cello over which flute and violin dialogue, furiously together and apart. A spacious slow movement follows, violin and rumbling piano miles apart, a lyrical reflective realm soon made turbulent, a veritable romantic wind storm that settles into a minimalist pulse before shaking itself loose again and simply stopping. This demanding work warrants more hearings, its folk origins much less prominent anchors than in the Golijov and Bates.

The visual and aural showpiece of the evening was Leon’s A la par (1986) with Bernadette Balkus on piano and Alison Eddington on a substantial array of percussion. It opens with a dance of rapid, focused piano play textured with marimba followed by a sudden transition to soft vibes and spare percussive gestures in conversation with a moody piano, a kind of stream of consciousness (like a Keith Jarrett improvisation). A sudden gearshift puts the piano in marked ostinato and percussion in flourish. A deep bass drumming introduces us to what becomes a bouncey folk motif urgently delivered by the piano. It’s here that the composer then allows the percussion to come into it’s own, Eddington turning rapidly on the spot, right hand and left busily playing different instruments in an impressive dance.

On Shooting Starts—Homage to Victor Jara (1981) is Vincent Plush’s much performed work for the Chilean composer tortured and murdered in the US-backed Pinochet coup of 1973. The work starts out with Jara’s evocation of the Andean musical world with congas, clarinet and strummed violin gradually propelling themselves away from the tune, floating, settling again. In part 2 a Jara lullaby briefly unfolds out of a slow clarinet opening. Part 3, with all save the pianist playing blocks, faces the explosive pain of Jarra’s death, his voice multiplying urgently through the speakers of small cassette players, then the whole world seeming to fade away on the buzz of a cello and receding breath of a flute.

The Sonic Art Ensemble’s second 2006 concert was a Takemitsu tribute, performed in low light amidst a collection of beautiful Isamu Noguchi paper lamps, and executed with a liberating precision. The carefully constructed program moved pleasingly from Takemitsu’s engagement with the sounds of his own culture, and a particular regard for nature, to distinctive dialogues with Western idioms out of Debussy and Messiaen. McGuire’s easy engagement with his audience, informative program notes and the ensemble’s superb playing have commenced the hard work of building a new and deservedly large audience.

Sonic Art Ensemble, Southern Stars, conductor, artistic director Marshall McGuire, cello Adrian Wallis, violin Rowan Martin, viola Thomas Talmacs, double bass David Cooper, flute Christine Draeger, clarinet Margery Smith, piano Bernadette Balkus, percussion Alison Eddington; Sydney Conservatorium of Music, April 1; A Tribute to Takemitsu; Sydney Conservatorium of Music, May 13; www.sonicartensemble.com.au

While there is a healthy cross-pollination of acoustic and digital audio experimentations in Australia evidenced by the annual NOW Now festival, some events like impermanent.audio have always had more of a digitised aura about them. So it is a pleasant surprise that caleb.k’s sequel to the Typhoon series (see RT 70 p47) is Mistral—2 nights of performances and an exhibition of completely unamplified, solo, sonic explorations.

The exhibition component was particularly engaging. Vicky Browne’s works spoke loudest by being, for the most part silent. In Calling Occupants, she has created a series of objects that take the shape of modern sound playing devices made from surprising materials. Cassettes and radios are roughly chiselled out of wood; iPods cast in plaster; headphones are knitted; a record player and accompanying collection fabricated from cardboard. One contraption utilising the mechanism of a meat grinder and a paper cone actually emits a tiny sound, but only if you crank the handle. Drawing it all together are records crafted from copper, felt and spirals of tiny twigs. Perhaps it is the care of the crafting, the charmingly clunky results and their insistent silence that make this work so satisfying. These normally slick and shiny fetish objects are stripped back to basics and forced to face their imminent obsolescence. Browne’s arrangement is nicely mirrored by New Zealand artist Phil Dadson’s 33rpm UV/R#2 (rock records)—a circle of treated cardboard discs (Dobson spectrophotometer recording discs normally used for geological measurements) that have been subjected to rock-rubbings, creating a variety of markings perhaps alluding to the materiality of sound and its textures and Dadson’s continuing ecological explorations.

Special guest Ernie Althoff (see RT 70, p46) offered both a sculptural work and a live performance. Althoff’s materials are basic: wood, metal, glass, plastic. He creates relations between the materials setting them in motion either through his own actions or in the use of small motors in order to create a shifting sonic percussive landscape underpinned by a humming drone. He prowls slowly around his creations, activating and adjusting items: pinning sound making mobiles to his trousers, twirling string through the air, stretching wires. While the performance is meticulous, chance—or the uncontrollable pull of gravity—plays a major role. This is also evident in his simple yet elegant installation Aleatory Pentaphonic over 5 Part Canon which relies in part on the random intersection of a wooden pendulum with 5 aluminium tubes rotating on a turntable. This interplay between chance and control is beautifully encapsulated in his performance when he throws tuned metal rods on the floor as though casting the I-Ching. It is unusual in the current sound culture, to see such attention to gesture, but this is the Althoff magic. A cross between backyard inventor, puppet master and shaman he coaxes objects and raw materials to release their sounds, and in doing so allows us to contemplate the essence of things.

Althoff’s influence on other artists is evident in the installation and performance of Robbie Avenaim. Off-kilter motors manipulated by footswitches agitate the branches of a small uprooted tree. This in turn activates the percussion assemblages strung from it—a drum skin with bottle tops, a kalimba in a gourd struck by a spasmodically leaping drumstick. His beautifully paced performance incorporated this sculpture to create a haunting set of extended percussion explorations accompanied by the gentle rustling of leaves.

While the series was unamplified, it was by no means un-mechanised. All the performers with the exception of Clayton Thomas utilised small devices to activate vibrations. The ultimate example was the intriguing invention of Matt Hoare. A row of motorised fans with little flashing lights are individually tuned and programmed into sequence creating a surprisingly quiet and quaint geek music box. Arek Gulbenkoglu used 2 ebows (battery operated devices that magnetically activate guitar strings) on a prepared acoustic guitar creating super quiet noise music of shifting drones and vibrations. Dale Gorfinkel undertook a thorough exploration of the mysterious vibraphone. Utilising its own vibrating mechanics and other motorised devices he elicits pure tones and pulsing drones augmented by ringing melodic lines and quiet rattles to create a wondrously rich, ever developing, dreamy landscape.

However the highlight for me was the completely unelectrified, totally human-powered effort of Clayton Thomas on double bass. Employing a repetitive, aggressive bowing technique for over 20 minutes, Thomas released extraordinary harmonic overtones from his instrument and from the room itself. He gradually works up the tones and releases them, allowing them to sing gloriously pure, then he transforms them, shifting the pitch or splitting them in 2. Underneath pulsing rhythms, jaw harp twangs emerge creating mesmerising rythmic effects. The essence of this piece lies in the intensity and athleticism of the physical action and the fluidity and shifting beauty of the sustained sounds.

Accompanying Mistral in Artspace’s other gallery is Alex Davies’ new installation Flutter which while amplified, never rises above a whisper. Based on the game of Chinese Whispers it uses 16 speakers in a circle, to track the progression of phrases—urban myths, news snippets, biblical quotes. Even after taking part as one of the whisperers (along with half of the rest of the arts scene in Sydney) I am amazed how grossly distorted the messages become, phrases such as “A farm littered with landmines…” morphing into “a farmer eaten by the AIDS alliance”. Or my personal favourite: “A lie can travel around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes” becoming “A lie can travel around the world in a striped shirt!” The work offers both amusing and disturbing evidence of our tenuous control over aural language, and how easily myth is perpetuated. While based on a simple premise, its technical execution is complicated as each voice is recorded and replayed on its own channel—that’s 16-channels of hours of material to edit. However what is most appealing about Flutter is the way it works as a composition. Underpinned by an unobtrusive, yet sustaining sparse piano line, the voices ebb and flow, with rushes of whispers rising, threatening to overwhelm, only to subside again into another round of bizarre mishearings/mispeakings. Flutter is a visceral and satisfying experience.

Media Ecologies—Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture
Matthew Fuller
Leonardo series, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2005
ISBN 0-262-062-06247-X (hbk)

Art, as much as science, often attempts to put an enclosure around a sequence, a process, in order to isolate it as material to be inspected in a certain way, as distinct. Name a system, exhaust its permutations.

Aphorisms of this kind pepper Matthew Fuller’s account of the interplay of expressive electronic media forms with creative people, both producers and audience, through the millennium change years. Characteristically, the statement can be taken as both pungent critique and benign observation. As critique it suggests practitioners and researchers cynically delineate territory through which they career for their individual professional and economic benefit. As an observation, it is a reasonable description of the approach so many, the altruistic together with the avaricious, take to dealing with complexity—far better perhaps, to deal with a part of the world in depth than drown in peripheral details.

Ecological systems of biological interdependency are less than 50 years old in the public mind during which time we have experienced the impact of systems of information and communications technology. Indeed radio and television have been largely responsible for disseminating information about the biological domains, presenting us with the shape of an image we now refer to as ecology. It enables us “to think through the patterns of mutualism, dependency, fuelling, parasitism etc in a system, and between overlapping systems…” as Keith Gallasch wrote recently. “Audiences eager for arts information and criticism increasingly seek alternatives to a challenged mass media, whether in street papers, magazines, websites or blogs, and above all, in combinations of these. A decade ago the commercial media mocked prophets who forecast a participatory rather than a passive audience in the near future. How wrong they were.” (Fibreculture list, 11.03.2006, http://fibreculture.org).

Media Ecologies—Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture traces the shifts, developments, dead-ends and breakthroughs in this dynamic area of studio, laboratory and street-culture activity. Fuller’s tone is agitational rather than methodological. The pitch builds upon selected works of cultural, political and philosophical treatise: from Nietzsche through Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World (1938), to Foucault, Negri, Deleuze & Guattari. The recurring metaphor of the itinerant metallurgist, moving to where the materials, the conditions and the needs are situated, the “machinic phylum” of A Thousand Plateaus, “allows thought to enter a thicker relationship with practice, with materials of expression, their constitution of effect.”

Materials like the low-power FM transmitter, used (illegally) in districts of London as a part of hip-hop culture, are tempered with the more mundane official documents that trace the management of a key material of modernity, radio waves (the subject of 70s activism for community-based radio and television). The “machinic” tools of turntable and microphone, of voice and drugs, the issues of redundancy and entropy bent out of shape to produce heard stuff, are crafted through parts of the text into a prose refracting the central issues of cultural traction. Reflection by the reader is a requirement here, as this is no quickly absorbed account. Discussion of mobile (phone) cultures moves back into more familiar range with echoes of JJ Gibson’s views about technology driving cultural change and where frameworks and affordances provide for consumers and hackers opportunity to patch their gadgets, from which emerges more meaningful “dimensions of relationality.”

These are present in The Switch, a community-based installation by Jakob Jakobson where the street lighting in a cul-de-sac in Denmark involved the 40 households in determining each night at what point the lighting would be switched on or off. What flowed was unpredictable, less so the rhetoric of Australian, Natelie Jeremijenko’s BITRadio data interventions over WNYC at the WEF. This is straightforward reading, but not so the penultimate and longest chapter, “Seams, Memes, and Flecks of Identity.” Covering boundaries, variables and events, it zips between ideas and artefacts at a breathless rate: Dawkins to packet switching; Chaosmosis to Neue Slowenische Kunst collective; TCP/IP to A Media Art (Manifesto) from the 60s; Jennicam to Albert Speer.

The short final chapter deepens the auto-reflective stance taken by the writer, seemingly conscious that the ride has been a demanding one, though determined to resist the temptation to prescribe or predict progression, through the text or from the text. He proffers a belief in a reframed art practice having the potential to take a lead in the intense process of reinvention, of orders and relationalities of the social, the material and the imagination. Fuller moves to extract essences from the phenomena encountered, by so doing, to make transitions more visible between them, highlighting tendencies, accenting flow.

Sue Healey’s choreographic work spans more than 2 decades, involves performance, installation and film work created across 3 cities where she has made a base for herself since the mid-80s—Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney. She has also had an ongoing interest in working and presenting in Japan since 1997.
Sue Healey

Last time RealTime spoke to Sue (RT61, p48) she talked about her Niche series which included performance, film and installation. Healey has now turned her attention from space to the theme of time. Her work in this current series has included the award winning dancefilm, Three Times; a second film, Once in a Blue Moon; a live work, Inevitable Scenarios, which tours 2006-7 to Sydney (May), Melbourne (June) and Japan (TBC); and an upcoming installation/dancefilm project, Will Time Tell? The latter was funded by Neon Rising, the Asialink Japan-Australia Dance Exchange project and consists of 3 stages, the first of which (filming in Japan) has just been completed. Stage 2 involves installation research and rehearsal in Sydney at Critical Path (July 2006) and stage 3, performances in Japan in 2007.

How does the Japanese co-production, Will Time Tell? fit into your current series on time?

I was given a small grant and a lot of freedom, which was great. So I took dancer Shona Erskine and cinematographer Mark Pugh and a translator with me and in 2 weeks we shot a film on Super-8 and HD video on the streets of Tokyo and Yokohama. I still haven’t cut it together but I’m really excited about that project. It got me out of the safety of the studio and challenged me to deal with available light conditions and creating choreographic narratives ‘on the spot.’ We played with contrasts of time—placing Shona still or moving slowly in ridiculously chaotic places like Shinjuku, and then reversed with Shona moving frenetically in serene Japanese gardens. And we had 4 Butoh-trained Japanese dancers who were in each scene as my ‘controlled’ Japanese environment.

Stage 2 involves a further grant from Asialink to bring one of the Japanese artists here to work with an Australian dancer, to do more filming and then spend a week researching a live work, which incorporates some of the footage. I want to create a room of screens with multiple projections. So a film/performance installation and a film will come out of it. This stage involves Critical Path giving me 2 weeks free space so we will then work towards a public outcome. While I was in Japan last year I met up with a producer who is keen to get us back for stage 3 in 2007.

The Niche series had a very satisfying journey starting in film, then site-specific work, a collaboration in Japan, the performance, Fine Line Terrain, and culminating in a film, Fine Line, which was very much like a full stop. And Shona was the link across that work. So starting this new series I really did try and move into new territory. From being really linear and angular we started making something rhythmically complex and round-edged rather than hard-edged to describe the basic material difference. All the focus on space is still there but also temporal ideas, which are so much more slippery.

So I started with a filmic study, Three Times: 3 solos with 3 different sorts of time. Lisa Griffiths was looping and repetition; Shona was timeless and suspended, but with glitches and cuts out of time; and Nalina Wait ended up sort of floating (she was pregnant at the time and her body was changing in fantastic ways). Then I spent about a month working on Inevitable Scenarios, thinking about more theatrical ways of dealing with time beyond the abstract. And my work with film really assisted me for this stage. So reversing, slowing down, focusing on rhythm, a sense of glitching. Working with percussionist Ben Walsh was fantastic—he talked about how infinitely varied the space between moments in time can be. The score was so diverse rhythmically and aesthetically it demanded an episodic structure—many scenes of temporal play, from pure melodrama to intense physicality.

Shona Erskine is such a constant element in your work. What is it about her dancing that obviously inspires you?

Shona has been essential to my work over the past 6 or 7 years. She’s not just an incredible technician and performer; it’s the way she connects imaginatively to what I do. Her focus is psychology; so to have her in the studio from day one is extraordinary because she demands a rigour in investigating an idea. What she brings to the other dancers—that sense of enquiry—is just fantastic. It’s such a treasure working with her. She’s also given me the sense of an ongoing evolution of an idea. I don’t feel like I’m constantly having to start over again. And that goes for Lisa and Nalina as well. They bring the ideas with them to a new work and we can work deeper. I guess that’s why you form a company. And I’m still trying to find a way to make that viable. This last work was a huge undertaking for me as choreographer and producer. And I have lost 2 dancers prior to Melbourne and need a substantial amount of money each week to rehearse…which I don’t have. There’s no safety net for artists like me who are working independently. And I’ve done pretty well so far. I’ve got by because I’ve learnt administrative and producing skills.

I am feeling like film is more viable in that I have more control over it in terms of scheduling. But I do have interest in the live work from Japan and New Zealand, so having a manager or agent is really the key. These things are essential for me to move forward.

Inevitable Scenarios, choreographer and filmmaker Sue Healey, composer, Ben Walsh, performers Shona Erskine, Lisa Griffiths, Nalina Wait, Craig Bary, Michael Carter, James Batchelor, Rachelle Hickson; Arts House, Melbourne, June 13-18

Brian Lucas is a significant figure on the independent dance scene, both as a local in Brisbane and as a guest artist with companies across Australia including Chunky Move, Dance North and Rock ‘n Roll Circus (now Circa). An accomplished performer and writer, he has played a role as teacher and mentor in Australia’s first Physical Theatre and Circus Training course and the QUT Creative Industries Faculty, and holds an MA in choreographic research from Melbourne University. He is the recipient of a 2-year fellowship from the Australia Council for the Arts and will produce 2 solos over the next 2 years, the first being Underbelly which premieres in Brisbane in June. When RealTime spoke to Lucas he had just finished performing in CorRUPTION (see page 37), choreographed by Michelle Heaven for Chamber Made Opera, and he will work with Clare Dyson on her show for Brisbane Festival 2006, Churchill’s Black Dog.

You have been a resident artist at the Brisbane Powerhouse for some time. What resources has that offered you?

The position is a fairly ephemeral one in that it doesn’t come with some of the formalities of many other residencies. Since 2000, the organisation has informally underwritten my career. My association with the Powerhouse has certainly been most valuable to me in terms of my profile, simply because the venue has a really strong reputation both as a presenter of exciting performance work and as a local cultural icon. When you operate as a freelance artist, it sometimes becomes a real struggle just to ‘prove your worth.’ More practically, the Powerhouse provides me with access to rehearsal space and administrative support, and is the chief commissioner of my work. While it has all been negotiated in a fairly laid-back way, each of these things has been enormously beneficial.

You worked with Chunky Move in their New York Bessie Award winner Tense Dave (a collaboration between Gideon Obarznek, Lucy Guerin and Michael Kantor). How does that experience fit into your career?

It really represented an important move for me in many ways. Although I had been working continually in Brisbane for just over 20 years, at that time I still had a fairly low profile in the rest of Australia. That’s one of the few drawbacks of being based outside of the Melbourne-Sydney axis.

The experience itself was fantastic, everyone involved in creating the piece had a sense that we were onto something very special and the subsequent success of the work both here and overseas totally proved that. And it saw the start of what I think will be long-term collaborations, like that with Michelle Heaven.

On the surface, the plan is a fairly simple one. I’m creating and presenting 2 new solo works, one in June 2006 and then the next in June 2007.

In reality, it has become more complex than that. I’ve used the first 12 months to create the first piece, Underbelly, but I’ve given myself the opportunity to research and develop the work in a wide variety of contexts. I started the piece during the Chunky Move USA tour in 2005, and since then have been able to continue the process in a wide range of locations. I listed them the other day for my own amusement and realised that Underbelly has been made in New York, Jacob’s Pillow, Tallahassee (Florida), Melbourne, Adelaide, Canberra (at the Choreographic Centre), Brisbane and Warwick, my hometown in Queensland. It was a really strange experience to hire the hall that I first started dance classes in as a 6 year-old, and to use it as a rehearsal space for my work 35 years later!

After Underbelly premieres at Brisbane Powerhouse in June I’ll be starting on the next work, and my aim is to follow a similar process but to take it into a more international sphere. I’m hoping to spend some more time in both the US and the UK rehearsing and researching, as well as checking out as much live work as I can.

That’s been one of the other fantastic aspects of the fellowship, it’s provided me with a bit of breathing space to recharge and refocus. I’ve been able to immerse myself in anything that will feed my creative work. After 2 decades of working in the arts, and particularly after 10 years of freelancing, it’s exactly the right time for me to take stock of where I am and what I’m doing, and to look forward, without the stress of just keeping my head above water in the here and now.

You’ve chosen to create 2 solo works during your fellowship. Is this the genre of work with which you feel most comfortable?

God, there’s a thesis in there, somewhere! I love creating and performing solo works. I love it as a form and find that it suits me. I suppose that you could either be kind and refer to my having an ‘auteur mentality’, or be more cutting and say it’s just a case of my being an egomaniacal control freak. Either way, I just know that I have a particular set of creative and performance skills that are only fully catered for in my presentation of these solo works.

There is something about really taking yourself on, challenging yourself and drawing out the stories and states that exist within the ‘self.’ I’ve always been keenly aware that solo work, without common reference points, is just personal therapy…I’m still trying to figure this one out. But I do know that I couldn’t work as a choreographer or as a performer in other contexts if I didn’t do what I do with my solo pieces.

The bottom line? I just know that if I didn’t create these solo pieces, I would metaphorically explode. It, ‘the stuff’, needs to get out. There has to be a release valve for me… and in my experience, I realise that I’m the best person for this particular job. It’s dirty work, but someone’s gotta do it.

Underbelly, choreographer and performer Brian Lucas, Brisbane Powerhouse June 21-24

Melbourne-based contemporary dance company, BalletLab, recently received a prestigious Arts Innovations Grant from Arts Victoria for its new production Origami, the epitome of Artistic Director, Phillip Adams’ collaborative drive. I spoke to him as he prepared for his final creative development before the premiere in Melbourne and then a season at The Sydney Opera House Drama Theatre.

The inspiration with anything pop up or moulded, such as modular plastic toys has always been there. These are the images I retain from being a small kid and which first fuelled me as an artist. Combine this with the Americanised bastardization of Japanese cartoons, such as Astroboy and Kimba, which excited me in the early 50s and you have a sort of oriental fantasia which still resonates with me as an adult.

Origami is perhaps the culmination of all the work I have made to date, as it takes my obsession with the fold to its logical conclusion. There is an approach to layering in the piece which moves from sea to land to mountain to sky, creating a landscape which is inspired by my Western perception of all things Japanese. Yet I am proud to say that there is actually no paper in this production, nor is there any ‘typical’ Japanese music. The most literal origami you will see is in our use of objects like tatami mats and the costumes that fold up around the body as the performance progresses.

I am striving for a relentless complexity in every aspect of Origami. The choreography becomes magnificent in the virtuosic vocabulary which interprets ballet technique loosely before taking it to extremes. Another influence is Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging, in which I took a short course. We create an Ikebana arrangement through ballet technique.

I still draw heavily from ballet technique, yes. I am very inspired by the baroque, the romantic, the classical form. I am just seeking to twist this into a contemporary aesthetic that allows me the range of diversity and queer elegance that is me.

But there is a lot more than just you in this piece? How did you find the many collaborators for Origami?

The architects, BURO, found us, having seen Fiction and been enthralled at the animation of toys in that piece. I like to educate myself before commencing any new work, so I plunged into architecture to learn about structure, form and space at an academic level.

I am delighted by the ‘piece de resistance’ set which we call ‘Mount Fuji.’ The mountain starts from a flat surface and folds ad infinitum into a valley, a plain and ultimately a flat wall.

I was introduced to Matt Gardiner, a conceptual origamist after seeing his Orobotics exhibition and we were soon collaborating. There is a folding of light in the work of Ben Cisterne, and Rhian Hinkley, the animator whose work I had seen in Soft by Back to Back Theatre, makes another important contribution.

Also, I am working with David Chisholm, the composer, with whom I have just finished a commission for The Australian Ballet’s bodytorque season and who will be my collaborator on the next production, Brindabella. David and I have a productive mutual appreciation which I find very inspiring. He is composing for a four string instrument ensemble which will play live over an electronic score.

No, in the past I have had a live DJ, but otherwise that has been it. In Brindabella I have the luxury of live music again and I feel like I have turned a corner and will dedicate the next set of productions to incorporating live music.

I draw, we talk, watch movies, look at buildings, try things out in the open and take them back to the studio. It’s all about creating a new vocabulary together. I also bring a lot of stuff into the studio. I should really have a junk shop to store all the paraphernalia…

Collaboration is definitely the way forward. Either contemporary dance in its purest form has exhausted itself or I am just over it, but I have to work with artists from other disciplines. I feel that the visual arts, contemporary chamber music and architecture are really driving the arts in Australia and that dance has to merge with these forms to thrive.

I am not interested in the use of technology, nor multimedia and tend to stay clear of the synthetic domain. I am most defiantly a hands-on artist and need to touch tangible objects to coax the work out of me. It’s about crafting the human body within a visual arts aesthetic.

You are already well advanced in the creation of your next production, Brindabella. How do you keep such passionate productions running in parallel without interference?

I am an artist for life. Nothing else matters but the work. Each time I begin a new work, there are already 2 others forming in the background. That is never a hassle. I have an abundance of ideas which I very passionately and necessarily have to show to my public.

Yes, in light of our history, which has never been easy, now seems to be a very good time. Having met David (Chisholm) I feel more confident as an artist holding up a company. Plus international presentations such as the recent New York season at PS122 have locked us in as a significant company. Also Linda (Sastradipradja, producer and performer) has real vision for the company.

We have genuine interest for international touring of Origami and have almost confirmed the San Francisco International Arts Festival alongside dates in Slovenia, Bangkok and Hamburg. Plus this could be the work that enables me to fulfill my goal of taking BalletLab to the UK.

BalletLab, Origami, ArtsHouse, North Melbourne Town Hall; Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, July 31-Aug 5

From abrasion to seduction, precision to play, Strut’s two week mixed bill presented a challenging collection of disparate embodiment.

Choreographer Paul Gazzola offered a reprise of his duet for Aimee Smith and Jessyka Watson-Galbraith with Yep. The piece worked somewhat better in its earlier gallery manifestation at Artrage in February, the theatrical restaging here having something of a uniformity of rhythm. At Artrage the work had been characterised by silent pauses irregularly shifting between long, pregnant gaps and shorter ones, which alternated with moments of rapid gesticulatory activity. Hands saluted or cut the air before the trunk, describing the space immediately around the body, whilst also suggesting a florid, opaque language. Sound designer Dave Miller fired off selections from his CD collection as the performers launched into movement, from a standing position, to cries of “Yep!” Unison was broadly maintained, before something went awry (“What?” spectators wondered) and one dancer announced “Nup!” Then it all came to a halt as each performer strained to perceive the motives of the other. The space was reconfigured as one dancer strode to a new position—typically with one unable to directly see the other—and suddenly it began again. During one notable moment at Artrage, both Smith and Watson-Galbraith tramped outside and across the road, distant echoes of “Yep! … Nup!” reaching bemused onlookers by the gallery.

This piece became a great guessing game with the performers publicly displaying and vocalising the rules-based structure of the semi-improvised work, whilst also withholding the information to allow one to fully decode their actions. Questions of why, what and when danced about this organised display of abstraction.

In Sliding Towards, dance-maker Olivia Millard appeared on her own, exhibiting a strong sense of directional movement and swinging inertia. She violently threw her leg out from her waist, causing her frame to pivot at this point and sharply roll out behind it in a counter-balancing action. After a whirlwind of intense dynamism, traversing both walls and floor, Millard settled into a slower, meditative phase, almost romantic, produced from the inward contemplation of her own embodiment and resting within a single pool of light. As she quietly posed and rotated through the shoulder, along the arm, and ended poised on one foot, the audience was invited into a sympathetic relationship with her; a metaphorical caressing of the body through shared physical attention. This initial section—the strongest within the piece—was followed by equally lyrical material in which dancer Paea Leach joined Millard to perform a series of slow, gymnastic weight-exchanges and poses. The effect here too was heightened by the performers’ concentration, yet focused on their active accommodation of each other’s bodies. The duo made a stimulating contrast, Millard with a fine, elongated form in which the limbs extended the line of the torso, while Leach’s broader shoulders suggested a more weighty, muscular presence.

In Leach’s own work, Vibratile et Nuance, the dancer-choreographer melodramatically scissored her arms before her torso in a red dress, or plied the garment’s surface as she spread it on the floor. Jessyka Watson-Galbraith threw her head back so violently that her red-clad torso arched and her whole frame staggered. In a miniskirt, Watson-Galbraith’s legs glowed under Andrew Lake’s lighting, adding a sense of misplaced sexuality and aggressive exposure within this tense space. Separate even when touching, these bodies only came together to angrily carve up geometric lines, to bounce together or to urgently clasp as they enacted violent self-abuse. Leach has said that the choreography explored sensations of touch. If Sliding Towards manifested a seduction of bodies—a self-aware choreography of physical dissonance, lyrically accommodated—then Vibratile et Nuance produced a sense of psychokinetic frottage, a rasping of bodies within a potentially threatening environment.

The finest piece in the program was choreographer Sue Peacock’s full length Hoofas. As in Yep, this work featured a series rules-based improvisations. The piece had an enticing, relaxing stop/start ambience, in which the 2 performers ceased dancing, came to the front of the stage and played, amongst other things, the child’s game of seeing who can slap the other’s outstretched hands. Clothing was rearranged, coins tossed, pants and tops exchanged and worn in bizarre variants as head gear, a top, or as a skirt, and other configurations. The hoofing of the title involved a repeated tap sequence—a test to see how many variations could be stomped out while the other performer took time on a stopwatch. The piece was sustained by a bittersweet, fragmentary narrative of 2 women, friends since school days in the country (out amongst the horses), who had worked cabaret, showgirl gigs, as hostesses, and in modern dance, falling out and together again. Moulding herself into a virtual doll, Tammy Meeuwissen donned a beaded cocktail dress, bouffant hair-piece, tiara, heels and grimacing smile, pouring forth the rules to which she had been subject (always smile, light the gentleman’s cigarette, keep a napkin over your lap) and the scorn which she had received from peers and friends. In an ambivalent, rarely fully-accepted gesture, Claudia Alessi attempted to compensate for such human failings by resting her chin on Meeuwissen’s shoulder, or by pushing into her partner with the back of her head, like a horse.

Beginning as a slight, comic piece, the performance ended as an intriguing study of the character of these dancers and their physical presence—Alessi the gamine game player, at ease on the ground and in gymnasticism, versus Meeuwissen’s sensual, far-flinging dancerly play. Jokes about Alessi’s diminutive stature abounded, leading her to seek revenge by stealing a cigarette and showing off with smoke rings. The constant rearrangement of costume and props produced a pleasing musicality of colour and texture, moving from bright shades to black tops and stockings, which reflected an overall darkening and formalisation of tone. Enacting an ambience between that of Sliding Towards and Vibratile et Nuance, Hoofas depended upon individuals endlessly coming together and splitting apart, a love/hate relationship of bodies and sensibilities, warmly represented.

Strut, curator Sue Peacock, Yep, choreography Paul Gazzola, sound Dave Miller; Honey You Lied, choreography Bianca Martin; Sliding Towards, choreography Olivia Millard; Vibratile et Nuance, choreography Paea Leach; Moon Hides Go Seek, direction/choreography Sete Tele; performers: Aimee Smith, Jessyka Watson-Galbraith, Brooke Leeder, Olivia Millard, Paea Leach, Sete Tele, Mike Nanning; design: Andrew Lake; Deckchair Theatre, March 22-26

Hoofas, choreographer Sue Peacock, designer Andrew Lake. performers Claudia Alessi, Tammy Meeuwissen; Deckchair Theatre, March 15-18.

“Bloom” is a provocative choice of title for an exhibition developed for Adelaide’s decaying Queen’s Theatre. The artists have approached the site as though sneaking through an abandoned house; there are few lights and screens flicker against the darkness. Domestic objects take on the character of ghosts in a deserted space. Discomfort is the pervading tone; this bloom suggests uneasy birth.
Lisa Harms, flightpatterns_flocking 2006 installation (detail)

Lisa Harms, flightpatterns_flocking 2006 installation (detail)

Kaylie Weir, Lisa Harms and Anna Hughes have created installation works in response to notions of disease or perhaps dis-ease. Harms describes a process that involves “letting uncomfortable things well up” to inform the works. While the artists have distinct sensibilities and subject matter, there are formal threads and peripheral connections that keep the encounter of the exhibition a tightly constructed experience.

Anna Hughes uses the space most aggressively with the 4 distinct parts of her installation, Beside History, marking out a central square in a lighter, more open part of the space. In one corner an unhealthy proliferation of charcoal black latex nipples swarm on the surface of a vaguely physiological form. The installation title supports the suggestion of a medical mapping of bodies: a dominant male paradigm (his-story) encrusted with a plague of female body bits. In the opposite corner bodies, or things that might become bodies, pile up, like the outcome of a conveyer belt crash in a stick figure factory. These vaguely human forms are made from new pine, bolted at the joints and strapped haphazardly together by leather belts in a pile, the total resembling something between a collapsed house frame and a mass grave.

There is a calculated formality in the making of Hughes’ work; a deadpan delivery of highly subjective and emotional content. The work might also evoke a profound sense of futility, akin to the numbest part of loss, where mechanical movements take the wheel, creative activity becomes misdirected and wooden skeletons are repeatedly made only to miscarry before completion.

Kaylie Weir presents a series of tactile installation works made predominantly from screen works, plaster, toffee and hundreds of red shiny, rotting apples. She uses the highly charged symbolism of the fruit to signify knowledge and perhaps sex. If an apple is a single consumable unit of thought, then the sheer number used implies confusion and mental disorder, or to follow the path of temptation, uncontrolled opulence. The apples are crowded, disorganised and decaying. Alongside are fragile plaster and toffee casts of suitcases that suggest an attempt to control, compartmentalise or hold still this excessive, unstable mental state.

A strength of the exhibition is its diversity and sensitivity in the use of screen media. Weir photographs soft-edged painted scenes from a distance and projects them also from a distance—we are held at arms length, perpetually out of focus as though watching another person’s memories.

Lisa Harms displays a delicate sensibility in her video installation flightpatterns_flocking. The screens show related images and sequences, most featuring a young woman spinning at different intensities. In one we see a corseted torso as she spins giddily, in another it’s legs only as she turns in a circle, perpetually held on tip-toe by careful editing, impossibly teetering. Harms uses old furniture, bell jars, the ecstatic spinning and the old Queen’s Theatre itself to evoke women of an earlier era—‘hysterical’ women of the sort that might have fascinated and frightened Freud.

Harms’ work involves making and tracing patterns. The installation title might reference Deleuze and Guattari’s “lines of flight”, a term they use to describe a stringing together of movements based on intensity (A Thousand Plateaus). A large video projection shows bird flocking patterns overlaid onto an image of wallpaper. The freedom implied by the flight is juxtaposed with the tightly controlled editing and mirroring used to construct the ebb and flow. The overlaying suggests nature held still alongside a desire for release.

In a dark, dank space Lisa Harms, Anna Hughes and Kaylie Weir have explored rich and difficult subject matter, the sheer scale of the Queen’s Theatre allowing for ambitious installations. The exhibition suggests the potential richness of working outside traditional art spaces. While, like a delicate flower, Bloom tempts the viewer, it is equally unsettling. I leave feeling I have been handed a bright algal bloom; its beauty made dangerous by unstable replication.

Bloom, co-curated installation by Lisa Harms, Anna Hughes and Kaylie Weir, Queen’s Theatre Adelaide, April 29-May 21

Complex digital technology pervades every aspect of our daily lives and the visual arts are no exception, especially with the readily available and cheap stockpile of high-tech, off-the-shelf gizmos and gadgets currently saturating the market. However, Rebecca Horn’s kinetic creations are born out of the mechanisms, gearing and inner-workings of obsolete typewriters, surgical instruments and analogue clocks. Her exhibition Time Goes By at the ANU’s Drill Hall Gallery brings to Australia for the first time a number of the photographs, drawings, films and most interestingly the kinetic sculptures of this internationally acclaimed artist.
Rebecca Horn, Large Feather Wheel, 1997

As a student in the 1960s at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg, Horn produced a series of filmed performances incorporating body sculptures and extensions, masks and feathered objects/costumes. Over the next decade these fanciful creations developed into the wearable kinetic sculptures documented in films such as The Feathered Prison Fan in Der Eintänzer (1978) or The Peacock Machine in La Ferdinanda (1981). However, as Horn’s practice evolved, she completely replaced the human body with mechanical constructions and kinetic sculptures. The dynamic and fluid movement of the performers’ bodies in her earlier films is replaced by the very slight rhythmic movements and extremely precise mechanised functions of her sculptures. In a final step, this exhibition displays these as individual artworks.

Painting Machine, 1999, is Horn’s largest kinetic sculpture in this exhibition and resembles a primitive version of the complex and technologically advanced robotic machines used in the automotive industry. As though resurrected from one of Henry Ford’s automated production lines, Horn’s robotic arm sprays a fine jet of paint across an entire gallery wall. As the name suggests, the human painter is displaced by the mechanical apparatus, in the same way factory workers were made redundant by robots. In effect, Horn’s robo-painter replaces the need for an artist’s involvement in the creative act and raises questions as to whether it is the actual process of painting or the idea and construction of the mechanical apparatus that constitutes the artwork.

Moving parts powered by intricately geared electric motors and pumps animate this and many other sculptures in Horn’s exhibition. On entering the gallery, the viewer faces the splayed wing-feathers of a bird, mounted on a brass apparatus. As implied by the title, Large Feather Wheel (1997), the feathers momentarily form a giant disc when fully open, before slowly folding away as the machine completes its cycle. On the opposite wall is another small machine, constructed from 7 oyster shells attached to the working innards of a piano. In Oysterpiano (1992), the rocker action of the revolving shaft causes the oyster shells to rise and fall in a wave-like motion. Horn has an obvious interest in natural cycles, such as the influence of the moon or sun on the seasons, weather and tides. In Blue Wave (2002), she sets in motion 2 circular mirrors, over-painted with blue waves, that orbit one another. Occasionally, one of the mirrors catches an overhead floodlight and redirects its beam, casting a crescent shadow across the floor like a solar eclipse.

At the heart of each kinetic sculpture beats the faint repetitive sounds of animated parts. Reverberating from across the gallery space the “pitter-patter” of tiny feet, leads the perceptive listener to a large canvas splattered with dark blue paint, Arteaters (1998). The sound resonates from 2 miniature insect-like machines attached at either end of the canvas that beat to a constant rhythm just like their living counterpart, the cricket. Their long spindly legs, made from brass tubing delicately soldered and activated by small electric motors and gears sourced from an old clock or typewriter, softly tap on a canvas surface taut as a drum. Effectively, Horn has overcome the limitations once advanced mechanisms to perform new artistic functions that are now taken for granted by new media artists using digital technology. Horn’s art is neither nostalgic nor romantic, she uses the outmoded components of antique instruments, of scientific innovation past, to construct beautifully simple creations.

Rebecca Horn, Time Goes By, Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University, Canberra. March 9 – April 23

Inflight’s new Project Space is one of Tasmania’s few public art spaces offering visitors the chance to see works in progress and take part in their evolution. Specifically catering for experimental work, the Project Space offers a relaxed arena for artists wanting to test and develop their ideas. The compact, intimate space (located in a small room just off the main gallery) also acts as a prime location for projections, video and sound work.
Deborah Pollard & Matt Warren, Apparently Nothing

Deborah Pollard & Matt Warren, Apparently Nothing

Amongst the first to make the most of the Project Space were Deborah Pollard and Matt Warren. Presented in late March, their collaborative video/sound installation, Apparently Nothing, explored aspects of absence and memory associated with loss. Part one of a 2-part exhibition slated to conclude at Inflight in November 2006, this version of the show included a 5-day home video diary and a recorded phone conversation describing the dread associated with impending loss.

Curtained off from the main entrance to accommodate for low light, Apparently Nothing transformed the Project Space into a sparse dining room. Positioned in the middle of the room was a table set for three. Four chairs beckoned the viewer to choose a place. Once seated, it became apparent that the plates were clean and the cutlery unused. Seated by yourself at the table, a pervading sense of loneliness and isolation began to creep in. The absence of others was clearly felt.

Breaking the desolation of the room was a dual video projection of Warren and Pollard appearing at separate intervals on the outer walls. Like the initiator of a pre-dinner discussion, Pollard appeared first and began to speak (in past tense) about an inspirational colleague. The tone was conversational yet neutral. As the video unfolded, Pollard gradually revealed more about her subject’s characteristics (the way he laughed, his gift for storytelling and meals they shared) and spoke about the effect he had on her life. Aided by the darkened space and the personal conversation, the experience of watching and listening became strangely hypnotic.

After several minutes, Pollard faded into black and another projection located directly opposite began. Similar in style to Pollard’s confessional, the second projection captured Warren reminiscing about a childhood friend. Again the details were esoteric. Hints of departure, change and the passing of time were scattered through Warren’s story yet the disparate nature of the narrative made it difficult to fully comprehend. What happened to his friend? Was he still alive? Is he invited to dinner?

At sporadic points during the projections the speed of the frames became slower and caused the speaker’s facial movements to appear drawn out and distorted. During an unnerving slow motion blink, Pollard’s eyes rolled back in her head as though momentarily looking within. At times, the emotional impact of the recollections caused the performers’ speech to stall and their eyes to become dewy. For the viewer, there were more questions than answers.

To further accentuate the sense of absence and mystery, spliced in between the video monologues was documentary style footage of uninhabited domestic interiors. An unmade bed, a messy lounge, an empty kitchen—the air was thick with the shadows of the past. A muffled voice spoke off camera about people and events associated with the interiors. The dialogue was often difficult to hear and seemed deliberately shrouded in secrecy.

Cracking open the uncomfortable experience of loss, Apparently Nothing forced the viewer to assume the position of silent witness. Like being the unintroduced guest at a dinner party listening to fragments of conversations about unknown people and places, Pollard and Warren created an experiential void that threatened to swallow the viewer whole. Without the flickering light of the projections or the subdued voices emanating from the speakers, silence engulfed the space and emphasised the social alienation felt while sitting alone at the table with only one’s own thoughts and memories for company.

Citing the influence of John Cage’s task-based scores and performances as well as the work of UK performance artist Tim Etchells, Pollard and Warren construct affecting collaborations that lucidly dissect the nature of communication and emotive experience. Part 2 of the exhibition promises to extend beyond personal accounts to include a group discussion of the absent figure and a real-time meal daily attended by 4 performers.

Apparently Nothing, Part One, Deborah Pollard and Matt Warren; Inflight Gallery (Project Space), North Hobart, March 23-31, www.inflightart.com.au

Two very different works featured recently at the new and improved Inflight gallery, the popular artist-run initiative which launched its second gallery Project Space a few months previously. This new space is intended to allow Inflight to showcase more artists, both local and national.

Alicia King is artist-in-residence at the University of Tasmania’s School of Medicine, where she is learning tissue culture techniques for growing semi-living sculptural forms from human tissue. She is interested in the potential of biological technologies to influence the human perception of ‘self’ within the natural world.

Her fascinating installation clearly draws on these concerns, but can be profitably viewed or ‘read’ without an awareness of them. A large, approximately door-height, white fabric lair (to use King’s word) has been positioned at the entrance of the main gallery, effectively blocking it off and seeming to grow from within the gallery itself. It’s a a mass of white protrusions extending and dangling from its uneven ceiling and curved sides like stalactites or fingers, all of the work a mass of organic shapes suggestive, to this viewer, of some rogue body part or internal growth.

A wall panel advises the viewer to spend some minutes within the several metres deep brightly lit space; 2 movement-sensitive heat lamps switch on when this occurs and large, copper-toned globular masses within the work turn green. I thought the white lair, with its meticulously sewn walls and dangling finger-like growths, was almost a significant enough resolved work in itself, but I was intrigued and engaged by the addition of this nominally interactive element.

A colleague observed that the heat lamp-globule component of the installation might just as successfully have been exhibited on its own and this is arguable, but I enjoyed the physical and visual sensations experienced in the context of the wider work which is a real testament to skill, patience, vision and research in its creation.

King explains, “As new developments in biological technologies occur, our ability to interact within these and other spaces, to generate growth and life in the most unlikely of circumstances, is greatly enhanced … [The installation addresses] the possibility of life to manifest itself in unexpected ways [which] has significant potential to enrich our perceptions, experiences and relationships with the natural world and the spaces we inhabit.”
Ada Henskens, Blackstream

Quite different in format if not in some of its concerns is Ada Henskens’ experimental video Blackstream, one of a sequence of experimental works using digital image in conjunction with 2D works to explore constructing concepts of reality we can live with. The work deals with the dialogue between light reflected off surfaces and the visual cortex—with flux, light as wave and particle: things in the moment of becoming, with an element of fantasy creeping in.

A seemingly simple 5-minute loop of abstracted black and white curvilinear visuals, Blackstream really does offer more than first meets the eye. The piece is silent and this works in its favour, as the viewer is neither distracted nor seduced by sound. My first impression, on looking at the bubbling, twisting, dissolving black lines, was of the prosaic idea of knitting spontaneously unravelling. Don’t laugh, I know it’s not a very high-tech interpretation, but Henskens is out to let the viewer catch glimpses of things before they vanish. I next saw hieroglyphics and assorted other semi-figurative shapes, only again to see them disappear. The curved lines and irregular spaces between them constantly change and evolve and this flux is exactly what Henskens is aiming for. One viewer neatly called the image ‘space-time foam’, while another revelled in trying to decide what he was seeing and in concluding everything was left wide open.

Certainly, I found the work hypnotic (perhaps unsurprisingly) and for such simple (but not simplistic) art making, very engaging and seductive. As one fellow commentator noted, Henskens, a mid-career artist, certainly makes unselfconscious use of effects, such as zooming in and out, that the grainier and grittier work of emerging practitioners generally eschews as a little cringeworthy. Interestingly, in Ada Henskens’ hands, these techniques work and serve a purpose. For once, the uninformed gallery-goer could voice the old anti-Modernist mantra, ‘What’s it supposed to be?’ and feel confident that it’s whatever he/she chooses.

I’m growing to love you, installation, Alicia King, March 4- 24; Blackstream, experimental work, Ada Henskens, Inflight Gallery, Hobart, April 7-29

I had a gander at some interesting performance stuff in Canberra recently and it was refreshing to see some free-form exposition take centrestage. What I like about the whole performance thing is that it moves the punter away from the edges of the gallery to that somewhat dangerous middle ground at the centre of the space. Thus exposed, the audience becomes an integral part of a fleeting event. It’s kind of like a dance. Audience and artists meet halfway and fool around.
Dysfunctional Feed

The exhibition comprised 3 separate collaborative performances, and I saw the opening of each over the course of 3 Friday nights. First on the menu was Dysfunctional Feed, an apparently loose collective of about 25 artists from Sydney. It was a terrific show, comprising various video installations and live performances set against and interacting with a range of experimental music, which was the engine and undisputed star of the performance. Trying to say too much more about the music would be futile—you just have to hear it—but some of the artist descriptions are great: “cinematic industrial analog”, “computer game music”, “laptop focus listening.” One feature that especially captured me was a sort of time-based programming in which the artist manipulated the sound digitally to maintain a kind of wave function on the video, sort of like a flowing worm graph. Another of the larger video installations depicted multifarious human scenes quickly, but with pathos, though maybe this was my reaction to the ominous, building white noise that accompanied it. I really like the ideas of these guys. They just seem to be into putting stuff together and getting it out there with very little pretension, though it must be hard to shuffle the stylings of so many together.

Natalie Thomas and Kristen Phillips gave us their appropriately titled Picassol performance on the second Friday. Fast forward many hours after the show and I still seemed to be surrounded by imitation Picassos resplendent in their French jailbird tops. This was true of more than one drinking establishment. The work centered on Dora Marr, the surrealist photographer who was better known for her relationship with Pablo Picasso and as his model. Through Marr, the artists explored the subjugation and suffering of female artists across history, I suppose asking us to consider amongst other things the social maladies that lead to their obsequiousness. This was achieved through an ‘historical’ intervention, an act of retribution against men like Picasso and their brutal and selfish use of women. To wit, the audience was treated to installed caricatures of some of the little man’s sculptures: cleverly mutated versions of Goat and Skipping Girl. There was video and dance too, the former incorporating Johnathan Richman’s witty single Picasso, the latter performed to a scathing poem acerbically highlighting the history of a very one-sided relationship. I guess this was overly and overtly a political piece, but, as Richman’s lyrics noted, “Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole, not like you.” So perhaps it was high time. Plus there was plenty of free wine.

spat & loogie rounded out the series with new!shop, a “genre-hopping ride in a shopping trolley full of video, performance and interactive technology.” Now this was a fully interactive performance piece. The space was changed entirely to resemble a supermarket or convenience store; and the audience was asked to take a basket and fill it with a range of nebulous yet strangely desirable products such as used sporting trophies, syringes and styrofoam pills in bottles with labels making outlandish promises. Once the shopper’s contagious desire was sated or the basket was full, an orderly queue was formed to checkout where the goods were scanned—but not delivered back to the customer. Instead a receipt was printed outlining a unique consumer horoscope, topped with a dapper name badge. Naturally, I was “priceless.” This was all to the insidious banality of elevator music. The shop was fully staffed (I was at one point frisked for security purposes) and the audience/shopper was initially guided by a video installation outlining a perverse sort of mission statement. Lots of fun and an apt parody of the inward material vision of contemporary human life.

Canberra Contemporary Art Space (CCAS), ctrl+alt+del, performance-sound-new media-installation, curators Mark Hislop , Amita Kirpalani; Dysfunctional Feed, www.dysfunctionalfeed.com, April 21; Picassol, Natalie Thomas and Kristen Phillips, April 28; new!shop, spat & loogie, May 5; Gorman House Arts Centre, Canberra

In brief…

For this edition, our editorial is necessarily a short one. We’ve been busy beyond belief, completing our plans for the next 3 years, working on a publication documenting the achievements of Australia’s Indigenous filmmakers, and engaging in the Australia Council Theatre Board’s timely dialogues about future funding strategies (see their Make it New? paper available from the Australia Council website). Interesting to see the Australia Council Chair David Gonski do a runner before securing the Federal Government funds we thought he’d promised to raise for Council and its clients after the 2005 restructure. He’s to be replaced by James Strong, not a promising appointment at first glance, given Howard and Kemp walked all over his important recommendations for the reform of Australia’s orchestras. We live in hope.

Experimenta Under the Radar

Good news is Experimenta is taking an exhibition of great Australian new media art to FACT in Liverpool (an impressive complex of cinemas, galleries, bar and café) and to the ICA in London. While we were in UK it was a relief not to have to worry about what we called the work, ‘new media art’ seemed fine, while here the push is on to re-label it as ‘media art.’ On page 27 we look at the Experimenta Under the Radar program and what Shiralee Saul has made of it in her optimistic catalogue essay.

Craig Walsh

Great too to see Craig Walsh in the Experimenta Under the Radar program with Cross-Reference, the work featured on our cover. Craig’s disturbing Contested Space (2004) nested massive cockroaches above the Art Gallery of New South Wales portico and appeared on the cover of RealTime 65 when he was a finalist for the Anne Landa Award. In the 2003 Sydney Festival showing he convincingly filled the windows of the financial institutions on Martin Place with water, fish and floating office furniture.

RealTime 74: Arts Education; LIFT; Rich Mix

In our last editorial we promised reports from London on LIFT and Rich Mix. These stories have been held over until our August edition.

RealTime 74 includes our popular Arts Education feature, this year focusing on artist-teachers in tertiary education, how they balance the demands of teaching and art, sustain vision and inspire new generations of artists. KG

Booking a ticket for Simon Ellis' Inert is perhaps part of the experience itself: when informed that the audience capacity for each performance is limited to 2, and then asked for one's height, a sense of anticipation is inevitable. Why would height be a factor? And, more interestingly, who will be the other lone audience member to share this encounter?

Arriving early, I find myself passing time in the Dancehouse foyer, aware of the young woman similarly distracting herself with show brochures, advertisements for classes and, yes, browsing RealTime. We smile politely, conscious of the fact that we're here for the same reason, but don't make much small talk. All of this, I later think, is an integral component of Inert, whether deliberately intended or otherwise.

Eventually a smiling pair are led out of the performance space and we enter, guided to a pair of upright platforms which seem nothing less than vertical operating tables. We are positioned against these, with cushions placed behind our heads and headphones over our ears. This is where our connection with one another ends.

I'm now prone, though upright, with one of the 2 performers (Ellis and Shannon Bott) positioned before me. Movement begins in silence or, at least, unaccompanied by prerecorded sound. The sounds that I do hear are those of the dancer in front of me, only piped through my headset and increased in volume. Bott is an accomplished dancer, but her performance is consciously restrained, holding back. Phrases begin to appear but are cut short, or a moment of connection beckons but deflates. Gradually, she begins to accept the presence of Ellis, who is performing in front of my fellow audience member. They eventually share a space, if hesitatingly, but before any real correspondence can occur the dancers move to our resting platforms and lower them to a horizontal position. It's a slow descent, but as I sink backwards I become aware of the screen hovering above me.

Projected upon this screen is a fragmented repository of moments: quick cuts of limbs or the corners of the body are offered as snatches of spoken text and sparse music filter through my headphones. The narrative is one of connection and disconnection, of a relationship seen only from one angle. It's a delicate and reflective play of captured movement, both physical and emotive, and it takes some time before I become aware that the performers haven't entirely succumbed to the power of the image. I have to crane my neck up see them, sometimes obscured in positions out of sight, sometimes moving in darkness. I'm forced to choose where I look, but no matter how hard I try there's no way I can view everything offered to me without losing something along the way.

Finally the performance ends, and our platforms are returned to their upright position. The slow transition has an unexpected side-effect: as I become upright, I become acutely aware of my muscles and bones settling into the pull of gravity. When watching the projected images, I hadn't noticed the weightlessness of the experience, but now I feel re-embodied, back in the world as a participant. Upon leaving the space, the woman with whom I'd just shared the performance turns to me and says “It's like waking up from a dream!” And I can't help but agree.

Inert, performance/choreography Simon Ellis, Shannon Bott, sculpture/design Scott Mitchell, videography Cormac Lally, composition/audio design David Corbet, costumes Marion Boyce; Dancehouse, May 10-21

With a program of works composed almost entirely by living American composers, Australian-born New York resident Lisa Moore wove her unique musical magic for an audience that may not have known any of the pieces before hearing them that evening. Moore specialises in performing new music by composers she has worked with closely. Thus she is able to introduce each piece with personal anecdotes and creative insights. The demanding repertoire she performs somehow seems more approachable for her warm observations and sense of humour.

The program began with performances of 2 works which displayed a strong sense of nostalgia. John Halle's Second Childhood (2000) had moments of dissonance and abrasiveness, but at its heart were Gershwin-like blues references and the classic piano rag form, although taken to a new level of virtuosity. The choice of this work to open the concert was a clever way for Moore to ease her audience into her specialised new music repertoire. Likewise, Paul Lanksy's It All Adds Up (2005) is a rhapsodic exploration of traditional and modern harmonic styles. It takes us through a variety of accessible piano textures, including toccata passages, elaborated decorations of chords, and bitonality resulting from different left and right hand patterns. Both these elegant works were played with effortless grace.

But the mood of the concert changed radically with Julia Wolfe's 'my lips from speaking' (1993), an abrasive work for 6 pianos, here performed by Lisa Moore as a live solo part with computer playback of the other 5 piano parts. Like Halle and Lansky, Wolfe also takes her inspiration from earlier music: her work is based on a few chords from the opening of Aretha Franklin's recording of the song Think. For the most part, however, a savage dissonance is imposed upon the source material. This was an excellent vehicle for Moore to demonstrate the great power and energy of her pianism. It is extremely loud, aggressive and rhythmically disjointed but in the centre of the work, there is some relief as it builds to a phenomenal funky groove between the soloist and the backing parts. The piece is both exciting and disturbing but perhaps goes on a little too long.

After an interval the concert resumed in a considerably more subdued mood with Martin Bresnick's Dream of the Lost Traveller (1997), based on a poem and drawing by William Blake. This subtle piece begins with an exploration of the major/minor dichotomy and works its way somewhat minimally through a variety of interesting piano textural ideas leading eventually to a meditative and folk-like song setting of the Blake poem. Moore handled with aplomb the somewhat unusual requirement for a concert pianist to sing a song while playing.

Lisa Moore's performance of three of György Ligeti's Etudes for piano (book 1, 1985) was the highlight of the concert for me. These highly inventive virtuosic movements by the only non-American on the program, are the more remarkable because Ligeti is not a pianist. In the first of the etudes, Fanfares, Moore maintained a suitable nimbleness of touch for the bitonal scale pattern which pervades the work; in Arc-de-ciel she achieved a mysterious and dreamy mood through its rich chordal textures; and in Automne à Varsovie she struck an excellent balance between the drama of the chordally textured melodic materials with the lightness of the accompanying multi-octave figurations.

Moore's tour de force was arguably her performance of Frederic Rzewski's Piano Piece No 4 (1977), a remarkable work based initially on rapid repeated notes, said to represent the gun shots of the Chilean Pinochet regime. They start at the very top of the instrument and gradually work their way down to the bottom. A lyrical passage then leads to use of a Chilean folk melody which is subjected to a number of dramatic textural variations including the gun-fire idea to end the piece. In introducing the work Lisa Moore indicated that it was Rzewski who had inspired her to pursue her career as an interpreter of new piano music. It certainly showed in her dynamic and charismatic performance and was a fitting end to a remarkable display of musicianship.

Lisa Moore, piano, works by Halle, Lansky, Wolfe, Bresnick, Ligeti, Rzewski, Byron Bay Steinway Series, Byron Community Cultural Centre, May 12

It was one of those strange times, a couple of months in which much of the work in contemporary performance and theatre I saw didn’t hit the mark. There were exceptions, even if with reservations. At the youth end of the spectrum there was PACT’s Toxic Dreams, a remarkable music theatre venture, and at the other the State Theatre Company of South Australia production of the emotionally and ethically rivetting Who is Sylvia? The Goat, written only a few years ago by Edward Albee, now in his 80th year. But it was dance theatre that excelled, just as we went to print, in the form of Tania Liedtke’s 12th Floor, immaculately made and bravely performed, if to a somewhat dodgy scenario. Like Kate Champion at her best with Force Majeure, or Chunky Move in Tense Dave, this was exhilarating and inspirational theatre (to be reviewed in RT 74).

Toxic Dreams

There has been a toxic airborne event, Seven people have taken refuge in makeshift safe house. Time for a miracle. Or a song.

PACT’s Toxic Dreams, is a nightmare vision—on the promotional postcard and program not even the cockroach (the most likely survivor of nuclear war) has survived this disaster. However, this unrelentingly grim and apparently helpless vision is relieved by a superbly effective exploration of the potential of new music in performance.

This is a world of waste (swathes of unread newspaper) against a dark mural of tired oil derricks and drab pelicans. A jug of water and 7 cups sit centre stage. Each cup is filled and drunk in the course of the performance, each act of drinking possibly a death sentence. Like the paper, the performers are littered across the space, coming into focus primarily in solos or now and then in duets of assault or temporary compassion—cradling, protecting, feeding. Occasionally they are as one, but mostly they signal helplessly, audiences to each other’s passions and fears.

After visiting a sewage plant, a waste disposal site, Lucas Heights and going on a bush trip, 7 writers worked with dramaturg Bryoni Trezise on texts about toxification and intoxication to be used collectively as a libretto for a PACT performance. As often, libretti on the page rarely impress, but in performance they here enjoy the alchemy of Margery Smith’s powerful musical direction for 2 saxophones, electronics and piano. The texts are sung or spoken and, when spoken, the performers’ voices are liberated, extending their range, shifting registers, exploiting acoustic and microphonic spaces. Although articulation and verbal clarity weren’t always sufficiently sharp, intention, shape and strength were-a big vocal step forward for young performers in demanding work.

As ever, PACT’s directors get the most out of their young performers, perhaps here more than ever, Georgie Read excelling in a vertiginous rhythmic flailing high above us and, eslewhere, displaying potent vocal qualities. While individual writing, the matching of words with music and the strategies for enacting them were all admirable, the overall scenario however sometimes lacked shape and intelligibility and the PACT performance vocabulary felt more than familiar. These not inconsiderable complaints aside, Toxic Dreams was a bracing music theatre experience.

The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?

Edward Albee provides a more conventional theatre experience, but one nonetheless full of surprises, not just in content but in construction. That most favored of American stage formulae, the unravelling of a secret is again centrestage. However, the title gives up the secret to allow Albee to focus on just how his characters will reveal and explore it. He deftly moves from social comedy into the kind of verbal viciousness we associate with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, on into dizzying ethical debate and, finally, a ritualistic moment straight out of Greek tragedy (“goat play”). While the set design and spatial deployment of the actors appear less than accommodating, the performances are superb, director Marion Potts drawing out of Victoria Longley and Bill Zappa some of their very best work. Zappa lives his persona of an essentially quiet, forgetful and ruminative middle-aged man, caught out, struggling to understand himself and the violence of other people’s responses to what was for him a transcendant experience before morality kicked in.

From a Distance

Version 1.0 have created an impressive track record with Second Last Supper, CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident) and Wages of Spin. Their discursive but incisive house style, adroit play with forms and media, and a strong sense of ensemble sustain their political drive. From a Distance, however, is not in the race. Inspired by the bad behaviour of an Australian Olympics rower who let her team down and they in turn her, the show begins strongly with a walking dance of meticulous uniformity in which the members collectively stare one of their number down until no-one is left. At the end of From a Distance, the rowing team and management line up to spin their collective taking on the blame for turning on each other and behaving in ways un-Australian, but all still jockeying to stay centrestage. It’s become just too easy to say sorry. It’s in these scenes that you feel close to the material which inspired From a Distance, but in between, for the bulk of the work, you’re somewhere altogether different, at an Australian family barbecue.

Version 1.0 opt for metaphor instead of going at their subject matter, as they usually do, head on. This image of bad domestic behaviour peppered with prejudice, infidelity, petty squabbles and personal quirks, and fuelled by wedge politics, goes nowhere fast, it remains a conceit—a half hour with Kath and Kim’s quickfire satire seems more revelatory. There are brief bursts of insight and some fine, wacky moments from the Fondue Set, like Emma Saunder’s frantic inability to play the game, but it’s not clear what this family adds up to. Nikki Heywood as mum, ironing fatigues and sports jumpers, drolly worries at her son’s primary school experience of being labelled un-Australian by a teacher, and seems momentarily to belong to an altogether different, more politically aware family than this obtuse bunch. If there were too many signs of cut and paste and an inconsistent and under-developed vision (and an unusually weak link for Version 1.0 between live performance and video imagery), we mustn’t get depressed, the occasional defeat will doubtless be corrected on the learning curve. The excellent Wages of Spin is soon go on tour.

Blowback

I wasn’t any happier at Not Yet Its’ Difficult’s Blowback which relentlessly hammered home its dark vision of a US-occupied Australia. As in Version 1.0’s Wages of Spin, the setting is a television studio, though less totally so because it shares the stage with a torture chamber and a war room. Framing these is an Australian TV soap opera suspected of delivering coded signals for terrorist resistance. The torture oscillates between erotic play and rape, and the US officer, Jenny Ripper, is an unfunny relative of the Ripper in Dr Strangelove. Although played with great commitment and realised with deft cinematic shifts of focus, the code-in-the-soap plot was ungainly and Blowback’s agitprop stance and pacing allowed little room for reflection on our complicity in the occupation. Again, the choice of subject matter is spot on, but its handling uncertain. Not everything in the same company’s K appealed to me, but for clarity of intent, nuance, technological engagement and potency of image it far surpassed this new work. John Bailey’s review of the Melbourne season of Blowback appeared in RealTime 65 (page 35).

Silence

Tanya Denny’s account of Suzan Lori Parke’s In the Blood was one of the best shows of 2005. However, her version of Moira Buffini’s Silence did not impress. This much praised British play is an historical comedy, played here as farce, but not convincingly written as one. The acting was exhaustingly big with only Rose Grayson as the girl raised as a boy to become a lord of the manor playing, for the most part, with the requisite subtlety.

The Hanging Man

Also historical, also from the UK, Theatre Improbable’s The Hanging Man. This fable is about an architect who hangs himself when he senses his new cathedral a failure, but lives, ghost-like, until he learns to love life and Death then lets him die. The best thing about The Hanging Man is the theatre as machine. The clever unit set is packed with devices that allow for flight, entrances through the floor and for swift changes of scene. But the inadequate metaphysics, the sluggish pacing, a text-driven revelation, and a final superfluity of effects, weakened the theatre magic and the easy ensemble playing.

Luke Davies’ Stag

Sydney Theatre Company’s PUSH program of plays-in-development is attracting big audiences over its 3-night presentations in the age of participation. All kinds of Q&As, festivals of ideas and other forums are proliferating, developing in parallel with new communications technologies. There’s even a user-pays aspect: $15 a ticket to see a work-very-much-in-progress. Luke Davies’ Stag, about a group of sports day dissidents hiding out, smoking dope and reflecting on the meaning of life at the far end of the school yard, is wonderfully discursive, capturing the power plays and embarrassed confessions of of adolescence. Davies’ language is, as ever, a joy, here focusing on how verbal images grab young minds and enter into circulation. The business of 2 school teachers having an affair is as yet unweildly, there’s a loaded theme pertaining to absent fathers and the resolution in a set of monologues describing what happened to each of the characters reads like author notes. Otherwise Stag looks promising.

Request Program

From the same wing of the STC, Wharf2LOUD, came Brendan Cowell’s production of Franz Xaver Kroetz’s Request Program (1971). Without ever speaking, the lone subject of the play goes about her quiet life, meticulously ordering every object and moment in it until her resolve finally weakens and alcohol and medication beckon. Cowell admirably has Suzi Dougherty maintain her distance from us, she remains a stranger (unlike, say, the confessionalists of Big Brother), but he cannot resist overplaying and parodying the radio request program for lovers and the lonely she listens to, but never visibly reacts to. The sheer strangeness of witnessing such empty privacy is consequently, if not irredeemably (once the radio is turned off), undercut.

Toxic Dreams, director Regina Heilmann, assistant director Alice Osborne, performers Ashley Dyer, Jane Grimley, Lulu Hogg, Gideon Payten Griffiths, Georgie Read, George Root, Hila Sukkar; writers Corin Adams, Christian Brimo, Thao Cao, Lynda Ng, Sarah-Jane Norman, Jon Seltin, Hila Sukkar, saxophones Nathan Henshaw, Andrew Smith, digital musician Andrew Smith; dramaturgy Bryoni Trezise, musical direction Margery Smith, design Claire Sandford, lighting Clytie Smith; PACT Theatre, Sydney, April 6-16

Who is Sylvia? The Goat, writer Edward Albee, , director Marion Potts, performers Bill Zappa, Victoria Longley, Pip Miller, Cameron Goodall, designer Gaelle Mellis, lighting Geoff Cobham, Company B Belvoir, State Theatre Company of South Australia, Seymour Centre, Sydney, April 1-May 7

Version 1.0, From a Distance, devisors, performers Nikki Heywood, Stephen Klinder, Jane McKernan, Jane Phegan, Elizabeth ryan, Christopher Ryan, Emma Saunders, director, producer David Williams, consultant director Yana Taylor, dramaturgy Paul Dwyer, lighting, video Simon Wise, sound Jason Sweeney; co-producer Performance Space, Sydney, April 5-16

Not Yet It’s Difficult, Blowback, writer, director David Pledger, performers Todd MacDonald, Roslyn Oades, Rachel Gordon, Benji McNair, Vivienne Walshe, Luciano Martucci, Tom Considine, Natalie Cursio, Joshua Hewitt, dramaturg Peter Eckersall, lighting Paul Jackson, design David Pledger, costumes Danielle Harrison, sound Lydia Teychenne, film editor Mark Atkin, animation Louise Taube; The Studio, Sydney Opera House, April 26-29

Moira Buffini, Silence, director Tanya Denny, producer Sam Hawker, performers Sophie Cleary, Rose Grayson, Nicholas Papademetriou, Paul Tassone, Andrea Wallis, Johann Walraven, design Jo Lewis, lighting Stephen Hawker, sound Jeremy Silver; B Sharp, Seymour Centre, Sydney, May 5-28

Improbable, The Hanging Man, directed, designed & scripted by Phelim McDermott, Lee Simpson, Julian Crouch; Adventures in the Dark, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, May 4-June 3

Push#1, Stag, writer Luke Davies, director Lee Lewis, Wharf2Loud, Sydney Theatre Company, Wharf2, April 20-22

Franz Xaver Kroetz, Request Program, director Brendan Cowell, performer Suzi Dougherty, designer Genevieve Dugard, lighting Stephen Hawker, sound/composition Basil Hogios, radio show written and performed by Brendan Cowell; Wharf2, Sydney Theatre Company, May 25-June 10

Jo Lloyd and Phoebe Robinson presented 2 short pieces at Lucy Guerin’s Studio as part of Next Wave. Whilst Robinson’s The Emperor’s New Guns was a quiet solo presented in half light, silhouette and shadows, Jo Lloyd’s threesome Not As Others, shattered the peace with conflict, violence and drama. Which is odd really, given that Robinson’s work was concerned with the spaghetti western, a genre seething with conflict, violence and drama and Lloyd’s recalled the ‘innocence’ of childhood.

There was a certain peacefulness about Robinson’s movement which you might think failed to engage the supposed action associated with westerns. And yet the crucial elements were there: epic humanity, space, light, darkness. The epic character of the piece was suggested by its being a solo—the dramatic lived pathway etched by a lone entity. Plus the finale—death—a slow rolling, receding towards the back, fading into the shadows with only a cutout horse for companion. The floor furnished a sense of dry sand, of grit layered between body and floor offering the sounds of feet sliding on wood, the texture of space.

A girl and her horse in the sun grappling the elements. As with all animals onstage the horse did at times upstage the human. Ben Cobham’s masterful manipulation of lightscapes focused upon the horse, amplifying Alex Davern’s balsa wood cutout into an assertion of equine proportions.There was a deadpan quality in Robinson’s movement choice and execution, serial distal moments strung together in modular forms of association. Not so much torso, more jointed action of the limbs. Quiet, delicate. A nice diagonal sequence travelling backwards achieved a sense of flow, of activity traversing space. Similarly a rolling sequence covered ground; creating the ground.

There was for me an opacity in Robinson’s movement that made it difficult to enter her experience; the subjectivity of the cowboy, if that is what she was. What feelings, sensations were there, were felt? There is a parallel here, perhaps intentional, with the masculinity of the cowboy; determined, external, lacking interiority, lonely even. This pith of humanity is subject to her environment, responding to, even dwarfed by Cobham’s dramatic lighting changes. Perhaps this is the epic loneliness of the long distance cowboy, a rereading of the image of self sufficiency spawned by icons such as John Wayne, Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson.
(L-R): Alison Currie, Sarah Cartwright, Ana Grosse

(L-R): Alison Currie, Sarah Cartwright, Ana Grosse

Jo Lloyd’s Not As Others was a completely different kettle of fish, manifesting a violent intensity more familiar to the cowboy genre than relations between femmes. That said, Anna Kokkinos’s film Only the Brave (1994) put paid once and for all to the idea that girls don’t fight. Not As Others drew on the fact that three’s a crowd, working and reworking dynamics of inclusion, exclusion, and persecution. A mixture of dancerly precision and emotional drama, Lloyd used her energetic style to make trouble. Although the piece began with clearly defined roles of dominance and subjection, these were later blurred in the complexity of relational movement.

The floor was a faded patchwork of linoleum sutured by tape. The women traversed this quietly broken narrative with their own cross-hatching of lunges, twists, plaits and pairings. Can difference be tolerated? What does it take to incur suffering within the intimacy of relational play? Does simple exclusion imply oppression? Not As Others stopped short of imposing any narrative closure or moralistic resolution, provoking instead interpretive questions around changing relations of force between the three dancers. Mostly the kinaesthetic timbre of the movement worked seamlessly to suggest and create human dynamics. One step grated however, just one moment where someone extended a pointed, tense leg into a deep second position plié (in ballet’s lexicon), which made me think about the way in which ‘the dancerly’ functions in relation to narrative. Something about this plié reminded me of the way movements are used in traditional dance forms (classical ballet, Bharatanatyam) to suggest storyline. I’m not sure the plié was meant to ‘say’ anything in particular but it worked against the flow of movement—human dynamics that the rest of the work embraced—reminding me of the conventions of traditional dance. That move was a relic poking out of the sand, a not-yet fossil from dancing days gone by, grating against the athletic modernism that comprises Lloyd’s distinctive style.

The Emperor’s New Guns, choreographer, performer Phoebe Robinson, lighting Ben Cobham, sound Felicity Mangan, installation Alex Davern; Not As Others, choreographer Jo Lloyd, performers Sarah Cartwright, Alison Currie, Ana Grosse, sound Sacha Budimski, Duane Morrison, Byron Scullin, installation Sasha Gribich, costumes, Shio Otani, Next Wave Festival, Lucy Guerin Studio, Melbourne, March 29-April 2

Graffiti writers versus public artists. Funding legitimacy versus community legitimacy. The fractious arts community versus itself. Private Commonwealth Games security guards versus the customary streetlight. The very environment makes it hard to ignore that the street art component of Next Wave is on disputed turf, and some of the best works in the program have harnessed contention to their advantage.

Taking no prisoners in the battle against saccharine public art is the arresting Clean, championing the city’s homeless people and graffiti artists, both of whom had been made more unwelcome than usual in readiness for the Games. The stencil-art mainstay of Hosier Lane is infested with the ghosts of the repeatedly evicted street dwellers, in the form of sensor-triggered audio recordings. The always cringe-inducing “You don’t have any change, do you?” drops like an epitaph in this little space, as it starkly and suddenly illuminates the mass deportation of the city’s poor. The surveillance state paranoia of officialdom is cheerfully inverted, as Big Issue vendors and drunken teens harangue you from above, in place of the silent police cameras. (Hosier Lane in fact sports a blanket and bottle that some hapless sleeper has abandoned, I like to imagine, in their irritated flight from the self-fulfilling prophesies of the sound-art work made to mourn their passing. But anyway.) Under Clean’s umbrella of official art approval, or perhaps just the usual surrender to the cult stencil status of the lane, graffiti here is largely unmolested by council cleanups, densely layered as always, and Clean’s own small street decorations (parodic wallpaper with a repeating council wall-buffing motif) are already vanishing beneath a layer of fresh scrawls.
Clean

Emile Zile’s New Ruins is placed a little more ambivalently in the public space contention. Graffiti scrawls from the interior of the City Watch House are recontexualised in blue capital letters on an LED display, the sort usually used to announce street detours and miscellaneous public works, on the front of the Watch House itself. Things like “J 4 H 4 EVA” scroll in the firmest of public service announcement fonts across the grim facade. It’s classic detournment, questioning even its own origins in the debates over graffiti as art, just a tad affecting to boot, and it made me laugh until my obligatory Melbourne coffee came out my nose.

Zile’s work is in 100 points of light, a night-time program of diverse small scale intervention flavoured works in sundry nooks of the streetscape of Melbourne, in a kind of perturbing nocturnal under-layer to the city’s ascendant Shiny Public Art aesthetic. There are about 30 works at peak periods, though a couple fewer if you are checking immediately after the demolitionary weekend crowds.

Brydee Rood’s 3 pieces, Natural Selection 06, have drawn the short evolutionary straw more than once, and it’s hard to find the works in a functional state. Eventually spotting one makes it all worthwhile. Rood has fashioned images of furtive urban scavengers, rats and the like, in LED pictures embedded in wheelie bins. The diodes’ yellow glow transforms dead-end urban crannies into dens for the esoteric process of the wheelie bin life cycle. The effect upon the unbriefed punter, if you’re stumbling on one unawares ducking round the corner for a drunken piss, must be delicious.

Which is irritating. You wish you’d just stumbled on this stuff, and that privilege is denied you as you stamp about with a festival program-and-bonus-map clutched in your hand. Half of the pleasure of half of these pieces is the wistful longing not to know what is going on. It’s hard enough to find the things as it is, though. Placements range from prominent, to cunning, all the way to impossible to locate even with a map and description. Emilio Fuscaldo’s Birdie, for example, takes a couple of walk-bys and a double take before you have it nailed. The neon-sign work, perched above the second storey in quantised serenity on a rare space of empty wall on a Chinatown alley, is a transmission of oddity almost invisible against the background neon noise of dumpling joints and wine bars. (“Above the pavement, the sky.”) The buzz of suspecting yourself the only one in a crowded street who has captured this detail… gets me right there.

Tim Webster’s Block embeds another neat detail in the landscape outside the Victorian State library. The perforations in the library bins have been transformed into the backlit windows of a miniature skyscraper. It’s toadstool housing for the bourgeois faery-on-the-go. Or perhaps evidence of the fractal self-similarity of the city. Or architectural models for a disposable lifestyle. It’s probably the least sinister piece on display—the cheeky silhouettes on Tim’s tiny windows (mostly domestic, interspersed with occasional spear-bearing hunters and what have you) can sit congruously in the Public Art camp. Or at least, the humour is less indignant than the rest of the series. After a long day’s outrage at the co-option of the urban environment, as strident as the Games city it critiques, in fact, it’s an antidote of comforting, vicarious domestic bliss.

Clean, Nic Low, Stephen Mushin, Jim Moynihan; Hosier Lane; March 15-April 2; 100 Points of Light, LED, Emile Zile, March 15-26; New Ruins—Natural Selection 06, Brydee Rood; Birdie, Emilio Fuscaldo; Block, Tim Webster, design Nicole Dominic, electronics Paul Webster; Next Wave; March 14 – April 6

Operation isn’t just one of the most dynamic works at this year’s Next Wave festival; it’s easily one of the most intriguing pieces to have recently played in Melbourne in any context. The first show by new company Blood Policy, it combines puppetry, microvideo, sound and performance to create an intricately unfolding mystery of terrorism and redemption, spectacle and intimacy.

For a production in which words and text play so little part, Operation speaks volumes. The audience is guided through a space filled with tiny map-covered podiums upon which rest shadowy objects: a miniature helicopter, a chair, a rubbish bin. Once seated, we become aware of the body lying upon an operating table at the far end of the room, a projection screen hanging above. The performance begins with a video image on this screen: a point-of-view shot of someone entering the space, as we have, and lying down on the medical table.

A doctor enters and moves to the lifeless body below the screen, now revealed as a lifesize articulated puppet. He attempts to obtain some sign of life, and this is signalled when the mannequin opens its eyes: what it sees is now shown to us through the projected video above. We’re suddenly confronted by a doubling of space, a reciprocal perspective in which we see ourselves being seen by the object of our attention, and this is just the beginning.

Operation is the story of a dying man’s journey to the medical theatre in which he now lies: the doctor, also our puppeteer, opens up the patient’s body to extract tiny versions of his subject which then play out dramas of his life on the various miniscule stages scattered across the space. A camera mounted on the man’s head offers us an extreme close up of the homunculus as he journeys from a war-torn third world country to the banal ignominy of a first world existence of servitude, before being dragged into a terrorist resistance by a figurehead who reveals the degraded existence into which he has sunk. All the while, the constant layering of both narrative threads and visual fields creates an energy and dynamism which is entirely absorbing. Operation is worth any chance you have to attend.

Jacklyn Bassanelli’s Pink Denim in Manhattan is another power-punch to the sensorium, a 25-minute performance which delivers as much affect as many full-length works. Clambering through a narrow tunnel, the audience settles inside an inflatable snowdome detailed by the unmistakable New York skyline, and towered over Liberty Statue-esque by Bassanelli in pink tailcoat, hotpants and mirrorball heels. Her impassioned monologue is a love letter to the city, the iconic metropolis available not directly but only through the many incarnations in film and song which have given the city its mythic status. Snatches of text from popular movies and Broadway tunes weave together with Bassanelli’s original dialogue to form a tragic-ironic plea to a city which cannot return her affection; she finds herself gutterbound, another victim of an urban infatuation which is destined to death. The spectre of 9/11 pans out as a shadowplay, a model aeroplane heading towards the twin icons of legs held skyward; and the tiny, final image of a glowing heart ascending the Empire State Building is a charming nightcap for a piece all-too-brief but more than satisfying.

Works by emerging artists too frequently betray their youthful innocence; Australian works especially have seemed beset by historical amnesia, unconscious of the history of performance which has come before. It’s deeply encouraging, then, to view the sophisticated way in which Ming-Zhu Hii presents her homage to Yoko Ono, a performance artist whose significance for later generations is worth revisiting. Y is not a conventional biography, since the iconoclastic position of Ono would render such a depiction paradoxical, but is instead a performance of the figure, producing her image through emulation but not impersonation.

Hii makes accessible the kinds of performance art so often derided by reactionary critics: throwing eggs upon the floor, apples rolling from the wings, a succession of matches lit and extinguished, slowly adding to the pile of burnt stubs at her feet. It’s all too easy to see these gestures as signifying nothing more than their own lack of significance, but Y contextualises these moments in a history which seeks to regenerate the heady moments of the late 20th century avant-garde. The personal, political, fiction and fact are interwoven in a way which doesn’t result in an undifferentiated miasma but instead produces the sense, if not the logic, of an artist frequently written off as a relic of counterculture aestheticism.

Blood Policy, Operation, co-director, puppeteer Sam Routledge, co-director, media artist Martyn Couts, sound Aaron Cuthbert, puppet & props Andrew Mcdougall with Zoe Stuart, spatial design Alison McNicol, The Croft Institute, March 15-30; Pink Denim in Mathattan, writer, performer Jacklyn Bassanelli, original concept Danielle Brustman, Jacklyn Bassanelli, director Clare Watson, choreography Peta Coy, design Danielle Brustman, music/sound Kelly Ryall, lighting Luke Hails; Artshouse Meat Market, North Melbourne, March 23-April 2; Y, writer, director, performer Ming-Zhu Hii, co-director Gerard Williams, lighting, Bronwyn Pringle, designer Alo McNicol, sound Jacqueline Grenfull; Artshouse Meatmarket, March 23-April 2

This year’s Next Wave was bursting at the seams with projects including a small show titled Mind Games at Conical Gallery. Curators Kerrie Dee Johns and Fiona Bate brought together a body of works in a collective dialogue to realise the overarching methodology of the project.

Mind Games is an interactive show, but in the most unconventional sense. It invites viewers to immerse themselves in an alternative, fantastical reality that nevertheless has a complex history.

In the work of Ry Haskings, everything appears innocent. However, his irreverent use of materials and composition introduce us to an illusory world. In his video, World Stab, we see a spinning globe stabbed with a knife, tomato sauce pouring from its interior.

There’s something melancholy and sarcastic about this work that comments on the superfluous structures that operate in the art world on a global scale. A distinct absence of special effects reveals Haskings’ sullen engagement with that art world: modular wooden hands giving the finger; a severed arm wielding a dog leash; an axe in the wall; a flaccid candle in its pseudo baroque holder; a drawing of a vacuum cleaner and easel mounted on giant balls of Bluetak. Commonplace art references and Haskin’s resistance to participate make for a unique work, pathetic and triumphant.

Sydney duo, Ms and Mr, share something of this absurd quality. These artists transport us into private worlds that contrast with the more familiar realms in which we digest contemporary art. Their irreverence to the outside world is tactical.

Ms and Mr make us complicit in Sensory Perception Experiment, their matrimonial collaboration cum carnival magic show. Works on paper against maroon velvet backgrounds see the artists acting out their experiments which, again, like Haskings, expose nuances such as sketching ‘no hands’ with a severed hand, or Mr donning a garment with the text, “I visited Salt Lake City and all I got was this Mormon underwear.”

Each of the works in Mind Games provides us with an internal reality through which we ponder our own. The work of Brie Dalton is like a family tree sprawling across the gallery wall. However, both the public and private worlds of the artist inform her characters. Dalton presents us with an intricate map connected by strings of plastic beads and pearls, glue, sequins and wire. We see a white whale constructed entirely of false fingernails, circuit boards rewired with gum and razor blades and oyster shells framing cutout portraits of teen songbirds, Beyoncé Knowles, Britney Spears and Pink.

Brie Dalton’s work highlights a lack of faith in the idea of aesthetic special effects in which art (so momentary in its superficial guise) is packaged and marketed as product, in which we are bombarded with images, each as shallow and fleeting as the next. Her genealogy unveils something of a tormented fusion of popular references and literary characters. Dalton gives us a real ‘feminist action’—the infrastructure but not the answers.

Mind Games suggests a real sense of possibility and enquiry. Gabrielle De Vietri’s Idea Catalogue Headquarters invites viewers to contribute to a document which includes ideas from de Vietri herself such as “Give people a government-funded holiday” and the Sorry Expo relating to the Australian ‘Sorry’ phenomenon—not such a bad idea!

Scottish collective, Something Haptic, disrupt the space with segments of a church bell mechanism placed in Conical’s rafters. The pieces offer an historical, structural reference, a mechanism usually of a swinging momentum instead becomes a juncture within the existing framework. This work reminded me of Terri Bird’s 1999 Melbourne International Biennale installation. It generated some of the same subversive power by intruding into the physical and historical timeline of the space.

Something Haptic offer a proposition and a problem: the mechanism is stifled in the rafters and, not unlike Brie Dalton’s self-portrait in Parade, constructed from what looks like left over feathers and balsa wood from a Mardi Gras festival, her image inscribed into a wooden panel as she prances in line, feathers spewing from her headress.

David Keating’s installation generates an austere presence with a series of works on paper splayed across a white MDF wall constructed in the space and, as with the work of Something Haptic, the internal workings are exposed. Keating’s drawings reference pre-fabricated model homes and juxtapose a sense of the possibility of the ‘dream home’ with the question, “Whose dream?” His voyeuristic exposés of formalized European architecture give us an insight into the world of his mundane characters, performing pseudo rituals in regimented lines and in gestures like the architecture itself. Keating allows his audience to peer inside his drawings of dream homes, his unlikely characters such as a green blob man and a native American totem pole suggest a time shift or perhaps a conflict between the conventional and spiritual worlds.

These quietly subversive works are gently loaded with ritual in aesthetic, spiritual and fantastical modes. Keating challenges the trite packaged designs of life, love and faith through the systematic adoption of the same tactics.

Mind Games challenges contemporary curatorial methods because it identifies the artist’s disappointment with the real world of art. It offers instead to the audience an intimate exploration of our own fantastic worlds, without the special effects.

Mind Games, curators Kerrie Dee Johns, Fiona Bate, Next Wave, Conical Gallery, Melbourne, March 10-April 2

“Ideally a festival like Brisbane’s offers something for everyone.” For a moment, first time Brisbane Festival Director, Lyndon Terracini, sounds dangerously like the men who used to run such events as Brisbane’s Warana, Melbourne’s Moomba or the early Sydney Festivals. But the man who has sung more avant garde music than he’s had hot dinners, as well as founding the radical regional NORPA Festival and taking Queensland’s Biennial Music Festival to new levels of engagement from Barky to Thuringoa, quickly qualified his remark: “For me, accessibility is about great variety rather than simply dumbing down.”

So, there is a central arts core to the July event which will look and feel comfortingly familiar—Strauss’ great opera Salome in a concert performance starring local Lisa Gasteen, conducted by her friend Simone Young; Johnno, the great Brisbane novel by David Malouf, staged by Brisbane Powerhouse in a version by English theatre man, Stephen Edwards, who’ll take it on to Derby; a new QTC play by RealTime contributor Stephen Carleton, set in pioneering days on Cape York, Constance Drinkwater and the Final Days of Somerset; Cirque Eloize, probably the best of those Canadian companies that modelled themselves on Circus Oz; and Cloudgate Dance Theatre from Taiwan, masters of contemporary Orientalism.

But on either side of that comfort zone there’s the challenging material you might expect from Lyndon Terracini—or maybe not. Who’d have thought he’d roll one of those trendy festivals of ideas into an arts event? But the Artshub website headlines its story about the festival, “Mikhail Gorbachev to appear at Brisbane Festival.” Terracini seems to have tapped into the zeitgeist. Gorby (plus Beattie and sundry Nobel prizewinners) sold out in a day! “It was like a pop concert”, recounts an amazed director, “selling out the first of the ‘Earth Dialogues’ before the festival brochure even hit the streets. The subject of resource management has just grabbed people—the latest Vanity Fair has 12 pages on it, for heaven’s sake—and they really want to talk about it.”

It helps that the man who invented Perestroika, who cost $1000 a ticket to hear when he was last in Brisbane in 1999, comes free this time thanks to his role as chair of Green Cross International—described as “a Red Cross for the environment.” Terracini believes that artists need to take more responsibility for issues of such moment: “Verdi used to in operas like Nabucco; and what about Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, encouraging the French Revolution? People like Sting in the pop world do it; perhaps at the high end we’re too arty-farty?”

Well, one answer is to match the pop world in the size of your ambition, your use of technology and, dare I say it, in the truculant use of the title, Winners. This one-off world premiere brings the words and musics of survivors of great tragedies together on screen in Brisbane, directed by Terracini. 9/11’s Ground Zero was just yesterday compared to Ayuthaya’s 18th Century destruction in Thailand. Dresden was incinerated in 1944, Maralinga atomised in the 50s and Sharpville shot down in the 60s. But the experience of survival produces common cause, it would seem, epitomised by blind Yami Lester, interviewed by Terracini in the blinding desert, declaring his happy acceptance of all that happened. “How much more important is that than our jingoistic joy when we beat the Solomons in the Commonwealth Games”, says Terracini. And his challenge has been taken up by the Pompidou Centre in Paris, who’ve bought Winners for next October.

Another answer is to get down a bit. And just as Terracini was determined to prove that “every city has its own culture” in the Queensland Music Biennial: “first identify it, then bring in professionals to help illuminate it.” He’s now trying the same for Brisbane’s suburbs. “I’d like to have done something in every ward, but we can only afford uniquely chosen events in 10 of them. It’s a really interesting question for me as to why people live in a particular suburb, why it’s right to have opera in Brookfield and a skateboard musical in Coorparoo? And I don’t think that reflecting these differences is ghettoising cultures as the old Shell Folkloric events tended to. People can always go from one to another.”

Interestingly, Energex, which used to be the naming rights sponsor of the whole Brisbane event in previous director Tony Gould’s day, has now accepted Terracini’s decision not to sell the festival’s name but to put its name to the “Positive Energy Across Brisbane” program rather than either the high or experimental arts.

It’s in the latter area that we find proof of Lyndon Terracini’s assertion that “I haven’t gone out of my way to soothe the audience. Tony Gould set up the festival brilliantly. But society has changed in response to what he offered, and it’s time to move on.” Most notably, Brisbane’s education system has changed in creating the Queensland University of Technology’s Creative Industries hub. The festival brings its graduates back on campus to give focus to its ongoing work.

For instance, Deep Blue is an actual ARC research project in which Professor Andy Arthurs is trying to create a sustainable orchestra for the 21st century. This one contains a fifth electronics section, a big coordinated light show on screens, previews at which the audience can help to develop the performance and the prospect that the resulting band could play the world like Arthurs’ similarly crafted and superbly marketed Ten Tenors.

Cheryl Stock’s Accented Body is yet another event with screens as she goes live in 3 different countries to see whether dancing bodies can interact virtually as well as live. “It’s a fascinating use of technology to watch a body from a huge distance away,” says Terracini, “just making patterns of movement like a chessboard; and then bring it right up to touching distance.” Somehow this is a promenade event as well as online.

But then you can get right down and virtually dirty with Intimate Transactions, where you go one to one in hyperspace with someone else in Cairns, and every action of theirs has an effect on you in Brisbane.

The final two QUT works were both created elsewhere by graduates, and Terracini is delighted to bring them back to reflect the institution to the community. Unspoken has won a heap of awards in Sydney for Rebecca Clarke’s poignant solo text and performance about growing up with a severely disabled brother; and Clare Dyson’s dance about depression, Churchill’s Black Dog, made in Canberra, is so gorgeous visually, according to Terracini, that the terrifying isolation caused by depression somehow becomes an uplifting experience.

But perhaps the major event that’s challenging stereotypes is Mabou Mines’ Dollhouse, an even more radical take on Ibsen’s original than the Adelaide Festival version from Berlin. Somehow Lee Breuer, who’s been reconceiving the classics in New York since 1970 has never been to Australia. Now he comes with a cast of male dwarfs to reflect both the stunted condition of the patriarchy and the infantilisation of men that women don’t seem able to resist. Apparently there’s even a line or two in Ibsen to justify such extreme casting and the production wowed them even in Ibsen’s homeland of Oslo.

From even further back in time, Sophocles’ Oedipus plays have been mined by the much younger American Anonymous Ensemble to satirise the Iraq War and the society of Homeland that’s been created to support it by the Neo-Cons. “An Orwellian American Idol” is how Terracini describes this upbeat MTV take on Weimar cabaret.

Can the local avant garde compete? It will be interesting to see how the Elision Ensemble fares as they celebrate their 20th birthday (see page 35). They’re Brisbane natives these days, but they’ve never played their opera, Moon Spirit Feasting at home before, while taking it all round the world. Magic-realist writer Beth Yahp and composer Liza Lim pooled their Chinese genes over a story about which no two Chinese are ever said to totally agree: how Chang-O became the Woman in the Moon.

Adventurous Brisbane media artist Craig Walsh (his Cross-reference, currently touring to the UK, is the cover image for this edition of RealTime), features twice in the festival, providing visual design for Johnno and taking those images and transforming them in Aloof, a major installation at the entrance to the Brisbane Powerhouse. “By pushing out of the theatre like that”, explains Terracini, “I hope he’ll give people a way into the piece.”

Finally, in respect of Indigenous presence, the Brisbane Festival ‘06 appears to have but a token smoking ceremony, leaving the field to Rhoda Roberts’s Dreaming Festival, up the road at Woodford. Of course, Lyndon Terracini was able to disabuse me: the Maralinga episode of Winners involves Yami Lester and family. But he was also keen to reveal the development of a Memorandum of Understanding between the Festival and Indigenous Australia which he hopes will lead to significant contributions in 2 years time. “There were problems between the Festival and the community”, he admits. “But I’d involved Cherbourg (the notorious dumping place for Queensland’s Aborigines) in the Music Biennial, so I knew it was possible, if I put myself on the line, to get them to feed a lot back in so that we can work things out together.”

A man stands on a burning chair screaming at the national palace through closed gates. A body is draped, arms spread as if impaled on the bars of the gate. Notes from the audience about education are glued to the bars.

Rows of old style wooden desks from Dutch colonial times are set up like a classroom with blackboard and teacher’s desk, in front of the Jogjakarta Parliament building. A group of blue and white uniformed students, arms and legs in bandages, march under the regimental instruction of their teacher/commander. Their faces blanked out by tall white hoods, they are marched to the desks where their berating instruction continues.

Men swing from ropes hanging from tall banyan trees. They come dangerously close to crashing into the desks, each other, the trees and the audience. Then the inevitable happens. Two of the men collide. One falls to the ground. A pool of blood spreads out across the asphalt from the back of the man’s head. The other dangles unconscious in his rope. This part of the performance wasn’t planned, but this is performance art Indonesian style, where anything can happen.

Perfurbance is a new festival organised by Iwan Wijono and Ronald Apriyon of the Performance Klub, a group of Jogjakarta artists who want to take art out of conventional spaces and into the street.

Perfurbance#1 in 2005 had a similar format. Around 30 artist/performers were invited to submit proposals for 10-minute performance pieces in outdoor locations around Jogjakarta.
Iwan Wijon

In April this year, performances took place in 3 locations: the grounds of DPR, the local Parliament in front of the National Palace gates on Malioboro Street and in the bookshop street behind. In case you didn’t know, Malioboro is the famous street of Jogja leading to the Kraton, the Sultan’s palace, and is alive and bustling at all hours with vendors, becak (pedicab), andong (horse and carriage), street food and masses of motorbikes and cars cruising its length just to see what’s happening. On any Sunday an audience is assured and crowds gathered to watch local artists and a couple of guest performers—myself and Seiji Shimoda, a noted Japanese performance artist who is also director of Nipaf, Japan’s twice yearly performance arts festival.

Seiji travels internationally performing his art and has interesting things to say about how culture and censorship mould the different tastes and personalities of performance art in all the countries he visits.

In Indonesia, as one audience member noted, you can always count on pissing and penises, blood and fire and a degree of body mutilation. The blood spilt when the flying tree swingers crashed is characteristic of the wild nature of some of the performance art seen here. There is nothing chaotic, however, about the way this festival is organised. On little to no budget it pays its performers a token fee (50,000 rupiah or AUD$7), provides lunch, produces posters and programs, pays for performance permits and produces a VCD-ROM for each performer. It also gives its performers a theme to work with. Last year it was urbanisation. This year it’s the industrialisation of education.

As the day progressed artists performed their work in different classroom arrangements in one of the locations. The desks were then piled into a truck and carried on to the next place.

One artist in school uniform sat alone in the desks pretending to be a good student, working on his laptop until it dawned on the audience that he was watching porn. A crowd then gathered to watch with him. A woman watched cartoons on a monitor placed on piles of books on the teacher’s desk while another stepped from desktop to desktop dressing in layers of coloured school skirts and cutting up standard text books with scissors. Another artist crawled through the desks, asking the audience to cut his skin and cover him with crushed chalk before placing him in a cardboard box.

There was body painting, spray painting and proclamations, and ideas about the education system were taped, eaten, shouted, waved and burned as the audience gathered and dispersed again.

Jogja, a university town overflowing with students, artists and street performers, is accustomed to this kind of thing and the hard core audience stayed to the end to catch the dusk performance of Seiji Shimoda. Stepping up onto the teacher’s desk, he used his body alone to display the tensions of a man trying to fit himself impossibly into a frame.

More performances followed as night fell. Rose petals flew into the air, fire, smoke from a hookah, kisses through plastic and the fate of a lone roast chicken on the sidewalk were all remembered. As the last performance faded into the dark we all took our places behind the Perfurbance banner for photos, and the ongoing discussion among participants and audience about what makes good or true performance art continued on into the night.

The experienced artists, including Iwan Wijono, who performs internationally, Ronald Apriyon who is about to perform in Japan’s Nipaf festival, and Seiji Shimoda all have something in common. Their presence as performers comes from an intense focus and commitment to a single idea. As a result you are left with an image, a taste, an experience or a feeling, so strong it stays with you like a dream image. Whether you recognise it, understand it or process it at the time doesn’t matter, for performance art often works best when it cannot immediately be explained but instead wakes you up to a new way of looking at the world around you.

Spending the day like this with Indonesian performance artists has the same effect. It changes you, and you can’t help but be moved by the commitment they all have to producing their art. While the intense energy of their work comes from celebrating a new freedom of expression following the years of repression and censorship of the old Suharto regime, there is still little or no support for artists, only the cold comfort that conservative forces in government are rallying again to bring in new anti-pornography laws that will seriously hamper the work of all artists in this country. Hence the flavour of performance art in Indonesia is always political. Whether carrying a direct message to the powers that be or reflecting a past of violence, pain and neglect, these performers represent a spirit that pervades all Indonesian life—the will to survive against all odds and laugh in the face of impossibility.

As Australian performance artists only a few hours’ plane ride away, we have the opportunity to experience this spirit and the vibrant atmosphere of Jogjakarta’s arts communities. This year’s festival was spontaneously supported at the last moment by a handful of Aussie performers and by RealTime. The organisers of next year’s festival invite more Australian performance artists to be involved.

Note: Performance Klub members survived the recent earthquake and are carrying out volunteer work in affected areas. They badly need donations to get kerosene, food and tents to those left homeless. Please email Jan Cornall whwn@jancornall.com to arrange a direct donation

The EPIC (Emerging Producers in Community) initiative was let loose on the cultural landscape in 2004 developed by multiple departments within Australia Council—the former Audience and Market Development Division (AMD), the Community Cultural Development Board (CCDB), the New Media Arts Board (NMAB) and the Policy Communication Research Division (PCR). Well named, its aims are certainly challenging: professional development for emerging producers, curators and community cultural development workers, creating projects utlising new media art in rural and remote Australia. Oh, and where possible, get the youth involved too. No mean feat for an experienced producer, let alone an emerging one—you have to be 30 or under. The producers undertake internships or mentorships with appropriate arts organisations, and then devise a series of activities or projects to develop within particular regions, frequently extending that organisation’s reach into areas they have not been able to tackle. Nine producers have taken up the challenge so far.

Western Australia is well-suited for the EPIC program with 2 consecutive producers placed at IASKA, and one at Artrage. IASKA (International Art Space Kellerberrin Australia is situated 210kms east of Perth. IASKA has a strong residency program for national and international artists so EPIC producer’s role is to develop engagement between the visiting artists and the community through workshops, projects, education and other access opportunities. The first round placed Felena Alach at the centre in 2004/5, followed by Amanda Alderston. A key project for Alderston so far has been working in conjuction with artist-in-residence Nigel Helyer who created a temporary FM radio station in the main street airing material collected from locals. For this Alderston initiated a youth radio project Midnight Cries—an 18-part mini drama written and produced by local students. In May she will work with WA artist Bennett Miller for the Playing Up program exploring “sport as the means through which young people in rural and remote communities explore and develop personal identity and interpersonal relationships.” She has also managed to secure funding for Zones of Engagement—a large scale project planned for 2006-2007 involving 2 Australian and 2 international artists from the residency program, and research scientists from CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems working “with local youth, land care groups and rural students to research the interaction between natural and human living environments in the Wallatin/O’Brian catchment.” A key to the success of both Alderston’s and Alach’s mentorships is that that their roles are integrally linked to the everyday business of IASKA and there is a continuing community engagement with secession between producers factored in. (www.iaska.com.au)

While Artrage is based in Perth, Ro Alexander’s EPIC project is expanding the organisation’s reach to Geraldton, 440kms north of Perth, and is in partnership with the Geraldton Regional Art Gallery. Since 2005 Alexander has been working on Audiosity, with artists Josh McAuliffe, Tomàs Ford and young people sampling the sounds of the town: “on the streets, down the beach, at the crayfish factory, the wheat silos and in the bush…During workshops the samples have been cut, stretched, affected, re pitched and rearranged into a range of rhythmic and ambient loops, as well as full sound works.” The results have 2 manifestations, one an interactive sculptural instrument designed by McAuliffe, programmed by Chris McCormick exhibited in the gallery until June 9; and online at NOISE as an interactive sequencer from June 10 until 2008. It will also be shown later in the year in Perth during the Northbridge Festival. Meanwhile Alexander is continuing to work as an associate producer at Artrage. (www.artrage.com.au)

Across in South Australia, Sasha Grbich has joined with ANAT (Australian Network for Art and Technology) to develop the pixel.play project. Working in Whyalla (396km northwest of Adelaide) and Port Lincoln (646km northwest) Grbich will facilitate intensive workshops for young artists to develop creative content for mobile phones. The outcome will include exhibitions within the regional communities and in Adelaide at the Come Out Festival in 2007. Due to the emergent nature of mobile phone art, Grbich found that no SA-based artists felt suitably skilled in this area so before going into the communities she actually had to set up train-the-trainer workshops led by with the UK group the-phone-book.ltd in December 2005. Workshops in the communities are set to kick off in July this year. Already looking ahead, she is also trying to secure funding for the sequel, portable worlds, “an extensive regional touring exhibition and skills development program engaging mobile and wireless projects.” (www.anat.org.au)

Queensland’s EPIC producer is Thea Bauman. Mentored by MAAP (Multimedia Art Asia Pacific) and with a key partnership with Queensland State Library she is developing Manhua Video Wonderland. Drawing inspiration from graphic novels, gaming, gamics and fan fiction, Bauman will be co-ordinating mobile workshops in video and animation in venues such as hybrid noodle bars, manga cafes and LAN/gaming arcades. The resulting screen and web works will be distributed via MAAP, (Youth Internet Radio Network) and various other media-based festivals, with the potential for other education-based outcomes. (www.maap.org.au)

Pip Shea has recently finished her EPIC internship with Next Wave facilitating BITSCAPE—a program of events across 3 regional areas: the Macedon Ranges, the La Trobe Valley in Victoria and Wagga Wagga in NSW. She says: “We tried to keep the workshop program flexible as conditions, access and skill levels varied from group to group. The workshops explored animation, blogging, digital audio, digital video, stencilling and image making.” Each region had a slightly different final outcome; in the Latrobe Valley, work by Koorie students of the Woolum Bellum Campus were projected onto the TRUenergy power station; in Wagga Wagga, works were projected on to the Civic Theatre; and in the Macedon Ranges the creations were used as projections for a live theatre performance. Components from all regions were also brought together in an exhibition at Experimedia at the State Library of Victoria, during the Next Wave festival. An impressive website also documents the elements allowing the communities to see their contributions to the combined project. (www.nextwave.org.au/bitscape/)

Interestingly, part of Shea’s team was Ian Corcoran, one of the first round of EPIC producers, working with Experimenta in 2004/5 in Warnambool which involved training local artists in new media practices so that this skills base developed in the region. Corcoran is continuing to work in this area producing projects for Artrage (see RT 70, p12) and Liquid Aesthetics for the Midsumma Festival (RT72, p26).

Sara Boniwell has also finished her time as EPIC producer. Boniwell, mentored by 24HR art (Darwin), developed a partnership with the Deadly Mob (Alice Springs) to work further on the Youth Out Bush Project, conducting workhops in sound and video and touring media-based works around remote Indigenous communities in Central Australia. (www.24hrart.org.au, www.deadlymob.org) Daniel Flood from Victoria is just finishing up the DIGITAL GRAFFITI through Franskton Arts Centre on, running skills-based workshops with at-risk youth in the area with an extended exhibition outcome at the Glass Studio.

And in NSW… well. Besides Pip Shea’s slip across the boder to Wagga Wagga, there hasn’t been a NSW EPIC producer. Electrofringe/ Octapod was approach for the first round when I was one of the directors however the mentor model that the initiative proposed just didn’t work for us. Octapod was run by volunteers and the directors of EF receive honoraria so the idea of a paid mentee created an imbalance. Also the EPIC initiative required that the producer extend the current program, and once again, this seemed beyond the current organisation’s capacity. However as Octapod has undergone considerable infrastructure change over the last 2 years, EPIC may sit better within the cultural ecology now. The fact that no other organisation has either been interested or successful does raise questions as to whether the model can be adapted to fit different situations.

In October 2005 all the producers came together in Perth as part of Artrage for a Think Tank in order do a running assessment of the initiative. I was invited as a guest to share my experiences with Electrofringe in 2003/4 and perhaps offer a NSW perspective. By this stage 3 of the producers had just finished their projects so it provided a valuable exchange of handy tips and inspirational experiences. The most pressing issues that arose were (as in all areas of the arts) the matter of raising enough funding. All of the projects augment the established programs of their hosts, and as these are often key organisations there are restrictions on seeking funding from the same artform board. Thus producers have to investigate state and local government options, as well as health, education, philanthropic and other non arts-based options. But as Marshall Heald from Noise (also a guest speaker at the Think Tank) stated, that’s the job of being a producer, securing the cash. The other issue is that none of the mentor organisations besides IASKA are based in the regions. Not only does this mean a lot of travel time and expense, but perhaps more importantly, the producers are always coming in from the outside, trying to quickly gauge the temper of a community, find the right access points and gain trust. This is also problematic for sustaining relations with communities. Also raised, was the problem that some of the mentor organisations did not have prior CCD experience or focus, so that the producers really are forging new, and frequently tricky territory less supported than they had assumed. Of course some of issues can be ameliorated if key partnerships are formed in the regional areas. Discussion also revealed that perhaps one year was actually not long enough to develop the projects, particularly within the cycle of funding deadlines. Overall, the producers have found (or are finding) the experience to be incredibly rewarding. Those who have finished are continuing to work in the area either freelance or in continuing relationships with their host organisation.

So in the ever-shifting landscape of new media funding is this an ongoing initiative? According to Nina Stromqvist, the EPIC project manager for the Inter Arts Office, the Australia Council is pleased with the progress and will be announcing 4 new producers and organisations for 2006-2007 very soon. A welcome sign of support for community cultural development and new media arts.

At exactly 5pm on March 13, 2006, the computers in the State Library of South Australia shut down. No advance warning, just a blank screen. The person taking notes for the final session of the Hard Copy workshop sat bolt upright as the data projector defaulted to blue. “Errr… we’ve been continually saving this I hope.” Vain hope as it turned out. Given the day’s discussions with regards to the important role of the library in the process of archiving this seemed like just a little too much irony.

Hard Copy was organised by Lizzie Muller and Melinda Rackham as part of ANAT’s [Media State] program run in association with the 2006 Adelaide Festival of the Arts. The workshop was facilitated by Roger Malina, editor of the US periodical Leonardo, and its aims were to provide an overview of the state of interdisciplinary publishing in Australia and to provide participants with an opportunity to contribute to a dialogue about new models. It also aimed to develop new partnerships between organisations and individuals active in the field. The workshop was preceded by a discussion on the Fibreculture list led by Malina and the other facilitators; Lizzie Muller, Keith Gallasch, Linda Carroli and myself. An ongoing report on the outcomes of the workshop will be developed on the wiki on the Fibreculture site and it is hoped that a permanent resource will emerge from this (http://wiki.fibreculture.org/index.php/ Hard_Copy_Workshop_2006).

The workshop itself was divided into 3 themes that looked at interdisciplinary publishing from the point of view of archiving and distribution, research, scholarship and their dissemination, criticism and readerships. Given the breadth of the themes, it’s not surprising that the day’s discussions were far ranging and detailed. Rather than attempt their faithful reproduction, I’ll focus on a few salient points.

From the outset, the question of language and the definition of terms occupied both the discussants on the list prior to the event and those present at the workshop in Adelaide. Andrew Murphie asked whether the use of the term ‘transdisiplinarity’ was more appropriate than ‘interdisciplinarity.’ “Put simply”, he wrote, “if interdisciplinarity allows an impossibly smooth communication between different disciplines, often by imposing some kind of recognition metrics across the whole, transdisciplinarity is about how things cut across disciplines and transform them, moment by moment. Of course, their processes—including legitimation and so on—are constantly transformed as well. This would include publishing.” Although not explicitly addressed at the workshop, Andrew’s point could have framed many of the discussions that took place on the day.

How, for example, do we allow for the transformation of academic writing by new technologies rather than trying to make new modes of writing fit into outdated but recognisable academic constructs? Even further to this, how do we then get the academy and those who fund research to recognise these new modes of writing as legitimate? As many of the workshop participants noted, new technologies for publishing not only allow for different outcomes in terms of writing but can in fact also produce new ways of thinking about writing. Writing is not always about something, as Linda Marie Walker put it. An instrumentalist approach to writing fails to recognise writing as research rather than writing about research. This was a point also made by Ross Gibson when he talked about the need for a more immersed critical writing to balance out the over-emphasis on critical distance in academic writing that has emerged in the last 150 years. He argued that the kind of writing called for in interdisciplinary publishing is reflective, active and immersed writing that helps the reader to think rather than telling the reader what to think. For Gibson, however, new technologies for publishing can actually hinder this kind of writing because they emphasise speed rather than reflection and development.

Questions about the potentials created by the use of digital technologies in research and publishing, however, did generate a good deal of discussion on the day. These discussions ranged from the appropriate use of terms such as ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ to describe off and online forms of publishing (does the term ‘soft’ devalue online publishing, for example) through to questions of authentication and reputation in online and collaborative publishing environments. And, of course, the archive is critical to the entire project of online publishing. Katie Cavanagh warned that we are living in a digital ‘dark age’ where the amount of content published is exceeding already its ability to be stored and retrieved effectively. How we address this problem is crucial if what we create now is to survive into the future.

Following on from this, questions about how we sustain publications, and in particular specialised, academic or niche publications, in a rapidly contracting funding environment were also addressed. As both Sam de Silva and Andrew Murphie pointed out, we are approaching a time when we may have to imagine a world where there is no funding or institutional support. As an adjunct to this, the development and maintenance of readerships/audiences is crucial if interdisciplinary research is to develop an interface with the broader community. As Lizzie Muller pointed out, there is a need for a public discourse that is still thoughtful and not merely popular. How all of this will transform Keith Gallasch’s publishing “ecology”—“the patterns of mutualism, dependency, fuelling, parasitism … in a system and between overlapping systems” (Fibreculture list, 11.03.2006, http://fibreculture.org/pipermail/) is anyone’s guess. As his post also notes, it’s a challenge that this very publication is facing as it continues to work to “bring audiences into the loop of critical engagement” in the face of new models and methods of delivery.

Hard Copy, the event, was an intensive and inspiring day. The issues that were raised both on the day and on the Fibreculture list need to continue to be addressed. Hopefully this is just the beginning of an ongoing engagement with these critical issues and ideas.

Hard Copy, organisers, Lizzie Muller and Melinda Rackham, ANAT’s [Media State] program, 2006 Adelaide Festival of the Arts with support from Creativity and Cognition Studios, University of Technology, Sydney, the Fibreculture network and Smart Internet CRC.

At her floor talk, new media artist, r e a, stands before a map on the wall, pointing to the area she hails from, the country of the Gamilaraay/Wailwan people. At the entrance to her exhibition at Sydney Opera House is a small black and white photograph of the class of 1970 at Coonabarabran Primary. She’s the kid at the end of the second row and somewhere in the same iconic image are Sharmaine, Maria and Susan—Aboriginal girls from the gang she hung out with. Though she’s a local, and well regarded in her own community, r e a’s still a puzzle—a woman who left to pursue a career in an artform few in her community understand. “Everyone thinks if you’re an artist, you have to be a painter or if you’re carrying a camera, you must be a filmmaker.” Then there’s the name. Having discarded surnames r e a has chosen a single moniker with gaps between the letters and no capital. It suits her, expresses her identity, in a modest kind of way. But in Aboriginal culture, she says, the individual is an unfamiliar concept. Everyone is connected to family, community and to country.

r e a’s creative life has taken her a long way from Coonabarabran. Recipient of a New Media Arts Fellowship this year, she spends a lot of time in the US and has recently been studying at San Francisco Institute of Art as part of an American/Australian Fulbright Scholarship for research and development in creative technologies. She returns home regularly. On one such visit in 2001, she sought out her old schoolmates, this time with the idea of recording interviews with them about their connections to the place that none save her has left. This material forms the basis of gins_leap / dubb_speak

I enter the multi-channel DVD installation through an ante-room, past the map, past a wall of words expressing female connection to country: gamilaraay wirringgaa dhayaamba-li wadhagii (gamilaraay women whisper secrets). Once inside I take my place in a circle of illuminated stones, enveloped by the 4 large screens, turning as I’m called to take in each, sometimes one at a time, at other times, all four at once. Sometimes I simply listen as Lea Collins’ recordings of birdsong, wind or water fill the space. No faces appear.

It’s a gentle, reflective work that slows you down, invites you to listen to the land speaking through the voices of women who love this place, though they’ve thought of leaving. They speak of shared memories, of the joy of returning after absence as well as thwarted ambition and sad family memories. There’s pride in the regeneration of languages thought lost. As the camera gathers and layers images—feet on stones, fingers sifting earth, scooping pebbles from water, cradling blossoms and seed pods—the 4 women weave together again the strands of a complex and enduring relationship.

In June-September, dLux media arts will tour gins_leap / dubb_speak to regional centres in NSW. Sadly there’s no venue in Coonabarabran to show this work but it’ll be touring to Newcastle, Moree and Broken Hill and r e a will attend the opening nights at all venues.

gins_leap / dubb_speak, creative director, artist r e a, technical designer, programmer Stephen Jones, dramaturg/project coordinator Gail Kelly, sound design Lea Collins, co-editor Peter Oldham. In collaboration with dLux media arts and the Sydney Opera House gins_leap / dubb_speak was included in the 2006 Message Stick Program, May 12-28

Don’t think this is a show about Berlin.
<img src="http://www.realtime.org.au/wp-content/uploads/art/3/317_conner_van_lieshout.jpg" alt="Erik van Lieshout, installation view of
Schöne Grüße aus Chemnitz-Rostock (working title), 2006″>

Erik van Lieshout, installation view of
Schöne Grüße aus Chemnitz-Rostock (working title), 2006

The curators of the 4th Berlin Biennial issue this warning as part of their statement in the exhibition catalogue. They can be excused for worrying that the local context and history could overshadow the work. This is, after all, Berlin—a city that bore witness to the Reichstag fire and the fall of the Berlin Wall, evolved into a mecca for the international creative class and is now riven by joblessness and racist attacks. Your humble art hack on the beat can be excused for thinking there’s quite a lot to write about before he even gets to the artwork.

The official programme of the Biennial was staged along a single city street, Auguststrasse, and this concise structure was one of its greatest strengths. The journey from one end of the street to the other was as much an urban archaeology experience as an international biennial. The exhibition made use of venues that elicited narratives from the local context, such as a shipping container, a graveyard, numerous private apartments and a former Jewish girls’ school, in addition to the KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Of these, the disused school provoked perhaps the most comment. The building was one of the last buildings opened before the Nazis seized power and the catalogue tells us that it “remained open throughout the 1930s, despite the increasing persecution of Jews by the Nazi regime.” Many of the rooms had paint peeling from the ceiling, wallpaper hanging off the walls, strange fixtures of indeterminate use. At one point I spent several minutes in a disused toilet before realising that it wasn’t an artist’s installation.

This momentary confusion would no doubt have been welcomed by the curators. Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gionni and Ali Subotnick have earned curatorial notoriety in recent years with the Wrong Gallery. With one square metre of exhibition space, it was billed as the smallest gallery in New York: “The Wrong Gallery is the back door to contemporary art and it’s always locked.” To ensure that the Biennial lived up to this irreverent precedent, the curators established a rogue gallery in Berlin under the international art brand “Gagosian”, without, of course, official permission from Larry G himself. Their love of the unconventional also came across through the inclusion of works like Martin Creed’s The Lights Going on and Off. When an installation consists of a blinking light fixture installed in a rickety 1920s German institutional building, the line between art and life becomes difficult to detect. To make matters worse, the work was out of order during my visit: Creed’s lights were simply stuck in the ‘off’ position.

Grim sights

Don’t let these gestures fool you into thinking the Berlin Biennial was a rip-roaring good time. This was a rough-hewn exhibition that wasn’t afraid to confront the absurd and tragic futility of the human condition. Otto Mühl’s orgy smorgasbord; Klara Liden’s manic exercise routine set on a Swedish subway; Jan Toomik ice skating in an endless loop while naked—the works in this exhibition suggested that the line between human and animal behaviour, between mice and man may not be as clearly marked as one might like to think.

Bruce Conner suggests that even disaster can be absurd in his film work Crossroads (1976), drawn from archival footage of the first postwar A-bomb tests. The nuclear test is replayed again and again, from a number of different angles, in a pulsing visual rhythm. As I watched, the image of the mushroom cloud gradually lost its associations with disaster and began to have a hypnotic effect on me—due in no small part to the urgent soundtrack by avant-garde musicians Terry Riley and Patrick Gleeson. When I got back to my hotel that night, I was still impressed enough with the piece to check the web for more information on these two and was not disappointed—terryriley.com is well worth a visit for anyone interested in psychedelic wallpaper or audio tracks with names like Conquest of the War Demons (see Greg Hoooper’s review of Terry Riley’s Brisbane performances on page 33).

While Conner’s work undercuts the factual nature of his source imagery, a well-known piece by Gillian Wearing trades on the supposed objectivity of the video image. In the 3-screen video installation Drunk, Wearing’s camera captures alcoholics from her South London neighbourhood in a sterile, white environment. The scale and installation style of the piece gives the impression that these men are actually in the gallery space itself. This illusion creates a sense of awkwardness, perhaps because the men are being callously scrutinised on camera, or perhaps partly because these men are unpalatable for a gallery context.

Erik van Lieshout, an unpalatable character himself, is also known for creating uncomfortable portraits of subjects including Moroccan prostitutes, Dutch mental patients, his brother and most prominently, himself. Each of his videos is structured as a series of shots that flow by in rapid succession offering glimpses of events that seem to be triggering a nervous breakdown on the part of the artist. His new piece for the Berlin Biennial was no exception. In this work, van Lieshout travelled through Germany by bicycle “to get to know his neighboring country.” The resulting work offers a snapshot of van Lieshout’s own intolerance and that of his neighbours. He criticises a man on the street who appears to be out of work and yet owns an iPod; he gets beat up; he worries about his pee being yellow.

Van Lieshout’s piece is presented in a shipping container viewing environment that could best be described as abject. Only a handful of viewers could enter at a time, and the wait for a screening was at least an hour throughout the opening days. This problem of hundreds of visitors trying to enter unorthodox spaces and private apartments was one logistical downside to the event. The single interactive artwork at the entire Biennial was displayed in one such private apartment and the context did the work no favours. Damián Ortega’s furniture works were designed to shake whenever a person approached. It made a certain kind of sense to show the work in a domestic space, but it also ensured that the only people who would go to the trouble to queue and see the work would be those who already had some idea of what to expect. Perhaps the installation would have benefited from the element of surprise if it were shown in a more accessible venue.

More successfully spooky than the moving chairs was Aïda Ruilova’s new film work, an homage to her mentor, French horror auteur Jean Rollin. Ruilova’s past work has relied heavily on the repetition of sound, filled with staccato mantras such as, “You’re pretty!” Her new piece makes use of a similar audio rhythm, but instead of spoken mantras, the soundtrack is composed of small noises recorded in close-up, such as the unzipping of a fly. The work centres on an erotic scene between a young woman and a seemingly dead Rollin, shot in his Paris apartment. The young woman is continually on the verge of expressing her passion through kisses and caresses, but each time she is about to complete these gestures, Ruilova cuts the shot sharply. The inability of the protagonist to kiss or touch the object of her lust imbues the piece with the sense of obsessively repressed sexual desire.

Alternative viewing

One of the most interesting projects at the Biennial was not a part of the official program at all, but an independent exhibition. The Treasures Project was an exhibition of 4 young artists from Berlin selected by Janet Cardiff, Rebecca Horn and Robert Wilson. The show was installed in the basement of an old brewery, the Alte Königstadt Brauerei. Visitors descended several flights of stairs emerging into a dark, labyrinthine vault. To navigate their way to the exhibition space, they had to follow a trail of small light fixtures that were extinguished as each visitor moved through the space. The technology behind it was simple—the kind of motion sensors that are most commonly found in the driveways of suburban houses—but it made a big psychological impact.
Nebelwelten

The Treasures Project included 3 works, each of which played up to the texture of the exhibition space itself. Erik Bünger’s installation Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground used computer controllers to determine the speed of 3 turntables, each playing a recording by Blind Willie Johnson to create an ominous choir that echoed throughout the space. Andrea Loux’s video installation Nebelwelten filled a subterranean chamber with a large screen projection of fog covered landscapes. The pastel palette of the video very nearly complimented the colour scheme of the subterranean vault where it was installed, creating the illusion of a tunnel looking out into open space. A third piece, Performance Envelope, created a theatrical underground laboratory for the cultivation of genetically modified plants used for detecting the presence of land mines. Visitors were invited to literally watch grass grow—and explore the secret narratives suggested by the piece. Upon leaving, visitors passed through a final room where exhibition organisers Anna von Stackelberg and Louise Witthöft had covered a long banquet table with hundreds of candles.

The Treasures Project marked a sharp contrast with the official programme of the Berlin Biennial, which seemingly betrayed a desire to return to a pre-technological era. The exhibition suffered from the inclusion of too many works with a self-conscious aura of age, giving the impression of a slightly ham fisted attempt by the curators to evoke a sense of history. On the other hand, the Biennial’s biggest successes stemmed from its traditional approach. The narrative structure of the exhibition, the in-depth engagement with the local context, and the care with which the works were selected and presented, made this exhibition a success on many levels.

4th Berlin Biennial, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, March 25 – June 5, 2006; The Treasures Project, Alte Konigstadt Brauerei, March 23 – April 24

We often think of technology as ultimately impersonal, and of having a dehumanising effect upon the soul. Cyberspace may create a perceived intimacy—of conversation and communion, even real time vision—but it occurs without skin and touch. It offers the flaneur’s consolation, of being ‘in’ the world but not ‘of’ it; of being a perpetual eavesdropper, voyeur or passerby. And yet in Leah Mercer and Amantha May’s The Physics Project, technology also makes it possible to bridge time and space; and to bridge the metaphysical gap between the old certainties (of knowledge in God) and the great postmodern void.

Two women—one in Brisbane, one in New York—are grieving the loss of people they have loved. The Brisbane woman lost a close friend a decade or so ago and the American woman is haunted by reminders of her mother who died 12 years ago. We learn of these twin narratives in a complex latticework of live performance in Brisbane interspersed with ostensibly real time live streaming broadcasts from Amantha in New York, who is ‘watching’ the show from her loungeroom. A fictionalised extension of her self is performed live; while this fictional self in turn imagines her parents’ courtship in the Yucatan in the 1960s. Mercer directs the piece and relates her own narrative through a woman living in a revolving box on stage who, via video projection, ventures desolately into the crowded and increasingly faceless urban sprawl of the Brisbane CBD.
Hanna Wood, The Physics Project

It takes some time to locate precisely whose story is whose, and what is fiction and what is memoir. The piece is, in many ways, a meditation on the elusiveness of truth and of narrative closure in the cycle of human life and death. Attention to this complexity, though, is richly rewarded as the audience is slowly given the pieces with which to fill in the jigsaw. It is as though Mercer and May provide the borders and it is up to us to complete the picture in any fashion we choose.

Both women are looking for order amid chaos. They turn to maths and science as a means of finding consolation for grief and absence in a world where the range of options (for personal faith) are as infinite as the universe itself. The American finds comfort in mathematical equations; the serendipitous patterns that occur in the infinite configuration of pi seem to hint to her of meaning and order within randomness. The Australian turns to Confucius and Einstein and their theories of time and motion to conclude that the past and present get closer together as time escalates, so that there is ultimately a place where all of our experience converges, and we are reunited with everyone we have ever loved.

As technologically daring as the logistics of this fascinating theatrical rumination are (scenic design complements of Kieran Swann, lighting by Matt Logan, and video by Conan Fitzpatrick), the piece is surprisingly touching. Margi Brown Ash brings her trademark warmth and wisdom to the stage as the narrator who assures us it will all be all right in the end. Pre-recorded telecasts from the American Woman’s (real!) father add a fond patrician gravitas to her narrative. We are reminded too—in case we were needing further proof—that technically it is ‘yesterday’ right now in the live streaming from New York and that the light we see reflected in the stars at night belongs to suns that have already died. The past and the future are constantly with us. The Physics Project is a unique, transporting and surprisingly consoling theatrical experience. One hopes there is an afterlife for this work too.

The Physics Project, creators Leah Mercer and Amantha May, performers Margi Brown Ash, Erica Field, Hanna Wood, Emily Thomas, Errin Rodger, Amantha May, William May, Gracie, Georgia, musicians Gavin Henderson, Sam Kahle, Michael Gray, scenic designer, Keiran Swann, lighting Matt Logan, video Conan Fitzpatrick, composer/sound Robert D Clark, costumes Beck Clark, Megan Wlliams; QUT Loft Theatre, April 6-8

Benedict Andrews is about to make his Melbourne directorial debut with Marius von Mayenburg’s Eldorado for Malthouse. Andrews’ strong body of work has included a commitment to contemporary German plays alongside forays into Brecht, Malraux, Calderon, Chekhov, Shakespeare, Sarah Kane and Caryl Churchill, all with a consistently developing, bold vision.

Melbourne’s radical theatre lineage includes Lindzee Smith, Peter King, Jenny Kemp, Richard Murphet, Barrie Kosky, Nico Lathouris, Margaret Cameron, Douglas Horton and Michael Kantor, and continues in the new generation of theatre magicians John Bailey has been reviewing on these pages. Andrews, a Flinders University Drama School Graduate and former Sydney Theatre Company Associate Director (with Wesley Enoch and the guidance of Stephen Armstrong), will find himself in good company, in a theatre culture which has seen itself as engaged in a European tradition of a very distinctly Australian kind. Not only that, but Andrews, like Kosky, has been developing a life as a director in Europe. His productions in Sydney attracted the interest of Berlin’s Schaubühne, where he has now directed 2 plays including Blackbird by the Scots writer David Harrower (reviewed in RT 71, p10 by Melbourne director Daniel Schlusser) and is looking forward to doing more—and extending his grasp of the German language.

I asked Andrews about the attractions of German theatre and of German plays. As a student he’d been fascinated with Buchner and Brecht, visited Germany and later toured his account of Goethe’s Ur/Faust there. “It’s the only culture in the world where mainstream theatre is radical and intense, and there’s a density of activity like nowhere else. It’s a culture that permits risk, but also the full-time engagement of artists, especially actors. I hadn’t experienced this.”

While searching for the contemporary plays he wanted to direct, Andrews encountered English translations of German plays through London’s Royal Court Theatre, and found the work of Marius von Mayenburg and “a great friendship unsought for.” Andrews premiered the playwright’s Fireface in Australia and David Gieselmann’s Mr Kolpert, which von Mayenburg had premiered as a director in Germany. Von Mayenburg found Andrews’ STC account of Chekhov’s Three Sisters unlike any he had encountered, but felt at home with the director’s vision and an invitation to direct at the Schaubühne later ensued. In turn, Andrews found himself “feeling at home at the Schaubühne, close to the actors with their belief in [artistic director] Thomas Ostermeier’s vision. The directors and writers are of my generation, text-based, and in an intense engagement with theatre making.” Andrews makes it clear, however, that it’s not German theatre alone that interests him, but theatre that challenges him: working in Germany has allowed him to experience the vision of the likes of great Swiss director Christoph Marthaler. He’s also adamant that his interests are not limited to German plays, which leads him to comment that, “anyway, Mr Kolpert is the most un-German of plays.”

From early on, reviewing Andrews’ work in these pages, I saw an integrative vision, a creative deployment of performer, sound, image and mise en scene common to contemporary performance (which Andrews wrote about for RealTime from Europe and New York) which soon grew to become his own. The stage designs had a kinship with contemporary visual arts, design and sound, and the performances were rooted in languages other than naturalism. Andrews says this tendency went back to student days, pre-dating his German encounters, and with a wariness “of theatre that was decorative. Theatre demands to be an artform with every element part of a discourse, a poetry machine, always engaged with the ongoing question of what theatre is.”

Andrews describes von Mayenburg’s Eldorado as “a luminous nightmare”, an experience, I have to say, conjured by a reading of the script alone. He sees himself attracted to plays that have a sense of fable (most evident in Caryl Churchill’s Far Away): “even Blackbird, with its extreme naturalism, has that sense.” How does a fabulist deal with reality? Andrews describes von Mayenburg’s Cold Child as “a fractured cubist nightmare of overlapping realities.” In Eldorado it’s the overlapping of realities (there’s some kind of war going on) and fantasies (what kind of war?), with the play’s opening words conjuring bizarre horrors with kinship to Churchill’s grim fantasia in Far Away.

Another, related preoccupation is with distance. Andrews feels that it’s been common to his work whether it’s emotional distance, which can become explosive, or the distance that keeps us from the brute realities of the Balkan wars or Iraq. In Eldorado, he says, near and far come together in “overlapping cities”, in the kind of world described by urban theorist Paul Virilio. The city in this play is no Eldorado, no city of gold, although it is wished to be by at least one of the characters. It is a city at war, but with few signs of it as its bourgeois inhabitants continue the struggle with art, relationships and the property market. “The play was written March to May 2003”, says Andrews, “when Bush and company were invading Iraq and we were submitted to a constant stream of war pornography in the media, bringing the war near but keeping it far. In his fabulation, von Mayenburg has the city being reconstructed as it’s being annihilated.” Such is the Neo-Con fantasy in Baghdad.

A summary of the plot of Eldorado wouldn’t tell you much; its power and meanings reside in the way it overlaps realities, plays with near and far in the most intimate manner, distorts your sense of time in the curious entries into scenes and the cutting away from them (“it’s not blackout theatre”, declares Andrews), avoids expository explanation and speaks to you through a language that is deceptively lucid and littered with gripping images.

Andrews describes von Mayenburg’s dramaturgy as “cellular”, as always referring to the space around the immediate world of the play, never separate from the larger world, although not literally connected. It’s a dream world, a nightmare of connections and associations, in which, like Noh theatre, ghosts can appear as a matter of course. This connectedness yields what appears to be a nihilistic vision in which, says Andrews, “we are all complicit, we are all guilty, all culpable, as an orgy of annihilation is enacted on a city, but no one person is blamed in Eldorado. That’s for the audience to think about.” There’s something about von Mayenburg’s language, about his vision that Andrews describes as “sophisticated, but crazy, like a child, a child’s eye view” which estranges us from the world, making us look at it again. Thekla, the pianist, haunted by visions of a worsening war, pregnant and alienated by her husband’s secrecy, is losing her art, afraid to “put my hands into that elephant’s mouth.” The feverishness of the language reminds Andrews of Buchner and the young Brecht.

Played through a 12 metre glass wall and radio miked, the otherwise sparely staged Eldorado promises to be quite an experience, not least because it deploys talented performers of the calibre of Gillian Jones, Robert Menzies, Alison Whyte, Bojana Novakovic and Greg Stone.

Malthouse Theatre, Eldorado, writer Marius von Mayenburg, translator Maja Zade, director Benedict Andrews, design Anna Tregloan, lighting Paul Jackson, sound Max Lyandvert, June 10-July 2, www.malthousetheatre.com.au

Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962) is an iconic reminder of the postmodern experience of shopping. Faced with an image that proffers repetition without difference our eyes ceaselessly scan the surface, never able to find a place to rest or a point on which to focus. This is supermarket glaze.

Enter new!shop, a new media performance installation by the Sydney based duo spat & loogie, supported by a dedicated cast including the talented and po-faced Mr Teik-Kim Pok. Part of the 2006 Next Wave festival’s Empire Games, new!shop is a cheeky, ironic event that pits our everyday experience against a taste of the near future where branding alone will be deemed sufficient to fulfil our shopping desires. “Wanna buy some air?” says the crook to a gullible Bert in Sesame Street. As he takes the stopper out of the bottle and pours nothingness into Bert’s open palm, he continues, “I’m not sellin’ the bottle.” This is the experience of new!shop.

new!shop is a cross between supermarket jaundice, 24/7 and Play School, a place where shoppers of the future cut their teeth, repeating and reiterating the habitual behaviours of their parents. The press blurb reads:

Enter new!shop…An ‘unretail’ space where shopping is encouraged but buying is not.…Play the sport of market research. Fill your basket and find your destiny.

In new!shop shoppers find themselves at the mercy of the shopping machine. As scanners set up a background rhythm, shoppers, eyes glazed, glide around the aisles as if on wheels, murmuring demurely amongst themselves as they select this and that from the goods on offer. They fill their baskets to the max. Promotional stands tout their wares, loud and blurred. PA announcements make no sense, alarms go off but shoppers being shoppers keep shopping. In the world of self-service the attendant sentinels practice indifference and shoppers busy themselves scanning goods and trying on wares with no expectation that there might be service here.

A hapless customer knocks over a display. She moves away in embarrassment, hoping against hope that her faux pas will go unnoticed. A dour and resentful shelf filler is called to fix the mess. Paranoia heightens; an alarm goes off as I try a Fear Mask for size. Caught on camera I am frogmarched to the front of the store where I face humiliation as the inscrutable manager (Teik-Kim Pok) conducts a thorough body search. The whole shop rubbernecks to see ‘who done it.’ Crisis over, the muzak re-asserts itself and shoppers return to the shopping glide and glaze.

I take my booty to the checkout and have it scanned: Achievement, Irrational Desire, Bright Future, Power and Authority and a DIY Botox Kit. Achievement builds a collection that makes you stand proud; Irrational Desire gives you all the love that you can buy and the Bright Future sun glasses provide the ultimate prophylactic to protect you from the store itself. What I buy predicts my consumer fortune. “See the blinding light,” my docket promises. “The patterns and routines in your world may become hostage to an overwhelming 800 watt glow. Now it’s time to take charge. Beware of empty slogans offering potential life improvements. To keep your mental environment in check, breathe deeply and keep moving beyond the superficially seductive. Expect great rewards if you keep on track.”

And for being such a sucker, the bell tolls and suddenly I am in the limelight: shopper of the hour…or something to that effect. The attendant sentinels slowly surround me smiling their vacuous smiles. I am topped with a crown, a Polaroid is taken and all returns to normal.

new!shop, creators spat & loogie, performers Teik-Kim Pok, Kenzie McKenzie, Naomi Derrick; sound The Toecutter; software developer Benhamin Meneses-Sosa; Meat Market, Arts House, Melbourne March 22-April 1

In Francois Truffaut's French New Wave film The 400 Blows (1959), the protagonist, a wayward schoolboy, wags school for the pleasures of exploring the city. At an amusement fair he tries the Rotor ride, climbing into a circular chamber that spins at great speed. Plastered against its side, he whirls round and round, joyously suspended between sky and ground.
LR: Heath Ledger, Abbie Cornish, Luke Davies, Neil Armfield

LR: Heath Ledger, Abbie Cornish, Luke Davies, Neil Armfield

The opening of Candy, the new Australian film directed by pre-eminent Australian theatre director Neil Armfield and based on Luke Davies' novel of the same name, recalls this very image. This time its own protagonists, the equally wayward Candy and Dan, played by Abbie Cornish and Heath Ledger, similarly defy gravity. In this image Armfield finds an eloquent metaphor for the thrill of heroin, and its seductive sensation of suspending time. It's an impossible wish, of course, and the film charts the consequences of Candy and Dan’s spiralling addiction. Candy is soon forced to work as a prostitute in order to fund their habits while Dan scores and occasionally works a scam. The terrible price that this experience exacts on them individually and as a couple is the subject of the film.

Back in 2003 I attended a daylong scriptwriting workshop at Byron Bay with Neil Armfield and Luke Davies, the film’s co-writer. At that time they had already spent 4 years adapting Davies' novel into screenplay form. Candy, originally published in 1998, was Davies' first novel and he had based it on his own experiences as a long-term addict. Producer Margaret Fink was impressed by the book and approached Davies to develop some ideas he might have into screenplays. None of Davies' suggestions matched the singular intensity of the novel but his own initial draft adaptation—which closely replicated the book's episodic structure—needed development to find its cinematic form. It was at this point that Fink introduced Davies to Armfield, an experienced theatre director with a few television credits and they quickly developed a collaborative relationship.

In particular, Armfield and Davies grappled with how best to convert the book's perspective from Dan's introspective and deluded headspace. Davies commented, “Neil expanded the original cast into the circle of family—family is what he loves to explore—and that's when the script was transformed, when it really began to blossom.” They made another crucial change, enhancing substantially the role of Dan's mentor, Casper (performed by Geoffrey Rush, a long-time theatre collaborator of Armfield's), a junkie friend and organic chemistry professor. These changes have shifted much of the story's action from predominantly down-at-heel terraces in Sydney's inner suburbs to a more affluent millieu. Unlike the recent Little Fish (Rowan Woods 2005) that set its own story of heroin use against a bleak backdrop of systemic problems in Sydney's struggling west, Candy’s focus squarely remains the love story between its protagonists. Armfield cited this as what attracted him to the film in the first place. It presented him with a uniquely cinematic opportunity to explore the nature of a sexual relationship, not possible in the theatre.

That central relationship is rendered with great poignancy. While the film is still framed from Dan’s perspective, Cornish’s Candy is the mesmerizing heart of the film. She is by turn youthfully exuberant and full of painful, suppressed emotion. The sparseness of the dialogue makes Cornish’s performance largely one of gesture. It’s remarkable watching her minute shifts in expression as she moves between emotional registers. Ledger likewise inhabits his role with a similar degree of conviction. That we come to like Dan as much as we do attests to Ledger’s ability to play him with surprising compassion. He is a largely thankless character—parasitic and hopelessly passive—for much of the film. But Ledger hones in on Dan’s romanticism; he is an enthusiast. His fervent desire to remain in the moment is a desperate way to avoid thinking too hard about Candy’s sex work in which he is complicit.

The inevitability of the characters’ downward trajectory imbues this love story with a tender melancholy. It’s a minor miracle that our sympathy extends to Candy and Dan for the duration of the film. After all it could be argued that their problems are largely of their own making. Armfield, however, is a compassionate filmmaker and he brings a restrained dignity to the material that includes some difficult and horrific scenes. Instead of psychologising addiction, offering up ‘reasons’ for Candy and Dan’s heroin use that might invoke sympathy for its protagonists, the film takes a refreshingly defiant stance. This is a life lived, for better or worse. Or as Armfield’s puts it, “At the heart of the film is the suggestion that junkies are you and me.” He described this decision as purely aesthetic. As soon as they tried including scenes that might go some way towards providing an explanation for Candy and Dan’s addiction, the story, according to Armfield, got boring. Instead, the film focuses on heroin’s role in this particular relationship, from something that they initially share, to something that divides them.

All of this makes Candy sound very dark indeed, yet it doesn’t feel overly sombre. The film pulses with energy and a killer soundtrack. Sydney sunshine, suburban swimming pools and the ocean's expansive horizon provides the backdrop. The film is awash with light. By staging so much of the action outside and in the daytime, Armfield avoids one of the pitfalls of genre, the cliché of the dank drug den. The film adaptation also retains the book's humour. Dan's voice-over provides a wry perspective on their disintegrating lives. There’s a humorous edge to his baroque, poetic riffs; a comic mismatch between the richness of the language and the increasing leanness of their junkie existence. Candy also includes scenes memorable for their absurdity. In one such sequence Dan steals a wallet from an unlocked car outside a known beat and impersonates its owner at the bank in order to withdraw his money. He would like to be a smooth con artist, but in reality he’s desperate for the money, a complete amateur. It tells you something about Armfield’s view of the world that the victim of the theft—a nerdy, nervous guy—is clearly undeserving of the crime. While we are pleased to see Dan finally pulling his weight, our pleasure is laced with discomfort.

The question of audience identification is one of the more complex aspects of Candy. There is a sense in which heroin and Candy and Dan’s love for one another creates a closed circuit, one that places the viewer on the outside. The film overcomes this difficulty by opening the story up to include Candy’s family. It's a welcome jolt to see that she matters to someone other than Dan. Their initial sense of denial gives way to helplessness at the situation. Tony Martin and Noni Hazelhurst, both excellent here, portray Candy’s uptight, bewildered parents. They find themselves completely out of their depth, fearful of appearing intrusive but nevertheless deeply concerned. Although the film generates a lot of sympathy for them it also manages in a few short scenes to paint a portrait of suffocating conservatism and family dysfunction.

Despite Armfield's background in the theatre, in almost every respect Candy is a cinematic film. If anything Armfield’s professional experience is reflected in the film's overall clarity. It's totally devoid of that awful staginess that marrs so many theatre directors' film efforts. Armfield, accustomed to the democratic nature of the stage, directs his actors with a sense of even-handedness. For the most part it helps shape the film’s rich and complex view of human nature. On occasion however, it feels as though he is unsure of how to best deploy the camera in suggesting interiority. At a crucial point in the story, just when Dan has begun to turn his life around and his relationship with Candy is deteriorating, the film briskly skirts the seismic changes taking place. It feels as though an opportunity has been lost to experience Candy's and particularly Dan’s, deep level of disappointment and hurt.

Minor quibbles aside, Davies and Armfield have fashioned a heart-breaking love story that manages to convey with an elegant simplicity and unerring directness the painful, heady experience of coming of age. The rush of drugs, the rush of love, they're the big notes, sure, and Candy covers that territory with candour. But it's the film’s ability to unearth the more complex emotions that underpin the intoxicating experiences of drug use and love that resonates most. In its many beautifully observed moments Candy shows the tenderness that can exist between 2 people even in the grips of addiction. The cost of Candy and Dan’s getting of wisdom is a deep sense of regret. It's in that final reckoning that Candy most powerfully reminds us of the responsibilities of love.

Candy, director Neil Armfield, writers Neil Armfield, Luke Davies, based on the novel by Luke Davies, Producer Margaret Fink & Emile Sherman, distributed by Dendy Films

In an interview with RealTime during the principal photography of his Indigenous language cautionary fable, Ten Canoes, writer, director and producer Rolf de Heer revealed, “Ultimately, I wrote a script that conformed to the parameters that were set for me” (RT68, p22). The finished film is proof that de Heer is adroit at turning constraints to advantage in a fine tragicomedy not only of considerable historical significance, but also containing its own distinctive narrative and production elements. There is little doubt that Ten Canoes will be fittingly recognised in Australia and internationally. It has already won the Special Jury Prize at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section.

The intrinsic rules placed on de Heer included the desire of his collaborators, the Yolngu people of Ramingining (local elder Peter Djigirr is co-director), to include certain ethnographic details so the film could also serve as an object of historical posterity for the community. To this end, one layer of the narrative centres on canoe building and goose egg gathering, significant rites and activities that the Yolngu wished to record as a capsule of traditional activities. De Heer uses this action as the platform for the main narrative; set centuries ago against the backdrop of these daily hunter-gatherer tasks, a Yolngu elder, Minygululu, imparts an instructional tale to his younger sibling Dayindi who lusts after the elder man’s wife. The mythic tale told by Minygululu is expressed in a sequence of flashbacks and forms the chief action of the film, and is brimming with dramatic tension including instances of mistaken identity, forbidden love and violence.

In entwining these 2 narrative strands, the film cleverly echoes the episodic and elliptical storytelling patterns of some Australian Indigenous cultures. There are discursive diversions, explorations of alternate versions of the events, and the plot’s pacing is punctuated by ruminative breaks: several times Minygululu’s story halts for a moment and the perspective returns to the goose egg gatherers. As they set camp or cook some food, Minygululu chides his brother for his impatience to hear the end of the story. A further story strand is layered in by way of a friendly omniscient narration, spoken in English with the distinctive voice of David Gulpilil giving the on screen action an easy accessibility.

From the very first diegetic exchange in the film, a variation on the ‘silent but deadly’ fart gag, it is plain that de Heer is reaching for universal resonance through breadth of humour. On the whole he is successful: it is very enjoyable to see the group of canoe-builders verbally needling young Dayindi because of his crush, and scenes involving the corpulent elder Birrinbirrin build an easy bridge between Arnhem Land of a thousand years ago and contemporary mores. Counterbalancing the moments of near slapstick is a more lugubrious tone provided by occasional reminders of the cheapness of life. Perhaps most representative of this mix is the film’s denouement which manages to match the amusing aphorism “be careful what you wish for,” with sorrowful circumstances.

Ten Canoes was partly inspired by the research and photography of anthropologist Donald Thomson, and the visual style of the film certainly is informed by his 1930s work. The goose egg scenes are shot in pristine black and white, often with a locked-off camera and are highly reminiscent of classical landscape portraiture, even the figures move minimally and slowly. Great assistance is provided by the hauntingly photogenic Arafura swamp. Contrastingly, Minygululu’s story is shot in colour with more dynamic movement within the frame, often encircling smooth steadicam shots. It is rare to see such an articulated stylistic division within an Australian film, and director of photography Ian Jones and his department are to be commended for its precise execution.

To return to de Heer’s production parameters, it was the exclusive and necessary use of non-actors that posed the biggest risk of diminishing the impact of the film, and the term non-actors here means a cast with only the most rudimentary conceptual handle on fictionalised performance. However, the cast is almost uniformly outstanding. Of particular excellence is Crusoe Kurrdal, who plays the central warrior in Minygululu’s tale with a sense of powerful fatalism, Jamie Dayindi Gulpilil Dalaithngu in a dual role as confused apprentices, and Richard Birrinbirrin in a natural comic turn as a greedy honeyeater. These performances are also attributable to de Heer’s directorial skill and his rich association with the Ramingining community.

Much will be made—as it should be—of the status of Ten Canoes as an Indigenous language film, and as an historical marker with an Indigenous perspective. But this is far more than a curiosity piece—it is a well-nuanced and strikingly designed film deserving of wide attention.

Ten Canoes, director Rolf de Heer, co-director: Peter Djigirr, producers Rolf de Heer, Julie Ryan. National release June 29.

Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-73) was a key figure for prominent directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Michael Mann and John Woo, yet Australian audiences have rarely been given the opportunity to catch anything but a limited glimpse of his films. Le Samouraï (1967) was re-released in a restored print back in the early 1990s, and more recently a new print of Le Cercle Rouge (1970) toured the country, but Melville's earlier work has long been hard to access. That situation will shortly be remedied for Sydneysiders at least, with a retrospective at this year's Sydney Film Festival.

Melville is best known for his crime films which draw heavily on the American gangster tradition and its film noir variant. The influence of American cinema is clearly evident in his gangster classic Bob le Flambeur (1955), set in Paris' Montmartre. The film's referential, playful tone was a strong influence on the French New Wave, and Melville has a brief but amusing cameo in Godard's 1959 debut, A Bout de Souffle (Breathless). But while they shared a common interest in American genre cinema, Melville avoided the pastiches and deconstruction of genre that characterised Godard's early films. He worked within genre forms rather than taking them apart; exaggerated generic conventions are integral to his fatalistic cinematic world, particularly in his later films. Le Samouraï is typical in this regard—indeed from its opening shot Le Samouraï is the exemplary Melville movie.

Behind the opening credits we see a man lying on a bed in a bare grey-brown apartment. There is no movement, except for his smoking of a cigarette. A birdcage sits beside his bed and we hear a high pitched twittering on the soundtrack. The regular rhythm of passing traffic can be heard outside. The gently drifting smoke is the only random element in the austere composition, which frames the apartment in long shot like a theatre stage. As the titles end, the frame very subtly moves for no obvious reason. Although the overall shape of the shot remains fixed, tiny variations in the image and sound are continually playing out.

This single prolonged introductory shot reveals much about Melville's style. As the Sydney Film Festival's season curator Adrian Danks has noted, Melville pictures the world according to a “modernist tradition in which [it] appears predetermined, patterned, almost geometric.”Within these rigorously framed patterns Melville's characters move along apparently fixed lines, alienated from their own actions, simultaneously inside and outside the drama (to paraphrase Danks). Yet as the films progress, the repetitive actions and compositions gradually mutate, change and fall apart. Melville's characters operate within systems and routines, but their fate is never completely predetermined. Rather, there is a constant tension between systems, routines and balanced oppositions on the one hand, and the overarching effect of time on the other. It is duration which above all serves to erode and shift the most meticulous arrangements in Melville's on screen worlds.

Danks has described Melville's cinema as”tonal.” To take this concept one step further, Melville's is a cinema of subtly shifting tones in which resonances from the slightest oscillations build until they explode, often in the unexpectedly violent deaths that characterise most of Melville's conclusions. To put it a different way, his films record the results of 2 systems coming into contact: in the case of Le Samouraï, the regimented routine of a lone assassin and police systems of observation and control. Each system gradually shifts as each tries to out manoeuvre the other. Inevitably, it is the individual who eventually succumbs.

This retrospective is important not only because it will bring some of Melville's lesser-known films to light, but also because it is only in a cinema that Melville's tonal approach can be fully appreciated. His meticulous formal compositions, graphic matches and expressionistic colour palettes need the luxuriously wide spaces of the cinema screen to truly come into their own. Although disappointingly non-comprehensive (only 7 of Melville’s 13 features are screening), the retrospective nonetheless includes such important works as Melville's 1949 collaboration with Jean Cocteau, Les Enfants Terribles, his 1969 Resistance film L'Armée des Ombres (Shadow Army), and the aforementioned Bob le Flambeur, Le Samouraï and Le Cercle Rouge.

A Band of Outsiders—The Cinematic Underworld of Jean-Pierre Melville, 53rd Sydney Film Festival; State Theatre, George St Cinemas, Dendy Opera Quays; June 11-19

Dan Edwards will be appearing with season curator Adrian Danks, and regular RealTime contributor Hamish Ford, on a panel discussing Melville's work in the Festival Lounge at the State Theatre, 2.30-4.30pm, Monday, June 19.

Akram Zaatari is a video artist and curator who lives and works in Beirut, Lebanon. He is part of a generation of independent video makers from the Middle East who use video beyond the conventions and limitations of television. These films explore new avenues of storytelling which express the social and cultural debates of the Middle East. Many of Zaatari's stories have an unmistakable documentary form, as in This Day which was screened as part of the Middleastalentime program of Middle Eastern film and video. I curated the program at the Sydney Opera House where Zaatari was a special guest of dLux media arts. My conversation with Zaatari began at the after screening talk and then via the internet since the artist’s return to Beirut.

This Day seems at first a documentary of your investigations of early photographic images shot in the Syrian Desert 50 to 60 years ago. Once you returned to Beirut to the comfort of your editing suite, it takes another turn with these images not only being discussed further but juxtaposed with images of modern-day Beirut, your own images and diaries during the civil war, planes, cable cars, archival photographs and footage and sound bites from the internet and television which are all brought into the mix. What triggered such an investigation? Was it initially planned this way or did the project just morph itself from the perch of your editing station, where these layers of history and the truths captured in these images are questioned?

This Day From the beginning I wanted this work to sum up my relation to different groups of images and sound and video recordings that I had been collecting and studying. So from the beginning I knew it would end up a heterogeneous work, where those collections are tied with different threads. I conceived the video as a container for them. I was inhabited by these images and sounds, partially with what I do as part of the Arab Image Foundation, and partially with a huge number of recordings I did and still do until this day. These are recordings of sound explosions, of news clips, images of shelling, particularly dating back to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

I had always considered these two practices [sound and image] distinct, but not anymore. By saying that I had conceived the work this way, I do not mean the work was pre-scripted, on the contrary. I was opening up axes, heading in different directions pursuing elements of study. I delayed even thinking of binding everything altogether until post-production. I would say the film took shape while editing, not because it is a collage, but because writing this film was like doing lab work, waiting to go through a synthesis phase. In all cases, for me, films get written while editing, in the sense that there is always an unpredictable shift that takes the film somewhere else. In the editing I rebel against myself.

The collections belong to a particular geography, divided by territorial conflicts, and marked by successive wars. I am talking about Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Palestine/Israel. How can one talk about images in these countries without ending up talking about war? While working I was becoming conscious of the formation of an iconographic landscape that can testify to conflicts. It is then that I started to find interest in analyzing images circulating on the net—images of mobilization, commercials and anti-commercials—to say that in situations of war, the images that tend to circulate are images of mobilisation. For me it was about time to cease these images and take them seriously.

The major narrative link between all the different parts of this work was, on one hand, the element of transportation: the crossing of distances and borders to meet subjects, in Syria and Jordan. So it was the machine, the car, the airplane, and even the camel. So the film starts with a pan on a black and white photograph taken by Manoug in the desert, showing historian Jibrail Jabbur holding his camera on his shoulder, standing next to a Bedouin, observing someone fixing his car. The car is clearly from the 50s and is broken in the desert and the commentator says that this is an image of “East meets West”, because a western car has to break down in the desert. This is how the film starts the voyage: in the Syrian desert looking for desert inhabitants that were once photographed by Jabbur and Manoug.

This trip to the Syrian Desert was indirectly my tribute to a documentary tradition often marginalised in the art world, but also often trivialised in the documentary genre. I wanted the film to oscillate between these traditions, on the one hand an extrovert voyage in geography, visiting places and meeting people, on the other hand an introvert voyage in time observing images of past wars. Some people perceive it as 2 films, I don't. I say it is one film that looks formally as a diptych in duration.

I was one of the founders of the Arab Image Foundation, an archive for collecting and preserving the photographic history of the Middle East and North Africa from the 19th century to 1960. Since then I got to shape and improve my collecting practice. I travelled in Syria, Jordan and Egypt and met so many people who used, or collected photography. I made a video about Van Leo (an Armenian photographer from Cairo) entitled Her + Him Van Leo. I have made a few publications and exhibitions based on these photographic findings. Now I am studying the work of Lebanese studio photographer Hashem el Madani, in particular in relation to the city he comes from, Saida.

You chose video over film or television. You have strong views also about documentary and feature films. Please elaborate on your views, particularly as you have plans to make a feature length film in the near future.

I never draw boundaries between these disciplines. I wish one could navigate among all of them. However, the boundaries exist and they are imposed by markets and by industries of production. So the boundaries are not inherent to those disciplines, but are artificial creations of the market. I have always worked outside systems of production, partially because I live in Lebanon where these relationships (producer to director to distributor) do not exist. After playing all these roles for more than 10 years, I think I am reaching a dead end. I do want my work to be widely seen, ie seen on television, in theatres etc—I want my work to encounter people who did not particularly choose to see it. This happens particularly on television. And this is, I believe, the power of television. This is why I am now doing what I resisted for a long time, which is writing a script in order to look for a producer.

I left Lebanon before Rafik Harriri's assassination. As an outsider, I could see that public opinion of him was quite divided before his death. Ask any taxi driver. Funny thing is, I am that sure since his assassination these same drivers who used to complain about how corrupt he was now carry images of him around in their taxi. But besides the initial 'Peoples' demonstrations, how has the arts community responded to his death, or do they not know how to respond?

Despite possible critiques of Hariri, he was a very pragmatic man of state, very charismatic, down to earth and very open to critique, which is really rare. Unlike other political figures, he was not a war figure and never had a militia. It is naïve to say that after his death, many people discovered his qualities, but it is partially true. His tragic assassination brought images of other assassinations that remained un-investigated in the recent Lebanese history, and that brought people to the street. It is hard for us, artists and intellectuals, to stop what’s happening. I personally need some distance to formulate an opinion about it. Naturally, I started recording directly after the assassination, and now I have more than 100 hours of tape from television, and many direct audio recordings of demonstrations. I do not think I am ready, as I need to digest this material; besides I need time to view it!

Brisbane’s OtherFilm Festival (OFF) is less an occasion of mourning for the death of cinema than an opportunity for the happy reanimation of its corpse (courtesy of some incandescent electrics). This revival can be attributed as much to an expedient and fruitful accommodation with digital technologies as it can to the cinema’s alchemical ménage à trois of chemistry, optics and mechanical moving parts. That accommodation might suggest an ungainly and ultimately static confusion of back and forward steps, but the reality is some considered hoofing in otherwise unlikely ellipses. Clearly the epitaphs have been somewhat premature; on the evidence of this year’s OtherFilm Festival, artists will continue to find creative solutions to the problem of cinema for a considerable time to come.

The prevailing atmosphere is one of avuncular congeniality; there is a discreet but genuine sense of community among many of the OFF attendees, nurtured in part by experimental music festivals like What Is Music?, Liquid Architecture, the NOW Now, and the Articulating Space concert series. The obvious sonic analogies are completely pertinent: the structural dynamics of the work at OFF are informed by the energy and electricity of contemporary music. This embrace of strategies of immersive spectacle and audience engagement lies at a far remove from the austerity of sober structural methodologies that came to characterise creative film several decades back. By consolidating a recent legacy of experimental synaesthesia, OFF’s curatorial agenda approaches a dedicated exploration of ‘Audio-Vision.’

OFF is further distinguished from comparable Australian surveys of moving image media by its curators’ appreciation of a rich international history of marginal media practice, and their fervidiness to interrogate a specifically Australian historical context. At this year’s OFF, these imperatives were served by the presence of the nation’s most tireless champions of experimental film, Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, in company of their son, occasional filmmaker Ivor. Long-time advocates and agitators for the cause of creative media through their self-published Cantrills Filmnotes—the longest lived experimental media journal in the world—the Cantrills’ filmwork is increasingly occluded from public audition. On the evidence of their expanded cinema performance, reprised at OFF for only the second time since its 1970 premiere at the National Gallery of Victoria, this seems both an injustice to them personally and, more widely, a considerable loss to Australian film culture.

Across some four decades, the Cantrills have been undertaking an interrogation of the celluloid muse that is, certainly within Australia, unique in its scope and rigour. The results of that research are brilliantly detailed in their ‘colour separation films’; domestic scenes shot in black and white, before grey-scale spectra are translated into different colour tones through the device of an optical printer. The effect is of some colours being both naturalistic and ravishingly variegated, while others (bright orange skin tones or deep blue shadows!) are confoundingly aberrant. For its modest ambition, this work reveals a virtuosic control of cinematic apparatus.

Even more profound was the revelation of the Cantrills’ Expanded Cinema performance. This work elaborates their purely celluloid experiments by resorting to multiple projections, live declamation, some accomplished musique concrete soundtracks by Arthur Cantrill and the same sculptural screens they employed at the work’s original NGV debut. The Cantrills’ evident on-screen interest in notional ‘place’—something approaching a psychogeography of domestic space and the Australian landscape—is here transposed into an exploration of the physical limits of theatrical exhibition, a utopian challenge to a situation which can otherwise reproduce its own normative models of audience and filmmaker behaviour.

This expansion of cinematic ideal form is, alongside the reevaluation of sound-image relationships, one of the principal concerns of the festival. Natasha Anderson back-projects her organically fluid animations of tumescent grotesquerie onto home-made latex screens, performing the live soundtrack on processed voice and contrabass recorder. As an essay in abjection, it’s a compellingly lateral use of digital imaging technology. Velvet Pesu doesn’t even resort to a conventional projector, demonstrating rather the shadowplay and trompe l’oeil effects produced by her intricately wrought kinetic sculpture. Beautiful to behold, this skeletal assemblage communicates a quality of obsessive atavism which is provoked into unearthly, cacophonous life by Pesu’s performance.

The work at OFF is typically characterised by a thoughtful ambivalence towards new technologies, subordinating their use to more elemental aesthetic criteria. This measured synthesis of digital and analogue means is evidenced by Pia Borg’s digital projections for Pride and Prejudice (in collaboration with Mark Harwood, who provides live scoring). Their performance investigates the inherent uncanniness of theatrical screening: the ambiguity of a static human form projected at life-scale and enhanced by the matte cutout protruding from the screen proper. An intelligent work that acknowledges its debt to the supernatural qualities of the primitive cinema, with Harwood’s soundtrack evoking the perfect mood of creeped-out apprehension. A different course to minatory dread is taken by performance duo Vanilla (animator Van Sowerwine on image duties accompanied by Camilla Hannan on soundtrack). Exploiting another variety of the uncanny, Sowerwine invests her doll’s house set with infantile terror through the use of articulated silhouette puppets, while Hannan makes an unsettling mix of environmental sound. If the question of narrative aspirations is an indifferent matter for some OFF participants, both these artist ensembles are elsewhere working in more conventional narrative forms and I am frankly excited at the possibility that these performances might support some renovation of Australian filmmaking practice.

Lloyd Barrett’s Mise En Scene essays more elusive narrative intentions, employing a programming metalogic to drive its lurid abstractions of character portraits. Barrett’s striking electroacoustic score discloses a close attention to the sonic environment, something he otherwise explored through the soundwalk he conducted with acoustic ecology partisan, Anthony Magen. Where Barrett and others (notably, the synaesthetic feedback produced by Botborg) employ more strictly digital means, international guests Sam Hamilton and Eve Gordon (New Zealand) and audio-vision ensemble Abject Leader (Sally Golding and Joel Stern, with guest Adam Park) are conducting their very different enquiries into the tactile properties of analogue film. This artisanal countermedia is sometimes assisted by some hilariously pataphysical instruments (eg Hamilton & Gordon’s light refractors: broken glass supported by soup cans spinning on turntables in front of the projector beam).

Australian cultural institutions can sometimes seem beholden to a naive technological determinism at the expense of a more considered understanding of artists’ interventions in moving image media. The OtherFilm Festival provides a heterogenous corrective and the curators should be congratulated both for gracefully negotiating what must have been a logistical nightmare of outlandish technical requirements and for providing such an expansive survey of contemporary artists’ cinema practice. The only prominent omission was Robin Fox, whose compositional practice has made a considerable advance since the addition of a laser to his visual arsenal.

Velvet Pesu is moving soon from her expansive studio and irregular venue for experimental music, a one-time Masonic Lodge in inner city Woolloongabba. The good news is that the Brisbane City Council is providing her a with new home—larger, at the edge of the CBD and even double-glazing the windows to forestall any neighbourhood noise complaints—for a peppercorn rent. As much as Brisbane suffers some unkind comparison to Southern circumstance, to my knowledge there’s not a municipality in Sydney or Melbourne prepared to extend this level of support to creative music.

And there’s the rub: a loose coalition of Brisbane artists have described themselves a mandate that large and amply resourced institutions outside Queensland have signally failed to address (a 10 minute drive from ACMI would put you at the Cantrills’ doorstep). The OFF curators have historical smarts, an international ambit and the kind of hands-off support that doesn’t compromise their curatorial independence. This might bode well for the success of Brisbane’s Australian Cinematheque, but it also entails a considerable challenge to legitimated screen culture south of the Tweed River.

The 2nd OtherFilm Festival, curators Sally Golding, Joel Stern, Danni Zuvela., Queensland College of Art, Griffith University; Globe Theatre, Brisbane Brisbane, March 24-27, www.otherfilm.org

Further discussion of OFF and Australia’s problematic history of creative media in relation to cultural policy will appear in the next issue of the Senses Of Cinema web journal: www.sensesofcinema.com

At the moment, in Australia at least, mobile phones are the new buzz technology for delivering news, info, porn and entertainment. Documentarians have joined the rush to the mobile. Telcos are hungry for content and those filmmakers who’ve worked in the online environment are upgrading skills to create portals and interactive mobile phone docos. It’s early days.

Major broadcasters like BBC and NBC are mostly treating mobile phones as a platform, one of many mobile ways of viewing material. Mobile phones are placed in the same category as portable media centres and iPods. To date, broadcaster alliances with telcos to create exciting new documentaries are limited. In Australia the national broadcaster, ABC, provides news for the Telstra portal: a picture followed by 3 or 4 paragraphs of text. Snippet News. They are yet to discover the full potential of mobiles. Commercial channels are mainly using mobiles as a way for youth audiences to vote for their favourite character on reality TV programmes. Clearly there is far more potential. Only in Korea has a full TV network for mobiles been established but unfortunately they commission very little, relying instead on material that is already popular on regular TV.

Image gatherers

For broadcasters the mobile phone functions more as an independent news gathering device than a delivery platform. Think of the masses of images of the London bombings that the BBC used in conventional broadcasts and online. Other broadcasters are following suit and disasters around the world are now being covered by victims and onlookers. Disaster coverage has become postmodern. Of course amateur video has been around for a while. Think of the impact in the US of the Rodney King bashing footage. The amateurs of the 20th century were limited to those who happened to have a video camera handy, mainly tourists. Now almost everyone in the first world has a mobile camera, the cinematographers are endless.

The problem is verifying the authenticity of the images and their context. In the wake of the recent cyclone in Queensland, the ABC asked its audience to send through images of the disaster. Because phone lines were down there was no way for the ABC to verify most of the images they received. They published them on trust, and on their assessment that they were indeed of that particular cyclone.

Myth of the ephemeral

For documentary makers the story is different. While broadcasters are using mobiles as a platform of immediacy, documentaries on the whole are anything but projects of immediacy. How can documentarians train the audience to use them as catalysts for revisiting the past or provoking analysis of the current world order? Where does mobile delivery sit in the plethora of media?

It is interesting to take a look at the internet as a way of understanding how new media is consumed. The major broadcasters around the world are fast coming to the realisation that the online environment is far from ephemeral. Quite the opposite, it lengthens the life of a documentary by years. Prior to 3G mobile technology the web was thought of as the ‘immediacy’ media form. Online news updated each hour, emails flashing through systems and traversing the world in seconds. Yet the usage data on major sites associated with documentaries shows a life span of years after the broadcast date. At the 2006 Australian International Documentary Conference, Annie Valva explained that her site Evolution has been Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” site for a few years. For the uninitiated that means that the site associated with the documentary has more sites linking to it on the web than any other site that discusses the concept of evolution. The BBC are so excited by the ‘tail end’ life provided by the web that they are even revisiting archived documentaries and versioning them for the web environment.

I’m arguing that there is the potential for mobile platforms to inherit the longevity that the web has created for the documentary. In fact the most ephemeral of the broadcast options is the conventional free-to-air or pay TV ‘appointment television.’ The documentary is accessible in perpetuity on the web.

Red lion inspired by rising sun

In England there was a recent project created by the BBC Natural History unit that gave information to tourists in situ via their mobile phones. Instead of reading a guidebook they photographed a pixel image on a sign that told them by phone to go to a certain site to access information about this view, or this building. This opens up the potential for documentaries to interact with space and place. This project was inspired by the use of mobiles in Asia, especially Japan. When it comes to new ways to use them Japan is in the lead. Basically the mobile is becoming what the watch was to Buck Rogers and other sci-fi heroes of the 20th century. It will have everything and be able to do everything.

In Japan mobile ownership is approaching saturation and companies are now reaching out to children by creating phones that include GPS and emergency help alarms. The same Natural History unit at BBC has turned this around and created a game. The kids role-play lions in the savannah using GPS to locate themselves in the make-believe world. In a combination of documentary and new technology, anthropomorphising is taken to the extreme.

Problems with mobiles

There are the obvious problems: multiple platforms that are not compatible; different screen sizes; lack of bandwidth etc. These technical issues need to be resolved, but not by documentary makers. Their issues are to do with content and how the viewer interacts with it.

One of the problems that occurs in the online environment is that not much of the product out there engages on an emotional level. A good feature length or TV hour documentary will engage, you’ll cry or laugh or feel angry and reach a cathartic conclusion. The mobile platform has the potential to leap out of the fact-heavy internet world and engage with emotions. This is an intimate device that you hold in your hands, near your body. Viewers will be open to material beyond what they expect on the medium screen net. One of the few Australian internet documentary producers engaging this emotional level is BIG hART (www.knotathome.com/interface). It will be interesting to see what the group creates for mobiles, especially since their target audience is disaffected youth.

Most pressing among the tech issues for documentary are sound and image clarity. Mobiles have dreadful sound unless the user wears earphones. There are myths about image clarity. Sure, a cinema-style wide shot is lost on a mobile, but because of the proximity of the device to the viewer’s eyes, images shot for TV are fine for mobiles. The exception is that fast pans and shaky-cam will degrade the image, simply because it takes more memory to view a moving image. That will become less of an issue as bandwidth increases.

The most important thing is that the video clip is quick to download and access. When given the choice of high quality, slow download versus low quality, quick download the user will nearly always choose the latter. This tends to mean that shorter pieces work better for the mobile audience, whereas longer pieces, probably purchased on DVD, will be loaded on mobile media centres and iPods. In Korea they worked with the notion that viewers had an attention span of approximately 5 minutes. According to Neal Anderon from Ovum, Telstra has found Australians are happy with maerial between 5-13 minutes—engagement with the media is higher than expected.

The choice medium

Mobile devices have also become the ‘choice’ media. Already young users are downloading from i-tunes into their phones and creating their own mix of music, in essence, their own radio station. Radio has cottoned on to this and has begun to make available download versions of the talk sections. You can now schedule radio to suit you. The iPod and mobile are merging. As they do, the notion of downloadable discrete material for mobile devices is becoming common. This is not about letting people see feature documentaries on their mobiles, it’s about short pieces that are easy to consume on the peak hour train to work.

The modern user no longer buys a product, they buy an experience. It’s the experience of the cinema, or the lounge room or the intimate and handy mobile, accessible where other screens are not.

Attracting an audience

How does the audience find out about your doco? Most documentary material for mobiles will be accessed online. The main access to sites at the moment on mobile technology is through portals: index pages that contain links to a variety of sites. The most effective portals are run by the telcos. This is because when you fire up your phone it immediately takes you to your telco portal. As the bandwidth grows the portals will become less vital. Already the major search engines have created mobile phone versions of their sites, but most internet sites have not yet re-versioned to make themselves mobile phone friendly. You simply can’t interact with the page in the same way that you do at a computer. For instance, there is no mouse on a mobile, the backend coding is slightly different and screen size is certainly different. So until the net becomes more mobile savvy you can bet your favourite astrology site won’t be viewable. This means the audience is less likely to search the net on a mobile until they are sure it is going to provide viewable material. Working outside portals is a risky business at present.

A version of this article appears in DOX, the European Documentary Network magazine

Lisa Pieroni, curator of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image’s Focus on David Cronenberg retrospective, describes the Canadian director’s films as “a very cohesive body of work.” Despite the reflex to describe simply any filmmaker or artist’s work in such terms, the body metaphor is more appropriate than usual when discussing Cronenberg.
Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside) & Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), Scanners

Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside) & Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), Scanners

‘Body horror’ is a popular, generic label for Cronenberg’s films, suggesting they are comfortably situated within the conventions of the horror genre. The ACMI retrospective traversed Cronenberg’s works from early avant-garde shorts such as Stereo (1969) and Crimes of the Future (1970), to his latest, A History of Violence (2005). Such a broad coverage ultimately confirmed that generic labels are, as always, oversimplifications.

While Cronenberg’s films are strikingly preoccupied with the body, particularly processes of abjection (even his forgotten B-racing film, Fast Company [1979] finds its narrative denouement in death by inferno), the idiosyncratic narrative tendencies and mise en scène defy generic classification. Videodrome (1983) was initially marketed as a horror film. Rather than for terror or manipulative suspense, the film is memorable for hallucinatory plot machinations, surreal set pieces and tantalising (though somewhat under-realised) proclamations of a ‘new flesh’ emerging in our media saturated world.

When researching the program, Pieroni learned that the majority of Cronenberg’s films are largely unavailable on DVD. She commented, “I think that says something about the position of his work, I think quite often people don’t know where to put it.” The Cronenberg opus confirms the truism that the question of genre reveals more about the need for distributors to find audiences rather than anything in the films themselves. Even ACMI struggles to overcome this. Their promotional brochure described Crimes of the Future as a thriller and the inaugurator of the body horror fascination. Yet it resists reductionist labels with its alien aesthetic. The Cronenberg lens (he was cinematographer on his early shorts) fixates on abstract architectural framing. The central premise of the film, concerning a future where men become the locus of all gender possibilities after most women die of a bizarre disease, is explored through a non-narrative, under-the-microscope approach.

The early low-budget films, Shivers (1975), Rabid (1977), The Brood (1979), Scanners (1981) and even Cronenberg’s first 2 ‘mainstream’ films The Dead Zone (1983) and The Fly (1986), all variously contain the stuff of horror (gore, violence, the overthrow of normal social order). Yet Cronenberg’s claim in early interviews, that he was doing something different from contemporaries like John Carpenter, Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper is (without generalising Carpenter et al) hard to disagree with.

In Shivers, artificial parasites infest a sterile apartment complex rendering the inhabitants sexual zombies. An orgy of sexual intercourse replaces a lacking social intercourse. The film’s conclusion of sexed-up apartment dwellers emanating from the underground car park (a visual metaphor for ejaculation) to spread the sexual epidemic across Montreal, provokes debate as to whether disgust or joy is appropriate.

Pieroni “shrieked with laughter” watching Samantha Eggar’s hyper-manic performance in The Brood, and wonders whether a woman whose rage manifests in murderous, deformed clones of her daughter could come from anywhere but the mind of a man. The scatological climax, revealing a womb external to her body, certainly armours critics who label Cronenberg misogynist, especially since he admitted the film stemmed from his frustration with the divorce from his first wife. Yet, as Pieroni suggests, “You’re in a judgement vacuum when you’re watching his films.” The film’s striking image of Eggar licking a newborn seems not misogynist, but rather a visceral confrontation of the humanist assertion that we are not animals.

A public forum complemented the film program, with Age critic Philipa Hawker and artists Philip Brophy and Ian Haig. Discussion centred on Cronenberg’s obsessional challenges to culturally constructed dualities, from the Cartesian body/mind split to gender binaries, and discourses of high and low culture. This seems to run through all Cronenberg films, from the sexualisation of technology in Crash (1996), the metafictional fusion of his own artistic sensibility with William Burroughs’ in Naked Lunch (1991), and the paradoxes of embodied identity in the exceptional Dead Ringers (1988).

According to Pieroni the Cronenberg program was a success, with “consistent audiences across all of his films.” Presumably this was a relief after the difficulty of locating prints thanks to the not uncommon tendency of distributors to thoughtlessly trash them. Such a reality tempers the myth of a networked society of instantaneously obtainable information and demonstrates the continuing relevance and importance of retrospectives. The exposure to David Cronenberg’s oeuvre certainly enhances our appreciation of A History of Violence, prompting a more lyrical understanding of its exploration of darkness within the American family. Like the bodies we all inhabit, hopefully Cronenberg’s body of work will continue to mutate and evolve over time.

Focus on David Cronenberg, curator Lisa Pieroni, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, April 13 – 23

When broadcast in April, the 2-part telemovie The Silence was promoted as something of a showcase for the beleaguered ABC drama department, the program that “might help resuscitate the ABC’s reputation as a producer of quality television”(Sacha Molitorisz, “Good cop, mad cop”, Sydney Morning Herald, March 29). With the hours of Australian drama on our television screens dropping drastically in recent years, a new program from the team that brought us Somersault was always going to garner a lot of attention. Produced by the seasoned Jan Chapman, the telemovie also reunited Somersault’s behind-the-camera pairing of director Cate Shortland and cinematographer Robert Humphreys. A strong team and an intriguing dramatic premise offered the possibility that The Silence might actually deliver the kind of innovative locally-produced drama that has been so lacking in the contemporary Australian television landscape.

One of the great weaknesses of our local TV dramas is their almost uniformly unadventurous visual style, so Shortland was an inspired directorial choice. She is one of the few Australian filmmakers who really delves into the visually expressive possibilities of cinema, relying on the colour and texture of her images to tell her stories at least as much as words. Which made The Silence’s unvaryingly predictable visual approach all the more disappointing. While there were elements of the emotive colour palette of Somersault, they were less successfully integrated into the story. In the main Shortland fell back on the shaky camera work and jagged editing that has become virtually de-rigueur for ‘edgy’ Australian cop dramas since the pioneering Wild Side and Blue Murder a decade ago.

The sense of harking back to former cop drama glories was reinforced by the presence of Richard Roxburgh, turning in a decent lead performance as the traumatised detective Richard Treloar, a role not a million miles from his remarkable portrayal of the infamous Roger Rogerson in Blue Murder. But the tough talking, emotionally wounded Treloar was essentially a by-numbers addition to the long list of similarly depressed detectives who have been the mainstay of crime fiction since the 1940s. The rest of The Silence’s characters ranged from one-dimensional stereotypes to barely fleshed out plot devices. The fault here essentially lay in the writing, which as well as relying on hackneyed character types was fatally undermined by a chronic lack of thematic development.

The idea for The Silence apparently came to writers Mary Walsh and Alice Addison while Walsh was working at Sydney’s Justice and Police Museum. Centring on the aforementioned Treloar, the story begins with the detective posted to a desk job at the Police Museum after he witnesses, and fails to stop, the shooting of a police informer. At the museum he curates an exhibition of vintage crime scene photographs and notices an attractive young woman loitering at the edge of several shots from the early 1960s. When the woman turns up as a corpse in a series of photographs from 1964, Treloar becomes obsessed with uncovering her identity and exhuming her story.

Anyone who saw Ross Gibson and Kate Richard’s Crime Scene exhibition at Sydney’s Justice and Police Museum (1999-2000) will have experienced the mysterious allure of vintage crime scene photographs. Recording the bloody aftermath of grisly events, they frequently feature an unnerving combination of homely domestic settings or prosaic public spaces marked by traces of extreme violence such as mangled corpses, pools of blood, overturned chairs or bloodied blunt objects. The photographs function as mute historical witnesses, clinically recording every physical detail before the lens but offering no explanation for the horrors they depict. In its opening half-hour The Silence seemed to be exploring the morbid fascination of these images, offering a thought-provoking consideration of photography’s ambiguous, uncertain relationship to the past.

Several of The Silence’s early scenes brought to mind Antonioni’s Blowup (1996), which similarly revolved around an alienated character trying to unlock the story of a crime caught on film. However, where Antonioni offered a rich meditation on photography’s slippery relationship to reality, The Silence quickly shied away from anything remotely resembling philosophically engaging content. Instead, the plot rapidly degenerates into a convoluted murder mystery in which the crime scene photographs function simply as narrative markers, holding all the clues required to solve a 40 year-old crime.

In a ludicrous turn of events, the murdered woman is revealed to be closely linked to Treloar’s mysterious childhood, and solving her 1964 murder conveniently serves to resolve the detective’s emotional issues in the present. Happily, the murderer is still at large in the local area, which gives Treloar the opportunity to engage in a strange scene of transference in which he appears to be following a ghostly shadow of his mother to her killer’s house. Once there, he stumbles upon a scene of the murderer holding his estranged girlfriend (a fellow police detective) at gun point. Blurring with the apparition of his mother, his girlfriend is shot down. But this time the victim survives. Thus, in apprehending his mother’s killer, Treloar undergoes a kind of bizarre “rebirth”, reliving his mother’s murder—except this time the incident has a happy ending, clearing the way for the program’s trite up-beat conclusion.

The script glibly ties together every disparate narrative thread from 1964 to the present stretching credibility beyond belief and, suffocatingly, leaves no room for viewer interpretation. The program’s thematic tentativeness would have been more forgivable if it hadn’t suffered from such narrative straitjacketing.

There has been much hand-wringing lately about the dire state of drama on the national broadcaster, with output plummeting from 103 hours annually to just 13 in the past four years (figures quoted in “Senators could cross floor over media law changes”, ABC News Online, March 15). The Silence’s numerous failings are indicative of how damaging such low levels of production can be. Without a sense of ongoing production, with old hands fostering young talent and healthy competition inspiring innovation, the dynamics of an active industry are lost. Broadcasters become increasingly conservative, genres remain static, writers and directors fall back on clichés, and audiences become utterly indifferent. Unless we regain some sense of critical mass in terms of production, we have little hope of producing television drama of worth, irrespective of the talent involved. Given the limited opportunities for making feature films in this country, this has serious implications for the health of Australian screen drama as a whole.

In this context, the $88.2 million increase over three years to ABC funding announced in May’s federal budget (with $30 million earmarked for drama production) is far from impressive. A leaked draft of the recent KPMG report on ABC funding stated that an increase of $125 million over three years was necessary for the broadcaster to even maintain current services. In light of this shortfall, May’s financial boost hardly signals an end to the crisis.

The Silence, director Cate Shortland, producer Jan Chapman, writers Alice Addison, Mary Walsh, performers Richard Roxburgh, Essie Davis, Alice McConnell, Emily Barclay, ABC Television , 2006

Richard Sowada has now been at the helm of the Revelation Perth International Film Festival for nearly a decade. Over that time, the festival’s founder and director has seen its reputation and cache as an uncompromising advocate for independently made and distributed cinema grow exponentially.

This year, Sowada received more than 350 entries across the festival’s genres—feature film, animation, feature documentary and shorts—with almost 40% of the total coming from overseas filmmakers who had heard about the festival through good old-fashioned word of mouth.
Boys of Baraka

It’s the same with promoting a film or any cultural activity, really, Sowada says of Revelation’s increasing profile. “Sometimes you can really promote the buggery out of something and work really, really hard and it just doesn’t fire. At other times, things just build their own momentum. I’m not saying I haven’t worked hard in building Rev, but it seems to be taking on its own momentum now. The network of filmmakers and screen artists internationally is large, but really it’s not as big as you might think, and in an environment where not many events are prepared to stick their necks out, a reputation can build quite effectively under its own steam.”

Revelation has always been strong on a particular ethos, an anti-commercial philosophy that underpins every decision Sowada makes about what will or won’t make it into his program. Revelation isn’t just about screening great low-budget, indie films to cult film buffs who want something more challenging than the dross served up by the cineplexes. It’s about fostering distribution opportunities for young filmmakers who may not have the clout or experience to penetrate a market glutted by product aimed squarely at the major distributors’ appetite for no-risk, guaranteed-commercially-successful formula.

“Rev purposely exists outside of the established distribution and exhibition infrastructure, which works, I think, in direct opposition to independent activity”, Sowada says. “That’s the very nature of vertical integration and corporate strategy. The current structure has really scattered independent activity to the 4 winds and it puts screen culture at the mercy of commercial dynamics which it can’t obey.”

Last year Sowada introduced a screen conference element to the festival, a forum for filmmakers and those involved in the industry to discuss the logistical, technical and creative aspects of filmmaking and distribution. He believes the troubled relationship between production and distribution in Australia has reached crisis point, but it’s an issue consistently swept under the carpet or put in the too-hard basket.

“The relationship between healthy production and the existing distribution and exhibition environment is something Rev has continued to highlight and it’s a central component of the conference side of things,” he says. “You can’t really have one without the other, but at the moment the distribution and exhibition component is very unwell and the vertical integration of the industry’s main players—Village, Hoyts and Palace—is a real problem. One weak link in the chain has a major impact on the others, and I think we’ve seen this in the low standard of Australian films recently. If one element is in trouble, then they’re all in trouble, but I’ve yet to read anything that makes that link or provides a serious critique of these relationships.”

While film festivals can redress the imbalance caused by the domination of the multiplex mentality, Sowada argues that Australian audiences still get exposed to only the tiniest fraction of what is being produced globally.

“I don’t know if it’s possible to have too many independent film festivals in Australia, although I think the term ‘film festival’ is used too loosely”, he says. “One of the big problems with film festivals to a degree is that there is such a lack of context in the programming, and in the philosophy behind the event. With something like Rev, where I think there is a very strong sensibility behind it, people respond very strongly.”

One of the most important aspects of Revelation is Sowada’s insistence of taking film viewing out of the cinema complexes and providing other avenues of exposure and exhibition. Although the idea of ‘microcinema’—showcasing film selections outside the theatre environment in more informal settings, like clubs, bars and lounges—has been popular in the United States and Europe since the 1930s, it’s still a comparative novelty in Australia.

“The problem with filmmaking here is that people aren’t exposed to enough,” Sowada says. “We don’t have the alternative screening mechanisms that places like the States and Europe have. There’s a fairly long tradition of more subversive styles of film exhibition and distribution over there. In the last decade or so things have become incredibly corporatised in Australia, but people are slowly beginning to turn around towards concepts like microcinema, not just in the Eastern States but also here in WA, where you’ve got 3 or 4 different sources that I know of either working non-theatrically or looking at non-theatrical screening of alternative or experimental works.”

Along with this year’s Cinema Tabu microcinema showcases (replete with live music, DJs and a bar), Revelation 2006 contains a mix of its stalwart categories with a handful of new initiatives, including a feature length program of short Australian experimental films. The animation showcase has a much stronger Australian component than last year, while home-grown talent gets highlighted through Get Your Shorts On—Rev’s selection of Western Australian short films—and S.P.L.I.F (Screening Perth’s Local Independent Films).

This year’s feature films are a typically diverse and wacky lot, from Spanish director Santi Omodeo’s Astronautus—described after its showing at the Edinburgh Film Festival as “Breakfast at Tiffany’s on methadone”—to Hungarian film Fekete Kefe (Black Brush), a ‘lazy, aimless’ film that Sowada describes on the Revelation website as a cross between Richard Linklater’s Slacker and the Jim Jarmusch classic, Stranger than Paradise.

This year’s ‘buzz’ film is I Am A Sex Addict, the ultra-low budget autobiographical story of writer, director and star Caveh Zahedi’s addiction to prostitutes, which has been a cult hit on the US film festival circuit and which, Sowada says, is “told in such a clever and interesting way that, as with all good low-budget films, the budget is irrelevant”.

The festival’s Australian contingent includes Kriv Stenders’ Dogme-style realist film Blacktown, the Vietnamese-Australian co-production Bride of Silence, which traces the life of a young Vietnamese woman disowned by her family for falling pregnant, and Perth filmmaker Zak Hilditch’s The Actress, made for $800 by a group of Curtin University film graduates and already screened to acclaim at the Slamdance Film Festival in Utah earlier this year.

As always, a strong documentary section combines recent work with archival films. While this year’s documentary program is not as heavily music-based as last year, Amazing Grace: Jeff Buckley is the feature film every Buckley fan has been waiting for. Other highlights include Favela Rising, a powerful portrait of Rio de Janeiro’s slum areas, Boys of Baraka, an uplifting film about a group of young, ‘at-risk’ Baltimore kids who spend 2 years attending school in a tiny, remote Kenyan village; and The Future of Food, which takes a hard-hitting and eye-opening look at the GM cropping industry in the United States.

Sowada says he programs the festival according to the mood or a tone of a film rather than trying to provide any kind of overarching theme. “The process tends to dictate itself,” he says of the selection process. “I end up choosing films that relate in some way to the feeling that people have about the world around them. Last year the films were overtly critical and politically questioning; this year there aren’t as many political documentaries, and even the feature films aren’t as bleak. Instead, there’s a lot more twisted, black humour and introspection. It’s not as fist-shakingly angry, but it’s still very much about individuals who have no control over their circumstances. Yet they just keep going forward, because they have to. The anger of what’s been happening globally over the last couple of years has resulted in a batch of films that are giving a much more sophisticated and subtle critique of society, and how it impacts on the individual.”

As Australians become more conscious of the ways our fortunes are tied to China, media companies and government agencies are putting out feelers to increase regional film activity. All the more reason then, why events such as the Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) should assume increased significance for Australians.
Little Red Flowers

This year was the festival’s 30th anniversary as it continues to change in response to the fluctuations of Asian film industries. At a panel discussion on the importance of HKIFF for Chinese cinema, Jia Zhangke (director of Platform and The World) said that for him, the festival had been like meeting the Chinese audience for the first time. Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-hsien stressed the importance of the exposure given to Taiwan’s new wave movement in the 1980s and invoked the 1985 screening of Yellow Earth, which famously launched the international reputation of the Fifth Generation.

A few years ago it was difficult to see mainland Chinese films at Hong Kong. Programmers were faced with the dilemma that if they accepted films shot without official sanction they would have the films withdrawn. The Chinese government has worked to heal this breach and draw the underground filmmakers back into the industry, but the question remains: what to do with them?

The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) recently announced that while China is now making more films, only 10% of them are being screened with any kind of success. Of the 260 films made last year, only 90 screened domestically and two-thirds of those were withdrawn the day after release due to lack of popular response.

As Hong Kong’s own production has declined, HKIFF has become a major venue for viewing the diversity of mainland Chinese production. While we saw the usual mixture of special effects spectacles spiralling down the same lush, sterile path established by Hero and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, there were also films to suggest that a viable, popular, smaller scale cinema might be emerging.

After the miserabilist tradition of Sixth Generation filmmaking, it is strangely heartening to see a well-crafted sentimental piece like Ma Liwen’s You and Me. Centring on the relationship between a crotchety old granny and her feisty young student tenant, it tracks a predictable enough path from initial antipathy to deep attachment. There are no great surprises here, no buckets tipped on the transition to the market economy. Given that we’ve had so many dystopian visions of China recently, it seems significant to acknowledge that the relation between generations goes on with its usual mixture of love, irritation and poignancy. Director Ma understands the need to push against sentimentality to produce true sentiment. Her film proceeds on its understated and elliptical way until its final, heartfelt scenes have shed the need for any dialogue at all. Australian screenwriters might take note.

Dam Street is another fine, restrained achievement. Its story of lost children and sundered generations has become a recurring theme in recent Chinese films such as Wang Chao’s The Orphan of Anyang and Li Shaohong’s A Stolen Life. Li Yu is another in a wave of impressive women directors and her film tells of a woman’s rediscovery of a son she gave up after a teenage pregnancy in the early 1980s. It is full of the understated felicities of mise en scène-effects, where we need to keep track of both sides of the frame and elliptical cutting which begins scenes just after crucial actions which we are forced to reconstruct. Its long takes don’t call attention to themselves but build to a quite complex achievement.

Zhang Yuan is a relatively well-known director (Beijing Bastards, Seventeen Years) and he has significant international investment in Little Red Flowers. This is another film built around children—source material that has always been a central element of art cinema, to the extent that it even launched the international profile of Iranian cinema. We all know that Chinese tykes are unbearably cute, but in this story of a little boy’s experiences in kindergarten, a dark undertone is never far away. Four year-old Qiang is a fairly standard kid, interested in peeing, farting and pooping as keys to life’s mysteries. The film chronicles his descent into naughtiness and finally aloneness. It deals with the ways that socialisation is applied through children’s conceptions of their own bodies and bodily functions.

Combining static camera, flat compositions, little dialogue, extensive and imaginative use of framing and off-screen space, Korean-Chinese director Zhang Lu’s Grain in Ear represents a major follow up to the promise of Tang Poetry and marks him as a leading figure in Chinese art cinema. There is a skilful synthesis of character development along with a rigorous play within the formal restrictions Zhang has set himself. He pulls off an unusual combination—generating emotional warmth while making a minimalist film. Grain in Ear uses its restricted formal options to set up a final departure from them, though given the strength of a style based on suggestion and understatement, I wish he hadn’t found it necessary to pound his characters into the ground.

While China has become some sort of economic monolith in Australian mythology of late, it is important to keep track of its internal diversity and of the emerging social issues which are generating debate within China. Zhao Hao’s documentary, Senior Year, is a revealing portrait of the education system in a small provincial town. The students cram furiously for university entrance exams, spurred on relentlessly by teachers. For parents, who are generally uneducated and doing long hours of manual labour, it is clear that what is at stake is nothing less than the ability of their children to make the breathtaking leap to the new world of economic modernity.

We never see teachers doing much actual teaching, but rather driving students on with exhortations drawn from the vocabulary stretching back through revolutionary Party rhetoric to the May 4th Movement. Students must learn to “eat bitterness” for the year as they gird themselves up for “the conflict without gunfire” that will decide their fates. This is not always a pleasant film to watch as the filmmakers often seem complicit in the humiliation of students, and the girls who comprise the bulk of the class are never developed in any depth. It is, however, a fascinating account of the way a society is changing along the lines set down in its recent past.

Giving video cameras to ordinary people so that they can document the issues affecting them is one of those ideas that technological utopians proclaim as the hope of the digitally democratic future. It’s hard to argue against in theory and so the European Union had documentarist Wu Wenguang devise a project whereby 10 villagers were given cameras and instruction on how to use them and then sent out to make their own films about local elections. It seems churlish to report that the results are pretty uninspired. Maybe the format is the problem with each segment lasting only eight minutes; maybe we’re talking about the wrong medium for coming to grips with the complex and abstract processes of Chinese democracy. Maybe the tools of insightful exposition and political analysis aren’t inherently in everyone’s hands and this is what makes thoughtful artists such a valuable resource.

It is worth noting that an Australian film, Candy, closed the festival this year, due in no small part to the involvement of Fortissimo, an international sales agency with a strong base in Hong Kong. Prioritising institutional connections such as these are vital if Australian films are to have a regional future.

Joyce Hinterding, David Haines, House II:
The Great Artesian Basin, USA 2003 (2003)

As part of the Undergrowth program of Australian art touring to the UK in 2005-06, Experimenta is showing a collection of works drawn from The House of Tomorrow (2003) and Vanishing Point (2005), large scale new media art exhibitions that attracted considerable audiences in Australia. Both shows turned curious viewers into hands-on users of the artworks or made them their subjects. Audiences were amused, intrigued and sometimes disturbed, for example by the figures that suddenly appeared behind them in Alex Davies’ Dislocation but who were not really there, or the grim behavioural cycle activated in Van Sowerwine’s Expecting. But even these have their moments of humour, rooted in surprise.

In her catalogue essay for Experimenta’s Under the Radar, “The Art of Playing Up” (www.experimenta.org), Shiralee Saul makes much of 2 things. One is the quick uptake of new technology by Australians:

For a start, Australia is a nation of early adopters and enthusiastic adapters. Australian artists have used every new bit of technology in their work just as soon as they could get their hands on it…Australians were among the first generation of media artists to receive international recognition and Australian artists remain at the forefront of new developments in concept and practice.

It’s an optimistic view, one certainly challenged by arts funding bodies and universities in recent times but can still be argued for. The other focus of Saul’s observations is Australian humour, because while our geographical isolation has yielded “a ‘cultural cringe’…it has also granted [Australians] a sense of license. They can heckle from the sidelines. They thumb their noses at tradition.” But it’s not just mockery for its own sake: “It’s easy to mistake this sassiness for a lack of seriousness. It’s all too tempting to overlook the significance of humour, to ignore the bite in irony.”

In the Australian embrace of the new Saul discerns a creative playfulness which fits us to make the most of new technologies as both artists and consumers. She cites Darren Tofts’ opinion in his book Interzone that computer gaming is central to the emergence of media art.

Liz Hughes’ selection of works for Experimenta Under the Radar confirms Saul’s account: “Playfulness in all its guises is the thread that stitches together Experimenta’s selection of contemporary Australian artworks.” It’s a show packed with works that entertain but often demand that little extra, challenging perception, identity, function and the very nature of art.

In February this year RealTime witnessed the sheer pleasure of audiences at Arnolfini’s Inbetween Time Festival engaging with new media works by British and Australian artists. The range and variety offered by Experimenta Under the Radar should guarantee success. As House of Tomorrow revealed as it toured Australia, young audiences were particularly enthusiastic.

The sense of play is fully evident in what you’ll encounter in Experimenta Under the Radar: a digital rocking horse; an affectionate (and farting) couch; onscreen figures that rush away as you approach; a doll with a grim life of her own; a tiny room in which you can virtually bounce the furniture around; a giant who peers through a doorway (our cover image: Craig Walsh’s Cross-Reference); a house that spectacularly floods a neighborhood; digital ghosts who dart behind you; and the world digitally sliced up like bread and compacted. Logic is reversed, or tossed out, and fantasies realised. In every instance humour or surprise generate other dimensions to do with how we see and how we are seen, the distortions of perception, the thrill and the irresponsibility of voyeurism. These are toys with big ideas.

Saul sees the works, and presumably Hughes’ vision, as essentially optimistic: “This insistence on the centrality of the individual, on their individual necessity, runs counter to the technophobia that dominates so much of the media and so many people’s suspicion of new technologies. ‘No’, these works insist, ‘technology is not going to make humanity redundant; it can only exist for and through people. You interact therefore I am’.”

Doubtless such optimism is bound to be challenged, and should be, but the wit of Experimenta Under the Radar and, above all, its connectedness to the reality of our daily engagements with new technologies makes an active response more likely, a few significant glimpses into the dark side excepted. RT

The featured artists are: Stephen Barrass, Linda Davy, Kerry Richens; Daniel Crooks; Alex Davies; Shaun Gladwell; David Haines, Joyce Hinterding; ENESS (Steven Mieszelewicz, Nimrod Weis, Asaf Weis); Narinda Reeders, David McLeod; Van Sowerwine, Isobel Knowles, Liam Fennessy; Craig Walsh; and Tan Teck Weng. See the catalogue for the accompanying video program.

Experimenta Under the Radar, Foundation for Art and Creative Technology). Liverpool (FACT), June 16-Aug 28; Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), London, Nov 18-Dec 2; www.experimenta.org

This blistering display of fuel-injected narcissism is almost art-defying: watching a bunch of young men squeezing the most out of their car cylinders in the small hours of the morning. Burnt is a series of video installations produced by Mike Stubbs (see interview, RT69) exhibiting at Adelaide’s Experimental Art Foundation. At first glance, the axle-grinding maleness just about slaps you in the face.
Mike Stubbs, Jump Jet

Within a dual-screened installation titled Donut, the artist gleefully re-enacts his adolescent days in Bedford UK, flooring a customised car around a parking lot and leaving a trace of arabesque designs on the asphalt in his wake. You can almost smell the burning rubber searing off the car’s tyres as Stubbs demonstrates his circle-work in a neoplatonist pursuit of the perfect donut.

The twin loops of footage glare at one another from opposite ends of the gallery as I sit in their crossfire, straining my peripheral vision. Going nowhere hard and fast, a group of young men and teenage boys accelerate their tyres into an oblivion of black smoking liquid, plumes of noxious smoke enveloping the car and the driver like a magic cloak. This is interspersed with teenage crowds at a car rally and overhead footage of Stubbs as he executes a series of spectacular turns.

Glancing from side to side I catch subliminal glimpses of a young woman’s face in close-up-made up like a 70s porn star—and the voyeuristic snapshots of female friends, limbs suggestively interlaced. Plenty of psychoanalysts after Freud have posited theories about the relationship between ‘programmed’ cellular death on a biological level and its affect on consciousness. Nature’s last-ditch effort to propel the genes further down the timeline means that libidinous male energy flows on the precipice of physical danger. It has also been suggested that displays of narcissism mask an underlying sense of incompleteness. This notion of absence, combined with the subconscious fear of death may go some way towards explaining some ritualised acts of destruction, performed in order to attain a form of completion. Via the use of subtle symbolism Stubbs hints at a circular narrative within the work. In one scene he pushes a toy car around a woman’s navel, as if to suggest a return to childhood. A poem pinned to the back wall of the gallery between the 2 screens perhaps captures the artist’s return. The text reads in part:

A boy from one town / A small Island
In England / A small Island
Wanting to make a mark / Wanting penetration
To leave a trace / Afraid of the bigger boy
With the longer stare / The faster punch
A bigger gun

The white heat of the poem’s youthful defiance leaves a mark as indelible as the streaks of rubber left behind on the road.

On a smaller screen in the corner of the gallery, a much greater scale of self-destruction and hopelessness is exhibited within a work titled Tyne. The river Tyne runs through the metropolitan borough of Newcastle, in the North East of England. A long-range lens on a hand held video recorder films a young man perched on the cold, meatless structure of the Tyne Bridge spanning Newcastle and Gateshead, presumably about to jump. In stark contrast to the rebellious heat of Donut, there is no warmth to be found here. Below the bridge, a crowd of rubbernecking voyeurs waits for an outcome from the indecisive figure far above. On the ground, an onlooker can be seen grinning and talking on his mobile phone. The man on the bridge too, looks to the screen of his mobile phone, apparently with no messages, or no reception. In a culture so inured to second-hand information, reality TV and surveillance, social responsibility and duty of care is readily handed over to figures of authority: police, the military or anybody in a uniform.

The intensity of immanent conflict screams throughout the exhibition space from the sound of a Harrier Jet coming in to land in a piece called Jump Jet, made on location at RAF Wittering. Donning the headphones of this installation is rewarding, if only to gain temporary relief from the assault of jet engine noise passing overhead. The heavy respiration of a man in pilot uniform and oxygen mask (presumably the artist) is suffocating. Media reports of strikes over petrol prices in Britain are overdubbed with bleakly humorous comments from the artist, mocking the increased consumption of fuel as the public’s response to the overall shortage. Far from being a symbol of national security, military presence stirs social tensions into a judgement impairing state of crisis.

City of Culture is a ten-minute DVD essay screening of footage pertaining to the City of Newcastle-Gateshead’s failed bid for the 2008 European Capital of Culture. This footage is contrasted with audio recordings and video-texts of an incisive conversation between Mike Stubbs and Neil Ramy, the CEO of the Newcastle-Gateshead initiative. The tone of the conversation critiques the ostensible values attached to the ‘branding’ of public spaces for the benefit of tourism and cultural development. Cities that use selective framing to promote the attractions of the city, whilst editing out the ugly bits, as Stubbs suggests, may be doing wonders for the image of the city, not necessarily passing on those benefits to the people who live in it. The complex issue of developing the esteem and economy of a community—both inside and out—is put into sharp relief with the complementary screening of Cultural Quarter. Based on images acquired from Schedule D Productions, the film captures an event on the street below a set of inner city flats, depicting a group of children and teenagers progressively demolishing a parked car. Adults and passers-by view the spectacle with a detached interest until the police arrive, signalling the game has come to an end.

The installations in Burnt are perhaps not at a scale that matches the potency of their content. They work exceptionally well as interdependent pieces however, revealing Stubbs' artfulness at reframing seemingly “impartial observations” as subtle and engaging social commentary.

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