Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

October 2006

Jeph Jerman

photo Tom Hall

Jeph Jerman

June 30

In the low-lit, intimate setting of Brisbane Powerhouse’s VISY Theatre, laptop artist Ben Byrne’s subtle set begins. For the first 5 minutes the loudest noise is the mouse clicking and the usual shifting and rustling of the audience. Soft, rhythmic buzzing develops into an insectoid pulse that intensifies into a heavy, fuzzy, alien heartbeat and grows into a thick, crunching climax.

Greg Davis appears next and, like Byrne, his music is largely computer-generated, but instead of insistent metallic throbbing, Davis chooses a palette drawn significantly from the natural world. Opening with delicate bird and wind sounds, he complements his audio with large projected imagery of feathery treetops in familiar bright lime tones of video. Visual accompaniments to non-spectacular sound performance are largely welcomed by audiences who sometimes refer to contemporary sound art as “watching-people-check-their-email-music.” Davis’ repetitive slow dissolves between the branches are a constant presence, making for interesting comparison with audio that follows a familiar narrative arc of slow start, building to swelling climax and gentle resolution. For some, this lack of congruence between sound and image is disconcerting. Others find the disconnect between the simple, looped tree images and complex, carefully constructed soundscape invigorating.

Next up was Ross Bencina, combining static and electronic noises with some well-chosen urban field recordings to searing effect. The carefully crafted yet still freewheeling journey of Bencina’s music is realised through the “interactive musician’s environment” delivered by his creation, AudioMulch.

Maybe it’s the mythology that surrounds this reclusive ‘star’ of experimental sound, but Jeph Jerman really does seem to radiate a kind of shamanic energy when he steps onto stage. The Arizonan stands, head bowed, breathing deeply for a few moments. Then, slowly, he brings forward his fists, full of small, round seeds, which he proceeds to drip slowly to the floor. Contrasting this high pinging sound are the polished river stones to which Jerman turns his attention. Typical of his chosen ‘instruments’, natural found objects, the stones are the focus of immense concentration, of rubbing, caressing, tapping, rolling in a bowl, in a very physical performance, which includes Jerman suddenly sitting, crawling, crouching and bowing with deliberate intensity.

New Zealander Dean Roberts takes an entirely different tack to Jerman’s mystical minimalism. Playing a prepared electric guitar, he introduces harmonic pieces that plumb gloomy menacing depths but also lighter, more melodic territory. Contact microphones placed on the guitar amplify the sounds of fingers on the instrument’s body, creating a gritty, stringy texture that helps frame his husky whispers. At times reminiscent of the soundtrack to an isolationist Western, or moments of acoustic atmosphere in the collaborations of David Lynch and Angelo Badlamenti, Roberts’ guitar interventions—rolling a screwdriver against the guitar neck and over gently plucked strings—and his manipulation of warm feedback tones are performed with both refinement and impeccable timing.

The finale, a duet between Jerman and Davis, emphasises the theme of embodied sound, as the collaborators perform their take on acoustic ecology. Moving about the room in solemn circles, they clang chimes, massage rocks and rattle seedpods. The audience loves their response to the local area in the use of long, flat poinciana pods (which any Brisbanite knows make marvelous shakers). Inspiring all the adjectives commonly associated with Jerman’s work—grounded, pantheist, reverent—it is as much meditation as musical experience. DZ

July 1

The Saturday night session for LA7 kicks off with maverick Kiwi artist Dave Edwards’ improvised set for banjo, computer, percussion objects and toys, home video projections, radio interference and charmingly non compos spoken word. We might call this genre ‘farmyard intermedia’: a ramshackle, free folk-informed attitude towards new and old technologies, and a loose exploratory layering of ideas picked haphazardly from different disciplines and traditions. Confusing but good.

Zane Trow is next with a soothing, comparatively mellow set of computer-generated drone and shuffle interspersed with some sampled Socialist theorising and a vague sense of manipulated jazziness. Isn’t this what used to be called ‘illbient’? Maybe it’s time for a revival…

Taking us through to the interval is the collaborative performance of Swiss laptopper Martin Baumgartner and Australian new music ensemble Speak Percussion. It’s pretty hard to go wrong with the combination of pristine vibraphone tones and woozy electronic treatments, and these guys deliver with an immersive and elegantly dreamy sequence of backwards tinkling, ghostly dissolves, birdlike chirps and spatialised whispers. The second part of the set is audiovisual, a sparse instrumental soundscape matched up with flickering video images of brutalised Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib prison. Baumgartner doesn’t take part here, describing the sound/image combination as inappropriate, and I tend to agree. There is a compositional strategy at work, with various audio-visual sync points, but overall it is unclear what, if any, meaning the basically abstract sounds add to these already highly meaningful images.

Brisbane duo Faber Castell amble on stage and stand over their table of miscellaneous homemade electronic gear, gaffer taped plastic toys and 2 very battered turntables. Someone flicks the on switch and this is how it starts: a brilliantly effective, immediately engaging and joyful sonic blast of noise, grit, texture and rhythm, a performance style laced with both humour and rigour, a glorious merger of slapstick physical comedy and razor sharp structural awareness. Confrontational, entertaining, innovative and unpretentious. Bravo!

It’s a hard act to follow, but Julian Knowles and Donna Hewitt have developed their own highly elaborate aesthetic processes, and they swing the night back towards smooth sophistication and intricacy. Knowles lays the foundation with some blissful electronic drone work whilst Hewitt manipulates her patented microphone-stand-midi-controller-device, coaxing out a series of ethereal vocalisations. The piece surprisingly evolves into seriously funky electro-pop, with Knowles even unleashing some rather new-wavey electric guitar skronk.

Festivals like LA7 need to headline with a master, and while ErikM is not quite in the same historical ballpark as previous guests like Bernard Parmegiani and Tony Conrad, he is nonetheless a hugely impressive artist. This Frenchman performs somewhere in the world pretty much every night, and his skill at manipulating 2 turntables with various electronic effects, is so physically and conceptually coordinated that he seems to have more in common with some kind of freak sportsman. Just listening to the array of granular pings, thuds and bleeps, microsonic snatches of tone and extraordinary rhythmic complexity one might compare ErikM to Parmegiani and the other heroes of Musique Concrète, but I think perhaps the better comparison is Swiss tennis virtuoso Roger Federer, whose graceful economy of movement, sublime touch, and magical ability to find impossible angles, reflects the same combination of inborn talent and relentless technical refinement. JS

Liquid Architecture 7, programmers Nat Bates, Lawrence English; Brisbane Powerhouse, June 30 – July1

RealTime issue #75 Oct-Nov 2006 pg. 54

Ignition is Australian Dance Theatre’s in-house season where company dancers and guest artists present short works. For its 6th season, artistic director Garry Stewart provided the choreographers with a creative constraint, a stage just 2 metres square. The 9 short works presented at Ignition 6: The World’s Smallest Stage could be taken as an indication of future directions for Australian dance. Yet like a collection of short films at a graduating show, the works are not about tomorrow. They project instead the experiences of becoming artists today.
F-Lash

F-Lash

photo Chris Herzfeld

F-Lash

Fashion, sport and popular music feature strongly; feelings, romance and memories are recurrent themes. A layered look—arising from the artists’ versatility with medium if not form—is a hallmark of the collection. Emboldened by the techniques of cut-and-paste production, these artists are skilled compositeurs; wrangling movement, moving image, spoken text, sound track and lighting effect to layer-up their work. They are also storytellers, entertainers in the arts of recognition, re-possessors of movement cultures and distillers of bodily abstraction.

Two artists took the opportunity to tell stories of heterosexual romance, that staple narrative of theatrical dance. Timothy Ohl’s Broken Departed charts a love story of loss with slacker charm. Dancers Shannon Anderson and Kristina Chan perform a duet under duress as their plane goes down. Ohl in hard hat and work boots taps out a message on wired-for-sound tiles. Exposed to the elements in underwear, Chan is washed up by the wind. Ohl scatters sand on the floor and, singing, whistling, shuffles his way through a children’s song or two.

Returning to ADT as a guest, Lina Limosani locates her love story, The Penny Drops, in the office of a crazed relationship counsellor, performed with cartoon obviousness by Paul Zivkovich. The work scores a romance of histrionic emotions to a scrolling radio dial soundtrack of love songs. Students from the dance program at Adelaide Institute of TAFE play the girl, the boy and a couch. The girl is confident and assertive; the boy is nervous and anxious—alone, at one point, he cries profusely on the couch. As in Ohl’s Broken Departed, it’s the male emotional trajectory that enjoys the choreographer’s attention. The Penny Drops closes the evening with audience favour. It is recognisably comic, technically proficient and enjoyably banal.

Only one stage work threatens to exceed the obligatory spatial constraint. Theatre director Sam Haren makes his dance debut with The Game Is Not Over. Created with dancers Shannon Anderson and Ohl (and Larissa McGowan in rehearsal), Haren finds choreographic daring in the aerial moves of Australian Rules football. Kicks, marks, handpasses and those distinctive umpire gestures that signal the scoring of a goal are ‘mashed’ together with the grand jeté and port de bras of ballet. The compression of so much energetic extension on such a small stage is—to use the sporting lingo—awesome.

Daniel Jaber’s The World’s Smallest Stage: Invaded! compresses action drawn from the catwalk of high fashion. As in other works, Jaber uses entrances and exits to readily discharge the spatial limitation. Yet without a catwalk for progression the 9 dancers in this fashion show do little more than enter, present a pose, retreat, repeat. They are, however, appreciably costumed in fashionable strangeness by Jaber himself.
Slack

Slack

photo Chris Herzfeld

Slack

Two video works are included in the program. Paul Zivkovich’s Then Remember When evokes memories of the freedom and mobility of childhood. A playground becomes a site of contemplation for the constraints of adulthood; an album and its photos, a pile of books and a chair act as metaphors of stasis and containment. Guest artist Michael Carter’s awkwardly titled Intimate/dation also focuses on the choreography of feeling. Yet, in this work of closely cropped and over-exposed shots set in slow motion and repetition, the composition seemed determined more by the sound track’s progression than the choreographic interest of the movement.

The distillation of feelings and experience into abstraction is more compelling on the stage. Xiao Xuan Yang’s lively F-Lash, danced by Anderson, Jaber and Riannon Maclean, uses the changing colours of traffic lights to articulate the transition of emotional states “that people deal with while they are traffic.” The choreography of Lamenting Equipoise by Glen McCurley and Slack by Larissa McGowan is derived from even simpler grounds. McCurley’s is a choreography of breath, danced with grieving sensitivity by McGowan, Jaber and Laura Trevor. McGowan’s is a beautiful study in suspension, danced—with loosely swinging limbs and Jaber’s striking hair extensions—by Trevor, Megan Sullivan and the choreographer herself.

ADT, Ignition 6: The World’s Smallest Stage, curator Garry Stewart, ADT studios, Adelaide, Aug 15-18

RealTime issue #75 Oct-Nov 2006 pg. 40

Robyn Nevin

photo Hugh Stewart

Robyn Nevin

The 2007 STC program is a strong one on paper, in the great potential of its ensemble who will perform 4 of the year’s productions, and in the talents of an impressive assembly of directors, writers and actors.

Theatre can be both visceral and cerebral. Each dimension can thrill, at best when they meet. But one of the first things we ask of a play before we see it is, ‘What’s it about?’ The answer can determine whether we go to see (hear, feel) a play or not. The answer to ‘What is it about?’ is invariably a theme, an idea, a story (the precis of a story in a promotional brochure is in effect a theme, often a recognisable trope), but themes are of course only realised in performance and often in surprising, even aberrant ways, or new ones are thrown up. So it is with theatre programs.

The art of programming

On the issue of programming and themes, Robyn Nevin is firm: “I don’t approach programming with a need to establish any kind of theme. I never do that. I’m not interested. But things do emerge.” Whatever its provenance, the 2007 STC program is rich with fascinating connections (between artists, plays, forms, companies and cultures).

I ask what drives Nevin’s programming: chance, recommendations, plays she’s long wanted to do? She responds, “On the one hand it’s predictable and consistent but it’s always corrupted by whatever happens in the 9 months of the preparation of the program. Actually, it’s not a finite period, you don’t start on day one and have an oucome at the end. It’s ongoing, it rolls over, and 2008 and 2009 are now in their embryonic planning phase. People are pretty much what drives me.

“There is a wishlist that is never completed and that predictably includes all the great classics. It’s very interesting now because I’m being approached by young directors who are wanting to direct classics that I’d like to do for personal reasons…and one hands them over.” I ask if that includes a rare outing for Patrick White’s The Season at Sarsaparilla (1962), to be directed by Benedict Andrews.

“I wanted to direct The Season at Sarsaparilla because I’d been in the 1976 Jim Sharman production (Old Tote Theatre Company). It’s very interesting when you’ve had that experience inside something, you take a lot away with you, impressions and memories, and then over time they become questioned and you feel a need to approach the play from a different perspective, from outside. That’s been my engagement with a lot of plays I’ve known as a young actor, but I haven’t necessarily had the opportunity to do them again. It frequently happens that I give them over to other directors who coincidentally also want to direct them. Benedict Andrews studied Patrick White at Flinders University and feels a strong connection with the play. He hasn’t arrived at a way to do it, but all his ideas are very vivid, as you’d expect, and it’s great for those young eyes and that sensibility to be looking at a play from that era. And it feels to me as if he’ll take over the White baton from Neil Armfield as Neil did from Jim. I lived through that history so it’s interesting to see another generation approaching it.”

The Actors Company

Another rarely performed classic is Tales from the Vienna Woods (1931), Odon von Horvath’s acerbic anticipation of the rise of fascism in everyday Viennese life. It’s not a play Nevin has wanted to direct but she was eager for Jean Pierre Mignon to do it with the Actors Company: “He’s come in from the cold. He just disappeared. For years I’ve wanted to work with him because I loved seeing his work in Melbourne, his ‘shabby classic’ repertoire [at Anthill] and then I worked with him on Chekhov’s The Seagull at the STC in the 80s. I always remember the hydrangea flowerpots on either side of the stage in Stephen Curtis’ fantastic design of a house that is reduced and reduced …. those vivid blue hydrangeas seemed to speak of Australian suburbia. The reason I wanted Mignon to work with the Actors Company is because like all the directors I’ve chosen for the company he’ll work in a particular and appropriate way with the notion of ensemble. He’s very excited about coming back, and he’s about to do a Moliere with the company this year.”

In 2006 the STC Actors Company are working with Nevin, Barrie Kosky (The Lost Echo, see RT 76) and Mignon. In 2007 they will benefit from collaborations with leading UK ensemble directors, Annabel Arden, a founding director of Theatre Complicité, and Cheek by Jowl’s Edward Dick. Nevin says, “It’s the particular processes they bring and the background from which they’ve emerged that I find interesting, applicable and exciting. I wish I was going to be in the rehearsal room with them.” Both directors represent a generation of British theatre with strong visual and physical theatrical interests. Arden will direct husband Stephen Jeffreys’ The Art of War.

Jeffreys provides a link with the American dimension of Nevin’s program. Through a connection with actor John Malkovich (who played King Charles II in the Jeffreys’ scripted film The Libertine), his work has been programmed by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre. Steppenwolf also premiered Don Delilo’s Love Lies Bleeding which also appears in the 2007 STC program.

The Art of War, Nevin explains, “is part of an international trilogy. Jeffreys wrote the first play in the trilogy in America. He had 2 more planned and he gave me an option to choose one of them. He wrote the plays The Libertine and The Clink, which is about a standup comic who gets caught up in the political intrigues of Elizabeth I’s court politics. He has extraordinary ideas and he can write with so many voices from so many eras. He’s linguistically sophisticated and extremely funny—an elegant, understated English wit.”

The play’s title derives from Sun Tzu’s 2,500 year-old treatise on military strategy which has recently been adapted as a business manual. Jeffreys extends the treatise’s application to life and relationships. Nevin says, “The Art of War is set in Australia and Jeffreys is keen to connect it with the region. He was fascinated with John Howard’s visit to China in recent months to discuss the provision of natural gas. Annabel is meeting the ensemble while they’re performing Lost Echo.”

Edward Dick will direct The Actors Company in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of Shakespeare’s plays that has many times leant itself to remarkable interpretations, especially where its darkness is allowed as much licence as its lighter side.

America

Nevin herself will appear in Delilo’s Love Lies Bleeding with Max Cullen. It’s a powerful play about the experience of dying. Emerging director Lee White, who has completed a Masters at NIDA, performed in New York, directed for the STC education program and assisted Nevin on Boy Meets Girl (2005), gets her first mainstage production with this play. Delilo is of course better known as a leading American novelist. He’s an adroit playwright and, for a novelist, has a great ear.

Another American connection comes in the form of American film actor and theatre director Philip Seymour Hoffman who is to direct Australian playwright Andrew Upton’s Riflemind, about the reunion of an ageing internationally famous rock band with Hugo Weaving in the lead role. Hoffman is co-artistic director of New York City’s LAByrinth Theater Company. Cate Blanchett, is to direct Scots playwright David Harrower’s Blackbird (RT71, p10-11), a taut hyperrealist drama about the consequences of the sexual abuse of a minor. I recall that Blanchett was acclaimed for her performance in David Mamet’s Oleanna, the playwright’s reaction to the sexual harassment issue. Nevin says that Blanchett, “sent me [Blackbird] with a very strong letter. Perhaps she made the connection with Oleanna. It’s what I was saying earlier about being inside something, something controversial and so powerfully expressed, to be inside that is a very memorable experience, the muscle memory plus the intellectual experience.”

The other American work is the musical, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. It’s a Melbourne Theatre Company import in the absence of an Australian musical. Nevin explains, “I approached James Lapine [American director, librettist and Stephen Sondheim collaborator] and asked him to work on a new musical because I want to develop Australian musicals. I programmed Urinetown this year and Spelling Bee next because the musicals I’ve commissioned are not ready to produce. The American musicals are good models and very contemporary. Unfortunately Lapine couldn’t come. Simon Philips will bring his celebrated production of Spelling Bee to Sydney.”

The American theatre connection looks good to me. Although we are never short of American film and television product we rarely get to see what American theatre is creating. Nevin thinks this programming development “may be controversial, but I look forward to the controversy. I’ve worked to establish these relationships. It’s hard to spread your reach overseas…I’ve done the English one and now I’ve shifted to America, but it takes a while. These conversations, face to face, take place over a number of years before anything comes to fruition. And I’m building other relations in America.”

Australia

The 2007 program sweeps through Australian history from post WWI (Michael Cove’s new play, Troupers about entertainers communicating with the dead to earn a quid in 1919) to Patrick White’s mid-century Australia, the first theatrical exploration of our suburbia, to David Williamson’s Don’s Party (1971), epitomising the contradictions of the 1970s, to Stephen Jeffrey’s The Art of War, about Australia now, and, in the Wharf2Loud program, Brendan Cowell’s Self-esteem, about an Australia of the encroaching future with a fully corporatised federal government.

Themes, connections, resonances

The program reveals a loose set of themes awaiting their realisation: the serious concerns of the moment (euthanasia, sexual abuse, proto-facism, war and its incursion into everyday life) that theatre must tackle; an impressionistic but doubtless telling portrayal of a century of Australian life; and artistic collaboration itself, realised in the interplay of Australian, British and American artists, especially in the life of the Actors Company.

I ask Nevin if she’s had fun putting the 2007 program together? “I can never really apply the word ‘fun’ to the process of getting a program together. That’s not to say it isn’t exciting and satisfying. But how it’s going to go, with the Actors Company and with this audience base, it’s a complete unknown, a huge risk. It’s not an artistic risk. I don’t see that at all. But it’s the likeability factor. Will the audience like coming back to see these actors grow and playing unlikely roles and ‘married’ to particular directors. I don’t know if they’ll engage with that and take it on. But artistically it’s obvious and sensible and practical. But there’s also diversity and that’s part of our responsibility. It is one of the hard things about running a state theatre company. It’s joyous, but if you were an auteur or working in most other kinds of theatre, you’d do what you want.”

Even with its mix of freedom (Nevin’s hard won achievement in creating an ensemble, such a rarity in theatre in this country) and obligation, the 2007 STC program looks enticingly intelligent, urgent and, yes, entertaining—entertainingly urgent and intelligent.

Sydney Theatre Company, www.sydneytheatre.com.au

RealTime issue #75 Oct-Nov 2006 pg. 41

Gibson Nolte, Ben Winspear
Now that Communism is Dead My Life Feels Empty!,

photo Brett Boardman

Gibson Nolte, Ben Winspear
Now that Communism is Dead My Life Feels Empty!,

Honour Bound

Thanks to a bold piece of commissioning by the Sydney Opera House (for its Adventures in the Dark program) and Melbourne’s Malthouse, director Nigel Jamieson has been able to realise a powerfully immersive account of the agonies of unlawful incarceration and its impact on others. Honour Bound is structured not around a narrative—we all know the appalling story—but a series of propositions for and against human rights, onscreen interviews with David Hicks’ family, and a grim dance of internment and torture. Garry Stewart’s choreography wisely eschews dancerliness: nothing detracts from the intensity of physical feeling and compulsory abjection which becomes the totality of the tortured body. The immersiveness is realised in a number of highly effective ways; the helicopter lights that swing out over the audience; the frightening wrap-around sound (at other times delicately Middle-Eastern); the set which is both prison and screen—the real becomes virtual; massive shifts in scale; a nightmarish prison within a prison; and in the merging of text and action as Brendan Shelper tumbles in a vertigo inducing outer space where the charter of human rights, not stars, rolls out and from which he is ever and unjustly deflected. Our point of view, visually and aurally is constantly repositioned, the performers are prisoners one moment, guards the next, the text tumbles us from war-maker rhetoric to the story of a life, to parental anxiety, to the horrendous details of psychological torture. The performers’ bodies grow increasingly discombobulated, as if they’ve lost their centre of gravity until they are weighed down, the anger that once flung them against prison wire drained away. Honour Bound is no apologia for David Hicks’ actions but a viscerally intelligent argument for justice. Post-show on the evening I saw the show, Major Michael Mori addressed a full house, eloquently turning questions about US injustice back onto Australians for their government’s complicity in accepting treatment of one of its citizens that the USA would never allow for its own.

A return season of Version 1.0’s The Wages of Spin, prior to its Mobile States tour, was a welcome and timely complement to Honour Bound. In an improved version with a more potent and inexorable logic, Spin maintains its television studio hothouse of political rhetoric and media nonsense but with a stronger and more central focus on government and, by implication, media and public refusal to take responsibility for the deaths of a massive number of Iraqi civilians in a war that was supposed to liberate them.

Now That Communism is Dead My Life Feels Empty!

Post Berlin Wall, the old Marxian dialectic spirals out of control as a post-Godot duo (rock muso and some kind of intellectual) seek solidity where once upon a time Western values had been sustained by political opposition and xenophobic hatred. With his third Foreman work in recent years, director-composer (and presumably designer) Max Lyandvert continues his mission to bring the master of American installation theatre to needy Australian theatregoers. Although lacking the design verve of his hero (ie the requisite budget), Lyandvert and his performers do the old man proud in this tautly crafted and superbly acted (and skilfully designed) production. As ever, Foreman’s wit and wisdom are densely and gnomically articulated and it’s therefore wise to let some of it wash over you, pick up on the recurrent riffs and chew the whole thing over later. The female role is thankless—a generous interpretation would suggest an evocation of the plight of the women of the old Soviet Block transformed into the sex toys of the West. Big ideals and their contingent propaganda crash while sex and bodily functions are writ grossly large in this new world where there are still voices in our heads, but instead of spouting spurious ideals, they intone “All dogs are dead” and “There will be no paradise on Earth, my friend.” No wonder one of the characters insists, “I don’t wan’t to know the end of the story.”

Mixed Double: Rosie Denis, Martin del Amo

In Access All Areas, Rosie Denis continues to develop an engrossingly unique body-as-text performance language, signalling to us furiously with hyperventilatory, cadenced stuttering and obsessive gesturing, relieved from time to time by the long hiss of inhaled air. At times she’s like a human Max Headroom and as funny (the photocopier and phone riffs), at other times she’s deeply affecting, folding deeply into herself or powerlessly looped—a kind of aetheticised Tourette’s Sydnrome. And all this about everyday losses and anxieties. On the same bill is Can’t Hardly Breathe, the third part of Martin del Amo’s trilogy (the other 2 are Unsealed [2004] and Under Attack [2005]) gravitating around the loss of a friend’s life and the doubts about one’s own, as self, as artist. As before, moments of physical intensity—urgent moves, near falls, sudden reachings—emerge, even erupt, from del Amo’s subtle presence, his gently told part-narratives and the walked mapping of the performance space. In this work it’s the dancer’s relationship with the ocean (to which he lost his friend) that dominates, a fascination with water, its power to extinguish the fire he greatly fears, yielding movement that suggests the body beautifully engaging with and shaped by the sea. Gail Priest’s accompany score builds in oceanic intensity and detail as the sea sends waves through and tosses the dancer’s body, confirming the disturbing play of voluntary and involuntary movement in all 3 works. While not as structurally satisfying as its predecessors, Can’t Hardly Breathe is nonetheless memorable. The desire to see all 3 works on the same program is unlikely to be met given the demands on the performer of just one of them—a pity, so let’s hope they’ve been seriously documented.

The Hanging of Jean Lee

This is chilling and exhilarating music theatre from the composer-director of Dreaming Transportation. That show was a rich and lively account of women early in the 19th century meeting the challenges of landscape and class. This one is about Jean Lee, in 1951 the last woman in Australia hanged and possibly wrongly charged for murder. Constructed as a song cycle rather than overtly through-composed music theatre, The Hanging of Jean Lee comprises wonderful songs in a distinctive Greenwell semi-pop/rock idiom that for the most part stay away from 50s period feel (that’s left to projections and costuming). Although beset with cast illness and the composer-creator’s absence (in hospital awaiting the birth of son Gabriel Joseph), director Tim Maddocks, designer Dan Potra (a huge sweep of canvas covered stairs and screen impressively evokes the courthouse steps we see Lee climbing in the well known press photo), last-minute musical director Tom O’Halloran and a fine cast of singers (Max Sharam, Jeff Duff, Josh Quong Tart, Hugo Race) with no shortage of acting skill all contributed to the production’s dramatic cohesion and intensity. Filmmaker Janet Merewether collaborated with Greenwell to create the images taken from Lee’s life and across the period, morphing and gliding across the large screen. Black and white film reconstruction of the events leading up to the killing and the subsequent image of the victim’s body provide another disturbing dimension. Lee’s life was a mess. An apparently intelligent child, she “reside[d] a lot in her head”, wrote a teacher, and later made fatal choices of male partners. Lee fascinatingly combines the roles of agent and victim. Greewell and Sharam don’t sentimentalise a tough and irresponsible life. The songs similarly range from hard edged to poignant, and Jordie Albiston’s spare imagistic poems make for fine song lyrics in Abe Pogos’ scripting. The Hanging of Jean Lee is powerful music theatre. With a little tweaking, addressing the silences between songs and making some concession to the musical model (please, let’s hear more of those tunes and motifs), The Hanging of Jean Lee deserves to be widely seen, not least for the calibre of its performers and for its multimedia realisation but especially for its powerful challenge to capital punishment at the very moment when some Australians and their government entertain it once again—if not in their own country, but happily elsewhere!

Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung

Although atypical of Edward Albee’s output, Box… is a fascinating if demanding theatrical experiment from 1968. Like Richard Foreman, who’s made an art of the form, Box… is theatre as installation. Ropes thread through and frame a space in which hangs a large box, our perspective on it shifted by subtle changes in lighting. We hear heavy breathing, we hear a voice, seagulls, bells, words that are hard to place but which accumulate meaning through repetition: “When art begins to hurt it’s time to look around”, “All arts are now craft”, “Progress is merely a direction.” While the voice remains disembodied and constantly provocative about art, its limits and life, 4 characters occupy the stage, looking like they’re on holiday—Chairman Mao, a charming but increasingly ruthless ideologue; a middle-aged woman grappling with the death of her husband and her own psychological and physical precariousness; a folksy woman reciting a folksy poem of female victimhood; and a silent man, who appears to simply listen. The sense of fall and demise grows, for the woman, for paper tigers, for all capitalism (Mao: “If you don’t hit it, it won’t fall”). There are tendernesses and reservations—the woman says of her husband who, once he thought about death at the age of 39, became consumed by it: “His scrotum was large…his penis not surpising, but always there and ample”, “There is only life and dying … I was dying long before he did … what about me?” Director Kevin Jackson elicits superb performances from Elaine Hudson, with her measured and highly nuanced mezzo delivery, and Jane Harders who delivers the voice of the box from offstage with an eerie lyricism. More a curio than a great play, Box is nonetheless interesting as evidence of Albee’s engagement with 1968, even if nowadays one can imagine a better play with just the central woman and the voice of the box.

–

Honour Bound, conception, direction, design Nigel Jamieson, choreography Garry Stewart, performers DJ Garner, Alexandra Harrison, David Mueller, Marnie Palomare, Brendan Shelper, Paul White, composer, sound designer Paul Charlier, lighting Damien Cooper, video artist Scott Otto Anderson; Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, July 28-Sept 3; Version 1.0,The Wages of Spin, Performance Space, Sydney, Aug 9-19

Richard Foreman, Now That Communism Is Dead My Life Feels Empty!,director-composer Max Lyandvert, performers Ben Winspear, Gibson Nolte, Rebecca Smee, lighting Luiz Pamolha, A Kitchen Sink Production, Belvoir B Sharp, Seymour Centre Downstairs, Sydney, July 13-30

Mixed Double, Rosie Dennis, Access All Areas, Martin del Amo, Can’t Hardly Breathe, sound designer Gail Priest, lighting Clytie Smith; Performance Space, Sydney, July 20-22

The Hanging of Jean Lee, composer, artistic director, image director Andree Greenwell, director Timothy Maddock, script Jordie Albiston, Abe Pogos, designer Dan Potra, lighting Tony Youlden, musical director Tom O’Halloran, producer Anna Messariti; The Studio, Sydney Opera House, Aug 2-6

Edward Albee, Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, director Kevin Jackson, performers Elaine Hudson, Jane Harders, John Grinston, Rick Lau, Genevieve Mooy, set Hamish Peter, lighting Luiz Pampohla, sound Peter Neville, Cumulus Productions; Parade Studio, NIDA, Sydney, Aug 10-Sept 9

RealTime issue #75 Oct-Nov 2006 pg. 42

For those unfamiliar with Melbourne, the city’s premier arts venue, the Victorian Arts Centre, is crowned by an Eiffel Tower-like spire that thrusts proudly skywards. The effect is just a little bit pompous, a little bit self-conscious. With that image in mind, now picture a woman, enormous crowbar in hand, slipping the pointy end under the building and pulling down hard so that spire, once perpendicular, is now slightly off kilter. Will it fall, or does it simply signify that there is movement in the belly of the building and audiences are being offered the chance to see something unexpected?

The crowbar is the VAC’s 8-month-old program, Full Tilt, and the woman is Vanessa Pigrum, the program’s artistic director. While the Arts Centre tower isn’t literally askew, Pigrum is determined that the VAC’s audience will soon be looking at the building and what it offers from a slightly different perspective.

For the last few years, Pigrum says, there had been a growing feeling within the Arts Centre that the institution was disengaged from Melbourne’s independent arts community. Furthermore, the feeling was reciprocated. As an independent artist herself, Pigrum says her colleagues felt the VAC was “not even on the radar.” For some time, the Artist’s Advocacy Group associated with the VAC had been lobbying for a program that would offer opportunities for independent artists. As flagship performance venues in other capital cities began to establish programs to encourage and support the development of new works, moves began to set up a similar program attached to the VAC.

When Pigrum was first appointed as Artistic Director, it was to the soberly named Victorian Artists’ Program. Only ever intended to be a working title, the VAP gave way to the more dynamic moniker Full Tilt. For Pigrum, the program is not about radically changing the VAC, but simply shifting the balance a little. She does, however, acknowledge the phrase “full tilt” brings to mind “a sense of energy, speed and slightly out of control, barely keeping on the right side of the road…” And it is the new works and the independent artists that the program is partnering that she hopes will embody this sense of excitement and possibility.

Full Tilt has 3 tiers: creative developments, public performance seasons, symposia and master classes. The program was launched in April this year with seasons of Moira Finucane’s Gotharama and Angus Cerini’s Saving Henry (version 5) at the Fairfax Studio; both works with a definite edginess. Full Tilt is now well into its series of 13 creative development projects, which culminate in public showings of the works-in-progress. As yet, no master classes or symposia have been announced, but the first of these are planned for early next year.

Pigrum has brought to Full Tilt a commitment to works that feature collaboration across disciplines: “When I took on the job”, she says, “I was very clear that my interest lies not in text-based theatre. Although I love text, I think that the well made play is very well serviced around town.” Cross-disciplinary work is, she believes, “the language of contemporary theatre makers.”

To assist artists applying for a place in the program, Pigrum published her ‘manifesto’ on the Full Tilt website, describing the sort of work she was looking for. Phrases that jump out include: “fleshy, sweaty, audible and unpredictable”, “unknown territory”, and with a nod to the fear-driven and anxious times we live in, “alerts and alarms.”

Most of all, Pigrum says, she’s looking for work that has a “sense of danger or walking on a knife edge.” She cites Angus Cerini’s Saving Henry (version 5), a physical theatre work with themes of paedophilia and child abuse as an example. Less confronting, but still with an ‘unquiet’ aspect, Politely Savage by Sydney’s My Darling Patricia (RT 67, p32) and performed at the Fairfax Studio in late September, has “lightness” and “whimsy” as well as a “mysterious” element. Pigrum hopes the program will be a space where performers can test, explore and walk the tightrope of their creative possibilities.
<img src="http://www.realtime.org.au/wp-content/uploads/art/1/190_cuskellu_kage.jpg" alt="Byron Perry and Michelle Heaven
Kage Physical Theatre, Appetite”>

Kage Physical Theatre has recently completed a 2-week Full Tilt creative development for their new work, Appetite, where they teamed up with playwright Ross Mueller. Pigrum sees this as an exciting development for the company, allowing them to “go in a much more focused way into the use of text and character-based writing.” For Kate Denborough, one half of the Kage partnership, the creative developments are a welcome initiative, “It’s incredibly challenging trying to secure financial support specifically for creative development…which allows and encourages the development of new performance work.” The only pressure, she says, was having to present the results of their 2-week development, but this too ended up being a plus as it allowed them to “test out material in front of an audience and we also received insightful feedback.”

Pigrum feels her career prior to taking on the role as Full Tilt’s Artistic Director prepared her well. She was the director of Melbourne Fringe from 2001 to 2003 and has produced large scale community arts events, lectured animateuring students at the VCA and practised as an independent theatre maker. Crucially, her work as a dramaturg has given her the experience and confidence to be able to “put challenging questions to artists about where the work needs to go without stepping on their toes…but just to provoke and probe and suggest other avenues of support.” All this experience she believes puts her in a good position to understand “where the independent scene has been and where it needs to go, where it could go.”

Full Tilt has a $300,000 budget this year and is funded through the VAC’s consolidated revenue. This includes Pigrum’s salary, as well as wages for the artists involved in the various tiers of the program, venues, production support and some marketing. The intention is that the program will grow so that, in time, there will be a team of people working to partner independent artists in developing new work. This is exciting for Pigrum and sometimes, just a little bit daunting. She recalls feeling nervous about the amount of anticipation that the program was eliciting and hoped she could deliver on expectations.

Now, with Full Tilt already having a ripple effect throughout the VAC, and beginning to develop its own momentum, Pigrum can relax a little. The exhibitions department is exploring possible collaborations with Full Tilt artists and the Sunday Soapbox program is recruiting artists from the program to appear on their regular panels. This web effect of the program is particularly pleasing for Pigrum as it offers artists further access to support and potential audiences.

As to how she will judge the success of the program, Pigrum is very clear. In 3 years she would like to see a cluster of new works touring Australia and to be able to say, “That work started with a creative development at Full Tilt and now it’s up, it’s been presented, it’s been re-worked, it’s touring Australia.” The touring aspect, she believes, is crucial to give works a life beyond their initial production and she hopes this will be a feature of works that the program has partnered.

Woyzeck

There is a moment in director Matthew Lutton’s production of Woyzeck where the title character kills his lover, and the fish-eye style, water-filled aperture in the set behind which they are standing slowly fills with red ink. It’s a striking spectacle—simultaneously beautiful and brutal. This crisp, cool image in many ways sums up Lutton’s production. It represents a chilly, calculated and efficient aesthetic, yet it is somehow wanting in the full affective force which one might desire or expect from such a climactic moment.

Lutton’s previous work—a version of that other classic of German Expressionism and pseudo-Brechtian dramaturgy, Durrenmatt’s The Visit (RT67, p37)—was a vast, raggedy piece of theatre, a shaggy dog of messy ideas, conflicting emotions and theatrical motifs. While not always entirely coherent, The Visit was also striking in its novelty (the use of tiny set objects was particularly notable) and in its expansive vision. By contrast, Woyzeck is a far tighter work, with design elements reflecting a highly finished state and functional efficiency. But there is not much to surprise those of us who have seen this rich loam of European dramaturgy turned over before. In the wake of multiple revivals of Büchner’s incomplete script after he was rediscovered as Brecht’s precursor last century, as well as the superb 1979 version of the story from director Werner Herzog and actor Klaus Kinski, it is not clear what Lutton adds. As ever, his deployment of the set from Claude Marcos and his near constant use of a broadly electroacoustic score by Ash Gibson Greig is impressive. Several of the performers are also notable. Alison Van Reeken plays the Doctor who pays the poverty stricken Woyzeck so that she might satisfy her scientific curiosity as to what happens to a man who eats nothing but peas. Depicting Büchner’s archetype of heartless modernity as a gaunt woman gives an interesting nuance to the character. Nick Candy as Woyzeck’s competitor in love, the Drum Major, successfully manages to appear sexy demonstrating his ceremonial march, while a scene from Woyzeck’s increasingly strained romance is simultaneously played out. Although Brendan Ewing is becoming somewhat typecast as Perth’s young, crazed actor of choice, his twitchy Woyzeck, leading through his sharply inclined head and neck, is strong.

Nevertheless, for all of the beauty of Marcos’ somewhat Constructivist set and Lutton’s adept and dynamic application of a circular stage revolve, Woyzeck never quite becomes more than the sum of its well-oiled parts. For those audiences who have not accumulated the mnemonic filofax of German literary and cultural history which I have built up since seeing Fritz Lang’s M about 20 years ago, Lutton’s production offered an arresting introduction to Büchner’s story of a victim whose abuse both by and of others eventually turns him into something else (a cursed seer perhaps). It is perhaps time Matthew Lutton turned his attention from the classics of the European avant-garde to other, less well-worked material to which he might bring his acute sense of dramaturgy.

Tough Girls

Another fine production was the musical comedy Tough Girls, from director Maude Davey of Adelaide’s Vitalstatistix and Melbourne Workers’ Theatre regulars Irene Vela (composer) and Melissa Reeves (writer). The narrative of this Vitalstatistix and Deckchair co-production follows the twisted lives and mildly ridiculous scenarios of the Melbourne underworld, where a kind of brutal ockerism, inconsistent yet commonplace police corruption, and a garish sense of suburban style and ostentatiously expensive kitsch all acted to flavour a near war between cops and crims during the late 1980s. This famously led to the Walsh Street murders and to alleged police reprisals on those involved. The tough girls of the title include the former wife of one of these cop killers, Ella, now turned prosecution witness and holed up in a caravan under the supposed protection of unflappable officer, Irene. In a nearby caravan is the queen of the crims, Vivien, biding her time before moving to gun down her rivals, while the happily amoral junkie Luce flits between the 2 parties. Cath Cantlon’s set splits each caravan into a half shell at either end of the stage, enclosing the action (as one reviewer remarked) like a pair of inverted commas. As with Vela’s work for the MWT, the score is a deliberately bastardised, easy-on-the-ear mix of the odd Kurt Weill motif and classical references, dominated by folksy rock strummed out on guitar. Vela is ably abetted by Cathie Travers on accordion and piano.

Generic mixture is the reigning principle here but I for one did not find Tough Girls an altogether satisfying cocktail. Much in the characterisations is intended ironically, with Jacqy Phillips as Vivien shining. She staggers about the stage, bow-legged, like some kind of frightening offspring of John Wayne and the Kath Day-Night of Kath and Kim. Caroline McKenzie’s evenly measured opacity in the straight role, Irene, provides a strong centre against which to measure such excess. In both the libretto and the performances as a whole however there is a constant alternation between comically exaggerated faux opera versus actual ‘pathos’ conveyed via naturalistic performance and melodramatically sustained singing à la Australian Idol. Only Phillips consistently both acts and sings and with such a strongly mannered accent that her buzzing drawl would cut sawlogs. Overall, too much of Tough Girls is played for real within a musical context of relatively simple popular song, and too little with a sense of gross caricature and clashing musical diversity. For my tastes, the work of Davey and company comes a little too close to Andrew Lloyd Webber, and does not draw strongly enough on the richer heritage of musical theatre dealing with crime and murder such as Weil’s Threepenny Opera or Steven Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. I suspect that if Tough Girls was performed with the velocity and force of the Marx Brothers at their most manic, then the production might gather its inconsistencies into an impressively dark romp. Brecht would doubtless approve.

Woyzeck, director Matthew Lutton, assistant director Michelle Lowden, performers Brendan Ewing, Sarah Borg, Bryn Coldrick, Alison Van Reeken, Nick Candy, Adriane Daff, Talei Howell-Price, Wyatt Nixon-Lloyd, Zoe Pepper, Sandra Umbagai-Clarke, composer Ash Gibson Greig, designer Claude Marcos, lighting Lucy Birkinshaw, Be Active BSX-Theatre; PICA, Perth July 11-29; Melissa Reeves, Tough Girls, director Maude Davey, performers Eileen Darley, Rhoda Lopez, Caroline McKenzie, Jacqy Phillips, composer Irine Vela, designer Cath Cantlon, lighting Sue Grey-Gardner, musician Cathie Travers; Vitalstatistix, Deckchair Theatre, Waterside Theatre; Adelaide, Aug 4-19; Victoria Hall, Fremantle, Aug 24-Sept 2

On an evening bringing news of the eruption of another war in the Middle East, the poignancy of being gathered in an old World War II oil reservoir was not lost on the Future Perfect audience. Surrounded by a shallow pool, 2 pale figures curled up together unfold their bodies to shake off the rubble that has buried them. A soldier leans against a streetlight, barely illuminated beneath its dim glow. Melancholy sounds pine from his melodica. The pathos of this opening image dissipates as a nurse (perhaps more dominatrix) takes the instrument in her mouth and tangoes seductively before the soldier. Future Perfect is the most recent work by Russell Milledge and Rebecca Youdell of the Bonemap intermedia collective. It was presented at On Edge, a program of new media events produced by the company. Working with Milledge and Youdell on Future Perfect was an ensemble that included Melbourne-based Ivan Thorley and local performers Jess Jones, Daniele Baccala, Maya Poole and Mark Edwards.

Milledge and Youdell have a history of mentoring local artists and presenting programs that build audiences for contemporary performance and live art in Far North Queensland. Emerging artists bring unpredictability and freshness to Bonemap’s work and develop the pool of peers for the collective to draw on. Although differences in performance experience were apparent, Future Perfect offered exceptional moments that made the event memorable.

In stark contrast to the eclectic cinematic (art house and film noir) and burlesque references of previous works, Youdell’s performance was this time generated from a fictional other world. With her hallmark gestures, she frantically twitched and tapped a code into space as if to pass an unseen security barrier. Hearing sounds or encountering entities unseen by the audience, she introduced these fictions as gestures: head cocking, ducking, cowering and glancing that coalesced into a creature-like presence. Youdell has incorporated these devices in previous performances, occasionally risking a type of caricature. She avoided this in Future Perfect with her capacity to maintain a strong conceptual framework that rendered the body imperfect, failing and displaced. Flanking Youdell were 2 immense floor to ceiling cylinders illuminated with projections of static and large hands dipping from the top of each. These fantastic images created by Russell Milledge portrayed technology as phenomenologically onerous. Its power to manipulate, interrupt and silence became a Future Perfect leitmotif.

Taking a sideways step, Ivan Thorley was compelling in a very surreal but oddly placed tableau, throwing himself into and over the waves of a violent river. After managing to slip gumboots onto his arms and legs, he transformed into a comical, dream-like creature who wandered to the top of the outside amphitheatre to sit, watch and groom.

Segments of Future Perfect were at times only just held together either through simple co-location or against the imposing sound track. The drift from Thorley’s performance back into the Tanks struggled to gain focus as the performers muddled their way through a peripatetic sequence incorporating the rhythms of sign language. An awkward, zombie walk through the audience was quickly forgotten when technology insinuated itself as a glitch repeatedly interrupting and stilling a beautiful moving frieze of huddled performers who wound their way through the space as a laughing molecular cluster.

A duet by Youdell and Thorley referenced their formal ballet origins and struggled to find clarity, not helped by a surrounding field of eyeballs shrouded in tutus and reminscent of the hatchlings’ crèche in Aliens. The insertion of such formal references at this stage of the event lead to a conclusion of a classic return—the performers drifted back to the shallow pool to splash and romp, perhaps joyous at being reconnected with their previously displaced and muted bodies. For this viewer, having emerged from a performance projecting a rather dark and distinctly imperfect future, such dubious suggestions of happiness seemed farfetched.

In May this year I undertook a HotHouse Theatre Artist Residency—A Month in the Country—with Jason Sweeney and Caroline Daish of Unreasonable Adults, a hybrid performance ensemble based in Adelaide but with members in other states. We came together to develop Last To See Them Alive, a performance based on my research towards a Master of Creative Arts at UTS.

The residency takes place in Albury where we are provided with a farmhouse, a large rehearsal studio and a vehicle. We move in, put the kettle on and begin to design Caroline’s (first) demise.

The Last To See Them Alive plays with what it means to be the victim and/or the victor in the games of serial murder and serial monogamy. In a single girl’s life which will come first—marriage or murder? We spend quite a bit of time imagining murder scenes—some taken from true-life crimes, and some lifted from Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, Wire in the Blood and Sex and the City (full of ‘little deaths’ if not murder). To understand the serial killer and serial monogamist we became serial viewers. Our longest shift of straight viewing of various sex crimes (whether those of a criminal nature, or related to sex etiquette) was 8 hours. Here’s a question for Carrie: is it still a crime if you orgasm while being raped?

With the popularity of crime fiction and the recent trend of positioning true crime stories in women’s fashion and lifestyle magazines I had to ask: what is so appealing to single girls about serial killers? Is this the kind of book a woman reads when she says, “I’d rather read a book most nights than have sex”? There are ‘little deaths’ during sexual intercourse (if you’re lucky), but there are pages upon pages of big, bloody, visceral death scenes in crime fiction that offer a greater and more prolonged thrill. Fear lingers whilst orgasms subside? Terror embeds in the body and mind while men come and go?

Each of the texts we are working with attempts to answer a key question: where do narratives of terror and pleasure intersect in the body and how does this translate into performed ‘character’? I have written a series of monologues which propose a ‘character’ of a single girl and her relationship to a serial killer, distorting the traditional romantic fantasy portrayed in romance fiction to ask: ‘How do you meet Mr Right in an age of Serial Killers?’ Imagine if Carrie Bradshaw accidentally wandered into the world of SVU—a space in which terror becomes a pleasure to anticipate.
Caroline Daish, Falling Snow, short film made during the residency

Caroline Daish, Falling Snow, short film made during the residency

We begin our creative development by setting ourselves tasks designed by Jason which help us to break down and exploit the texts—we conduct tours of the death sites around the house, invite people into the pathological interior of the home in which acts of violence are romantic interludes, dig up buried bones of previous victims in the garden, host a sinister tea party and confess to rape fantasies whilst preparing dinner. We explore what it means to tell a story about yourself through the spaces you inhabit—how would a stranger make sense of your life by reading your home, the way you make the bed (or don’t), the placement of objects, the choices you make in furnishings? How would you set up your home if you knew with certainty that one day, a serial rapist or killer was going to break in and attack you? Is it possible to influence your own victimology report and, if so, does this still make you a victim or a victor?

These tasks become a constant experiment in form—how is the performer positioned in an interaction with an audience in an intimate setting (a house)? How intimate can this interaction become? One scene takes place on the couch in the loungeroom waiting for a gentleman caller, constructing the crime scene with the audience; a scene in a bathtub with one audience member, holding carving knives and hiding from the threat outside—“He was here last night, I know it!” Serving tea and biscuits as dual personalities fight for control of murderous impulses and the longing for a gentle touch. Sitting at the piano by moonlight singing about the serial killer BTK: “have you ever asked yourself why you’re so interested in what he did to those women but couldn’t care less about what he took from them?” A tour outside the house in silence as a woman, naked beneath a yellow rain, coat digs up the bones of a victim—the silent witness reaching out from beyond the grave.

Unreasonable Adults will present Last To See Them Alive as a Scratch Night for the Studio at the Sydney Opera House in late February 2007, working with Julie Vulcan (one of the members of the ensemble and of Sydney’s FRUMPUS). From there, it is expected that the work will premiere as part of the Mutations program for the SPILL Festival of Contemporary Performance in London in April, 2007 run by the UK’s The Pacitti Company. In the meantime, Unreasonable Adults have been presenting another work, GIFT/BACK, as part of Electrofringe in Newcastle.

It would be difficult to overstate how beneficial this residency has been for both the project, and the team of collaborative artists involved. The space to relax and create is such a privilege. The reception by HotHouse staff, and the community (a special mention for the staff at Electra café on Dean Street) was warm and friendly. This is a simple model for creative development, one that sadly is not replicated elsewhere. At a time when the Theatre Board of the Australia Council for the Arts is opening up a dialogue about the future direction of funding for the theatre arts it seems important to note the incredible value of such initiatives.

For more on Unreasonable Adults: http://unreasonableadults.va.com.au/

Fiona Sprott’s performance texts Often I find that I am naked and Partly it’s about love, partly it’s about massacre have been performed internationally. Easy Ryder premiered at the 2005 Adelaide Cabaret Festival and drowning in my ocean of You was produced by State Theatre Company of South Australia in its 2003 the laboratory program.

A Month in the Country: how much longer?

Residency places and programs for performing artists of the kind visual artists and writers are used to (if in lesser numbers in Australia than in many other countries) are very rare, especially ones that take them right away from the pressures of everyday life. HotHouse’s unique Month in the Country provides a former farmhouse near Albury, a large adjoining timber-floored studio, funds towards travel and living costs and has been home to hundreds of artists over the last 3 years. They include Lano & Woodley, Angus Cerini, Sue Broadway, Zeal Theatre, Tamarama Rock Surfers, My Darling Patricia, Flying Fruit Fly Circus, Wesley Enoch, Jacklyn Bassanelli, Ingrid Voorendt, PACT Youth Theatre, Eleanor Brickhill and collaborators working with a number of these artists. The program now faces a doubtful future. One-off initiative funding for the first 3 years from Arts NSW has finished and a new application has had to be made, while Arts Victoria, some capital works establishment funding aside, has offered no support across the period despite 50% of the artists using the program coming from Victoria. I asked HotHouse Artistic Manager Charles Parkinson what will happen to the scheme if funding is not forthcoming from NSW. He says that if artists want to use the space, but without financial support, Hot House will continue to make it available. Although sometimes rented out or occasionally used by HotHouse itself, Parkinson says that the residency program is “primarily a service for the industry.” He doesn’t understand why funding bodies can’t see that performing artists have the same need as visual artists and writers for creative isolation. It’s not uncommon, he reports, that artists say that they’ve achieved more in the few weeks of their residency than in months in the city. The program has allowed artists to work with each other across state borders, provided ideal studio space so rare in cities, and as Fiona Sprott reports on this page, combines creativity and relaxation, a hard-won pairing for many artists, and one that allows for invaluable reflection. KG

The top floor of the Europa Restaurant has been roughly swept and rows of chairs set up for the audience. There is a large gap around a hole in the floor, marked out with red tape. During Communist times the Europa was a popular meeting place for Party bigwigs but now the only hint of former grandeur is its size. The Europa is in a state of dereliction having been stripped of everything—light fittings, plumbing, wall panelling. Electricity for sound and lighting is sourced from one or 2 functioning powerpoints in the room adjacent. Interakcje 8 International Action Art Festival is launched.

The opening night includes performances from Poland, Quebec and ourselves (senVoodoo) from Australia. The room is bursting with local townsfolk and media, a flock of cameras settling around Janusz Baldyga, stalwart of Polish performance art since the 70s, who opens with a work about the burden of materialism.

Interakcje takes place in May in Piotrkow Trybunalski, a poor town of around 86,000 in central Poland. Run by Piotr Gajda and Gordian Piec, the festival is funded by the city council. Ryszard Piegza, the festival’s founder, although absent in 2006, remains a figurehead alongside Jan Swidzinski, at 80 one of the grand old men of Polish performance art. Interakcje has been running since 1999 and this year extended to satellite events in Poznan, Krakow and Bielsko-Biala.

Artists are provided with accommodation for the duration of the festival, a catalogue, meal tickets and per diems. Given Piotrkow’s unemployment rate hovers around 30%, the generosity is overwhelming.

Young locals are heavily involved as performers and volunteer crew. They also make up the bulk of the audience. It’s fair to say that they gave the festival its main fuel. The festival crew and performers were striking in their energy and imagination; the gang of tipsy teenagers that watched performances night after night offered a refreshing change from the earnest atmosphere that can prevail at performance events.

The second night began with Peter Grzybowski, a Pole based in the USA. His was the only performance that made reference to the Iraq war, a topic strangely absent from public discourse in a country that has troops in Iraq. Grzybowski’s piece was a sustained yet not entirely successful attack on brutality and the media.

There was an intensely masculine energy to the performances on this night, which, when interrogated with passion and honesty, was searing. Pole Mateusz Felsmann shaved himself until he bled, staunched his face with squares of white cloth, then stapled them to the wall. After printing the wall with his bloody cheeks, he knelt before the display. The work unconsciously resonated with everything from Scorsese’s The Big Shave (1967) to the blood printed cloths in performances by Ron Athey and Kira O’Reilly. Felsmann’s poise and focus created a unique performance that was to be one of the most intense and moving of the festival.

Omar Ghayat from Cairo followed with an interactive work. Ghayat refreshed familiar motifs—the bandaged man, the alienated suit, audience members placed inside compartments marked on the floor with tape—and delivered a heartfelt comment on communication, technology and social isolation.

This year’s Interakcje had a spotlight on emerging Quebecan artists invited by performer, teacher and curator Richard Martel, who has a long association with the Polish performance community. The most striking of these was Christian Messer. With only a chair and an onion as props, Messer created an anguished piece about heartbreak, the claustrophobia and anger of love. His climax had the audience scrambling out of the way as he tied a rope to a chair and swung it around and around, eventually smashing chunks of plaster from the walls.

The destitution of the venues gave a cathartic, anarchic feel to many of the performances. People let loose in every direction. The 3 guys from Grupa Wlochy set to work on a large round table and shelves with hammer, nails, saw and drill. They became increasingly frenzied and violent, a sort of orchestra of chaos, subsequently laying into a column which had glued to it a page of Kierkegaard’s Poetry of Fear.

Another highlight was a work by veteran Nicòla Frangione, who runs the Monza Festival in northern Italy. Frangione works with video, slides, music and spoken word to create hypnotic, provocative and highly amusing collages. Much of his text takes the form of manifestos, poetry as a sensory experience. He performed with such rhythm and passion that, although most of it was in Italian, little was lost on the audience.

Les Fermières Obsedées, a trio from Quebec, reminded us somewhat of Sydney’s Frumpus. They brought a colourful contrast to a program otherwise almost completely pared down, non-theatrical, ideas-based performance. In costumes, wigs and smeared make-up, Les Fermières stomped up and down, smashing holes in the wall with knuckledusters. They built nonsensical rhythms from repetitive movement, ending covered in paint, Coke and spit, and with grazed knees. If overlong and indulgent, it was nonetheless high-spirited and funny.

For 5 days and nights actions and performances took place in the streets, in Europa and another empty building, slightly less derelict, which also contained the festival office. Photos of the performances featured heavily in the local paper. Although the audience dwindled gradually, their spirit of commitment and energy was unflagging. The shabby rawness of the spaces intensified the intimacy of the performances.

Each morning in the hotel dining-room performances of the night before were discussed along with performance art in general. Old colleagues from the festival circuit were re-united, new performers examined with curiosity. Discussions continued in the cheap restaurant where we were ticketed to eat or at one of the 2 bars in the main square. What is this thing called performance art? How is it catered for in Poland/Spain/Egypt/Australia? All of us spoke the international language of whingeing about lack of funds. We were pretty much the only people in the town bars.

We were told that when Interakcje first began, the townsfolk were out and about a lot more. But now that economic depression had hit Piotrkow hard, nobody could afford to so much as go out for a beer.

Towards the end of the week performances became more frequent and improvised. In a park one afternoon 6 of the festival volunteers created a poignant comment on intimacy. Beginning at far corners of the lawn, they began threading themselves together before onlookers realised what was occurring. They ended in a tight circle, applauded by the public.

Another local, Huba Byczkowski, performed a light-hearted gender-transformation. In the context of a conservative government and an extremely powerful and homophobic Catholic church, the work also took on a darker, courageous hue.

There were grumbles about the programming. Zbigniew Warpechowski, pioneer of Polish performance art, gave a long dissertation on the second last evening right in the middle of a run of performances. Warpechowski has written 5 books and his installations and videos are in national museums. The audience, comprising largely non-Polish speakers, sadly and inevitably drifted away.

Warpechowski spoke of how conceptual and performance art as evolved in communist Poland had offered liberation—endless undefined possibilities. He was bleak about the current state of affairs, complaining that artists who are fashionable manage images, and that even state galleries look at art with a commercial eye. Interestingly enough, although schooled in Stalinist times, Warpechowski finds the new conservatism and political correctness just as limiting as previous regimes.

There were 2 compelling performances from Japan on the last night. Tari Ito created a beautiful homage to ‘comfort women’ (those forced into prostitution during WWII). Ito worked with slides and a latex costume at once elegant and grotesque with inflatable breasts and buttocks. She is a seasoned performer, with years of dance and movement study behind her. Her subtle butoh-esque moves and direct narration took on the tone of a grieving ritual. Seiji worked with nothing but his body and a table, creating a puzzle of flesh, object and space.

On the last night of the festival, the bedraggled delegates were invited to dinner by the mayor. This was once a public event, but is now private so the townsfolk don’t resent his spending money on art. The Kaczinski government gained power in Poland late in 2005 on a platform of family values and anti-corruption leading to the closure of long-running performance festival, Castles of Imagination and Warsaw’s queer-friendly club, Les Madames.

The Mayor of Piotrkow Trybunalski has been accused of taking bribes, his case is still pending. When I asked Piec, who also works at the town council, what the future held for Interakcje, he smiled enigmatically. The future, he said, is always uncertain.

Interakcje 8-Interactions, International Art Action Festival; Piotrkow Trybunalski, Poland, May 8-12, www.wizya.net/inter.htm

A Shift in Perception presents an interesting contradiction; a film made by sighted people about the experience of blindness. Herein lies the desire to communicate an unknown state, an intention with the potential to fall—not short—but somewhere deliciously far from the mark.

The film is part of Living Dreams, an exhibition growing out of a community cultural development project of the same name, initiated by Michele Fairbairn and the Port Adelaide City Council. As part of the program, artists Dan Monceaux and Emma Sterling developed the film and a series of photographs in response to time spent with 3 women with impaired vision. Initially the project was intended to empower the women through involving them in the creation of touchable sculptural works. It eventuated that while the group was interested in engaging the broader community in their experiences, they were less interested in becoming sculptors. The project was adapted, and at this point the artists volunteered their time to work with the women to create a filmic translation of their memories, dreams and everyday experiences, and thus began the series of conversations that underpin the exhibition.

The film is a visual treat. The fun starts with the use of Super 8 film, which brings a unifying softness and dreamlike quality to the work. Occasionally we look into the faces of the women, but these shots are either taken close up or in silhouette, preventing the women from being objectified; instead we are more often encouraged to take their positions as their words are imagined in film.

The tactility of Super 8 also makes it an appropriate choice; much of the film’s content brings close attention to the work of hands and the sense of touch as the women undertake the daily activities of cooking, sewing and playing the piano. The film negatives are dusty, with the contrast blown out in places, reminding us that this filmmaking was also the work of busy hands. The unpredictability of the medium is embraced, while instability is a constant theme. One woman states that “a thing you have to learn when you lose your sight is not to move things around.” The camera flickers and objects quietly do the stop-frame shuffle while sounds are experienced as dangerous things that might pounce. New techniques for ordering are developed as another woman recounts her technique of singing her way along a bus route, knowing at which chorus to alight.

A Shift in Perception features a soundtrack by Alex Carpenter which is a constant element and almost distinct enough to be considered as an autonomous work. There is interplay between the stories being spoken by the women, the visuals and the soundtrack. The soundtrack is loud; often the women’s voices are drowned out. I find myself closing my eyes to focus intently on their words and smile with the discovery that more than ever I am placed in their position. In the warm darkness I crane to hear the gentle humour of the storyteller as she describes a dream in which she plays piano with Rachmaninoff. I open my eyes to see the playful animated version of the dream recede into the constant tumble of images on screen.

The photographs presented in Living Dreams are not video stills but function like postcards from the documentary. They are not captivating on their own, however when considered with the moving images they become an interesting adjunct to the viewing experience—moments plucked out and held still for our slower contemplation rather than the means of introducing new elements.

Living Dreams is being shown at the Higher Ground venue as part of the SA Living Artist’s Festival (SALA). This is an interesting choice of venue as the exhibition is one of the many shows on in the foyer. When I dropped in, it was competing with Michael Franti over the stereo, loud conversations and coffee. Disappointingly, the projector had stopped working and the full wall projection was subsequently replaced by a television monitor. However, Monceaux says the choice of venue was determined by Higher Ground having disability access, enjoying a huge traffic of interested patrons and being open long hours. This seems—quality viewing conditions pending—an appropriate choice for the outcome of a community project. Higher Ground has itself been steadily developing as an arts community venue and resource from its origins as the 2006 Adelaide Fringe club.

Living Dreams, images Dan Monceaux, Emma Sterling, sound Alex Carpenter, Higher Ground, Aug 4-20.

On one wall of installation and performance artist Brigita Ozolin’s The Gorge, water swirls and eddies, on the other figures dive through the air. On an adjacent wall one of the figures has been fixed in a series of stills. On its own is an image of a small cottage clinging to the side of a cliff. The images are grainy, they seem old fashioned, the divers look like they are wearing those woollen one-piece costumes and they are probably in bathing caps.

On a hot summer’s day in 2006 a mother’s anxiety soars as she watches from the kitchen window of her home that hangs precariously from the steep cliffs of the Cataract Gorge in Launceston. Directly below, bodies plummet 20 metres from the bridge into murky waters. Among them she sees her son. In deliberately dropping himself into the water he becomes a member of the illustrious Tadpole Club, an institution almost 150 years old. The prefabricated steel bridge which is the site of this initiation was floated into place in 1863.

This rite of passage is replayed in Ozolins’ enigmatic work. And yet it is much more than descriptive. The work is a confluence of the artist’s practice, a residency program, the bicentenary of white settlement and one of Launceston’s most significant contemporary cultural sites, and the artist’s personal story. The exhibition is included in Launceston’s bicentenary program, It’s About Us, 2006, which presents a series of events around the theme of people who have made this city over the past 200 years. The images represented are a distillation from lived experience. The small weatherboard caretaker’s cottage in the installation was built in 1890 and is located at the entrance to the gorge, only a few minutes walk from the city centre. The caretaker was responsible for the pathway that the citizens of Launceston built as a pleasure walk. Now it is offered to artists for residencies. In 2005 Ozolins lived in the cottage for a few months. One of the first things she did was reorient the furniture in order to counter the vertigo which threatened to overwhelm her.

In The Gorge half a dozen figures glide through the air, mostly one at time. The soundtrack is beautifully mesmeric, luring the viewer into the imagery. However, a hint of menace awakens us to the sensation of the body suspended in space. This dissonance, gentle as it might first appear, increases as the infinite state of diving embeds itself in the viewer’s memory. One figure does not conform. Legs seem to reach out for something unattainable. The elegance of the dive is interrupted by a body out of control. This one is not diving but falling.

This seemingly simple aesthetic becomes a distillation of disparate moments bringing a recorded historical fact in a specific location together with a primal sensation and a private story. The public becomes personal. The personal becomes public. And yet it is not clear where one ends and the other begins. As the artist describes it, this is an exhibition about living on the edge.

Jonathan Jones, Gurrajin (Elizabeth Bay), 2006
Courtesy the artist & Gallery Barry Keldoulis

Jonathan Jones, Gurrajin (Elizabeth Bay), 2006, courtesy the artist & Gallery Barry Keldoulis

Sydney’s Elizabeth Bay House was recently invaded by 8 artists and a series of site-specific installations. Independent curators Sally Breen and Tania Doropoulos invited 6 Sydney-based and 2 Swiss artists to develop creative interventions as part of a strategy by the Historic Houses Trust to reach new, younger audiences. Through the artists’ inventive rethinking of the space, the story of Elizabeth Bay House was enlivened and injected with new voices and visions.

Designed for the Colonial Secretary Alexander Macleay and his family, and completed in 1839, Elizabeth Bay House is an extraordinary place. Both architecturally and in its frozen early colonial furnishing, it presents a challenging context for contemporary art. The ‘finest house in the colony’ has already been reimagined by Tracey Moffatt in her Laudanum series of photographs (1998), but no images can quite prepare you for the experience of climbing the majestic spiral staircase. Being inside the house makes you feel like you are part of the drama.

As it happened, I found myself at Ten[d]ancy by surprise, while visiting Sydney for a conference devoted to the German critic Walter Benjamin. In addition to the exhibitions, I witnessed a one-off evening performance by sound artist Gail Priest. Like the army-green canvas protecting the carpets, Priest’s sound performance established an uneasy mood from the moment of entry to the building. Her multi-channel composition—an all pervasive mélange of distorted, digitized sounds sampled from the artist’s own kitchen—provided an unusual contrast to the genteel environment. The syncretic accumulation of noise oozed out from the normally quiet spaces, as if exorcising the house’s sonic history.

In a sense, all of the interventions in Ten[d]ancy operated to unhinge the harmonious history that is conventionally offered by such buildings. This typically involved oblique and playful references to Australian history. For instance, Australian artists Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro, working collectively with Swiss artists Martin Blum and Simone Fuchs, filled the dining room with adroitly placed, bright red crocheted woollen doilies. Despite a reference to terror in the title, the work suggested not blood but a magical craft utopia. Alluding to Australia’s fortunes on the sheep’s back, standing at the ropes to the room, the tableaux recalled Rosemary Laing’s forest carpets as much as Louise Weaver’s fabric-embalmed animals.

Shaun Gladwell, seemingly an odd selection for a show about history, revealed another side to an artist associated with moody videos of young skaters and other urban subcultures. Smoke Machines/Specimens involved the introduction of unexpected surreal still lives into a botanical display (Macleay was a ‘gentleman scientist’ with strong interests in botany and the house also contains extensive insect collections). By introducing a degree of weird science into the house for us to stumble upon, Gladwell’s work upset the tightly ordered colonial fantasy. Skulls, in particular, suggested a morbid fascination in the collector.

Jonathan Jones’ installation Gurrajin (Elizabeth Bay House) engaged with the site at a phenomenological, cultural and quasi-spiritual level. While his arranged pattern of fluorescent lights on the floor immediately evoked the minimalist artist Dan Flavin, sited in this context the industrial tube forms took on more metaphorical qualities. As the catalogue essay fleshes out, Jones’ patterns are inspired by the lines of reflecting light produced by the floating onboard fires of Aboriginal people fishing on boats across the harbour at night in the early 19th century. While the cultural reference is obscure, the insistent abstract light forms encouraged a search for meaning, and like the visitor to any historic house, we duly read the text.

Picking up on the importance of didactic wall labels in any museum experience, Gary Carsley intervened with them directly. Inspired by the coincidence that Daguerre’s official announcement of the invention of photography coincided with the completion of the house, in Le Chamber of M Draguerre Carsley invented an elaborate fiction centred around the character ‘Draguerre.’ With a bold narrative of artists’ squats, Carsley’s work was all fantasy and burlesque. Linking drag to the act of masquerade, he also produced digital photographic landscape prints made up of veneer—another creative simulation. Carsley’s work was a clever and highly amusing parody and provided for some genuine confusion by mirroring the existing wall panel information.

No such humour was to be found in the cellar of the house in Hannah Furmage’s work Pig Town. This theatrical piece invited us to listen to the voices of present day prisoners through small speakers installed in the bricks of the cell-like walls, referencing the fact that the cellar bricks were made by convicts. Inmates had been invited to telephone an answering machine set up by the artist to give their views on police, and the result was a fragmented litany of poignant complaints. Subtle it wasn’t, but this excavation of repressed voices—a form of radical oral history—was well suited to the occasion.

In the immediate context of John Howard’s ideological assault on Australian history and the way it is taught in schools (and presented in our museums), this exhibition was extremely timely. As the curators suggest, an exhibition like Ten[d]ancy “ensures the mobilisation of Australia’s colonial history into a dialogue with contemporary notions of place and belonging.” Instead of Howard’s ‘structured narratives’ of white progress, we would do better to bring history alive through our cultural practices. In the process, artists such as those at Elizabeth Bay House operate as cultural ‘mediators’ and agitators rather than simple originators of autonomous aesthetic meaning. Although much of the work was quite decorative, their careful site-specific mimicry and responses prevented comfortable access to nostalgia. The interventions provided for dialectical images of history, as Benjamin might say. And at a purely sensory level, the exhibition successfully turned the whole house into an art medium, so that even an excessively puffy bed in one of the untouched spaces began to seem even more than usually odd.

Ten[d]ancy: Artistic Interventions for Elizabeth Bay House, curators Sally Breen, Tania Doropoulos, Elizabeth Bay House, Sydney, July 8 – Oct 22

The sound art roadshow, Liquid Architecture, now in its 7th year, presents national and international acts but also picks up performers in each of the 5 cities it visits. It’s an ambitious program co-directed by Melbourne founder, Nat Bates, Lawrence English in Brisbane and Sydney team Shannon O’Neil and Ben Byrne. The Sydney section included 4 nights of sound performances, an afternoon performance of audio-visual works, artist talks and workshops.

Locating the Sydney forum discussions in the convivial atmosphere of Performance Space’s courtyard worked very well, the informality perhaps enabling artists to better explain their sonic interests. Surprisingly, I thought, performance presentation and audience relations were a concern of many of those who spoke although a rough consensus emerged that “the performance is about the sound.”

This was true of the festival’s opening set on Wednesday by Sydney vocalist and sound poet Amanda Stewart and Saturday’s finale by French turntable artist ErikM. In both performances there was a profound physical interaction with the sound material that never distracted the listener’s ear. Stewart’s interplay between the recordings of her voice and the live sound produced in situ was a dance between the left and right microphone. She teased out the narrative of the day, stuttering, masticating, spitting words or their sound parts to accompany or lead herself through inscrutable semantics that made perfect sonic sense.

ErikM started by extracting a high-pitched screech from an array of effects but soon employed 2 turntables and quick change vinyl to accompany his dance around the containers of sound laid out before him. I enjoyed the way he bludgeoned silence into the service of the sonic events. Pauses and short rests served constantly to underline the percussive sound choices made from his materials. At times long decay served compositional effect only to be vibrated back into life before falling again toward oblivion. This was a breathtaking run through a layered multiplicity of samples that included violins, vibraphones, voice, vinyl pop and crackle and extracts from beat music. At one stage ErikM attached packaging tape to a turntable cartridge and unreeled it in a criss-cross motion around the space. The sound of tearing was explosive, receding when the distance from the pick-up was too great—a visualised fade-out.

Laptop artist Martin Baumgartner plays the silence too. On Friday night he moved deftly within the pulsing earthquakes and distressed overload of systems which sometimes originated in the microphone he thrust into his mouth. He leapt about and crouched under and around the table of operations, creating visual punctuations that accented what we heard. And we heard a lot: screams, dips and ascensions of voices flying into space. The connection to human vocality was at once obvious yet tenuous. Baumgartner’s frenetic physical engagement with his material mirrored his sound-processing which was intriguing, exhilarating and produced in finely detailed layers.

Baumgartner was loud. And justifiably so. In Saturday’s artist talk Darrin Verhagen (aka EPA) explained his interest in the “dynamic relationship between a sense of chaos and a sense of craft.” For him, “it’s only at high volume that you can get that relationship between chaos and control.” His performance commenced with some conventionally pitched anthems messed up occasionally by an ominous pulsing. What followed were explosive interventions using shifts of rhythm and aural time-space to disrupt the sonic places Verhagen had created, transforming them into episodes of profound density. A logic developed between the background and the foreground, places were introduced and then destroyed or overrun by layer upon layer of chaos. Hearing this musical straw-man collapse as noise overtook melody was very exciting.

Peter Blamey was pretty loud too. He kicked off Friday night’s proceedings with one strum of an electric guitar. From here on it was a manipulation of feedback, but using minor adjustments of the proximity between guitar and amplifier. This piece was richly layered once the ear became attuned—a play of higher frequency harmonics like so many phantoms bedeviling the inescapable and relentless drone of the guitar. Complexity emerged, sounding at times like a distant Jimmy Smith solo being played through the wall of the neighbours’ house or a Mongolian throat singer asserting the right to be heard through the noise. In this work overtones were the point and one well made.

The highlight of the week for me was a duet on Wednesday night. We heard a rhythmic pairing of plastic, tin, iron, wood and bow with bass from Clayton Thomas and the blowing of an uncharacteristically undismantled saxophone from Jim Denley. Denley pushed his lungs and mouth through extremes of endurance to find textures and notes by pressing the bowl of the sax into his leg or tipping back the spittle to create a tapestry of exchange between dancing harmonics and metallic emphysema. Thomas and Denley read the shifting dynamics of their instruments and the duet so well that transitions between one sound space and another were seamless. Their listening was so acute, the interplay so precise that they might have been following notation rather than their finely tuned intuition. The result was a wonderland, an evolving atmosphere that stretched the parameters of acoustic sounds to their limits.

This was a hard act to follow for the Loop Orchestra who were nevertheless a perfect foil for the visceral journey that had preceded them. This 4-man collaboration, begun by Richard Fielding over 20 years ago, uses reel to reel tape recorders and short loops of recordings to construct fields of warm analog sound. The performers looked like a panel of judges presiding over the taped evidence which on this particular night was presented as a series of human coughing sounds. There were occasional moments of humour too as loops and audience-spluttering mingled in this mesmeric blanket of staccato arias.

This night, like the rest of the season, had a satisfying thematic feel with its acoustic/analog permutations. Thursday showcased experiments in song-based hybrids, Friday’s programme worked with a sense of focus on the instruments and Saturday seemed to be about source transformation (Ross Bencina’s mix of natural and electronic sound was particularly satisfying). Difficult listening for some maybe and long nights for the dedicated but Liquid Architecture 7 set up exciting juxtapositions and provoked plenty of interesting debate.

Liquid Architecture 7, National Director Nat Bates, Sydney Directors Shannon O’Neill, Ben Byrne; Performance Space, Sydney, July 5-9, www.liquidarchitecture.org.au

Peering over the fence at another’s discipline is apt to bring home the limits of one’s own practice and make the attractions of collaborative work irresistible. But any collaborative undertaking brings new challenges—personal, technical, and creative. Phillip Adams’ Origami explores the principles of the art of origami applied to dance, but it’s much more than a work of simple transposition. A multilayered collaboration between BalletLab, BURO Architects, 3 Deep Design and Matt Gardiner, among others, Origami engages themes of contemporary Japanese culture, the place of tradition in a hyper-modern society, and the order in chaos of urban living.

With so many creative disciplines and themes in play, the challenge of this work was always going to be incorporating each without having them clumsily competing with one another or, alternatively, falling into the trap of tokenism: including one more creative discipline simply for the sake of adding yet another layer, without adequately relating it to the whole. Origami doesn’t succumb entirely before these challenges, but neither does it entirely rise above them.

The opening sequence sees the 8 dancers in formation folding into, and sliding across, tatami mats. The choreography seems to be reaching for the kind of precision and flowing, complex order found in origami, but the execution appears stilted, the mats encumbering the fluidity of dancers’ movements.

The incorporation of architectural elements—in the form of a performance space and sets that can be continually re-configured by the dancers—provided similar constraints, the dancers seeming to struggle with them. Rather than completing the set, the performers often appeared to be confounded by it. The foldable floor surface, in particular, made for overly self-conscious performances which lacked the subtleties suggested by origami.

The transitions between sequences, in which the performers re-configure the performance space, also seemed disconnected from the work. A generous interpretation might be that this is expressive of life itself: a meditation on the infinite number of minute rituals and work that we enact in the daily performance of living, making, un-making, and re-making the spaces in which we live. If this was the intent, then it was a lost opportunity. The dancers’ movements lacked purpose, with the result that the transitions came across as brief time-out periods, unrelated to the performance.

This is not to say that Origami is a deeply flawed work. There were some beautifully choreographed sequences in which the dancers’ bodies folded one into another creating a complex symmetry: a pure synthesis of form and content. Some of the more playful elements, such as the cramped living space evoked by a tent-like structure briefly inhabited by all 8 dancers, folding their bodies so as to sleep and eat, worked nicely with the themes of the work, exhibiting a grace and order reminiscent of origami.

Similarly, David Chisholm’s music lent order and structure to the work and themes sometimes lacking in the choreography, as did Anatasia La Fey’s beautifully erotic costumes, which melded Samurai influences with Western ballet costume. Combined with Rhian Hinkley’s computer animation, that references Japanese culture—a Godzilla-like monster destroying Australian architectural icons, and the animated version of Katsushika Hokusai’s The Great Wave Off Kanagawa—the music and costumes provided textures and layers to the performance, evoking pop and kitsch culture in a lively exploration of the complex interweaving of tradition and modernity, the organic pace of traditional forms coupled with the frenetic pace of urban living. Even the more gimmicky elements, such as a radio-controlled helicopter occupying the performance space vacated by dancers, worked well within the whole, making for interesting transitions between the different parts of the work.

Origami was at its most successful when its influences and thematic treatment were less literal, conveyed through the subtleties and playfulness of gesture and movement, imagery, and music, than the more obvious references of folding sets. In some respects, Origami was uncomfortably caught between 2 worlds. It needed either to be pared right back to become a much more intimate work, drawing on the strengths of minimalist understatement or, conversely, to require a much bigger canvas (and budget) to become an all-out, sensuous feast. In this regard, Origami is an ambitious though ultimately unsatisfying work. On that front, the collaborative team behind Origami might be best understood as being at the mid point of an exciting journey, rather than having reached their final destination.

Dotmov: Old Melbourne Gaol

The opening event of the Melbourne season of Liquid Architecture 7 takes place on a wintry night in the disused and dusty former City Watch House in the forbidding Old Melbourne Gaol. On entering the high-ceilinged corridor where the performance takes place, we are greeted, through barred windows, by TV monitors showing fuzzy old black and white footage of what looks like a hanging, which certainly establishes a tone for the evening.

In this wing, there are 17 cells and a couple of larger rooms, one perhaps a refectory, where Dotmov helpers now reassuringly serve drinks. Each cell is bare but for a bench and a steel toilet pan. Some cells are now equipped with percussion instruments and some with video equipment. In a padded cell, a CCTV screen displays imagery such as an inverted view of the visitor and a rotating cross relayed from a camera in the opposite cell that, in Nam June Paik-style televisual irony, is itself monitoring a rotating screen bearing the ‘original’ image. Other cells are darkened, though in one, a skull with a light inside adds a sideshow flavour.

An array of loudspeakers through the building broadcast the first of the evening’s 3 long, untitled works. The sounds of steel platters, sticks and drumsticks, bowed metal and electronics, produced collaboratively by several players, echo grimly through the crowded space. The audience files slowly around trying different listening and viewing positions. When heard from a dark, empty cell, a desolately squealing cello is even more disturbing. The many helpers at the performance document it all, audience included, in video and photograph, in a kind of reflexive surveillance.

The second work is for electronic sounds and samples of all kinds, including something reminiscent of chanting Tibetan monks and their instruments. The sound level builds to an overwhelming crescendo that seems to shake the building. Both these works are composites of extended, complex arrangements of pre-recorded and live sound, with the performers invisible to each other in different cells, producing an intricate, evolving and densely layered whole.

The final piece, Robin Fox’s laser light projection and sound work, takes place in the refectory, a space about 10 x 15m, with wooden benches and tables. Broadcast from inside a barred cage that encloses one end of the room, the sound and vision are synchronised to create a synaesthetic experience. (Fox’s concern with synaesthesia is the subject of Mitchell Whitelaw’s review of his Backscatter DVD on RealTime’s Earbash.) Fox’s heavily textured work is alternately driving, pulsating, rhythmic and meditative, shifting between the minimal and the complex: a sonic vibrato parallels a shudderingly staccato light, tubes of light accompany booming bass, and bandwidths narrow and broaden in what seems like an extended improvisation. After the weightiness of the first 2 pieces, Fox’s work has an almost nightclubby feel.

Dotmov, an ensemble of RMIT University students, has blended sound, vision, performance and location to create an innovative and memorable piece of theatre. The presence of the music combined with the large crowd suggests a reoccupation of the gaol. Such a productive collaboration has potential for adaptation to other significant sites.

Arts House, North Melbourne, Town Hall

In contrast to the oppressive immersion of Old Melbourne Gaol, the concerts at the gracious North Melbourne Town Hall place the audience in a conventional auditorium, albeit surrounded by 4 loudspeakers that are brightly lit to emphasise their central role. The July 14 concert, the first of 3 at Arts House, comprises 3 performances (again untitled) that, as LA7’s artistic director Nat Bates suggests in his introduction, are intended to ground the music in particular instrumental forms and then to step away from them.

Donna Hewitt (voice/effects) and Julian Knowles (electric guitar/laptop) open with a crooning, jazz-influenced, darkly romantic work. Hewitt stands at a microphone engineered to produce sound through movement, swaying and swirling it to generate effects, an ironic move given the pop iconicity of the (male) performer with mike stand. Knowles also sways his guitar to create feedback, even scraping the neck across the computer in a post-Townsend gesture. As the sound whines, sings and sighs in complex layers with multiple rhythms, Hewitt’s morphed voice emerges into dreamy awareness. The aesthetic here is in the electronic orchestration of musical and non-musical fragments into a seductive song.

Dean Roberts’s solo work follows. Barely feathering the strings of his guitar, he builds a slow, introspective blues. His whispered, disjointed song becomes even sadder through its attenuated development. The amplifier and guitar sound levels are so high that merely touching the instrument generates an intense polyphonic signal, and a chord tears through the auditorium like a thunderclap. Roberts is a master orchestrator of harmonics, creating a dialogue between guitar and monitor, whose feedback loop produces a haze like that enveloping an oncoming truck in the desert, the work’s drowsy, melancholic slowness belying its erotic power. The music progresses in a series of cadences like telegraph poles in a road movie. Roberts (NZ) and Hewitt & Knowles, probe the moment when a sequence of inchoate sounds resolves into a musical genre and where feeling is triggered into consciousness to envelop the experiencing subject.

Lastly, the Swiss Australian Collectibles, an ensemble of Swiss and Australian performers and mixers—3 on stage and 3 at the desk—play a variety of percussion instruments and flute. Their lyrical, sculpted work is grounded in percussion writing of many genres, suggesting influences from Xenakis to Taiko, which is then electronically mediated and laced with recorded sound to produce a dense overlay. In one piece, a disembodied female voice dances between the loudspeakers at each corner of the room, her breathy lyrics floating teasingly above the percussion. The listener is torn between trying to recognise words, sounds and musical forms and simply experiencing them.

Evident in all 3 performances is the adroit mediation of a sound or musical form whose transformation creates an independent sonic element that is then folded back into the mix. The musicians balance the degree of mediation and mixing within frameworks of popular musical genres to produce unique montages. The aesthetic potential of such work is in the skilled orchestration of effects that appeal both musically and sonically. The listener listens through the music and becomes absorbed in the processes of listening and interpretation and in the nature of sound itself.

Liquid Architecture 7, artistic director Nat Bates; Dotmov, Old Melbourne Gaol, July 13; Arts House, July 1

For the electro-acoustic cross-media artists participating in the Australasian Computer Music Conference 2006, the term ‘computer music’ sits about as comfortably as most did in their conference chairs.

Conducted at the Elder Conservatorium of Music in the University of Adelaide, this ambitious and artful event housed a range of workshops, concerts and installations covering everything from experimental audiovisual club-technologies to gene splicing.

The title and theme of the conference, Medi(t)ations, refers to the capacity of computer-related technologies to act as the carrier and/or location for reflecting upon creative events. In a paper titled “Computers, Music and Intermedia: (Re)(Trans)lation”, one of the key coordinators of the conference, Christian Haines, posited that computational technology—as a translator of information from knowledge into data—has the power to liberate information from perceptual and cultural biases intrinsic to the entanglement of media/messaging. He illustrated this by describing the process of opening up an audio file in image manipulation software such as Adobe Photoshop or, vice versa, a JPEG image into audio editing software. Recognisable representations—such as a photo of a pet dog, a sample of Debussy’s Footsteps in the Snow—have been converted into data patterns that are open for interpretation, or retranslation: a means of stripping an image or sound to its essential components so that it may freely pass across perceived media boundaries and in turn, redefine them.

A similar sentiment was evident in the opening keynote address from artist and writer Mitchell Whitelaw, senior lecturer from the School of Creative Communication at the University of Canberra. He discussed an increasing trend across electro-acoustic and audiovisual artforms (VJ-ing for example) towards a synthetic version of neurological synaesthesia. Our unique form of survival is predicated upon the ability to recognise complex patterns. On a perceptual level, our brains tend to dole out little electro-chemical sherbet pops of pleasure when we can produce a recognisable pattern from what at first appears to be raw, chaotic ‘data.’ This “Aha!” or epiphany, is a part of what perceptual theorists call Gestalt Theory. As an example Whitelaw presented a well-known image that is credited to RC James of what at first glance appears to be a sea of black and white blobs. Further scrutiny flips an optical switch to reveal a Dalmatian sniffing across a floor covering of leaves, or perhaps dappled light. Once seen, the Dalmatian cannot be unseen, a perceptual process Whitelaw refers to as “perceptual binding.”

Most of the conceptual and technological approaches discussed in the course of the Medi(t)ations conference were connected in some way to those artists who have developed a range of creative technologies that mimic the neurological phenomena of “cross-modal” perceptual binding. Here the melding of 2 or more senses (such as aural and visual) generates the subjective experience of illumination. Audiovisual club and live performance technologies released over the last decade have become increasingly adept at simulating neurological synaesthesia. Several of these were played at Earpoke, a series of satellite performances presented at the Jade Monkey club and curated by Michael Yuen. Earpoke was an opportunity for local and international guests to share their wares: Adelaide performance artists such as Darren Curtis, DJ Trip, Iain Dalrymple and Supaphatass teamed up with VJ Sustenance.

Putting a number of elegant theories into practice, audiovisual laptop duo, Klipp AV (Swedish for ‘cut apart’) played an enigmatic suite of polyrhythmic grooves that charmed the senses and confused the dancers. During their keynote address, Sweden’s Fredrik Olofsson and Nick Collins discussed a variety of performance tools and techniques that enabled them to capture, remix and play fresh samples of live audio and video in any given environment. Put simply, the set-up consists of one laptop with a DV camera dedicated to live video capture and mixing, and one laptop and microphone dedicated to capturing and processing live and sampled sound. The performance is played out through in-house speakers and data projectors.

Taking a geek-peek backstage is an entirely different matter. This is the place where poetry, musicianship and computational processing arrive in a different costume each night and improvise. Using a complex combination of algorithmic splicing and ‘on-the-fly’ trans-coding, the movements of dancers (or anything really) can be filmed, edited and remixed in real time. This collage of real time imagery may also flow back to inform the nature of the audio. Nick Collins suggested that the potential for working with dancers could add a rich dimension for collaborations in the future. Of course, the level of sophistication that goes into the programming and mapping of Klipp AV’s live performances would amount to very little if it wasn’t for their consummate stagecraft, enabling the duo to make entertaining and aesthetic decisions in response to the fluctuating moods of audience and venue.

Whilst artists such as Klipp AV are emphatic that live performance is the most important element of their work (they don’t record any of their events), the archiving of much electro-acoustic work, according to composer Peter McIlwain, is problematic for several reasons. He analysed common methods for composing electronic or computer-based works, making the excellent point that, unlike traditional musical composition, there is no universal language for annotating and transposing these works. The difficulty in preserving them is heightened further by the level of technological redundancy.

A huge array of tentatively related subjects emerged in the conference and workshops. Many sessions were dedicated to A-Life, or generative programming, as a means of introducing chance elements into an artwork or musical composition. Pierre Proske’s installation, Synchronised Swamp, uses customised software to mimic the phenomena of natural synchronisation—such as pendulum swinging at different rates falling into the same tempo—or in the case of his installation, the dynamic coupling of bird chirps and frog croaks.

Gordon Monro’s Evochord is an evolutionary breeding program of colour and semitones based on a genetic algorithm. Each semitone has a colour according to low, intermediate and high pitching. The dominant colours and sounds that emerge are those that sound the same semitone and colour together in the greatest numbers, resulting in a chord. Each cycle of Evochord is different, due to the random way in which the chord mutates over a variety of pre-determined time scales.

Whilst many of the sessions were theoretically and technically dense, the applications of tools and methods discussed were at times subversively humorous. Rene Wooller’s research into live electronic and automatic music technologies lead to the eventual development of the Morpheus project. Morpheus is the musical equivalent of digital image morphing software, whereby 2 images are used as source material, with the transition from one image to another plotted and then animated into a morphing sequence. Morphing has become increasingly popular through decades of turntabling and remixing. Wooller’s masterful design is a playful experimentation with the potential affect on the ear (and in live performance) of streamlining these transitions. In a conference presentation he closed with a jocular suggestion that such morphing technology could be used to meld the national anthems of warring nations, perhaps at the Olympic games.

In a poetic reference to intermedia and trans-coding, performance artist Catherine Fargher, with composer Terumi Narushima, delivered an entertaining and intelligently subversive paper/performance called “Evolution, Mutation & Hybridity: the influence of Biotechnology Practices in the Development of Chromosome Knitting.” (See Shady Cosgrove, “Knit two together”). Advances in technology and science have often been beta-tested in terms of household consumption. Fargher explains chromosome complexities in a demonstration one might witness in a supermarket or on a home shopping channel. Whilst knitting a quaint crocheted chromosome, ostensibly from lab-acquired genetic material she keeps in her fridge, Fargher is accompanied by composer Narushima producing an ingenious score based upon musical translations from genetic coding and knitting patterns. For artists such as Fargher, the future of artistic cross-modality is perhaps in nanna-technology.

ACMC06, Australian Computer Music Conference, Elder Conservatorium, University of Adelaide, July 11-13

Just under one year after it opened the Sydney gallery Pelt closed its doors. Instigated by Caleb K, Peter Blamey and William Noble the gallery had an agenda to “engage in the broad area of sound and sound & visual practices”, and over the last 10 months it has had back to back exhibitions (21 in total) by emerging and established artists. It was also the new home for the impermanent.audio series of sound performances. Caleb K has decided to end these as well.

In a fitting homage the final exhibition featured the photographs of Mr Snow who has dedicatedly documented impermanent.audio since its inception 6 years ago. Often taken in low light, his portraits of local and international artists in performance take ghostly forms, faces obscured by shadows or overblown by the otherworldly glow of computer screens. For an artform often disparaged for its lack of performativity and physical gesture, Mr Snow’s images capture the internal dynamism, the absolute absorption and focus of these artists. They also reflect the sense of communal concentration present in an audience on a good night.

In addition to the final exhibition, there were 4 nights of performances. I managed to catch a smattering of artists across the last 2 nights. The highlight was the audiovisual set by Robbie Avenaim. Seated behind a percussion kit armed with various vibrating devices, Avenaim starts with a surprisingly deep, resonant drone. He is accompanied by a screen divided in 4 onto which he systematically introduces live images from video cameras focused in extreme close-up on his instruments. The images are intriguing in their abstraction—the extreme concentration on one part obscuring the understanding of the whole—and also disturbingly visceral, reminiscent of medical imaging, or the strange gelatinous creatures that live deep below the sea. The relationship between image and sound is totally symbiotic. We’re seeing the rich resonances and vibrations yet the images are more than just illustrative of the process; they’re strange and beautiful creations in themselves. I hope Avenaim continues this fascinating exploration.

The final night kicked off with Will Guthrie combining junk percussion with reeling feedback and random radio tunings. While the feedback instigated by the miked percussion is occasionally unwieldy, it draws the percussive elements together into a chunky mass of sound, a kind of apocalyptic clamour.

Ivan Lysiak followed with his distinctive lo-fi, crunchy beat approach. The opening sample of a crowd with high noise to signal ratio eventually morphs into an ominous, dirty throbbing with heavy panning making it seem as though we are in the middle of a static storm. Having only seen Lysiak play short sharp sets, it was great to hear this sustained, longer composition.

Fittingly the final set of the evening and of impermanent.audio was by Julian Knowles with Donna Hewitt. As well as being an inspiring artist, Knowles is a key motivator behind much of Sydney’s sound culture. Working away at the intersection between pop and experimental audio tonight he begins ambiently, building to deep satisfying beats which teasingly slip away. He combines his sounds into multiple layers, rich and complex but never overcrowded. Part way through the set Donna Hewitt joins in on her e-mic—an intereactive microphone stand interface that allows her to process vocals live. Here the pop influence rises closer to the surface as Hewitt’s velvety voice pines and purrs, fractured, delayed and panned by strokes, caresses and sways of the stand. And just before the neighbours’ noise complaints can kick in, it’s all over.

So after a few frenzied years of activity (not only from impermanent.audio but other independent curators as well), what does the future hold? With recent council crack downs on performance events in galleries, and general apathy for the experimental from licenced bars and pubs, there is a significant absence of venues. Combined with limited sustainable funding and the difficulty of maintaining audience numbers it is not surprising that event producers are feeling less energetic. While festivals like Liquid Architecture and the Now now are growing in scope and are well attended, the major concern is about the absence of regular events like impermanent.audio that enable artists to develop a practice, rather than just turning it on once a year. In this respect Caleb K has made a significant contribution to sound culture, particularly in Sydney but also nationally. While it is disheartening to watch an era wane, we can only hope that it’s a temporary pause allowing for regeneration and re-invigoration in artists, producers and audiences.

Mr Snow, Camera Notes, impermanent.audio 2000/06, Pelt Gallery, Aug 10-20; impermanent.audio, Pelt Gallery, Aug 19-20, 24-25

Ensemble Offspring concerts are never less than educational and often inspirational. Whirlwind of Time instructively and entertainingly follows on from the ensemble’s 2002 Portrait of Kaija Saariaho (RT 50, p 9), the Finnish composer being one of the inheritors, in part, of ‘spectralism’ from founders, French composers Tristan Murail and Gérard Grisey. Spectralism’s sensory focus is on overtones and the waves of their unfolding, inspiring the late Grisey to reflect on the nature of time and the differences between human time and that of other species. The music can sound familiarly mid-20th century modernist but also generates passages of ethereal beauty liberated from fundamentals or achieving strange transcendant harmonies. Occasionally, in its pulsing, it shares certain qualities with a parallel musical movement, minimalism.

For Christopher Tonkin’s IN (2005), Claire Edwardes created myriad resonances from a bass drum using fingers, spit, billiard ball, sticks and wire brush. Rustled against a microphone and then played on the drumskin, the brush yielded a Xenakian human-cum-insect chatter. In this appealing sonic adventure electronic sounds (Tonkin) were triggered by Edwardes and included samples from the drum’s interior as well as a fragmented reading of a Gertrude Stein text. Damien Rickertson’s Ptolemy’s Onion (1998), for string quartet and bass flute, conducted by Roland Peelman, commenced as a high whispering, vibrating reverie for flute and falsetto violin and moved into glides and shudders before taking a more formal quartet shape, then advancing into a delicate high strung keening, a melancholy cello-ing and a final cooing solo from the flautist on recorder. A commentary on classical conceptions of the relationship between music and cosmology, Rickertson’s richly textured piece is more complex than I can describe here. Gerard Grisey’s Vortex Temporum (1994-96) for a small ensemble of strings, flute, clarinet and piano is even more challenging to describe from its almost minimalist beginning (fast arpeggios, pulsing strings) to its subsequent soaring chord mutations, various wave patternings and piano dramatics played to a growling cello. A funereal piano is then joined by the ensemble in a rising gentle wave, an upward ride that is quite hypnotic. A final, sudden high ensemble pulsing leads the way to a quiet end. A magical work, but requiring more than one hearing. Grisey’s not easy to find on CD, but his large scale Les espaces acoustiques (1976-85) is on Accord CD 465 386-2. Rachel Campbell’s program notes for the concert are a valuable guide to the intricacies of these works and should be posted on the ensemble’s website.

All the impulses of all the media were fed into the circuitry of my dreams. One thinks of echoes. One thinks of an image made in the image and likeness of images.

The art of Peter Hennessey has powerfully examined the media-saturated events and phenomena that have inscribed themselves upon his and our memories and dreams. Deploying the most commonplace of materials (plywood, galvanised steel hinge, canvas), Hennessey has produced bold, arresting and intricate sculptures based on subject matter which is familiar, even infamous, but physically inaccessible.

In exhibitions such as Repercussions (2004) in Adelaide, Proof (2004-05), My Moon Landing (2005) in Melbourne, and My Voyager (2005) in Perth, Hennessey has showcased stunning, life-size re-productions of military and aeronautic artefacts imbued with symbolic, historical and political resonance. My Ikara (2004), for example, is a 4-metre high plywood and steel rendition of an Ikara missile manufactured by the Australian military and tested at Woomera. The imposing, pistol-shaped sculpture is symbolic of both Woomera's troubled history and the broader anxieties surrounding national security. Conversely, the sprawling, satellite-dish-like structure of My Voyager is modelled on NASA's Voyager 2 space probe, which was launched in 1977 to contact extra-terrestrial life. Here, Hennessey adopts the theme of communicating with aliens in order to interrogate the treatment of foreigners in our own communities.The motivating force behind these and other works is Hennessey's ongoing fascination with what he calls “the 'physicalisation' of things that are only virtually accessible to us.” Hence his preference for objects which “have a large presence in the world: they exist as memories of televised images or via a multitude of representations like the echoes of a clear, sharp sound.” Accordingly, his structures are conceived with the purpose of enabling the viewer “to have a physical experience of the object while still being able to experience the absence of the thing.”

These concerns are realised through a rigorous, labour-intensive aesthetic: the use of computer-design software, 3-dimensional models and laser cutting technology to painstakingly design and assemble a 1:1 scale version of objects that initially exist as images sourced from the internet.

Hennessey's austere aesthetic is elegantly honed and refined in muscular, mixed-media works such as My Mission Control (the act of observation changes the object observed) (2005), a sharp, clinical re-staging of the NASA control desk that monitored the flight and lunar activity of the Apollo 11 astronauts. However, rather than broadcasting the footage of that historic mission, the bulky, blocky buttons, stationary dials, corky controls and slim screens on Hennessey's control desk transmit footage of his own, studio-based, makeshift lunar-stroll, My Moonwalk (Fourteen Kilograms) (2005).

Watching the DVD recording of the artist as a gangly, gallivanting spaceman, my mind reverberates with sound bites and ballads affiliated with the Apollo 11 mission. I recall a legendary astronaut's crackled, metallic, lunar greeting, followed by the lachrymose lyrics of a certain star-dusted Space Oddity: “Houston, Tranquillity Base here, The Eagle has landed” (Armstrong); “Take your protein pills and put your helmet on/Ground Control to Major Tom” (Bowie).

Hennessey's slick, skilful synthesis of sculpture and simulation in My Mission Control… reinforces the ghostly, televisual character of the moon landing, and its political import as a globally broadcast spectacle. If the majority of Hennessey's works to date have been concerned with furnishing physical re-enactments of virtual phenomena, then the artist's most recent offering at Greenway Art Gallery entitled My NICU (I am always amazed how something so small can be so big) (2006), marks a subtle shift in perspective.

My NICU… – the acronym stands for Neonatal Intensive Care Unit – is Hennessey's answer to an environment which, he remarks, “one could possibly access but in truth would rather not.” Indeed, from a distance, Hennessey's eerie, intimidating installation appears to have been prised from the grimy ward of some forsaken, contaminated clinic. In the centre of a confined gallery space, under a dim, dingy light, a Draeger incubator is flanked by, and affixed to, a plethora of infusion pumps, drips, ventilators and monitoring systems.

Conventionally, a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit is a considerably humid and highly controlled space, specifically calibrated to maintain the requisite skin and body temperature of prematurely-born infants, and to sustain their breathing and nutrition through the intravenous administration of oxygen, fluids and nutrients. In stark contrast, Hennessey's version of this synthetic, life-sustaining space-constructed from plywood, steel, graphite and silicone, then coated in wax is cold, ominous and unsettling. The bleak lighting, the cool, tomb-like setting, and the scumbled and scrawled surfaces of the installation evoke a formidable scene of abandonment, infirmity and trepidation: harsh, corroded and sinister. Hennessey is a new father. My NICU… is a haunting and disquieting interpretation of a profoundly emotive space which he believes “crystallises the anxiety and even fear that comes with anything precious.”

Although considerably more intimate and poignant in tone and character, Hennessey's latest work is in keeping with his previous accomplishments in its ongoing commentary on the ironic character of contemporary existence: our unfounded faith in, and apprehensive reliance upon, the media, science and technology.

Peter Hennessey, My NICU (I am always amazed how something so small can be so big), 2006, Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide, June 28-July 23

Staged in the round with mezzanine seating providing an aerial view of the action, Special Mention pumps its audience pre-show with a “We will rock you”-type riff, the atmosphere similar to a sporting match. Flyers on the seats read, “Keen to succeed? Afraid of failure? Call our hotline now! 1-300-SUCCESS”. The pressure is present and pulsating in this first work from Sydney youth dance group danceTank, commissioned by the Sydney Opera House with Critical Path, and directed by Luke George and Bec Reid of Launceston's Stompin Youth.

The music accelerates. A burst of intense white light blinds the audience. A mix of live and amplified clapping, whistling and cheering builds to a climax as the performers enter in single file, jogging in sync. In shades of military green and black they run a lap around the audience before descending to the stage where, with energy and precision, they execute a routine that captures the mood of a techno dance party whilst suggesting the relentless physical and mental focus involved in training. The quest for success is constantly likened to the rigours of sport.

Light magically divides the space into a grid in and around which the dancers perform until interrupted by the frustrated scream of a fellow dancer who has just made a mistake. Forced to start again and again, the performers repeat the sequence, running, jumping, helping, falling… but now the pace is relentless, the anguished dancer left behind.

Large ensemble moments are juxtaposed pleasingly with solo ones. Under an intense central spotlight, a microphone is slowly lowered from above, past the the lips of a performer forced to bend and twist lyrically, even comically, in order to be heard. The physical struggle echoes his agonising over choices and when to “seize the day.” As the microphone ascends, the performer jumps after it, words disjointedly amplified, leaving us with a powerful image of failed striving.

Now in blue and white sports outfits with coloured sashes-and one performer in gold-the dancers perform an award ceremony. But the supportive applause and praise dwindles into forced sporadic clapping. Within seconds glory is transformed into isolation. Under an intense spot, the deserted dancer resorts to sit-ups.

A series of photographic tableaux of significant life moments (catching a large fish, giving birth, proposing) confirm the pressures of social ritual but do not achieve the intensity or clarity realised in the dance sequences.

The abrupt conclusion, with a largely incomprehensible text yelled through a megaphone to a 'machine gun' soundtrack, suggested that competition is a manic state of stress, confusion and struggle.

Special Mention's energetically explosive style kept the audience grappling with the forces that drive us through life. The production was largely successful, however more effective theatricality in some scenes and conviction in text-based moments would have ensured a more consistently engaging work.

For Special Mention, Reid, George, sound designer Bernie Tan, composer Luke Smiles and apprentice choreographer Lisa Griffiths brought together 21 dancers aged 14-26, with the long term ambition of making danceTank on ongoing venture. It looks promising.

Kathleen Mary Fallon’s Buyback: three boongs in the kitchen offers broad insights into Australian race relations, but its origins lie in a place common to us all: the kitchen.

Rhodadendron is foster mother to the physically and mentally damaged Torres Strait Islander, Jimmy. It’s a Queensland Christmas of Christianity and Anzac biscuits, and Rhoda has returned to the parental home to spend the festive season with her folks: post- traumatic Theodolite and family matriarch ‘Sparkling Shirley’.

Palm trees above a black and white tiled floor hint at a ‘paradise’ underpinned by a history of racial violence-territory similarly charted in Ross Gibson’s 2002 book, Seven Versions of an Australian Badland. Rhoda’s good intentions in fostering the manic and unpredictable Jimmy have not taken into account the consequences of adopting a disabled Torres Strait Islander, or her own subconscious motives in doing so. It soon becomes apparent that Rhoda’s rebelliousness toward her white Australian upbringing has expressed itself in the adoption. Wrestling with love, guilt and an ingrained colonialism, Rhoda is set to explode.

Jimmy’s siblings arrive: sister Dolly and the iconoclastic Dennis. When the inevitable occurs, the fallout is less melodramatic, and more paradigmatic. Fallon’s script straddles a cultural historical tripwire-from Kanak labour importation and Stolen Generations to Theodolite’s childhood fear of “the boong in the back paddock” and its sublimation in the Anzac myth. From nowhere, a mythology emerges: a curious blend of Aboriginal dreaming and left of centre cultural theory, emphasising an indeterminate imagination and its essential pluralism, personified by Dolly’s tribal dance and her performance of a birdman myth. But Buyback… is also a play about absent mothers, and when it is revealed that Jimmy’s natural mother has died, without an opportunity to see her son, a most disturbing incident occurs.

The linking of Jimmy’s mother’s spirit and her presence in the kitchen with the entrance of a black transvestite Santagram was a moment only obtainable in the theatre. Was it perhaps indicative of something unresolved in the writing or a nuance requiring a swift lighting change or a defining shift in space to underline its presence and articulate its meaning? What it did confirm was that because of our individual values, the tales we have heard and the tales we want to tell, and our resulting cultural differences, we are all guests in this house. Unlike Theodolite, who builds a bunker out of fruitcake, Buyback’s pluralist script and courageous performances dismantle the walls that divide us and show how, with its messy and violent history, Australia has become a culture partly in denial. Plays set in kitchens, absent mothers and a history of bloody colonialism: you can’t live with them, you can’t live without them.

See also Keith Gallasch’s review of Call Me Mum, the Margot Nash film of Buyback.

Buyback: three boongs in the kitchen, writer, director Kathleen Mary Fallon, performers Dayne Christian, David Captain, Shiralee Williams Hood, Barry Webster, Sky Lilly Simpson, Marie-Therese Byrne, Ronald Johnson, set & lighting Bevan Vahland, Michelle Dunn, musicians Ricardo Idagi, Henry Phianesa, producer: James Adler, Eagle’s Nest Theatre, La Mama, Melbourne, Aug 30-Sep 17

Predecessor to Brecht and often uncredited founder of epic theatre, Erwin Piscator is cited as an influence on The Habib Show, about former Guantanamo Bay inmate Mamdouh Habib. Piscator's celebrated style of documentary theatre should be the ideal medium for unravelling Habib's nightmare, but is not evident in this confused and very selective work.
The Habib Show, Dana Miltins, Terry Kenwrick

The Habib Show, Dana Miltins, Terry Kenwrick

Ten minutes before the audience enters the auditorium, amplified voices are heard, belonging to participants in a Parliamentary inquiry. Representatives of the Australian Federal Police and ASIO are grilled by an unseen politician. The usual probing questions asked in a sophisticated tone of moral indignation are deflected by those wishing to conceal their unusual activities. Why was Habib a person of interest in the investigation of alleged terrorist activity? How was it that Australia's security system oversaw Habib's 6-month disappearance without knowing his whereabouts? If he was subject to the US policy euphemistically labelled 'rendition' and shipped off to Egypt, how could it be that an AFP officer observed Habib's alleged torture by electric shock and the threat of bestiality? Most importantly, if Habib was an innocent sourcing Islamic schooling for his children while in Pakistan, how did he end up among the “worst of the worst” in Guantanamo Bay? These are serious questions that suggest a serious abuse of human rights despite Australia's professed commitment to the rule of law implicit in Western democracy. Yet the tone in which these questions is addressed, interspersed by a chilling sound design of high voltage human screaming, is burlesque, highly emotive, subjective and not documentary.

Part of the problem surrounding the myth that has accumulated around Mamdouh Habib is that no-one is interested in the truth. The populist media can't be taken seriously and the Australian government is well aware that by associating Habib with Al Qaeda, his name will be forever tainted. Habib himself, for understandable reasons, is intent on playing the victim. The well-meaning makers of The Habib Show have a passionate commitment to human rights, but their judgement is blurred by the ghastly treatment it is alleged Habib received.

What is required is a documentary theatre with the capacity to articulate the complexity of the forces at play surrounding the treatment of Mamdouh Habib. Simple expressions of love and pain, although heart-wrenching, are not convincing. Neither is placing these in a framework of mockery. What of the documented statements by members of the Islamic community that Habib was suspected of working for ASIO? Was there evidence to substantiate these claims, or like the dubious statements of shockjocks, politicians and security agencies, were they tactics employed to erode the man's credibility? Audiences require conflicting evidence in order to reach unexpected conclusions about Habib, his treatment by the Australian government, the frightening policy of rendition, and the complicity of our bureaucracy. Otherwise, Mamdouh Habib appears only as a gentle man of passionate religious conviction trapped in circumstances beyond his control, or a radical Islamist the Australian government has succeeded in portraying as a threat to national security, or the enigmatic, self-seeking persona that the populist media has created for him. Ultimately, this offers nothing more than an extension of the myth. Others may disagree, but this should never be the resolve of documentary theatre.

There was gutsy work in The Habib Show from performers working in difficult terrain. Dana Miltins' coy, ironic and subversive prostitute was a standout. But design was the star of the show; always suggestive of the labyrinth that surrounds Habib, an element not so strongly present in other aspects of the show.

The Habib Show, writer, director Gorkem Acaroglu, performers Serge de Nardo, Georgina Nadiu, Terry Kenwrick, Dana Miltins, design Jacquie Lee, lighting John Ford, projections Ian de Gruchy, dramaturg Peter Eckersall, Theatreworks, Melbourne, Aug 31-Sep 17

One of life’s stranger experiences in recent months was to be part of a large Saturday afternoon crowd guided by photographer Roger Ballen through his show at Stills. First, there’s Ballen himself—a tall, langorous, baritonal American with a South African edge to the accent. Then there’s his calculatedly gnomic manner—he peppers basic information about his life with rhetorical questions meant to deny us easy answers to the mysteries of his work. Thirdly, there are the photographs—eerily akin to images from the work of theatre director Romeo Castelluci in their juxtaposition of human and animal bodies, drawings, sculptural and everyday objects, conjuring a very strange, sometimes visionary otherness. One-time geologist Ballen progressed from documentary photography in the 1980s in South Africa (knocking on the doors of small town householders and asking to come in and shoot) to spending many months with the impoverished of Johannesburg in an underworld of damp basements where humans and animals co-exist and a curious creativity abounds which Ballen captures. The outcomes sometimes look like pure artifice, but the best have a spontaneity at once theatrical and documentary in their courage to face the abject point blank and reveal its complexities. KG

In Anxious Bodies curator and artist Matthew Perkins sets out to establish an historical continuum between past and present performance and video practices, and to question the relation between body and self. The works reveal how anxiety can become an instrument of expression and influence conscious actions. Black and white videotapes of performances from earlier decades by Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci and Dennis Oppenheim suggest the legitimacy of the form. Video has become part of performance itself as well as a means for recording ephemeral works.

In his own work, Prick, Perkins draws blood as he makes small holes in 2 clay moulds with needles sharpened at both ends held in his mouth. The projection of the performance is split across juxtaposed screens building the illusion that the artist is moving the pins from one to the next. Reminiscent of and as palpably disturbing as the work of Mike Parr, the work invites sadistic pleasure in the artist's masochistic determination to move all the pins.

Agony and exhaustion also figure in Annie Wilson's In Your Own Time. Against a black background a man falls and bounces with no apparent pattern. The sound, however, dramatically evokes heartbeats until the man collapses, the screen darkens and the jumping commences once again–a constant, cyclic fight with our own anxiety.

Briele Hansen's Where suggests the ambiguities of presence and absence and public and private spheres. A human figure is rear-projected on a frosted glass door. The viewer's voyeuristic curiosity increases inexorably in the attempt to discover what is happening behind the glass. The tension rises to a climax when the ghostly presence reaches for the door and the shape of its hand is beautifully outlined as it touches the glass. So skilful is the illusion that the viewer expects the presence to traverse the liminal barrier and connect, as Anne Marsh suggests in her catalogue essay.

The dynamism of Hansen's work contrasts with the stillness of Alex Martinis-Roe and Amy Miller's video installation, The Drawing Room, where the artists stare at length at the viewer from a large screen. In the second part of the installation a performance is projected into a picture frame, ironically establishing a more conventional viewer/painting relationship. Sue and Phil Dodd's video performance, Gossip Pop, tackles the theme of anxiety in a wily way. The artists' songs draw on rumours about pop idols. Rather than addressing anxiety directly, they choose to ridicule the 'consumerist' answer to it: trash pop culture.

Anxious Bodies generated curiosity, perplexity, distress and numbness as artists engaged forcefully with their bodies, pushing me to face my own anxieties against today's omnipresent tide of rationalism. Definitely not a show for control freaks!

Anxious Bodies, curator Matthew Perkins, Linden St. Kilda Centre for Contemporary Arts, Melbourne, June 3-July; Plimsoll Gallery University of Tasmania, Hobart, June 2007.

The Hive is an adaptation by Nicholas Vines of Sam Sejavka’s play The Hive about the death in 1915 and posthumous fame of the Bloomsbury Group poet Rupert Brooke. The 1990 play was much lauded when it first appeared, winning the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Drama. Judging by the libretto for this version, the play is a wordy work, full of sharp exchanges and potent commentary. The opera takes the form of a series of vignettes that capture key moments from the death of the poet during World War I through to World War II, when England was again at war and the memory of Brooke was enlisted to encourage patriotic duty. Sejavka himself declares in the program note that his real concern is with ‘media hype’, the exploitation of the memory of Brooke for political purposes; a lesson that still has much to offer.

Chambermade’s production is for an intimate space–small stage, no wings, simple, well-chosen props–hat focuses on the performers’ delivery of the text. The backdrop is a clear plastic sheet with a green (starboard?) light behind, giving the setting an unworldly feel. The 5 performers, 4 of whom take multiple roles, are elaborately costumed, providing cues to their identities and the eras in which the action is set. The opera opens with the performers as crew members observing Brooke’s body on board the ship where he died, aged 27, dirging “Rupert Brooke is dead, Rupert Brooke is dead!” and hailing him as a fallen hero. “He died for his country”, they cry, mourning not only his demise but also the manner of it: “an insect bite, what a meagre end…” The blood poisoning induced by a mosquito bite was sometimes downplayed in the publicity surrounding his death. His so-called war sonnets were championed, and Winston Churchill in particular wrote an obituary that offered Brooke as a patriotic inspiration. At regular intervals the deceased rises from his gurney to soliloquise, at one point intoning: “I am a dead man but I suspect I have more living to do in the minds of men and nations.”

We meet publishers discussing the release of Brooke’s private papers, the executors of his estate, his friends and former lovers, including Bloomsbury Group members conducting a séance to try to contact his spirit. Insects permeate the work; Brooke was fascinated by them, hence the irony of his death, hence the opera’s title. Characters entering the drama create a kind of hive of activity around his memory.

In contrast to much other opera, The Hive is cerebral, discursive and philosophical rather than romantic or dramatic. Passages of involved discussion are periodically interrupted by Brooke rising and abruptly clapping his hands (as if killing an insect), slapping a book, declaring his observations. In the séance scene, the performers chorus, “Thank you, friend, thank you, friend!” while pondering his life, deeds and misdeeds. They query his sexuality, “Does he prefer man or woman?” and “Did he take Virginia?” Woolf rejects these claims with a melancholy reply, “Spirits can lie like the rest of us.” They analyse his poetry, his former lover Noel wailing. “Rupert, you confuse love with lust.” Those exploiting and judging him reveal themselves.

Vines’ score is fresh, lyrical and suitably edgy, ably supporting the unfolding dialogue. Using just two keyboard players, on synthesisers and a piano, his music is eclectic, flavoured with Romantic and contemporary styles to characterise particular moments. Well-known musical forms—a piece for organ at Brooke’s funeral and later the piano accompanied by a synthesised/sampled sound of a cello in salon style—build atmosphere. Douglas Horton’s direction emphasises the text and its interplay with the score. The actors’ movements on stage are economical, focussing attention instead on the aural elements. Baritone Simon Meadows creates a strong, introspective Brooke who is engaged, through an ongoing dialogue with his various acolytes, in an analysis of self and the world. As an opera, The Hive is a work with great potential, though sung lyrics can be difficult to interpret making the nuances of the text, and even the narrative itself, somewhat elusive.

Chambermade, The Hive, writer Sam Sejavka, composer Nicholas Vines, director Douglas Horton, performers Ben Logan, Sally Wilson, Anna Margolis, Simon Meadows, Arts House, Meat Market, Melbourne, Aug 23-Sept 10

In July more than 300 members of the International Planetarium Society assembled in Melbourne for their 18th biennial conference, the first to be held in the Southern Hemisphere, to see the latest dome productions, listen to a wide range of papers and presentations by full-dome experts, compare alternative projection systems and put an interactive simulation of the known universe through its paces.

The crackling sound of electricity fills the void of the planetarium theatre as countless sparks of reddish light ignite, arcing and discharging across the dome. Now the whole screen lights up as the all-enveloping soundtrack grows louder and more frenetic. Electro-magnetic energy races like lightning along branching pathways forming the vast network of neurons with which we calculate each action and interpret every event. What first appeared to be a dynamic, circular, abstract work of art is actually a 3-dimensional representation of the human brain. The percussive, electronic soundtrack intensifies as we swim through the blood stream and enter the beating heart. Suddenly, everything stops. A moment later we skip dimensions and emerge outside the body of an astronaut far out in space looking down at the distant Earth.

Astronaut, the latest full-dome show from the National Space Centre in Leicester in the UK, received its world premiere in the Melbourne Planetarium as one of the highlights of IPS 2006. In less than 25 minutes, Astronaut takes you through the gruelling training program that astronauts endure and explains some of the dangers they face while conducting research on the international space station. Without a word of narration or any sign of text, the 4-minute prologue pins you to the seat, not so much because of the subject matter, story or the quality of the computer graphics, but rather the expansive continuity of the hemispherical screen, the strange fisheye perspective and the tactile sound environment all combining to transcend any conventional multiplex experience. Written and produced by Andy Gregory, Astronaut demonstrates how far the full-dome video medium has evolved in its first 10 years of technical and artistic development. The score is a series of short tracks by Pip Greasley, one of the UK’s most intriguing sonic artists. Combined with Will Penney’s highly original soundscape, just to hear Astronaut is well worth the price of admission.

In the second half of the show, Ewan MacGregor’s likable, deadpan narration becomes the foil for an hilarious animated sequence involving an evil scientist and a bunch of hapless astronauts all called Chad. Each replica of the rather blokey Chad is disposed of—to a catchy salsa beat—in a series of catastrophic experiments that serve to underline the potentially fatal nature of space exploration. Drawing inspiration from England’s theatrical and stop-motion animation traditions, Gregory and his team of designers and programmers at the NSC have taken full-dome storytelling to new heights by using cinema-in-the-round as a form of total entertainment based on solid, scientific facts.

The International Planetarium Society is the largest professional body of full-dome users in the world. IPS conferences are held every 2 years in different host cities, a movable feast of scientific visualisation technologies all focused on the dome. Digital video made its first tentative entry into the planetarium arena in Osaka at IPS 1996 when Japanese star projector manufacturers Goto demonstrated their advanced Virtuarium video projection system. At IPS 1998 in London, Sky-Skan unveiled the first full-dome video playback system heralding a new era of digital planetarium production.

Today, there are more than 200 full-dome theatres and hundreds of portable inflatable domes dotted all over the globe. Statistically, Australia has more dome theatres per capita than any other country. Creatively, it is making a contribution to full-dome’s on-going development in a number of significant ways. Brisbane was the first Australian city to acquire an immersive video system for its charming, medium-sized planetarium in March 2004. Soon after, the Scitech Discovery Centre’s Horizon Planetarium in Perth opened, equipped to produce immersive video in-house for their 6-projector video system. The Melbourne Planetarium has also successfully entered the full-dome market, producing several projects in fairly quick succession. Conveniently, all 3 Australian full-dome planetariums are equipped with similar Sky-Skan projection systems. Australian large-format film director John Weiley premiered Heart of the Sun, his latest full-dome at IPS 2006. An intimate, 20-minute portrait of the sun mostly shot on IMAX stock, it will screen for many years to come in major and minor planetariums around the globe.

Some of the leading projector manufacturers and practitioners of immersive cinema were at the conference. Ryan Wyatt, Science Visualiser at the Rose Centre for Earth and Space, headed a small team of representatives from the American Museum of Natural History. As well as chairing an entry-level, 2-part seminar called “Full-Dome 101”, he was also present as the principle producer of a stunning range of full-dome AMNH productions—Passport to the Universe, SonicVision, The Search for Life and Cosmic Collisions. Wyatt was the recipient of the Experimentation Domie award for his short hand-drawn full-dome work, Dome Sketch, at last year’s Domefest.

Domefest is the brainchild of David Beining, director of the Loadstar Astronomy Centre at the University of New Mexico, who was also at the conference. The festival attracts a wide range of entries in all full-dome genres, from interactive games and abstract animation to mind-boggling scientific visualisations and realtime simulations of complex data. The international jury’s selections in each category are showcased at Siggraph and licensed to dome theatres worldwide by Sky-Skan. Through global co-operation and the common desire to see the full-dome format reach its potential, the international planetarian community is at the forefront of immersive projection technology and a totally different way of engaging with the moving image.

International Planetarium Society, 18th Biennial Conference, Carlton Crest Hotel, Melbourne, July 23-27

Multimedia Art Asia Pacific (MAAP) was established to focus the ‘unmapped’ new media culture of the Asia Pacific. It has partnered organisations and governments in the region to produce festivals in Brisbane since 1996, in Beijing in 2002, Seoul 2003 and Singapore 2004. MAAP showcases the work of the region’s leading and emerging new media artists. MAAP in 2006 is titled Out of the internet, and is centred in the State Library of Queensland (a recognition of the growing importance globally of public libraries in net culture) and in partnership with a number of international partners. Eds.
Kaiju Noodles, part of Manhua Wonderlands

Kaiju Noodles, part of Manhua Wonderlands

Kim Machan, MAAP Artistic Director

This MAAP is shaped differently and draws on a small, tight group of artists and is focused more on the internet. The artists in Out of the internet have leveraged the internet in their work in some serious ways. They all have a long history with MAAP and I wanted to have an opportunity to develop a refined curatorial approach.

The first premise is how we might bring the work from the ethereal nature of the internet into a physical space. I wanted artists to consider the physicality of their online work. This idea comes from considering how internet art is treated in museums and galleries. I’d like to have the artists’ work acknowledged for its artistic authority by processing it into or through significant venues to enhance its ‘cultural capital.’ The curatorial architecture twists and grounds internet art simultaneously and self-consciously into place and context. There are partner venues including international museums and galleries and libraries, additional online projects, a symposium and lots happening here in Brisbane.

MAAP started way back in the golden days of the dot.coms. In 1997 there was an almost hysterical desire to have artists explore the new hard toys and software entering the general market. Those were the days when there was a different catchphrase for each year. In 1996 the buzz word was multimedia, 1997 interactivity, 1998 content is king, 1999 user is content. Well, it was something like that!

Those were heady days and somewhere back in 1997 there was a proactively guided collision (or collusion) of corporate, government, education and arts sectors to start up a media arts festival. Call it a coincidence, or an alignment of planets, there was a lot going on. From that initial support MAAP was able to organize and assert its own identity before the dot.com bubble burst in 2001.

As for new media and multimedia, everyone seems to get very concerned with definitions and changing meanings. I admit that I have had to tediously define and redefine these terms but, really, just let me say that the multimedia in MAAP was settled upon as the language likely to get us more cash sponsorship at the time. More importantly, it is a steadfast word that has a history in the visual arts. Our committee felt confident that if the IT handle wore out, the visual art meaning would pervade.

It started with the question of the next city in which to base MAAP. After MAAP in Singapore (2004) there was no obvious location. I had a core group of artists I wanted to work with and consulted them—each had a different preferred city. I changed my position: why did MAAP have to be in one city? Why not use the opportunity to try to get artists into their preferred situation? It became an enormous challenge, one that also worked into ideas I was formulating about the digital networks within Asia.

What’s the curatorial logic behind the fragmentation of the sites of MAAP?

The premise was inspired by Seth Siegelaub’s seminal exhibition July, August, September 1969 where he arranged 11 artists to show in 11 different locations around the world. [Siegelaub is an American curator and theorist who was closely engaged with conceptual art in the 1960s and 70s.] In transcripts from an interview [Alberro and Norvell, Recording Conceptual Art, 2001] he describes the useless nature of the museum space and challenges the New York-centric nature of the art world. He’s very excited about the speed of communication and expresses an interest in Jack Burnham’s theories of switching from an object-oriented to a systems-oriented society [US sculptor and theorist Burnham was writing about art and technology in the 60s and 70s, eg in Beyond Modern Sculpture, 1968]. In some respects I am putting to test the notion of working in reverse.

The artists in MAAP 2006 are working in the world through the internet already. I am shepherding the work back into taking a material form in the museum context, to achieve authority, blending the different fields in which they operate, and joining another official art history context. Making a representation of all the works in the State Library of Queensland adds another dimension—or escape route—out of the closed museum context.

Out of the internet then grafts onto the established library network through links on library home pages all over the world. It is a gigantic challenge and the project has many aspects that will have different levels of success. It is an elaborate sculptural curatorial form which is elaborated further with the Manhua Wonderlands project that heads into another direction with a series of street contexts.

The works in the exhibition Out of the internet (and into the night) have varying approaches to the internet: some are dependent on the physical form to create internet visualization (Charles Lim). Other works reconfigure the internet cinematically (Candy Factory, YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES). GPS technology is employed in another work (Feng Mengbo) to create the writing of Chinese characters through city streets. Stories and voices are uploaded and downloaded (Iain Mott)—the form is both an online and physically presented space.

In conjunction with Out of the Internet, New York's Museum of Modern Art will host a Candy Factory presentation in their MediaScope series; Iain Mott will exhibit in the Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai and Charles Lim in The Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; Feng Mengbo will create work in Singapore; and Out of the Internet coincides with a YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES' commission with Tate London. The process has been very involved. The idea was to secure a placement of each artist in a museum, thereby sharing a large exhibition load. However, museums have strict conventions that are difficult to subvert and I often felt like a curatorial contortionist, though it’s been a fascinating process to work through.

Highlights are usually artist-based moments—achieving something that helps an artist to realise something special. To see YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES become such an important artistic contributor to contemporary art after her initial artist residency with MAAP in 1999. To see Candy Factory achieve a project with MoMA. Working on MAAP in Beijing in 2002, was an amazing highlight and perhaps one of the most challenging, but perhaps Out of the internet might be my toughest to achieve, in the form I imagine it to work.

Thea Bauman: Curator, Manhua Wonderlands

Manhua Wonderlands curator Thea Baumann explains that the project “was developed to provide cross-cultural media arts education initiatives and exhibition opportunities for young people in urban, suburban, regional, and remote areas of Queensland. It also aims to create new audiences for media arts practice by exploring alternative spaces and models for exhibiting new media art forms”. These include:

Chromophonozone (see Dan MacKinlay on SOOB) is “a series of one night gatherings at the Don’t Tell Mama karaoke club in Brisbane’s Chinatown district. Artist Jemima Wyman transforms a room in the karaoke lounge into a stage for karaoke revellers who stumble into the space, don sequinned balaclavas and let loose in a series of uninhibited, semi-anonymous, anarchic, krumping-and-karaoke battles. The ‘happenings’ are documented and then fed back in situ into the club onto a 16-monitor wall creating instant karaoke film clips.”

Kaiju Noodles: “A cross-cultural collaborative hip hop video between video artist Sean Healy, Japanese MC Potato Master, musician Alan Nguyen and costume designer Madeleine King. The hip hop film clip is a kaiju monster battle and is filmed in urban spaces and in online simulations of urban spaces—at costume play and anime conventions; on and under bridges; construction sites; on trains; and in video game arcades, but also online, at Google Earth—all subtitled in Japanese and English.”

Karaoke Bedlam: “A fleeting, one-night-only event at the Don’t Tell Mama club in which invited artists take over a room in the club to explore karaoke pop culture as channelled through the lens of hallucination/augmented reality, mania and madness. Karaoke Bedlam incorporates site specific installations, projections, performances and uses the infrastructure already existing in the space [screenings on the monitors, sound works on the karaoke system] in the presentation of media art works”.

Van Sowerwine: Artist, Purikura Infestation

Purikura Infestation: Baumann describes this installation as an “Aliens-meets-Hello Kitty site-specific, collaborative installation of monstrous, tumorous creatures invading a sticker booth, and a stop-motion animation installed in a vinyl pod, exhibited in a sticker booth stall in Brisbane’s commercial shopping hub, Elizabeth Arcade.”

Purikura artist Van Sowerwine says she “got involved about a year ago…the project started off as part community development, and I liked the idea of running new media workshops for young people. Early this year I ran workshops with young women from Asian backgrounds on stop motion and drawn animation, focusing on ideas of virtual pets and Purikura (sticker booths). Through a partnership with the State Library of Queensland I also ran similar workshops for teachers in Brisbane and young artists and students in Cairns and Townsville. I found the workshops really rewarding, particularly the first set in Brisbane where I was able to open up a new set of skills to young artists already working in other media.

“Thea was also keen for me to develop new work, inspired by the workshops, to exhibit as part of Manhua Wonderlands at MAAP, and suggested I collaborate with another Brisbane artist, Alice Lang, to create a work exploring Purikura. It’s been great to have the opportunity to work with Alice. I moved here from Melbourne 18 months ago and this is the first collaboration I’ve done with a another Brisbane-based artist. It’s made me remember how much I enjoy collaboration—it can be so much more productive and rewarding than slogging along on your own!

“We’re creating a work that will be installed in the sticker booth shop in the Elizabeth St Arcade. It will be a mini-sticker booth, but quite strange and covered with bulbous forms. Inside is a strange character I made, watching an animation of itself on screen. The work is quite different aesthetically from Alice’s and my work, which is quite refreshing. It’s quite garish, with lots of bright colours that neither of us use in our work. We’ve worked on most of it together so I feel like it’s been quite a successful collaboration in that we’ve produced a single work together rather than simply putting 2 disparate practices side by side.”

Kim Machan is a founding member and artistic director of MAAP; Thea Baumann is a curator, new media artist and producer; Van Sowerwine is a filmmaker and installation artist.

MAAP: Out of the internet, artistic director Kim Machan, artists YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES (Seoul), Feng Mengbo (Beijing), Iain Mott (Australia), Candy Factory (Fukuoka, Japan), Charles Lim (Singapore); Manhua Wonderlands, curator Thea Baumann, artists Jemima Wyman, Van Sowerwine, Alice Lang, Luke Ilett, Sean Healy; State Library of Queensland and international partner venues, Nov 30 2006 – Jan 25 2007, www.maap.org.au

Lucy Guerin is showing 2 new works in the 2006 Melbourne International Arts Festival. A major new production, Structure and Sadness, about the collapse of Melbourne’s Westgate Bridge in 1970, receives its world premiere October 19. Setting is a duet made in Japan premiering in Australia on October 25 as a double bill with Japanese choreographer, Kota Yamazaki’s Chamisa 4degreesC (see p6). The double bill was instigated by the Australia Japan Dance Exchange (AJDX) and comprises 10 events in both countries in 2006. AJDX is co-ordinated by Hirano Productions in Melbourne and Japan Contemporary Dance Network in Kyoto. With 2 important contributions to the festival, Guerin’s status as one of Australia’s most important contemporary choreographers is confirmed. I spoke to her about the projects and the prospects for Lucy Guerin Inc.

I was away for 6 weeks and it was a really enjoyable experience. I was in Kyoto and Yamaguchi, presenting the work in both places. In Yamaguchi we were in a brand new arts centre which was fantastic.

Well, I think. The pieces are very different, and yet there are some similarities, so it worked as a double bill. Both choreographers ended up working with the experience of being in a foreign place.

I met him for a drink when he was over for the last Melbourne Festival. But he’s not that confident with his English, so we didn’t talk much. And this time we only chatted a little too.

Not at all, the productions are very separate. He made his here and I made mine in Japan. We auditioned our dancers separately. I’m working with a Japanese composer, Haco, but that has nothing to do with Yamazaki.

Yes, I think we both found our experience of each other’s country very foreign.

Actually I had been there with Russell Dumas and Becky Hilton when I was 22, on our way back from touring somewhere. But we weren’t performing, just looking at Kyoto and Tokyo, as part of our ‘education’ with Russell.

Not really. The 6 weeks were pretty intensive. We were in the studio for 4, producing for one and performing for another. I did have a bicycle though and loved riding around.

No, the piece was inspired by the dancers. I interviewed them on my first visit and Haco recorded the interviews to make a soundtrack, which then inspired the choreography and the props. The piece is made entirely from these external sources, which is new for me. Normally I make my work from an internal concern.

Yes, very risky. But I’ve done a few commissions and find that the context in which I end up working is often very different from what I was expecting. So if you arrive with too many plans and preconceptions, it can be hard to achieve what you had in mind. This time I decided to just head over there and respond to the situation and let the piece grow out of my experience rather than impose any pre-thought-out ideas. It was a lot more enjoyable. And terrifying too! This could really not have worked out.

When you’re making a commission you certainly feel responsible to the people who put the money and support behind it. There’s an extra pressure. But my last experience of a commission, in Rotterdam, was not so good and I didn’t want to repeat it. Why do these if they’re not worthwhile? I needed to question my whole way of approaching commissions.

And you have another piece in the festival to act as some sort of insurance.

Yes! The 2 pieces are a good balance. The Japanese piece is gentle, light-hearted. I was able to express a happier tone, because the Westgate piece is about a traumatic, disastrous event.

In some ways, yes. The main difference is that it grew out of research into an actual event, located in a specific place and time. How that has translated into dance is quite abstract however. I was interested in the way that large physical subject disintegrated. I read about the engineering forces that led to the collapse—compression support, tensile support, buckling and sheering—and applied these to the human body. I looked at how gravity affected the dancers’ movement. Whilst I didn’t do much research into the human stories, aside from the accounts of victims and witnesses, which are in the public domain, the emotional repercussions did naturally emerge. It also started out very specific but has become more universal and could be about any disaster now.

It’s new to have a set and digital projections together. I am working with Michaela French again on motion graphics and Bluebottle (Ben Cobham, Andrew Livingston) have constructed a beautiful set. I really wanted the presence of the bridge.
Byron Perry, Structure and Sadness

We are looking for new office and studio space, as the VCA high school is taking over our current home. We are hoping to continue our Pieces for Small Spaces program (RT70, p38), despite our lack of venue. In that project I invite people I work with in and outside the company to create work for studio presentation. I think it’s important to be inclusive and create opportunities for the younger people coming up. We do a lot of secondments for dancers from the colleges and, when we have a project on, we always hold open class. It’s important to maintain links to the local scene, so we’re hoping to do some workshops at The Meat Market as well as the Mobile States presentations of Love Me there.

We have some great touring opportunities coming up. We’re taking an excerpt of Aether to CINARS (the international performing arts market in Montreal) at the end of the year. We’re also working with a US agent [Harold Norris of H-Art Management] on a tour of Aether in the States in 2007.

Yes, in Belfast and Manchester as part of The Australia Council’s Undergrowth program.

Yes, we received triennial funding from the Australia Council for the first time this year and are looking for more security in our funding relationship with Arts Victoria [currently the company receives project funding only]. We have a business plan, which seeks more funds, but we don’t want to grow our infrastructure too much. We’re still a small company and keen to maintain the balance of our activities. We try to keep our infrastructure in proportion to the work I want to make. Some projects are larger, but I can still go off and make a small piece if that is what the idea demands.

I tend to be optimistic about this side of things. Like most artists, I have doubts about my work, but I am really happy with the opportunities the company has at the moment.

Lucy Guerin, Structure and Sadness, Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse, Oct 19-21; Setting, Malthouse, Melbourne, Oct 25-28

Kota Yamazaki

We meet at the Metro Hotel, an office block I used to live in that has gained stature in an increasingly cosmopolitan Melbourne. I am meeting Kota Yamazaki, choreographer of Rise:Rose and Chamisa 4ËšC which are both being presented at the Melbourne International Arts Festival (MIAF) this year. The latter work is organised as a cultural exchange with Lucy Guerin where each choreographer works with dancers and artists chosen from the other’s country (Phoebe Robinson, Lee Serle, Nick Sommerville, Joanne White for Yamazaki) as part of Australia-Japan Dance Exchange (AJDX) and the current Year of Exchange (YOE 2006).

Yamazaki and his composer Masahiro Sugaya join me as we step into the unusually warm winter in search of a restaurant, Yamazaki trailing behind us like an oyabun (the boss of a Yakuza gang). Turning our collective noses up at the expensive Italian restaurants we head for Chinatown.

Yamazaki began as a student of Tenshi-kan founder Kasai Akira, who was a student of Hijikata Tatsumi, founder of ankoku butoh (“dance of utter darkness”). Like most butoh dancers Yamazaki paid the rent by working at a show club. He then established Rosy Co, a company of 10 dancers before moving to New York in 2001 where he set up Kota Yamazaki/Fluid hug-hug, a company to “exchange, travel and explore.” Since then he has divided his time between Senegal, where he spent 6 months with Jant-Bi choreographing Faagala (MIAF 2005), his home-town of Tokyo and New York, a perfect combination he says. Returning to Japan with the Australian dancers, Yamazaki will perform Chamisa 4ËšC in Yamaguchi, Kyoto and Tokyo before coming to Melbourne.

Aside from being a successful freelancer, composer Masahiro Sugaya has worked with Tokyo dance company Pappa Tarahumara for nearly 20 years. He describes his arhythmic original composition for piano like drops of water falling, like the calls of animals in the zoo. The piece promises to be emotional. He loves Debussy, Brahms, Mendelssohn, but never Beethoven or Wagner. Yamazaki is cooler, more reserved, but no less passionate about the piece. The title Chamisa 4ËšC is named after the small yellow New Mexican ‘chamisa’ flowers that are found floating over the desert floor of the Grand Canyon in winter. The repetitive flower motif in Yamazaki’s work is rooted in butoh sequences and recalls a 60s performance by Hijikata called Bara-iro Dansu (Rosy Dance).

Yamazaki says his work must be beautiful. He likes the writing of Mishima Yukio for this reason. Yet this is in stark contrast to the anime visual aesthetics of the otaku generation (geeks or fans preoccupied with anime and manga), now exhibited in Murakami Takashi’s emblematic toxic flowers and figurines or Yoshitomo Nara’s mischievous children. In what appears to be a generational shift, the younger dance company Mezurashii Kinoko (literally Strange Mushroom) who recently visited Melbourne as part of Australia-Japan Dance Exchange, as if in reaction to the romanticism and darkness of angura (‘underground’) theatre and butoh, seems to be heading in the otaku direction.

Despite modern dance being the dominating influence in Yamazaki’s work, butoh remains significant in his approach. Yet although he says “butoh is easy”, he later remarks how difficult it is to teach to dancers who are unaccustomed to it. The Australian dancers are uncomfortable with slowness. By contrast, the Senegalese dancers didn’t like remembering textual phrases while dancing and are scared to dance alone. Butoh must come from inside, he concludes. Is that an inherent or created ‘inside,’ I wonder.

Having rediscovered his roots during his travels, Yamazaki says he is now looking to traditional dances from South East Asia. In Japan where traditional cultures are considered by some to be concealed by a patina of western culture, he feels he is searching in the traditions of others for something he has lost.

The next time we speak Yamazaki says he has decided to scrap the butoh element and focus on bringing out the dancers’ individual personalities instead. So despite his dance being based on the darkness of the wordless body, for the first time he will introduce text.

So the question lurking beneath these intercultural collaborations is how is it possible to transplant one form of culture, particular or inherent to a context, to another?

Dumb Type

Dividing their time between Kyoto and France, Dumb Type’s production of Voyage comes to Melbourne after having premiered in France and touring the world since 2002. One of the world’s leading multimedia performance companies, Dumb Type’s work is based on the tenet of wordless expression as their name self-deprecatingly suggests. Founded in 1984 by students from the Kyoto University of Arts emerging from many disciplines including visual arts, architecture, music and computer programming, the group uses various media in their eternal search for new forms. The company also produces across a range of media such as performance, sound, video and publications. In the early 1990s Dumb Type gained notoriety in Japan and overseas for their unpopular AIDS activism prior to the death in 1995 of Teiji Furuhashi, one of the company’s core members.

To make Voyage, the group of 10 artists broke into twos and threes to make independent sequences. Rather than a pre-conceived plan, a director’s topographical vision, centralised organisation or all working to represent one opinion that has gained consensus, the only pre-condition made was for a common space. While the company members acknowledge that to find order and structure takes more time (and resources) this way, they prioritise individual feeling, action and thought, and only then consider what they can (and cannot) do as a group. Fittingly this interview was conducted via email with a polyvocal respondent.

The process has been a journey into a reverse world. Group members agree that they began from a feeling of not knowing what to do as artists in response to world events post-September 11, of being ‘lost’, a feeling which has only intensified as they have continued. The image in the festival program, and on this page, shows a female astronaut in a black space suit floating on a mirror with black smoke curling up behind her. Or is it perfect blue sky with perfect white clouds? asks one member. The group’s imaginations seem to be working in opposition, as if in a black hole. The further they travel the less is known in an ever-expanding implosion.

While they agree that the title Voyage is not about travelling towards a known destination with a specific purpose, from here on their versions diverge. Some feel it is an enforced drifting across expanses of water/land/sky/space/thought in an escape from war. Others combine the astronaut’s anxiety in venturing into the unknown with the excitement of following utopian dreams. Exploration or endeavour is the state manifestation of power, intones one, while another says the voyage is based on a northern European myth of forced exile as a form of retribution. Maybe this is what we all need, to think and look at things differently, muses one. When in space, the values cultivated on earth are turned upside down. Or are they?

The mirror, a motif in the work of both Yamazaki and Dumb Type, suggests a limitless expansion into absolute and infinite black. It reflects a place where things are immeasurable, where there is no light and no oxygen, no front and back, no conformity to codes of good and evil, a place of paradox, where common sense means nothing.

At the premiere of Voyage, one audience member, raising the technology/body dichotomy, remarked, “You are trying to end the body.” Yet Dumb Type assert they are not representing the cyborg or robot. While some members see tools as an extension of the body and others see technology as that which cuts through self-willed existence, others don’t feel the need to put subjective and objective existence at odds. Which ever way, these are always problems, yet they all agree that art is something to which they dedicate themselves.

Given that founding member Teiji Furuhashi is quoted on the group’s website criticising Japanese audiences for being apathetic and that the group “should always have a political view”, I turn to politics and ask about Japan’s recent conservatism—constitutional revisions in order to re-arm, continued visits to Yasukuni Shrine by heads of state aggravating international relations. The group say they are rarely asked about war and they have no intention of making clear statements. I persevere. One replies that religion is relatively unimportant to Japanese people while another says Prime Minister Koizumi’s visits to Yasukuni Shrine are being called a religious act in order to play to popular sentiment, conceal real questions and effectively unify religion and politics. Another says people all over the world are ceasing to think for themselves and are being swindled by the continuation of the present war, while yet another says rather than asking what they think, I should think for myself.

Those who have direct experience of war in Japan are disappearing from society, observes one. Another tells of being with 90 year-old grandmothers at the nursing home watching the war on television: “These are women who have lost their husbands and brothers in war.” She sees these women react in a way that seems to say, “Despite having gone through all of this, why is it all being repeated?” This has made her consider war more deeply, she says.

Dumb Type, Voyage, Playhouse, Arts Centre, Oct 18-20; Kota Yamazaki, Rise:Rose, Playhouse, Arts Centre, Oct 22-23; Kota Yamazaki, Chamisa 4ËšC, Beckett Theatre, Malthouse, Oct 25-28; Melbourne International Arts Festival, Oct 12-28 www.melbournefestival.com.au

Uniquely among the current crop of emerging arts festivals, Straight Out Of Brisbane positions itself as a (self appointed) representative of local arts. From the name on down, SOOB is suffused with the concerns and talents of Queenslanders. If the festival promotion is to be believed, a visit to the festival should answer the question, “In what state are the emerging arts in Australia’s urban-growth capital?” This year the answer is relaxed, confident, inventive…and a bit hard to find.

The process of gentrification squeezes urban Brisbane as it squeezes all cities, but the onset here is acute. Public space and its nephew, the emerging art venue, are scarcer than ever. The festival is aware of the contested nature of the space it takes place in and harnesses it; this is, by design or not, a unifying theme of the festival. Where SOOB once took over Fortitude Valley, owned it and inserted a rash of oddity under the hypodermis of club’n’pub nightlife, this year the infection is symptomless. Arriving in the centre of the festival precinct I am hard put to find any of the festival venues or, for that matter, maps to them. Or just a bloody list.

A bit of persistence, however, is well rewarded. The Bri$crane :: Remixed event suspends an exhibition over the river in an ephemeral gallery occupying a pedestrian rest area in the middle of the Goodwill Bridge for the sunset rush hour. It’s the loungeroom where good Situationists will hang out in their afterlives. Perspex sheets the windows of a wall-less room, looking out over the construction site skyline of the CBD. Each pane has been overlaid with transparent or translucent artworks offering alternative visions of the skyline. The concrete and decking of the little used space are strewn with toys of various kinds and comfy seating; a chatting audience watches the fading light reveal shifting video projections against the bridge pylons; and live electronic tonescapes overlay the rush hour traffic thrum.

Di Ball’s slick digital imagery layers the scene with dystopic futures and pasts: a nuclear technopolis collides with a primeval Brisbane River; a nightmarish urban architectural model gives voice to alternative histories overwhelmed by the historyless architecture of the city’s interminable construction boom.

Seren Pugh has a more tactile process, based in a kind of graffito urban planning. Her work, a spidery paint-pen sketch directly on the plastic, responds to the prim lines of the built panorama. Here the high-rise skyline imposes itself rudely on her canvas, as if the office block developers have scrawled on public property with ill considered concrete tags.

I wouldn’t say that steel scaffolding is the most graceful medium for hanging the pieces, nor, ah, the most tactful for the subject matter. But the main letdown here is the number of works. Only a handful of artists have been involved in this element of the show that purports to critique the lack of democratic voice in urban planning. Perhaps the show is running into precisely the issue faced by the city’s planners: there simply isn’t room to fit everything.

The show best lives up to its eponymous claim in its literal remixing of the commuting pedestrian crowd, suited workers and lycra’d joggers suddenly interpenetrated with hallucinatory art and the characteristically drunken mass of SOOB aficionados. It’s the first satisfyingly naughty happening of the 2006 festival in a SOOB history of some damn good ones. And it looks gorgeous when the sun sets.
Chromophonozone, Jemima Wyman

Chromophonozone takes the venue squeeze and runs with it, setting up off the gallery circuit in a seedy venue called Don’t Tell Mama in the strip club precinct. Upon arrival at the locked front door, a lean figure in a dark coat ushers visitors through the carpark at the back of the building to a second floor entrance. Apparently this circuitous procedure is less to do with the licitness of the activity inside than the fact the venue has been closed to the public for a liquor licensing infraction; inside it’s nothing more or less alarming than a karaoke bar. But the covertness of the entrance meshes perfectly with the show; as such, it must be the only entity to have benefited from the previous evening’s police liquor regulation sweep of the Valley, apart from possibly Law and Order itself.

If the forces of the law had arrived 24 hours later, I hazard, it would have been still more priceless watching them encounter the dance floor this evening with its frenetic vision of gold lamé and sadomasochism. On the main stage there’s a backdrop of multiple re-spliced instructional karaoke videos against which singers belt out MIDI pop classics from behind shapeless sequinned masks in the form of cloth head bags decorated with distorted leering faces. There are some performances of rare zest, occasional sheepishness, universal disregard for even vestigial melody, and overall bodyslamming undignified abandon—all wholly enacted by the audience. It’s a lurid cartoon world of saturated phosphors, overdriven speakers and unprovoked, untutored madness, totally hands off for the artists, who stand back with parental pride and discuss how the show recalls Abu Ghraib’s “interrotunes” musical torture. Certainly, the willingness of the audience evokes something fascinating about the disinhibiting power of having a bag hiding your face. As claustrophobic and badly ventilated as the venue is, the show’s captivating until eventually I’m co-opted for a spell as the lean figure in the dark coat out the front. Occasionally little herds of confused karaoke fans who weren’t told that they were in for a “new media interactive A/V exhibition” emerge, distraught, and huddle confusedly around the stairwell. And some stay in there and enjoy it. Chalk another excellent urban intervention up to SOOB.

No stranger to the world’s supply of saturated phosphors or Abu Ghraib imagery, San Francisco-based digital stills and animation designer Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung is well known in Australia, for his work if not his name. His eternal-splash-page site, 60×1.com was a viral marketing phenomenon, popular in email link-forwarding circles (I’ll bet you got one) during the last US presidential election for its high energy war and election propaganda parody. Perversely it is this online designer, of all the SOOB visual artists, who is translated into the most classically gallery-like, central city space in the festival’s stable of venues, the edgy White House, for his Global Presidential Election.

The stock characters here are the icons of global mediascape, fictional and actual. Ronald McDonald and George W Bush are, respectively, exemplars of each, Arnold Schwarzenegger weighs in in for both camps, and so on. These personalities are cut and mashed endlessly in some kind of incestuous genetic recombination in ever more concentrated concoctions of hybridised geopolitical action movie promotion. Hung’s look borrows from video game arcades, from Maoist propaganda, from martial arts movie posters, from fast food advertisements, from the choked neon signage of night-time Asian metropolises, from clichés of early web design—pretty much every lurid trend in the last century’s visual dialogue, and if there are any he’s missed it’s not from want of trying. Hung offers a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the process of global media storytelling where events and personalities themselves become items in the palette of advertorial graphic design, or bit-part characters in the endless, climaxless cartoonish geopolitical narrative—a homage to the global relevance of pasting boobs onto a picture of a major political figure in Photoshop. My reservation here is: if SOOB is trying to raise the profile of emerging arts, why isn’t this epitome of eyecatching advertising out on the street?

Bri$crane :: Remixed, curator Fiona Hogg, artists Di Ball, Seren Pugh, Priscilla Bracks, AV performance The General Will; Chromophonozone, Thea Baumann, Jemima Wyman, Don’t Tell Mama; Global Presidential Election, Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung www.tinkin.com, White House, Brisbane; Straight Out of Brisbane, Aug 15-20, www.straightoutofbrisbane.com

Jodie Le Vesconte, Caroline Kennison, Emily Tomlins<BR /> Constance Drinkwater and the Final Days…”></p>
<p class=

Jodie Le Vesconte, Caroline Kennison, Emily Tomlins
Constance Drinkwater and the Final Days…

In the lively, dialogic atmosphere of Lyndon Terracini’s 2006 Brisbane Festival 2006, 3 productions speak usefully to each other.

Based on an outrageous premise that is only so perfectly obvious because Mabou Mines dared to do it, Dollhouse paradoxically expands the architectural metaphor to recreate the pre-realist dimensions of the 19th century stage in miniature, presenting a brilliant pas de deux with Ibsen, infused by that rare egalitarianism of spirit that lifts an audience. This spirit is carnivalesque, theatrical not literary, mixing mutually subversive elements from deliberately fake Norwegian accents, slapstick, melodramatic posturing, music hall song and dance to grand opera to deconstruct Ibsen’s mythical paean to feminist emancipation. “Nothing here is real except the pain” (Lee Breuer).

If 19th century women were legal infants subjugated to their husbands, this production makes it physically apparent that men are infantilised and diminished by patriarchy. The dollhouse (Nora’s Christmas present to the children) is a child-size replica of an adult drawing room built to the proportions of the male cast (all played by actors of short stature). Women are literally forced to their knees in order to enter this paradigm of a man’s world, but Nora grows in stature until the house of cards collapses under the strain, and there is a magical transformation to a ‘puppet opera’ where the last anguished scene is sonorously played out. Maude Mitchell as Nora towers in the end, while Mark Povinelli as her husband Torvald runs through the audience like a frightened child.

In Lee Breuer and Maude Mitchell’s astounding and moving adaptation, role reversal and parody serve to negate an outmoded form of humanism sometimes wrongly attributed to Ibsen. Functioning as dialectical devices, they undermine the centrality of the individual ego. Simultaneously the repressive institutions in which subjectivity has no place are overwhelmed by the abundant variety and innovation poured out in this show. In Ibsen’s play, Nora declares that it would take ‘“the greatest miracle of all” to restore relations with her husband. Ibsen, that old anarchist, perceived that it is the authoritarian state of mind pervading a whole culture that is amiss. The comically subversive portrayal of the maid, Helene, the subtle relegation of the children, the ‘miraculous’ switch from dollhouse to opera house, and the tiers of puppet Noras and Torvalds all underscore this point. The final image of Nora’s daughter astride a rocking horse and brandishing a wooden sword while the son curls up in bed with his Nora doll calls for a different future. This was a big shout in BrisVegas against a world convinced there is no alternative.

Melodrama and a drawing room setting pull in opposite directions in Stephen Carleton’s Constance Drinkwater and the Final Days of Somerset. Sometimes the restraint of QTC’s production feels like a restraining hand, but the marvellous Michael Fulcher seems to get it right and bursts through the fourth wall in a performance that is, appropriately enough for Carleton’s play, ‘on the edge.’ That said, director Marion Potts sustains a claustrophobic, preternatural atmosphere, an insidious feeling of dreadful suspense building towards Carleton’s shock ending. The playwright is masterfully aware of, and in love with, the slipperiness of language yet he leaves the audience with no possibility of retreat into ambivalence. Not only are the threads neatly tied, but any white citizen of this country must feel it in the bone.

The place is a moribund, tropical settlement in Queensland’s ‘Deep North’ that clings to the notion of being “a hybrid capital of a renegade Northern State” at the time of Federation. Thunder crashes. A dissolute sceptic from the South, Professor Crabbe (Robert Coleby), and his Chinese companion, Hop Lee (Darren Yap), a businessman who pays due deference to worlds other than the mundane, have been wrecked in a storm and, with the assistance of a mad Catholic priest, Father Angelico (Michael Fulcher), take refuge in the Government Residency against the wishes of the Governor’s widow, Lady Constance Drinkwater (Caroline Kennison). Constance is the Lady in Black, in stark contrast to her wan, febrile daughters. Five children named for the cardinal virtues are already dead. The girls, Hope (Emily Tomlins) and Fortitude (Jodie Le Vescombe), are all she has left. Between passages of black drawing room comedy with their own propensity for disorder and violence, hungry ghosts prowl, the priest emits avian shrieks, a violated girl urinates, the future is foretold and Hope dies. The final revelation is unheimlich (uncanny): the familiar made dread.

Melodrama provides Carleton with stock characters to drive home points about myths of nation building, and also the means to confabulate what has been historically repressed. In the light of Freud’s analysis of secrecy and the uncanny having their roots in the home, Gothic features not only delineate a haunted landscape but bring history home to roost in a theatrical tour de force. The interlocking facets of Carleton’s ingenious, timely play work well together to recall that, in order to dream its own good, white Australia historically manifests a marked aggression to alterity. Constance’s defense of her beleaguered moral universe, her perverse attempt at “the right thing”, reflects darkly now that the vexed question of defining national values is abroad again.

In Constance, hungry ghosts are invited to an improvised feast by Hop Lee who seeks to appease them and then cathartically release them back into the spirit world. This is an allusion to the Chinese-Malay tradition of the month-long Hungry Ghosts Festival. Ritual elements of this festivity inform Elision’s Moon Spirit Feasting, an eclectic form of ‘rough and ready’ Cantonese street opera. With music composed by Liza Lim and libretto by Beth Yahp, this Australian work affirms that art is always a floating ‘renegade state’, and incidentally reminds us how much we have to be grateful for from multicultural policies now in storage.
Deborah Kayser, Elision, Moon Spirit Feasting, photo: Sharka Bosokova

Deborah Kayser, Elision, Moon Spirit Feasting, photo: Sharka Bosokova

Touching on the shamanistic origins of performance (significantly an earlier work by Lim was based on a classical piece of mythic Greek theatre, the Oresteia), Moon Spirit Feasting is a frenetic helter skelter ride of anima-driven, procreative and mystical proportions. Mezzo soprano Melissa Madden Gray (as Queen Mother of the West and Demon Goddess) and the baritone Orren Tanabe (the Archer Hou Yi and Monkey King) contest differing versions of the legend of the Moon Goddess Chang-O (soprano Deborah Kayser). The performers seem possessed: vocal and physical virtuosi. The extravagantly kitsch, super-sensible realm of these vexatious gods makes us feel richly, positively, contradictorily human. And these are not just 9 musicians being conducted by the man 3 seats along, they are monks, ghosts and humans crying out in another and necessary voice. In contemporary chamber music style, the compelling, hybrid musical score uses Eastern and Western instrumentation to transport us from the bustling street to the stillness of the stars. The final, cosmic image of the Moon Goddess Chang-O brings us full circle back via Constance to Nora embodying a similarly solitary, ambivalent freedom.

It is the play of diverse elements in all 3 pieces—the ludicrous and the regenerative, the diabolic and the sceptical, the materialist and the mystical—that challenges the ideological perspective of ‘high’ art, and indelibly stamps Lyndon Terracini’s provocative, transforming and energising festival.

Brisbane Festival: Mabou Mines, Dollhouse, adapted from A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen, conceived & directed by Lee Breuer; adaptation & dramaturgy Lee Breuer and Maude Mitchell, designer Narelle Sissons, lighting Mary Louise Geiger, costumes Meganne George, puppetry Jane Catherine Shaw, sound Edward Cosler, Gardens Theatre, July 15-22; Queensland Theatre Company, Constance Drinkwater and the Final Days of Somerset, writer Stephen Carleton, director Marion Potts, designer Bruce McKinven, lighting Matt Scott, composer/sound designer Brett Colliery, Billie Brown Studio, July 10-Aug 5; ELISION, Moon Spirit Feasting (Yue Ling Jie), composer Liza Lim, librettist Beth Yahp, director/lighting Michael Kantor, conductor Simon Hewett, designer Dorotka Sapinska, choreography Melissa Madden Gray, Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, July 28-30

Constance Drinkwater and the Final Days of Somerset has a season at the Stables Theatre, Sydney Sept 30-Oct 28

Queensland University of Technology’s Creative Industries Precinct is architecturally innovative but before Cheryl Stock’s Accented Body project it had yet to reveal its human dimension. Shadowing the squared-off streets and clipped turf of the ‘Kelvin Grove Urban Village’, the precinct has been earmarked as the heart of this new inner-city planned community while it continues to build its profile as an international hub for practice-led new media arts research.

Leading up to the village’s grand opening, Stock’s ambitious event was timely. Accented Body conjured character from the precinct’s newborn architectural skin and, in the project’s exploration of “the body as site and in site”, a conversation was started between the land (which had been startingly transfigured by the village development), human bodies and the built form. The event was a logistically awe-inspiring gathering of dance, music, media and digital performance art drawn together in 6 installations creating an “animated form of urban public art.”

On 3 chilly nights during the Brisbane Festival, the promenade experience of Accented Body opened in the neatly rectangular Kulgun Park, with Prescient Terrain’s movement prologue on the transformative capacity of the organic body. Choreographed by Richard Causer and conceptualised by Maria Adriana Verdaasdonk (who played a role in conceptualising other installations), flesh and stone were brought into contested relations as bodies emerged from the earth, vigorously combating the park’s rock features and morphing with butoh-like grotesquerie between human, animal, insect and plant states.

As the audience moved with performers to the grand outdoor staircase of the main Creative Precinct building, cameras were tracking, making us aware of our role in peopling the landscape and, in turn, effecting the creation of images and sounds in other mediated sites—both locally within the precinct and beyond in live streaming to London and Seoul.

In the momentary interactions of Presences, we encountered the “global drifters”—among them women wearing spectacular tulle skirts lit by blue bulbs—who didn’t really claim space or make transaction but arrested us with their presence. As one might expect of drifters, they did not invite us to settle but their role as provocateurs was integral: in the new global order do we make space for them or do they make space for us?

In Separating Shadows, indoors and outdoors became fluid in a play of shadows, bodies and text. Devised collaboratively with direction by Vanessa Mafé and performance by Jondi Keane and Avril Huddy, a relationship between intimates was played out in a mélange of familiar phrases projected on a semi-transparent screen visible through the building’s external glass wall: “He said, she said…”, “You always want the last word.” After Keane and Huddy’s lithe bodies run across, through and around the inside/outside area—never really connecting—the paradoxes of love are signified in the contrast between the heavy clumsiness of trying to shift the ground (via Keane’s sculptural antics with the floor mat) and the ethereal presence of the words whose ‘light’ projection betrayed their weighty consequence.

Two large scale installations, Ether and Living Lens, foregrounded more strongly the use of sound and sound/body interactions. Framed by 10km of cascading red rope on the outdoor Terraces, Ether, directed and performed by Tony Yap, extended “traditional temple rituals and practices into contemporary aural-kinaesthetic realms.” Composers and musicians Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey deftly reworked vocals collected via public “memory sound booth” in Brisbane and Melbourne to engage the audience in a collective ritual of sound as it resonated and reverberated with Yap’s trance-like body, swirled within the terrace auditorium and took flight into the night sky. In Living Lens, a team of Japanese, Australian and Taiwanese artists lead by technical director Tetsutoshi Tabata, had the alternate effect of vortexing the mind to an indoor fixed screen which overwhelmed the bodies of dancers whose attached motion sensors were directing the projected forms. Living Lens’ revisited Prescient Terrain’s organic body—although, this time, the body was in dialogue with electronics rather than stone.

Perhaps the most effective animation of civic space—which simultaneously problematised and celebrated the body “as site” and “in site”—was the large-scale Global Drifts projections in the outdoor Parade Ground. Although billed as an internationally live and streamed event (which in retrospect seemed amazing), for me it was engrossing to simply revel in the connective play of body, sound and light between what at first seemed an abstract projection on the feature wall and 2 real life bodies I only spotted by chance in the far corner of the ground. The 2 sites were informing and interacting with each other and, from the angle I perceived them, they seemed in concert with the building and city lights beyond. This moment of recognition and strange delight in a building that I had earlier not warmed to, is local testament to the value of the big, global, and ambitious conversation that Cheryl Stock has initiated.

Accented Body, producer-director Cheryl Stock, logistics & technical coordination Daniel Maddison; QUT Creative Industries Precinct, Brisbane Festival 2006, July 15-17

In the opening moments of Johnno, the actors form a gymnastics team chorus line and pass Dante (Sean Mee) a copy of the 1949 Brisbane Grammar School magazine like a lifeline, tethering him to the smothering uniformity of his youth and his home town. A Box Brownie camera flash goes off, and we see the class of 49 in heroic salute, with Dante’s anarchic mate Johnno (Paul Denny) sneaking into the shot in disguise. This incendiary gag is a formative moment of defiance and subversion: he is laughing in the face of staid, conformist Brisbane at the turn of that most staid and conformist decade, the 1950s. As he goes on to say, the Brisbane of Johhno and Dante’s childhood is “too mediocre even to be a suburb of hell.” Malouf, and adaptor-director Stephen Edwards, are quick to point out that this postwar malaise is not Brisbane’s alone. This is the Australia of the 1950s that the novel’s heroes must escape, much as the artist Roy Child, say, must escape Sydney in Patrick White’s A Season at Sarsaparilla. Johnno is the quintessential literary Brisbane novel, but as a parable of its time, it says as much about the nation as it does about its dull subtropical capital.

In Stephen Edwards and the UK’s Derby Playhouse, La Boite Theatre Company have found theatrical soulmates. They have been liberated from the confines of their theatre-in-the-round home, and taken flight—not just literally, to the UK (like the novel’s protagonist, Dante), but figuratively too, into an imagist theatre of body, metaphor and symbol.

The physical use of the chorus of actors from both companies is compelling from the outset. Dressed in dirty working class greys and blues the ensemble enact the abstract images with which this most prosaic of novels challenges the adaptor throughout. They become the pimps and prostitutes of underworld Brisbane and Paris, the fellow drinkers in the West End Greek Club or Pig and Whistle café. They also take us on the metaphoric—and metaphysical—journey through Dante’s (Odyssean) escape from Hell and back again. They carry Dante through the cafes of Left Bank Paris, help him clamber to the top of the Victoria Bridge as the Brisbane River in flood courses beneath, ensuring he never sets foot in the rich chaotic life through which Johnno swims and splashes, and flounders.

Both actors and set are immersed in water in Dan Potra’s arresting design evoking a Brisbane of the past that used to flood regularly, but has now been technologically prevented from doing so.

Entrenched as the city presently is in seemingly permanent drought, choked of water for all but the most essential of daily needs, the excess and inundation seems especially nostalgic. Matt McKenzie’s sound design and Elena Kats-Chernin’s score are exquisite, and do much to invoke the intelligent reverence that Malouf’s novel inspires. Johnno was never a glib satiric thumbing of the nose at Old Brisbane. It was an earnest, even affectionate, exploration of suburban torpor. As Dante states upon Johnno’s return to his old home, “so much of the old Brisbane was gone, there was nothing left to hate.” The aching uniformity was at least grist for the mill. John Rayment’s lighting and Craig Walsh’s visual design especially seem to sum up this conundrum. The 3-pronged crane that swirls around the action decked with scrims that are lit by projections of the city’s icons seems to encapsulate the imposition of technology over the past and convey the supplanting of weatherboard with iron and steel.

This is a mesmerising and truly transporting piece of theatre. If not quite reaching the dizzy theatrical heights of its obvious aspirational forbear, Cloudstreet, it did at least occur to me sitting in the transfixed, well-heeled and suitably urbane audience that the days of Brisbane’s me-too complex might be nearly over. With theatre like this, telling coming-of-age Brisbane stories in a festival that is itself passing from adolescence to adulthood, it might finally be time to accept that we’ve grown up.

Johnno, adaptor-director Stephen Edwards, Derby Playhouse & La Boite Theatre Company, Powerhouse Theatre, Brisbane Festival, July 14-Aug 5

Marcus Canning, director of Perth’s Artrage, concedes that festival themes can often be “arbitrary or a little meaningless.” Nevertheless in describing the selection of events he has gathered for the coming Artrage Festival, he notes that there are “elements that act as strong connectors throughout this program”, namely a sense of “pedestrian suburban reality transformed.”

While previous Artrage Festivals have tended to be, in Canning’s words, “a bit sprawling—traditionally it has been a month-long program”, this year however it will be “a shorter, tighter package.” Events will occur over a 10-day period, closing with the Festival of Northbridge—the suburb in which Artrage’s main venues are located. The program includes return seasons of some of the best events fostered by Artrage itself over the previous 18 months, together with specially commissioned works, public events, spectaculars and interactive booths designed to appeal both to Artrage’s usual clientele as well as to the wider public. As Canning puts it, audiences will experience “not only a transformed Northbridge, but also contemporary West Australian emerging culture, across all levels and all forms.”

Situated just north of the Perth city centre, Northbridge is, in Canning’s words, “the playground of the suburbs”—a busy strip of nightclubs, bars and restaurants. A prime piece of real estate in the area has recently been cleared and transformed into a grassy public space. This site, The Block, at the corner of James and Lake Streets, just up the road from Artrage’s main venue, the Bakery, is to act as the locus of the festival. “We’re building a compound from shipping containers,” Canning explains. “Six of them form the entrance. Then on the corner there’s Feuerwasser by artist Miles Van Dorsen. It’s a bit of an entry statement and, again, an example of the innocuous or the kitsch transformed. There’s a standard, above-ground Clark’s swimming pool—with the classic veneer wood panelling on the outside—and then there’s a 5 metre fire fountain that erupts out of it. It’s also an incredibly gentle work, because gas is literally fed through the water. So on the surface, you get this combination of flame and water intermingled.” Behind these structures will be a circus tent, its interior distinguished from traditional big tops by ornate curtains and a proscenium stage for a variety of performances. Meanwhile, the Bakery will house new pieces from emerging artists Zoe Pepper (schlock-horror theatre work, Manic Pony) and Paea Leach (solos from the choreographer, recently returned from dancing with Chunky Move in Melbourne).

“Alchemical” public art works such as Feuerwasser coexist in the festival with what Canning regards as more overtly “populist” or “playful” elements, like Pet Photo Booth. The public can bring their animal companions to be creatively immortalised in this small photographic studio. As Canning explains, “this is a work which we’ve supported over a long development. It’s had an initial showing in the form of 4 prints within the exhibition which the Australian Centre of Photography put together for this year’s Melbourne Festival. Then it will have a showing here, and finally they will do a big version of it in the front gallery at ACP in Sydney during December. Here, people will be bringing in their pets and booking a spot to join this growing number of extraordinary portraits.”

Pet Photo Booth is one of a number of ‘interactive’ installations at The Block, some of which call for audiences to activate the works or otherwise participate in their creation, and others which have been generated as part of Artrage’s outreach collaborations and satellite projects across regional WA, in schools or with tertiary institutions. One is Audiosity, initially mounted earlier this year in Geraldton by local young artists mentored by WA composers. Inhabitants of the town scoured their environment for found sounds to craft into a number of percussive loops which can be activated by audiences, alone or together and in different combinations. Canning explains that the interface comprises a number of “lift-up boxes which you can then plug in to a big grid. So it’s like a big, physical, 3-dimensional game board. It was set up as a bit of a fun park in the gallery at Geraldton.”

Other festival events include an opportunity for spectators to craft a close-fitting calico model of themselves (Lifesuit), an installation of bottle-top art works created by secondary school students to accompany a hand-painted set by local children’s book illustrator Shaun Tan, as well as 3 short, intimate theatrical performances from students in contemporary performance at Edith Cowan University (The Suitcase Trilogy).

The 2006 festival will also feature Artrage’s “strongest film program yet”, including a showing of US installation artist Matthew Barney’s famous Cremaster Cycle, as well his latest screen work, Drawing Restraint (p22). Accompanying this will be the WA instalment of the national ReelDance Festival of dance film, here supplemented by a special screening of works by WA filmmakers and students (Body Cuts) as well as a public artists’ forum (Cutting Film for the Body). I have curated these 2 events to try to get beyond the notion that if dance is the rhythmic arrangement of moving objects in space and time, then all cinematic editing of moving objects should be considered dance film. If the genre is to flourish as anything other than highly specialised then an expanded and filmic definition is required. Body Cuts will also include classic approaches to dance cinema, short works from students at Edith Cowan University and the WA Academy of Performing Arts, as well as 2 films from Perth dancer and choreographer Claudia Alessi. Her intimate, close-shot films will offer a strong contrast with the festival’s live dance spectacular, Crossfire, for which Alessi is producer. This piece features over 150 dancers performing on James and Lake Streets on the last Saturday of the festival. Also on show will be dance photography from Christophe Canato, who has worked at Paris’ Théâtre de la Ville, documenting the work of luminaries such as Ushio Amagatsu of Sankai Juku, Pina Bausch and others.

Canning is pleased that “The Cremaster Cycle, which is playing at the RMAX Cinema just off James Street, will feed into the ReelDance Festival less than a block away at Cinema Paradiso. Those are 2 really interesting programs sitting alongside each other. With the addition of the seminar and the local works screening, this will be a real jab of stimulus to local dancers and filmmakers. Artrage is here acting as a primer. It supports and develops emerging artists, across all art forms, throughout the year, and the festival is a great time to add some spice. Those who engage will hopefully walk away from the experience transformed, thinking: ‘I’m going to go out and make some work that I never thought I’d make before.’ And that’s what we at Artrage should be about.”

David Tranter has had a long career with CAAMA (Central Australia Aboriginal Media Association) in Alice Springs as a sound recordist and now as an emerging director. He has worked extensively on the award-winning language and culture documentary program series Nganampa Anwernekenhe and has directed one episode and co-directed another. Nganampa Anwernekenhe (‘Ours’ in the Pitjantjatjara and Arrernte languages) is a documentary television series spoken in local languages, subtitled in English and focused on local Indigenous cultural life. As Lisa Stefanoff wrote in her account of the 2005 Sydney Film Festival’s celebration of CAAMA’s achievements, this approach “foregrounds the film subject’s voice, in his or her original language, and allows it to shape the film.” (RT 67, p19) Stefanoff talked with Tranter about the art of sound recording and directing as both technical and cultural challenges.

What was it like doing video work at CAAMA in the late 1980s when you first started?

When I took up the position as Trainee Sound Recordist, it was the CAAMA TV Unit. Basically then we was just travelling ‘round out bush, seeing all the country out there, for about 2 or 3 years. Plus we used to do a lot of CSAs [community service announcements] around town, for Power and Water, and Social Security, and Telecom. We was pretty busy back in them days.

For them 3 training years, all I was doing was my job: sound. I only just had a little 3-channel FP32 mixer, a steel boom pole, and a 416 microphone. I never had radio mikes or nothing like that. It was good to learn like that. You had to do your job the best that you could, with the gear that you had. That’s where I really learned how to use the 416. I used it for about 5 years, before we even got radio mikes. I used to run leads, long leads, and do a lot of long lens stuff, walking towards camera, and booming. It helped me to understand. Boom swinging is a completely different job from sound recording. As I got older I started getting further into doing sound. [Film director] Warwick [Thornton] gave me my first opportunity to work on a drama, in Sydney, after he came out of the film school—Payback (1996).

CAAMA was a good training ground. They taught you all the stuff the hard way. You’d work out in 50 degree heat out in the desert, summertime. Sometimes that might mean old people go and get kangaroo. It’ll be 12 o’clock and they’ll be cooking it up, hottest part of the day, and you’re working round a big fire, and you’re documenting people, cooking tucker up. You’re working round a fire, and it’s twice as hot! When you’re working for the AFC or SBS and doing dramas and stuff like that, it’s just like a breeze. It’s not really physically hard, or mentally draining. Probably for the director it is, but not for the crew.

Did becoming a documentary sound recordist change how you listen to the world?

As a sound recordist, you’re always in the shadow of a cameraman. As a location sound recordist, you go out and collect the material, record a lot of interviews and footage and stuff like that. You get a lot of great things. Camera people, they can only see what’s in their viewfinder. Sound recordists are their eyes and ears. We’re the ones standing up over the person that we’re interviewing. When they’re filming and walking along and they’ve got their eye in the viewfinder, we’re behind them, or we’re watching their backs while we’re doing our job. It’s a team effort.

What’re the differences between making a Nganampa Anwernekenhe documentary and making any other kind?

Nganampas are probably the roots and foundation of Australia. There’s no other show in Australia that compares to Nganampa. Even the way that you go out and work. Like if people pass away, or if sorry business is on, they won’t let you go out. Or at a certain time of the year, it’s ceremonial time. So you’ve got restrictions too. And things can just happen. You might be halfway through a shoot doing a Nganampa story and someone might pass away, so people got to get up and go to sorry camp and go and see this family member or something, go and finish up. Those things happen. It’s nothing new.

But if you have people from Sydney come up here to work with us in CAAMA, you’ve got to teach them all the protocols, ‘cause they’re actually like little kids…You spend, 3 or 4 months teaching people about the culture: “What’s happening?…How come that old fella’s goin’ away?…What’s he back in the car for? We haven’t finished the story!”…You’ve got to turn around and explain it to them: “Oh no, someone’s passed away, and that’s the way it is. People have to go and see their families”. So the program is put on the back-burner. Probably we’ll have to come back into town and sit down for another few weeks before we can actually go back out. Or it might be 2 months, so you move on to another story.

Nganampa teaches you how to read people’s body language. Nganampa showed me, without telling me, just from me observing and being who I am, learning from Central Australia, and watching people all the time. Learning how people act and move you can sort of know what they’re thinking, or what they’re going to do: “He doesn’t want to start work today…He wants to do it tomorrow.”

When you do a documentary with English speaking people, you can understand what people are saying. But with Nganampa, it’s done in a lot of different dialects. You start learning how to read people’s expressions. I grew up in Alice Springs [and] I had to learn English. Even though my mother spoke Language, and my grandparents, I never really did. I didn’t really worry about that. I was too worried about learning about Space Invaders and riding BMX bikes, and mixing with town people.

I used to go out bush and see my family and all that. I knew about languages, and Language. I could understand little bit of my mother’s language, Alyawarr, and little bit Anmatyerr, and little bit of Arrernte. I never really heard Warlpiri language until I really went out there working and started listening to it. We grew up with all this richness with culture around and unfortunately never really learned language right through. Most old people around here, they spoke about 5 or 6 languages. That was pretty common. But we grew up in town, and went to high school and primary school and people were teaching us Indonesian language. I didn’t really want to learn that so I left school at the age of 16, didn’t get much education.

I went out, got this job at CAAMA and it just sort of opened me. We traveled around a lot out bush and seen all these languages. Basically Nganampa showed me the culture and how people live. When I was younger, I travelled out bush and saw family living out in the sticks and all that stuff—that’s natural—but Nganampa really showed me, opened my eyes. I wasn’t standing up looking in. I was a part of the program being made. I treat Nganampa as a show that you can learn from making. There’s not many shows like that around in the world today, a show that lives and breathes culture.

CAAMA is like a tool for Aboriginal people to use, and to promote the Aboriginal people in Central Australia, or Australia-wide. CAAMA was set up to really promote language and culture. That was its thing: to get the radio license and Imparja Television license to document and to preserve our language and culture and to broadcast it.

You’ve recently made two of your own Nganampas. The first one, Karli Jalangu, you co-directed with cinematographer and director Allan Collins [Dhakiyarr vs the King], and the second one, Crook Hat and Camphoo, you directed solo.

Yeah. Karli Jalangu is in Warlpiri language and in Anmatyerr. It means “Boomerang Today.” Basically it was 4 old fellas—Teddy Jangala Egan, Johnny Possum Japaltjarri, Albie Morris Janpitjimpa and old Frankie Moreton—making a ‘Number 7’ boomerang. We’ve done some stuff before about boomerangs but it was generally a man just telling a story. We decided to go and document the making of one. It took about 4 days for us to actually see the finished product. It was my first time as a director too. I’m always used to sitting down and watching either the cameraman or the director getting stressed out, watching them fiddle about. “We should be over here, we should be over there”, or “We’re crossing the line here!”. I finally jumped into their boots got to know how they feel. The pressure’s on.

I just like to document stuff I’m interested in—the culture of Aboriginal people, and making things—to preserve, to show younger generations coming up. I’m interested in what the old people have to offer young people, and what they can offer to Australia, a white audience. Or a world audience. Karli went around and screened a few places overseas.

How did you and Allan strike a balance as co-directors?

Allan was more into the television side of things, like the light, the shooting, the look about it. Allan is very passionate about what he films and how it should look. Timing. The flow. He was more the person that knew about all the laws in physics and the plan of the structure of the shots. I talked to the old fellas every night and would say, “Well, old fellas, tomorrow, you 2 old fellas, you 2 sit back here, and then these two old fellas will come, will walk…”. Those 2 old fellas they were the right people—father and son in the skin kinship—they were the ones that had to do that.

Were the old men familiar with being the subjects of a film? Did they know how to play their roles for you?

Those 4 particular guys, they’ve been acting, working with film crews for maybe 5 or 6 years. But I wanted to film them being themselves. I didn’t want them to act. When they work with feature films and things like that they get catered, they get spoiled. They get dressed up, they get make-up on. I just wanted them to be themselves, be back in the bush.

I sat down with them old fellas every night. Just myself with them and had a little yarn with them. We’d mention a few old people’s names, and they’d know them old people. And I’d tell them who I am. I try and get a connection with those old people when I mention a couple of names from my neck of the woods, or where I’m from. Everybody sort of knows everybody through either working, or marriage, or through Dreaming stories. People are all connected really.

When you give your skin name, then they put you in society, in Aboriginal society. Like, tjapaltjarri, like old Johnny Possum. He’s my uncle, so they respected me that way too. When you start talking, when you know the law system and they know that you know it, they get comfortable with you. They can talk to you properly as family: “Young fella…we don’t wanna show that one. That’s bit tickly, you know?”. “Oh yeah, I understand, no worries”.

Nganampa was my training ground. I’ve learned a lot from doing that show. Still my favourite show. I like going out bush, camping under stars and sleeping in the swag and listening. Sharing cultural things and knowledges and sitting down with old people, talking about things that happened back in the past. Or the Dreaming stories. It’s something that you can’t buy off a shelf.

Karli Jalangu got invited to Canada, over in Vancouver for the ImageNation film festival. That blew me away. Gee, wouldn’t mind bein’ a director now! Get these trips overseas, and see the world! Those guys over there, people like [Jicarilla Apache actor] Alan Tafoya, they’re pretty down to earth. They’re just like us, trying to kick a goal, and get somewhere in life.

According to film artist, writer and all-round agent provocateur Philip Brophy, cinema as once we knew it is dead—indeed, it has been for some time now. However, Brophy’s eulogising lacks the doom and gloom of Godard’s. Cinema’s death is exciting, liberating, opening up new possibilities for sound and image—a new beginning. Cinema may be dead, Brophy argues, but there’s still much we can do with its corpse!

Speaking at the opening of Either/Auteur, an exhibition of 10 short digital works by members of Melbourne’s Dotmov media collective, Brophy had only to turn to the screen to find evidence supporting his argument. Launched to coincide with the release of the 40th issue of the online film journal Senses of Cinema, Either/Auteur could in many respects be considered a series of little autopsies—10 cinecrophilic attempts to explore and play with cinema’s corpse, to prod and poke it and—most importantly—to use digital technology and new media aesthetics to rethink its possibilities. The results, while not uniformly wonderful, were at the very least always intriguing, providing the framework for several questions about history, homage and—that old chestnut—the relationship between content and form.

The artists approached the question “Where can cinema go from here?” by channelling the artform’s greatest practitioners—or at least the top 10 as voted by readers of Senses of Cinema. Far from approaching those filmmakers with too much reverence, the Dotmov artists employed cinema history as a launchpad for their own innovations. The manner in which they did so sharply divided their works into 2 discrete but symbiotic groups. There were those who drew inspiration from the content of their filmmaker’s work (a scene, a theme, an iconographic image) but departed from it drastically when it came to style and form, aestheticising the borrowed content in new and jarring ways. Others upheld the formal preoccupations of their chosen filmmakers, but applied them to sounds and images that were, at most, only marginally reminiscent of their muses, and certainly not direct quotations or samples from specific films.

Brendan McKnight’s reworking of the famous shower scene from Hitchcock’s Psycho characterised the former approach, recreating the sequence shot by shot using the typographic characters of ASCII. Flashing by, strobe-like, at 8 or so frames a second, these images—the dying Marion Crane a swirling morass of letters and numbers—remediated those of the master of suspense, not only in light of personal computers and code, but also, more specifically, in respect of the creative practices of fandom and niche cultures.

Other notable works in this first category included Saskia Panjii Sakti on Stanley Kubrick and Lorraine Heller-Nicholas on Orson Welles, both employing simple rotoscoping techniques to break violently with the styles of their chosen ‘texts.’ Shelly Duvall, knife in hand, screaming hysterically in The Shining; Marlene Dietrich and Welles in Touch of Evil, his future “all used up”—both ‘redrawn’, quite literally to resemble pencil sketches, childish doodles, the former in cartoonish greyscale, the latter in brightest colour (a move made all the more interesting in light of Welles’ profound dislike of colorisation: “Tell Turner to keep his goddamned crayolas away from my film!” Too late!).

The second approach—the privileging of form and style—found its closest adherents in Claire Best covering Andrei Tarkovsky, Dominic Redfern fielding Akira Kurosawa and—though perhaps to a lesser extent, her images more loudly echoing those of her chosen filmmaker—Eugenia Lim channelling the most difficult of them all, the still alive-and-kicking Jean-Luc Godard. While these works weren’t as immediately striking as those of the former group, in retrospect this may just have been because the approach they had chosen yielded subtler results. Where the former group made reference to specific images and scenes, relying on outrageous stylistic tropes to highlight the extent of their departure, the latter group found itself compelled to poke the corpse in other ways. And thus we find ourselves contemplating—not gasping at—the quietly discordant image of an oriental Anna Karina, the product of an increasingly globalised world in which the black and white Paris of 1960s Godard has become virtually indistinguishable from the black and white ‘metroville’ (the title of Lim’s work) that could today be any major city in the world.

Only one work—Ryan Hayward on Martin Scorsese—tried to honour both form and content at once, resulting in a likeable if comparatively intransigent short, mixing creative use of film stock (or at least of digital filters) and the frenetic cutting of so much Scorsese with the iconographic imagery of the church and the mob that has been endemic to his work from the beginning. But whereas the form-and content-centric works in the exhibition privileged one aspect in order to challenge another, Hayward’s homage seemed just that—homage alone. Part of what made Either/Auteur so interesting was the extent to which the artists were able to build upon and extend the work of the filmmakers in question. Hayward’s work simply failed to take things far enough.

Although no major works emerged, Either/Auteur, as both exhibition and idea, remained notable for its explicit attempt to grapple with the dead weight of cinema’s corpse. It marked a worthy attempt to use the immense potential that lingers in the cinematic body as a springboard for new endeavours—to push the body beyond post-mortem, towards post-cinema.

Either/Auteur, curators Lorraine and Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, producers Dotmov media collective, Senses of Cinema; City Library, Melbourne, Aug 2-15

Moving between several venues that spanned the length of Perth’s sprawling suburbia, film-goers at the 9th Revelation Perth International Film Festival enjoyed black comedies, cutting edge documentaries, absorbing features and restored classics. Along with an impressive experimental line up Rev integrated micro-cinema with the alternative and kitsch to create Cinema Tabu, hidden in Perth’s most versatile venue, The Bakery Artrage Complex.

Cinema Tabu & SPLIF

Incorporating local bands with an impressive line up of documentaries and features, Cinema Tabu provided audiences with the opportunity to watch films in a more intimate setting. This micro-cinema venture most notably featured Fuck (Steven Anderson, 2006), a well made, funny although not always eye opening critique of censorship in the United States; Super Starlet AD (John Michael McCarthy, 2000), a sleazy, grainy, B-grade, exploitation-esque cult oddity about busty girl gangs in a post-apocalyptic world; and Amazing Grace: Jeff Buckley (Nyla Adams, Laurie Trombley, 2005), an intimate journey into the mind and life of the musician.

The kind of ‘do it yourself’ aesthetic of micro-cinema was particularly well suited to SPLIF (Screening Perth’s Local Independent Films) a showcase of local underground cinema that was perhaps the main event at Cinema Tabu. The SPLIF program began with the smoothly produced and visually impressive Some Dreams Do Come True (Christopher Kenworthy/Chantal Bourgault, 2005, 6 mins). Recently accepted into the Palm Springs International Film Festival, the film evokes the powerful effect that “the things we picture” in our minds have on our lives. After spending years visualising his perfect wife the protagonist finally meets her on his wedding day. Switching between dreams and wedding scenes, the groom gradually approaches his dream woman who reveals herself to be less perfect than expected. Her distasteful, pointed comment while they are dancing—”I thought this was meant to be a white wedding”—allows the camera to move to the only black man at the wedding, who arrives just in time to signal the flaws in the not so perfect girl, and of course the flawed fantasy of the protagonist. The film’s underdeveloped culmination left me somewhat confused, the disrupting presence of the black man seeming a little tokenistic, even for a short film. Nonetheless the appealing special effects—the dream sequence of flying angels was nicely gothic—combined with vivid lighting and deep colours, highlighted the potential for politically oriented independent films to eschew the gritty aesthetics of conventional social realism.

This approach was particularly well developed in Weewar (Glen Stasiuk, Naomi Ashcroft, 2005, 6 mins) which engages with the politics of public history. An Indigenous period piece set in 1840, it tells the story of the first Nyungar man to be tried under white law in Western Australia. Weewar moves between the Nyungar language and English, between natural landscape and colonial architecture, between land and water to parallel the impact of colonisation on Indigenous ways of life in Western Australia. In doing so it reflects the disjuncture of colonial and indigenous cultures central to its narrative.

Nightfill (2003, 23 mins) by Luke Jago is a wonderful black and white comedic take on the horror genre. In a small suburban supermarket the night fill staff begin their duties. Unbeknownst to them it has just been discovered that drinking a particular brand of milk is turning people into bloodthirsty zombies. As the night fill workers begin to turn into zombies it is up to “The New Guy” to save them. Technically astute and visually entertaining, the film highlighted the features of the genre while showcasing the skills of the actors and crew.

Ransis and Alee (Randal Lynton, 2003) was another technically accomplished piece. A painstaking 10-minute stop animation work, it’s a story about a dog and a cat searching for food in a quiet medieval village. When a gargoyle tries to overcome them the creatures join forces against him. The detail in the animation makes it captivating and almost familiar. A creaking sign, eerie shadows and the bloody knives of the tavern owner, along with rickety skeletons, slimy fish heads and scurrying mice, are exquisitely macabre details in a deadly gothic fairy tale. The curiously anaemic cat, Alee, whose strangely shaped head bobbles out of a disused barrel to meet the diseased eye of Ransis the dog, is oddly endearing. The finely composed soundtrack enhances the imaginative evocation of setting in this fascinating short animation.

For me the highlight of SPLIF was A Dollar for the Good Ones (Josh Lee, 2006, 30 mins), a thoughtfully incisive documentary about the lives of 2 marginalised young men, Luke and Jermaine. Shot in Karawarra, once a working class Perth suburb where Lee and his 2 friends grew up, the film revolves around the boys’ midnight journeys to the new golf course to find balls that they then clean and sell to help supplement their drug habit. Lee shows a rare ability to avoid a sense of voyeurism, perhaps arising from his affinity with the men and his willingness to allow them to carry the film forward. It is, after all, their story, and it’s the daily interactions of the men with each other and Lee, and their rapport with the camera, that gripped me. Watching them swim in the golf course lake, cleaning the golf balls, discussing how they sell them, emphasised the economic disparities that underscore my middle class privilege and casual optimism about life.

Somehow Lee manages to bring his audience into an uncomfortable, but never unfeeling, relationship with the protagonists that, for him, must have been unnerving and exhausting. In the final scene we are left watching Luke in a post-injecting high, his spent body slowly slumping into a chair. If micro cinema offers the potential for new ways of seeing, perhaps this film embodies it: somewhere in between public and private space, viewing becomes potentially more ‘exposing.’

Experimental Showcase

Incorporating a diverse range of aesthetic and political concerns, Rev’s experimental program was curated by Sydney based independent artist Atanas Djonov. Screening at Luna SX in Fremantle, the showcase offered audiences a useful extrapolation of the possibilities and directions that experimenting with film-based forms might create.

Djonav’s own work formed a significant component of the program, several of his works using music as a crucial pivot. Juxtaposing time, music and landscape the video works Dawn (2004-2006) and Wide Open Fields (2005) are set to traditional Eastern European folk songs about hope and community. Against a backdrop of changing urban and rural scenes, past and present merge as the subtitled songs call up memories of lost warriors, forgotten causes and dreams. As the music evokes what we cannot see and hazy light throws shadows on deserted built and open spaces, we watch history pass while reflecting on how communities form and who they rely on to survive. I enjoyed the significant role music was given, overlaying and underscoring the conceptual work of seeing. Escape (2004), a stop frame animation, deals with our need to find and display images of perfection. Using a human figure made from wire, whose quest is to capture an image he is attracted to, Djonav suggests such desire provides moments of inspiration but is a fruitless urge that propels our lives.

In Trojan Horse, Turkish Crow (Karga) David Mackenzie’s poetic merging of colour, motion and stillness is mesmeric. As darkness slowly peels away under the glow of impending dawn, we see a group of birds cascading in all directions around the statue of a horse. Their textured motion juxtaposed with the frozen statue against hazily toned colouring captured something like the sublime: a moment of poised stillness in which viewers are immersed. Ticketweavels (Caroline Huf, 2004) is a frenetic stop animation video work. Full of worm-like movements that eventually disintegrate a railway ticket, its un-weaving evoked industrial processes of construction together with the natural process of decay. Bringing something so simple to life, Huf recreates its intricacy before our eyes.

In Sumugan Sivanesan’s Anaesthesia (2004), a television screen showing asylum seeker images struggles to make itself heard against a deafening soundtrack. The tightly synched video and audio creates an unnerving sense of dislocation and alienation that reverberates eloquently with the treatment of people seeking asylum in Australia. This kind of aesthetic engagement, variously deployed by the experimental works on show transformed the cinema into a gallery-like environment, reshaping and expanding the viewing experience.

The creative scope and the space they offer filmmakers make both SPLIF and the Experimental Showcase significant elements of the cinematic makeup of Rev. Along with Cinema Tabu they offer other perspectives on seeing, realising the revelatory impact of independent, underground and experimental cinema.

9th Revelation Perth International Film Festival: Cinema Tabu, Bakery Artrage Complex, Northbridge, July 14-16, 20-23; SPLIF, Bakery July 16, Mojos, Fremantle, July 18; Experimental Showcase, Luna SX, Fremantle, July 22

Congratulations from RealTime+OnScreen to Revelation director Richard Sowada on his appointment to ACMI as Head of Film Programs. He takes up Clare Stewart’s position, who is now Artistic Director of the Sydney Film Festival.

The extended run and conversation-generating impact of Michael Haneke’s film Hidden in Australia problematises the idea that audiences these days are only interested in ‘dumbed-down’ fare or middlebrow period dramas. Viewers responded deeply to this dark, challenging cinematic vision of contemporary Western life. Meanwhile, beyond our borders the film is quickly on its way to an unusually swift canonisation, though barely a year old. It may not enter the Sight & Sound Top Ten list in second place, as did L’avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960) only 2 years after release. Yet while not as formally revolutionary, Hidden shares with Antonioni’s film the uncanny ability to resonate with a particular yet also broadly relevant social, political and psychological reality. Mark Lawson’s big claim in The Guardian that this is the first masterpiece of the 21st century shows the extent of the film’s critical reception, especially in Europe and the UK. Though cautious about such a backlash-inviting call (which may also betray a ‘Eurocentric’ taste vis-à-vis recent world cinema), for me Hidden deserves its rapidly growing reputation. I’ll try and articulate why.

Inside: The ‘Post’-Colonial Story

The thematic obsessions of Haneke’s previous films—violence, guilt, complicity, the hypocrisies of postcolonial societies, voyeurism and a quasi-apocalyptic vision of Europe—return in Hidden. However, historical context is more precise this time, relating to a very particular, though relatively unknown, atrocity committed at, and by, the very heart of civilised Europe: the long-suppressed events of October 17, 1961, when French Police murdered at least 200 unarmed Algerian protesters in central Paris.

This substantial story provides the background to the tale of Georges, who while only 6 at the time has since suppressed a very personal, related crime, the abject selfishness of which effectively ruined the life of an Algerian boy, Mahjid, after his parents died in the October ’61 protest. The film builds to a notable limit point in the interiorising (hence also repression) of colonialism’s subject/other relation. Rather than the ‘problem’ and its violence occurring largely across the sea during the colonial period itself (famously told in Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers 1966), or unnervingly nestled in Paris’ poverty-stricken banlieu regions (as seen in Kassovitz’s La Haine 1995), Hidden forces us to see the relationship from completely inside the western subject clearly haunted by guilt-laden fear of revenge.

As if to properly mirror their suppression in France, the events of October 1961 are only briefly mentioned once in the film, during Georges’ reluctant, partial recounting of his role in Mahjid’s fate to his wife, Anne, in the process of belatedly explaining to her his suspicions as to who is harassing them with surveillance-style videos of their home. The scant treatment of the broad historical context, in favour of Georges’ ‘smaller’ but related story, means that viewers can consider the same essential narrative played out within their own part of the world (an Australian version of this tale could be mounted with very minor historical alterations).

Bright, Cultured Surface

Considering the film’s dark thematic focus, it is notable indeed that with important exceptions (the adult Mahjid’s airless apartment building corridor and Georges’ bedroom scenes), a bright, clean and airy visual palette predominates. And compared to Haneke’s earlier films (not to mention US cinema’s treatment of social crisis), we are shown almost no violence, making the millisecond’s worth we do witness deeply shocking. Rather, Hidden presents an anthropologically precise account of the fully civilised ‘surface’, forensically charting the mask beneath which unseen historical violence and ongoing injustice underpin an advanced social reality.

The bright tonality and decorum that renders the visible markers of dark, ‘hidden’ subject matter also works on this side of the screen, in a similarly deceptive way, to quietly generate a complicitous relation between the film’s largely middle class audience and the onscreen milieu. Though many critics deny it, Georges (a public TV literature talkshow host) and Anne (an intellectual-end publisher) are far from monstrous; working within the embattled—presumably ‘liberal’—intellectual sphere of Western culture (and its most romanticised form, literature), they’re likely to be respected or even envied by an arthouse film audience. Initially lured into empathy, we are soon also implicated in this onscreen couple’s ‘problem’ because of who they are—and perhaps as we sense it is also our own.

This cultural complicity only increases in discomfort as Georges cumulatively makes up a devastating portrait of the Western subject (again, but never has it been more timely) positioning itself as the victim of the feared—and repressed—ethnic/cultural ‘other’, irrespective of his possessing all the economic, political and social power. In the remarkable scene when Mahjid’s teenage son comes to see Georges at work (the young French-Algerian obviously an impostor in this culturally powerful domain of state-run media), during their exchange in the office bathroom Georges’ apparent fear of attack sees him on the verge of violent rage as the young man requests the chance to discuss his father’s suicide to which Georges was witness. The ‘winner’ of colonial relations gets very angry indeed when faced with the reality and personification of his personal history thereof, the seemingly benign and polite nature of its young representative notwithstanding.

Here and throughout the film, such anthropological concentration on Georges’ reactions and behaviour means that we cannot resort to a familiar reductive point scoring game between opposing sides (under the guise of ‘balance’, as in frequent ‘serious’ media treatments of military and political conflicts) wherein any ethical debate is short-circuited. Rather, we are trapped with the subject who likely most resembles the viewer, irrespective of one’s ethico-political opinions and allegiances, and left face-to-face with the myriad implications of this hermetic mirroring.

Slippery Images

Though Hidden at first looks more conventionally narrative-based than previous Haneke films, there is also a mirroring at the level of form. At first innocuous enough, the opening shot turns out to be a subtly reflexive image combined with an unnerving, voyeuristic kind of observational realism, as we watch still footage of a suburban Paris street in which nothing seems to be happening—before the image is rewound as a VCR playback. This straight-up initiation into a central, incrementally spiralling ambiguity will increasingly inform our reading of the whole film. The central recurring question is whether we’re watching a ‘transparent’ filmic image or rather a video tape from Georges and Anne’s unknown harasser (through the camera in its moment of filming, or as an un-framed image being watched).

Yet there is something curious about the surveillance-style videos: the camera that must have shot them doesn’t seem ‘hidden’ at all. Besides the obvious point that we’re much more likely to be filmed in the ‘post-September 11 world’, the apparent omniscient impunity of the unseen-yet-unhidden video camera compounds the deeper perceptual, ethnical and political questions the film has asked from the start. This deepening formal-thematic nexus gains further traction and impact from the fact that there is no narrative resolution to who has been sending the tapes. (Some critics briefly ponder that, irrespective of the film’s apparent realism, the tapes business could in fact be ‘metaphysical,’ in a Kafkaesque sense). We are faced here with an explicitly mediatised virtual ‘return’ of repressed feelings and guilt—as manifest in the inherently prosaic yet also digitally hyperreal, and hence very disturbing, video images. In this way, the lines between Georges’ dream/flashback sequences (the most clearly demarcated ‘interior’ parts of the film), the ‘realist’ scenes and the videos becomes completely flattened; in terms of both filmic language and conceptual suggestion, this is a troubling epistemological breakdown indeed.

The implications of all these highly ambiguous long-take, fixed position images, culminate—as did most of the post-screening discussions—in a final image way beyond the ‘ambiguous ending’ that amounts to a very limited choice of possible narrative outcomes. Even before the question of interpretation, here are two distinct images in one, depending on the viewer’s perceptual response. Though on the lookout, upon my first experience of the film I was one of what Haneke estimates is 50% of viewers who fail to see the 2 boys enter the frame and have an unheard conversation. (The ending still ‘works’ big-time, and my essentially non-narrative experience of the shot generated thematic shards such as: the contemporary religious clothing in French schools controversy; state education’s role vis-à-vis the nation’s ongoing ‘post’-colonial politics; Western paranoia about public space and our children as innocent, vulnerable targets for terrorism; and of course, the ubiquitous lingering question as to whether we are watching another ‘video’, in production or consumption.)

But whether one sees the boys or not, this ending is genuinely open in regards to a critically—non-doctrinaire—political and philosophical vision of the precise historical moment in and from which the film emerges. Does this final image suggest a continuation of a terrible colonial heritage subject-other relation that (though with a different history and specifics of power) might be seen as the French/Algerian version of the German/Jewish bond sometimes called ‘negative symbiosis’? Or, keeping in mind not only the boys’ part-appearance at the end but also the mysterious observer and elliptical inquirer roles they play throughout Hidden, do these new generation figures instead suggest a forging of some kind of solidarity made possible by historical acknowledgement opening up the possibility of a new, reconciliatory future?

Productive pessimism

In addition to the film’s aesthetic layering, I believe the key to this spectatorial and generative openness (I’ve listed only the most discussed possibilities) is Haneke’s rigorous pessimism. Like many of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s films, Hidden is powered by a seemingly hopeless or even nihilistic sensibility with which to chart social reality. It’s the necessary ‘cold shower’ antidote to the disempowering tendency of much cinema to suggest solutions that in real life would seem simplistic or childish fantasies. Instead, a seemingly bleak world view actually grants the audience the ultimate respect and space so that, separately and together, we might take responsibility for processing the ethical conundrums played out on screen—because in many ways they are our own, or our culture’s—and only thereby, albeit provisionally, ‘completing’ the film and creatively re-entering the world. Without the kind of negative space Haneke provides, literally and philosophically, we have no such room, opportunity or potential empowerment.

The cumulative affective and conceptual impact of Hidden is brought home in its last 3 shots: the finest image of ‘cocooning’ I’ve seen in the cinema, when the self-styled victim draws heavy bedroom curtains after taking an afternoon sleeping pill, disrobes and slips beneath the duvet; then, his flashback/memory/dream/imagined image of the young Mahjid being forcibly carted off, as a result of Georges’ jealousy, to an orphanage; and finally, the quietly eerie and very open double-image of a public school in the afternoon. For me, this sequence seals a cinematic experience that resonates so close to perceptual and conceptual home that it is impossible to escape. No wonder so many people are talking about a film the swift canonisation of which is testimony to the uncanny timeliness of its confronting thematic concerns and inextricably linked, insidious and deceptive aesthetics.

Hidden, writer-director Michael Haneke, actors Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche, cinematographer Christian Berger, editors Michael Hudecek, Nadine Muse; 2005; Madman DVD, release date Oct 11

Our celebratory/incendiary cover image text is but one of many that cascade across the screen in alarming and witty juxta/transpositions and lateral/literary narratives, often to fine jazz, in the web-based work of YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES from South Korea who will feature in this year’s MAAP: Out of the Internet international media art event out of Brisbane and libraries and galleries around the world (p2). Go to www.yhchang.com for a great collection of YHCHI works.

MAAP is just one of a host of festivals we’re covering in this edition and there are many more on the way. Historically, festivals were sometimes events of ritual inversion—of power, of the sacred, of gender relations—and often celebrated with fire—bonfires and fireworks. The intensity of any festival can engender a sense of transformation, of an old self purged and the world viewed anew. That’s what we hope of art festivals, renewal of our senses and values and a reinvigorated appreciation of art and its capacity to change itself and transform us.

In these dangerously conservative times we expect a lot from art and arts festivals. We ask them to keep us intellectually alert, politically aware and to protect our senses from being restricted, even shut down, by the dark forces of censorship and narrow views of what constitutes human experience. Nigel Jamieson’s Honour Bound (p42) powerfully merged a direct demand for justice for David Hicks and an immersive theatricality; Version 1.0’s Wages of Spin wickedly reframed the world of politics and media, distilling verbatim the appalling illogic of our politicians and their Iraq war so that we could not, as we laughed and gasped, ignore their criminality. With the works of Romeo Castellucci, Robert Wilson, Dumb Type and others in the coming Melbourne Festival we will be expecting no such direct appeals to our consciences, but we hope that they will rewrite the world for us in some way. The worlds conjured by these artists are strange ones that can take us far away from our everyday selves; others are more alarmingly familiar.

In his essay on Michael Haneke’s remarkable film, Hidden, Hamish Ford (p18) attributes some part of the film’s greatness and the considerable dialogue it has generated to the proximity between the lives of the film’s central couple and its audience. Hidden is neither bourgeois melodrama nor social comedy, where such proximity can provide a cosy refuge. This is an uncomfortable affinity and one distressingly difficult to categorise and put aside—hence the depth of the film’s challenge to our sense of responsibility and the intricacies of our complex connections with nation and history. In an era of comfortable narratives and perpetual demands for closure, Haneke, as Ford sees it, demands of us an adult response: “[His] seemingly bleak world view actually grants the audience the ultimate respect and space so that, separately and together, we might take responsibility for processing the ethical conundrums played out on screen—because in many ways they are our own, or our culture’s—and only thereby, albeit provisionally, ‘completing’ the film and creatively re-entering the world.” KG

Although MIFF’s short film agenda was certainly exhaustive, my ‘best on ground’ was the Focus on Nordic Shorts selection, uniformly excellent and sharing the blackest humour, absolute self-deprecation and a savage willingness to torch convention. Sniffer (director Bobbie Peers, Norway, 2005, 12 mins) imagined what conformity, consumerism and desire would be like in a futuristic world with no gravity, minimal dialogue and a cast of overweight men—a metaphoric wonderland with layers of meaning unpeeling like subcutaneous tissue. Bawke (Hisham Zamam, Norway, 2005, 15 mins) used a Zinedine Zidane football card and a cluey kid to pack an emotional sucker punch about illegal immigrants, while The Last Farm (Runar Runarsson, Iceland, 2004, 15 mins) was a bitter, compelling psychodrama that neatly inverted George Sluizer’s The Vanishing.

The searing Roswell Enterprises (Janic F Heen, Norway, 2005, 10 mins) gave us 2 corporate wannabes playing one-upmanship in a high-tech men’s room before a job interview, only to find their cock sparring is being monitored and assessed. Me As Usual (Martin Zandvliet, Denmark, 2006, 8 mins) featured a self-obsessed guy in a dinner suit walking across a frozen field, talking to himself. A wide shot reveals he’s actually prattling on to another bloke wearing a costume moose head, while a nerdy cop with low self-esteem watches. Film ends. Take this as a commentary on the impossibility of wrapping up narratives in 8 minutes. I did.

Kids featured in the Focus on French selection, typified by the magic-realist For Interieur (Patrick Poubel, 2005, 10 mins) where a boy discovers his grandfather literally holds the world in his hands. Hard Lines (Benoit Tételin, 2005, 17 mins) laid bare a woman’s emotional past. Shot in black and white (and blue), it interspersed the woman’s work as a counsellor for abused children with angry confrontations with her mother. A Curtain Raiser (François Ozon, 2006, 30 mins) skewered Gallic relationships with sharp wit, nuanced acting and lush cinematography. “How un-French”, a character bemoans, “to complain about a woman being late. What sort of woman isn’t late, some kind of sexless monster…”

MIFF’s Accelerator program showcased emerging Australian and New Zealand talent. The films ranged from the brave—the semi-improvised The Dance (Sian Davies, Australia, 2005, 10 mins), about teen depression—to the tasteless—Nature’s Way (Jane Shearer, New Zealand, 2006, 10 mins), in which a young girl is graphically kidnapped and murdered in the forest, all so we can witness a pointless supernatural template framed by car-ad cinematography. The Last Chip (Heng Tang, Australia, 2005, 22 mins), funny and wise, featured a trio of overmade-up Vietnamese harridans determined to score big at the casino to fund ‘more abalone and birds’ nest soup’. Checkpoint (Ben Phelps, Australia, 2006, 11 mins) inventively connected the ‘War on Terror’ and ingrained Australian racism via the power of suggestion.
William

Of the Focus on Australian Shorts program, William (Eron Sheehan, 2006, 20 mins) was the pick, portraying an Indigenous magician and his strange magnetism for violence of all stripes—as institutionalised thuggery, as survival tactic, as mindless indulgence. The documentary My Brother Vinnie (Steven McGregor, Australia, 2006, 20 mins) recounts the experience of the actor Aaron Pedersen virtually raising his brother Vincent, who has mild cerebral palsy. The film’s simple power derives from Vinnie’s gentle charm and Aaron’s desire to finally let off steam and tell the story of their struggle to survive in foster homes. My Brother Vinnie won the festival’s Best Documentary Short Film award.

The animated films From Gold to Grapes (Al MacInnes, 2006, 6 mins) and Yallourn Story (Dave Jones, 2006, 6 mins) were also highlights. Both tell stories of forgotten Australian communities using the same technique—bringing local adults to life via local kids’ drawings, allied to voiceovers from the grownups themselves. This unpretentious device, bridging generations and essaying history as worthy of preservation in an age of the eternal present, put the rotoscoping bollocks of MIFF’s “hotly anticipated animated work”, A Scanner Darkly, to shame.

In fact, most of the Animated Shorts films kicked Scanner’s arse, especially Rabbit (Run Wrake, UK, 2005, 5 mins), a surreal headfuck told via cutouts of primary school readers—as if Dick, Jane and Spot had been sucked into the freaky fantasies of devil children. The Wraith of Cobble Hill (Adrian Parrish, USA, 2006, 16 mins), a subtle claymation about conflicted youth, was shot in grainy black and white. Other notables included the watercoloured cannibalism fable, The True Story of Sawney Beane (Elizabeth Hobbs, UK, 2005, 11 mins) and the computer-generated Astronauts (Matthew Walker, UK, 2005, 9 mins)—like an English Dark Star. Funny Pets (Ryuji Masuda, Japan, 2005, 6 mins) delivered a tripped-out parallel universe made from queasy CGI, where a Betty Boop-like bimbo keeps 2 dumb alien pets that bend space and time completely by accident. MIFF awarded it Best Animated Short Film. Daydream (Yoo Jinee, South Korea, 2005, 13 mins) was simply beautiful, using fantasy to tell of the director’s love for his disabled daughter.

The Documentary Shorts were just as compelling. Sleep City (Enrique Rodrigues & Moncho Fernandez, Spain, 2005, 10 mins), a Ballardian meditation on urban psychopathology, artfully cropped its frames to exclude all humans—a train without passengers, a fairground starting up by itself, ghostly escalators looping for eternity—the technological landscape, a kind of AI, becomes the star attraction. Last Men Standing (Sasha Maja Djurkovic, UK, 2005, 17 mins) tells of the Tower Colliery coal mine in Wales, bought by miners with their severance pay. As the miners proudly speak of their dignity and their pride in the mine, we cut to smacked-out, teenage glue sniffers, unlikely (by their own admission) to live another few years. Will the mines save the kids from the glue? Or are these kids choosing glue over going down the mines? It doesn’t seem much of a choice and the power of this film is assured in the final shot, as a block of flats is detonated and the white smoke bleaches the screen to nothing.

The sheer range of the documentary shorts proved the creaky adage that truth is a billion times stranger, messier and more jarring than fiction, especially when too many of the Fiction Shorts relied on bog-standard melodrama, with characters learning inevitable emotional truths in inevitably empty landscapes. Still, A Supermarket Love Song (Daniel Outram, UK, 2005, 13 mins) sympathetically portrayed a horny old man’s lust for a bored, reprobate girl; Antonio’s Breakfast (Daniel Mulloy, UK, 2005, 16 mins), about a streetwise kid looking after his crippled father, was tough, edgy and full of steel-grey urban vibes (and was awarded a special prize by the MIFF judges); while Cotopaxi (Zack Copping, UK, 2005, 13 mins) was an acerbic, hilarious mockumentary about a guy who tries to rescue his sister from a hippy commune, only to succumb himself.

Unfortunately, Experimental Shorts was a real snorefest. Being a Chris Marker fan, I had hopes for the La Jetée homage, Beta Test (George Drivas, Germany, 2006, 14 mins), but it failed with its sterile fidelity to Marker’s original, including Identikit off-screen whispering. Too bad Marker’s intelligence wasn’t Xeroxed as well. However, I woke up when Brothers, Let Us Be Merry (Ulrich Seidl, Austria, 2006, 1 min) came on—hard not to when 2 naked, bored-looking men fill the screen, vigorously wanking to the thundering strains of Mozart’s Zaide.

During his 6 years as Executive Director of the Melbourne International Film Festival, James Hewison made his mark on festival programming in a number of ways. Arguably his most significant achievement was the development of a discrete festival section focusing on films from the Middle East. Given the increasingly complex nature of politics in that region, Hewison’s prescience has ensured the Homelands section of the festival has assumed an increasingly topical and urgent emphasis. As in previous years, the 2006 program provided some of the most provocative films on offer in the festival.

Evenly divided between documentary and fiction, a more modestly scaled but rigorous selection of 10 films comprised this year’s program. Unsurprisingly, the American/Iraqi conflict provided both direct and oblique inspiration for filmmakers from the US and the Middle East.

In Prisoner 345, Lebanese director Abdallah El Binni provides a now chillingly familiar account of incarceration without charge at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre. El Binni makes a forceful argument for a probable case of mistaken identity in relation to Al Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Hajj and, in the course of his investigations, highlights the arguably unjust and unnecessarily punitive treatment of ‘terrorist suspects’. El Binni’s occasional ‘Mike Moore’ moments are mitigated by comprehensively compiled footage, alarming testimony from former Guantanamo detainees, and an effectively unsettling soundtrack.

James Longley’s Iraq in Fragments explores the post-Saddam era from the perspectives of the 3 dominant Iraqi political forces. Focusing on a handful of individuals to represent Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish interests, and combining minimal narration with striking imagery, this impressionistic work owes a considerable debt to Werner Herzog’s masterful take on the first Gulf War aftermath, Lessons of Darkness (1992). Despite the swag of awards the film has garnered, Iraq in Fragments is a spectacularly beautiful but ultimately incoherent document. Its failure to meaningfully illuminate the complexities of the Iraq situation is also exacerbated by the conspicuous and inexplicable absence of female perspectives.

In contrast, My Country, My Country, directed by compatriot US filmmaker Laura Poitras, provides a salutary lesson in rigorously structured, compelling documentary filmmaking. As with Longley, Poitras narrows her focus to an individual subject in order to illustrate the wider Iraqi socio-political context. The director follows Baghdad medico and aspiring Sunni politician Dr Riyadh as he administers free medical treatment, encourages his Sunni constituents to vote in the historic 2005 Iraq election and interacts with his large and exuberant family.

A quietly charismatic personality, Dr Riyadh experiences gradual disillusionment with his party and the electoral process, a feeling compounded by the relentless violence in Baghdad and the palpable suffering of fellow Iraqis. Canvassing the opinions of a range of other electoral players including US military personnel, UN staff, Kurdish militia, and private Australian contractors, Poitras paints a dispassionate but telling picture of the grim and conflicting realities of life after Saddam.

Tackling an earlier historical period while making explicit the 21st century parallels, Kurdish writer-director Hiner Saleem delivers an equally damning indictment of Iraq’s longstanding ethnic tensions. At times a disconcerting combination of drama and black comedy, Kilometre Zero follows the exploits of young Kurdish soldier Ako (Nazmi Kirik). Drafted into Saddam Hussein’s army during the 1988 Iran-Iraq conflict and ordered to repatriate a dead soldier to his family, Ako is forced to share the long journey with a defiantly anti-Kurd Arab driver.

The absurdities of a repatriation process impeded by relentless bureaucratic obfuscation provide some light relief, but Saleem’s incisive script is ultimately more interested in interrogating the nature of his country’s internal conflicts. The acerbic dialogue, no-frills shooting style, striking framing of the scorched Kurdish countryside and impressive performances made this film a rewarding, if sobering, experience.

A trio of films from Israeli filmmakers addressed the broad thematic of marginalisation. Tomer Heymann’s Paper Dolls details the exploits of 5 transexual Filipinos living in Tel Aviv. Part of the foreign guest worker influx following the 2000 closure of the Israeli-Palestinian border, the men are dedicated aged care workers by day and flamboyant, lip-synching cabaret performers by night. Isolated from both their Filipino families and the broader Israeli community, and entirely dependent on their employers for visa status, these people occupy an increasingly tenuous position. As with his 2002 documentary, It Kinda Scares Me, Heymann’s film is a rambling and occasionally self-indulgent affair, but is ultimately redeemed by the poignant plight and honesty of the 5 subjects profiled.

Filipino aged care workers also provide one of the central storylines in prominent Israeli director Eyal Halfon’s ironically titled, multi-strand narrative What A Wonderful Day. This complexly plotted, Altmanesque, multi-character drama foregrounds the economic and socio-cultural difficulties facing illegal immigrants working in Israel. Anchored by the figure of Franco (Uri Gavriel), a tough, gambling addicted ex-cop facilitating the illegal sex worker trade, the travails of the keenly observed ensemble of characters make clear the unsavoury living conditions, discriminatory attitudes and emotional vicissitudes of illegal work. Managing the tonal shifts from grim realism to occasional humour with aplomb, Halfon’s film was one of the most impressive of the Middle Eastern entries.

Where Halfon tackles the marginalisation of foreign workers in Israel, writer-director Yoav Shamir’s Five Days details the predicament of Israeli ‘foreigners’ of another kind. Documenting the 2005 forcible ‘disengagement’ of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip, Shamir gets up close and personal to the key figures involved. Led by Noam Shapira, the settlers dig in for a long fight, elaborate military strategies unravel and ordinary Israeli citizens mobilize in support of the settlers. With virtually unlimited access to the man overseeing the disengagement, the genial and charismatic Major General Dan Harel, this fascinating documentary lays bare the ongoing tensions in Israeli society while revealing an unexpected side of armed forces operations.

Perhaps the most moving and inadvertently poignant film in the Homelands program was the French-Lebanese co-production A Perfect Day. Co-directed by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige (the team also responsible for The Pink House and Amad), this beautifully restrained, Antonioniesque mother and son drama is above all a paean to contemporary Beirut. As the narcoleptic Malek (Ziad Saad) roams the streets avoiding his melancholic mother and searching for his estranged girlfriend, static images of the same intimate streetscape are contrasted with the frenetic energy of the downtown metropolis and spectacular aerial panoramas. Oblique conversations, long silences, expressive lighting and crucially, the signature image of a driver scanning the Beirut streets make A Perfect Day in equal parts family melodrama, ‘city symphony’ and urban road movie. This finely calibrated film, with its overt references to Lebanon’s traumatic civil war past, was made even more resonant in the knowledge that during the course of the festival, Beirut suffered devastating damage in the latest eruption of Middle Eastern hostilities.

In the two Iranian contributions to the Homelands program, trenchant socio-political commentaries are embedded in the dilemmas of individual characters. It’s Winter is a forceful depiction of a young mother’s struggles when abandoned by her husband in a remote rural setting. Rafi Pitt’s third feature addresses the specific difficulties of rural unemployment and the grim working conditions in Iran’s urban manufacturing sector. Minimal dialogue, moody cinematography and sympathetic characterization make Pitt’s film a modest but effective parable reflecting the social and economic challenges facing contemporary Iran.

The central protagonist in prominent Iranian director Majid Majidi’s The Willow Tree is a blind, middle-aged academic. Rather than mining the conventional trope of the blind seer, Majidi restores vision to his main character, transforming him into an increasingly conflicted individual who cannot adjust to his rehabilitated status. Acclaimed for his award-winning works including Children of Heaven and The Colour of Paradise, Majidi’s most recent film is something of a disappointment. Despite his trademark meditative pacing and visual lyricism, the overwrought tenor of the work and elliptical editing style make this a less satisfying film. Unlike the symbolic appeal of the blind and mute young protagonists in earlier works, there is a histrionic, self-indulgent quality to this older character’s predicament that ultimately distances rather than engages the viewer.

In her recently published Cinemas of the Other: A Personal Journey with Film-Makers from the Middle East and Central Asia, Gönül Dönmez-Colin notes that The Willow Tree is a departure for Majidi in featuring a mature protagonist and a professional cast. Majidi is one of several directors featured in this comprehensive collection of interviews with both leading and less well-known filmmakers from the region. In addition to an incisive general introduction, Dönmez-Colin prefaces each interview with a short but informative overview of the director’s work.

While the interview with Majidi deals predominantly with her Baran (2001), Dönmez-Colin’s questions canvass a wide range of issues including the symbolic significance of child characters in the work of prominent Iranian directors, multiculturalism, the political climate and censorship issues in Iran. Iranian directors dominate the Middle-Eastern section of the book, which includes equally revealing interviews with pre-eminent filmmakers Abbas Kiarostami, Moshen Makhmalbaf and Jafar Panahi (the subject of a retrospective at this year’s MIFF alongside the Homelands program).
Emphasising the importance of understanding filmmaking in relation to the socio-political context of individual countries, Dönmez-Colin’s questions often investigate broader issues around cultural production, in addition to aspects of individual directorial style and content.

Despite some minor translation errors, a somewhat reader-unfriendly layout and the absence of an index, the extensive filmography and expansive series of interviews make Dönmez-Colin’s book a valuable contribution to understanding the increasing influence of filmmakers from this region.

Gönül Dönmez-Colin, Cinemas of the Other: A Personal Journey with Film-Makers from the Middle East and Central Asia, Intellect Books, Bristol, 2006.

Earlier this year, as part of its Future Classics program, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) presented the Australian premiere of New York artist Matthew Barney’s newest film, Drawing Restraint 9 (2005). Complementing this were screenings of Barney’s recent De Lama Lamina (2004), the Australian premiere of Alison Chernick’s documentary Matthew Barney: No Restraint (2006), and a brief return season of his iconic Cremaster Cycle (1995-2002) (unfortunately marred by the non-arrival of the Cremaster 4 print). The ‘future classics’ tag, a conspicuously optimistic divination, suggests that Barney is developing into a proto-auteur, the ACMI program serving as unofficial Barney film retrospective. This is an interesting accomplishment for an artist who makes films but isn’t quite a filmmaker.

A petroleum jelly sculpture, the Japanese whaling vessel Nisshin Maru and the music of Icelandic singer (Barney’s partner) Björk are some of the unlikely elements in the Drawing Restraint 9 mix. The film obliquely tells the story of two Occidental tourists (Björk and Barney) as they are welcomed onto the Nisshin Maru as guests during a whaling expedition. As they undergo traditional Japanese rituals beneath deck including a tea ceremony, the sculpture, in the shape of Barney’s emblematic field symbol (an elongated oval, horizontally bisected by a bar—representative of whales in this film) sets from liquid to jelly, and moves through a series of transformations and disintegrations. Obscurity of concept and idiosyncratic deployment are clearly Barney staples.
Drawing Restraint 9, Bjork

The film is the 9th (and already superseded) instalment in an ongoing, otherwise non-cinematic Barney project, which since 1987 has explored the process of creativity under artificial restraints. This informs Alison Chernick’s making-of documentary more than it does the diegesis of Barney’s film. His filmic creations (he is predominantly a sculptor) are so ostentatious they seem to demand heuristic analysis, yet are more immediately accessible when viewers pose as aesthetes. Drawing Restraint 9 is no exception.

Björk suggests in the documentary, No Restraint, that since Barney mainly considers himself a sculptor, his films are primarily in service of that role. Yet Barney and his distributors are evidently courting a wider, more instantaneous audience than sculpting alone could attract. Along with this come the twin demands of narrative and spectacle, awkwardly coupled with the competing expectations that Barney deliver both an aesthetic cinematic ‘event’ and something transcendentally artful. This is the tightrope he began walking in 1995 with Cremaster 4, and perhaps in a way that the earlier films were only able to achieve intermittently, Drawing Restraint 9 may just have enough to satisfy such diverse demands.

If Barney is at his best with Drawing Restraint 9, perhaps in this case one of the best things about Barney is Björk. The film’s much touted status as collaboration, rather than Barney vehicle with Björk in tow, is exemplified by the importance of her eclectic score, which strengthens the film’s most striking sequences. From the sub-bass symphony in the film’s opening passages, which abruptly bursts into a cacophony of ecstatic industrial noise, to the haunting electronic arpeggios and Björk’s intense soprano wailing that underscores the pivotal storm scene, the music evokes a visceral reaction to the film’s driven visual juxtapositions. Like all his preceding films, the music is a vital ingredient and Björk excels in crafting a unique soundscape.

Though a superficial glance might suggest otherwise, the film resists the narrow orientalist impulse of most American representations of Japanese culture. Drawing Restraint 9 couldn’t be more removed from obsessions with kooky otherness (though it might strike some as kooky itself). The film’s cinematic resonances are many, from its Powaqqatsi-like pseudo-ethnographic documentary moments in the opening stretches to the Cronenberg-esque transformation in its denouement. It also bears that unmistakable Barney hallmark, the plodding back-and-forth editing style. Nevertheless as an idiosyncratic exploration of form, shape, biological transformation and, above all, individual artistic whimsy, Drawing Restraint 9 sees Matthew Barney still very much doing it his way.

Matthew Barney: No Restraint serves as both the making of Drawing Restraint 9 and companion-piece to Barney’s artistic output till now. Chernick’s documentary explores not only the production of his latest film but also Barney’s meteoric rise to darling status on the New York arts scene through his other Drawing Restraint projects, the Cremaster films and various other works. As demystification of the obtuse symbolic logic in Barney’s latest film it is only partially successful, focusing quite a lot on the confusion Barney’s vision creates for many of his Japanese associates and the crewmembers of the Nisshin Maru. Chernick portrays Barney as manic, determined and enigmatic. The insights into the ongoing Drawing Restraint project raise the uncertainty of whether to afford primacy to process or product in Barney’s work. If only the documentary were less of an appetiser, it may sit oddly within Drawing Restraint itself as an exploration of the process and its unique constraints.

The other relatively new Barney film at ACMI was De Lama Lamina (the ACMI screenings were the film’s Melbourne premiere). The film was made after Barney completed the Cremaster Cycle and is part documentary, part remix/re-incorporation of his collaboration with American-Brazilian musician Arto Lindsay for the Salvador Carnival celebrations. The title translates roughly as “From Mud, a Blade” and while its thematic fusions of organics/technology and nature/culture is pure Barney, as a cinematic document of a performance in a specific time and place, it is unique within Barney’s emerging filmic cannon.

Lindsay’s Latin funk band perform atop a truck pulled by a tractor/tree fusion, during the Carnival parade, as environmental activist Julia Butterfly Hill and the Greenman (a naked man decorated with fluff and goo, bulbous, floral and beak-like protrusions and an Orangutan doll) create sculptures of organic/artificial composition above and below the engine. This is all surveyed by multiple hand-held digital video cameras and complemented by a cunning mix of the live music that gradually builds to a feverish climax. The intensity of this aural build-up and the audacious representation of the Greenman’s sexualised mechanical encounter (which one assumes from the credits, was shot later in the studio, not live) are among the film’s successes.

Drawing Restraint 9 has been given staggered screenings nationwide, with brief seasons at the Nova Cinema in Melbourne and the Chauvel in Sydney, representing a new frontier in Barney’s colonisation of the cinema scene. As with any premature attempts at canonisation, whether Barney’s filmic work warrants the ‘future classics’ tag is yet to be proven. Though there are undoubtedly fantastic visceral and visual pleasures within his works, he continues to attract criticism for lazily translating gallery art into cinema for a post-MTV generation. While this might say more about the audience than the artist, it is largely the former that builds reputations and determines the classics, for better or worse.

Barney’s cinematic works exist in a multimedia spectrum including gallery installations, books and sculpture-as-prop, to some extent suppressing the urge of cineastes to claim his works fully as their own. While being equal parts gallery art and pop cinema undoubtedly presents challenges to discourses of reception, it is not as if this is entirely new. David Lynch fused the worlds of surreal cinema and television melodrama in Twin Peaks long before the birth of motion picture television and continues to pursue his aesthetic obsessions in a variety of media, even furniture. Completely independent of whether a work is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, categorisation is a popular obsession. Barney, love him or hate him, serves as but one reminder that rigid categories do not simply exist unchallenged, but are constantly under review.

Future Classics: Drawing Restraint 9, directors Matthew Barney, Bjork; Matthew Barney: No Restraint, director Alison Chernick; De Lama Lamina, director Matthew Barney; Australian Centre For the Moving Image, Melbourne, May 12-17

Gina Czarnecki has written of a childhood trip to Poland with her father, a survivor of WW2 concentration camps, and the impact this has had on her art. Czarnecki’s film and installation artworks are informed by the human body in terms of disease, evolution, genetic research and by the technologies of image production. The work is often made in close collaboration with specialists in these fields. Czarnecki draws parallels between the reduction of human life to genetic units (through DNA analysis) and the technology of digital imaging with its modifiable pixel units, finding both can work as arbiters of, and smokescreens between, us and the ‘truth.’

Czarnecki has applied these ideas to her most recent work Contagion which is being funded by the prestigious Sciart Awards in the UK, Victoria’s Art and Innovation program and a Melbourne City Council Arts Project award. The Wellcome Trust’s Sciart scheme “supports imaginative and experimental arts projects that investigate biomedical science” and has its equivalent here in the Australia Council for the Arts’ Synapse program. Contagion uses mapping techniques employed to track contagious diseases such as SARS. Recently relocated to Australia from the UK, Czarnecki has collaborated with dance artists at Australian Dance Theatre (winning the 2006 Reeldance award for best dance film with Nascent), musicians, programmers and scientists working in the field of epidemiology. Her work is at the cutting edge interface between science and art and here she talks to RealTime about Sciart, Contagion, and her other interests.

Science and art

To give you a sense of the project, the scientists involved with Contagion are epidemiologists based in Australia. James Fielding is from the Victorian Government’s Infectious Diseases Unit. Steven Corbett, who I got in touch with regarding the 3D computational mapping of SARS, is now one of the leading scientists involved with developing control systems for a potential bird flu pandemic. Nick Crofts runs the Turning Point drugs and alcohol rehabilitation centre. All of these people are specialists not only in epidemiology but also specifically in observing the patterns of human interaction and behaviour under various extreme conditions.

Keith Skene is my long term collaborator and is a micro-biologist interested in the evolution of ecosystems. We mainly work together over a Guinness, having really good conversations about the migration of birds, pollen and forensics, slime moulds, or the way systems evolve when newcomers join them—which is the basis for this project. Adaptation, evolution and change: mutation. What’s essentially human? The biological in its physical and psychological forms. That’s the territory I share with these scientists. And then there are a number of other related things I am seriously interested in which come together in this project.

Mapping disease

One is the notion of purity, contagion and the spread of disease. I was sick for some time in Scotland following a trip to Kumasi, Ghana. The doctors in the isolation ward where I was being cared for suspected Ebola (making a scary front page newspaper story). Consequently I learned a lot about the virus. Ebola is transferred exactly the same way as AIDS, but it’s not as successful as the AIDS virus because it tends to wipe out entire communities, so it’s contained in that way. So then I started to look at successful diseases and their change over time, how they are transmitted and their effect on the way the world has evolved. For example, invading armies disregard local rules that are transmitted verbally through generations, unwittingly spreading disease. Europeans invading America, Australia and the islands caused so much biological havoc that a lot of [indigenous] communities were totally destroyed, which provides a theory as to why it was easy for white people to invade and dominate most of the planet.

Contagion uses the SARS outbreak in Amoy Gardens in Hong Kong 2002 as an epidemiological example. I’m interested in it because there are 3 schools of thought on how it was transmitted—rat droppings, sewerage and airborne. In the case for airborne, 3D computational graphics were used. I’m interested in the possibility that the compelling visualisations, or the ability to visualise the outbreak, provided a kind of proof authenticating one theory. When the news of the potential airborne nature of SARS became public, what followed was, as Stephen Corbett describes it, a “pandemic of fear” which can be far more dangerous than the virus itself. Humankind’s only remaining threat is either ourselves or single cell, microbiological disease which is invisible and mostly indiscriminate.

What is perceived as the disease’s incubation period, the mortality rate, the risk factors and the epidemiological laws are used as a starting point for the programming rules of the interactive installation, Contagion.

Mechanical reproduction and imaging the truth.

Contagion is also about an interest I have always had in the image and authenticity—how we have come to accept certain symbols or images as ‘visual truth.’ My most recent video installation, Spine 1.2 (union) gave rise to a lot of questions about falling bodies. Critic and curator Sally-Jane Norman made an association between this work and imagery of 9/11 on a news list. I am interested in how quickly an image is attributed to, or contaminated by, a certain event, or becomes owned by a nation’s history, as in this case.

We depend on context to recognise an image of truth. Science, law, medicine and the military present images and we take them as authentic, but so many of them are artificially constructed. Art can present fact but it’s often perceived as fiction. Medicine has been developing imaging technologies to prove the existence of something—scanning, ultra-sound, infra-red. On a train journey in the UK I sat opposite a Gulf War engineer who said “Of course we kill people, but we see them as little green dots on the screen and we just zap them.” On the one hand we have the technology to be able to see inside a womb and find foetal deformities, but we also use the same technology as a smokescreen between us and the reality of human destruction.

God, pigs and disease

This question of truth and authenticity is linked to the demise of organised religions and the rise of scientific theories. The word quarantine comes from the number 40. It was allegedly a Christian system to stop contamination; a boat had to be docked for 40 days before anything could be brought ashore. It was so successful that it is believed to be the reason Christianity succeeded so well in certain places where other religions didn’t observe quarantine rules.

Then you look at the pig, the animal genetically most similar to us and the only other animal that can catch influenza. The close proximity between humans, pigs and birds in Asia is thought to be the reason why bird flu seems to be stemming from there. The pig becomes the carrier or the host which transforms the virus between humans and birds. We seem to have detached ourselves from traditional reasons for abstaining from eating pork because we have dissociated local tradition from spiritual belief, science and medicine. So I’m interested in mapping the history of western biomedical sciences alongside societal rules and the development of control mechanisms for disease in an increasingly populated world.

The installation

I was sitting in Federation Square in Melbourne watching people watching themselves on the big screen. The quality of interaction made me reassess previous assumptions about interaction in more sanitised art gallery settings and inspired me to push interaction within my work further. I began by considering how the general public interacts with or responds to surveillance on a day to day basis.

In my work I want people to have a visceral experience, albeit digital, and so I’ve been developing an interface with Tim Kreger of a big colour palette in the installation space where people can mix colours in a liquid way. This makes up one projection on 3 circular screens in the space. The way the colour is mixed is based on action and interaction and the spread of disease across changing environmental conditions. Participants are aware that through their movements they are spreading an infectious disease, but it becomes a compelling and intoxicating game. We’re using surveillance software that’s been specifically developed to recognise people based on motion and average colour. So if you leave the room and come back again, you will be recognised. This interest in the human body on a micro and macrocosmic level, the articulation of movement, interaction and mapping, connects strongly to the many installation and dance projects I have previously done. Combining the observation of movement and time is my current exploration.

Contagion will be trialled at the Sydney Powerhouse Beta Space in October and will premiere in Melbourne in March 2007.

At the opening of Larissa Hjorth’s exhibition, Portrait of the Mobile, there were the requisite gallery sounds of wine consumption and luvvie “m’waw m’waw” air kissing. There was also the whiff of incredulity: “so it’s just pictures of mobiles, then?” That sentiment is not, of course, anything new for the spectators of everyday poetics. Hjorth’s work participates in a complex and problematic tradition of art which attempts to represent both the banality and gravitas of quotidian cultural practice. As such, her show articulates key preoccupations of this tradition: presence, intimacy and display.

The exhibition is the result of a 6-month ethnographic project on mobile phone culture conducted recently in Seoul and Melbourne. Hjorth interviewed 150 people, asking 2 questions: “What does your mobile phone mean to you?” and “How have you personalised your mobile phone?”

I have used a picture of my kitten as the wallpaper, and I like to hang gifties off it. Inspired by some artwork of a friend, I want to eventually have my phone laden with hundreds of crazy dangly things. I have also filled my phone with photos of everyone I love.

I’ve made my phone mine by putting my idol and Australia’s greatest ever cricketer, export and human being 😉 as my wallpaper …

These micro narratives comprise one component of the show, which is divided conceptually and materially into 3 zones. The survey responses, for example, are displayed as spinning lines of green text via a minimalist, sexy, flat screen monitor accompanied by a music track that could best be described as “symphony of elevator kitsch.” And here is where the visual and cultural logic of Hjorth’s work becomes evident. A productive tension inflects this exhibition between, on the one hand, the austere aesthetic conventions of gallery sensibility and the exuberant declarations of personal taste. Indeed, as Zara Stanhope observes in the catalogue essay, our attitudes to domestic space and personal technologies often manifest as “an Anglo-Saxon stoic resistance to all things kitsch and decorative.” This twin logic, one need hardly add, is also animated by gender. Just think of the marketing of mobile phones: forget about how they function, girls just need to fit them in their skinny jeans. In Hjorth’s work, both as art practice and academic research, we find a sustained critique about the gendered assumptions of mobile phone customisation and consumption.
Larissa Hjorth, Snapshots: Portrait of the Mobile

Larissa Hjorth, Snapshots: Portrait of the Mobile

Occupying a second thematic and technological zone of the show are 6 photographs mounted on A3 size light boxes fixed to the wall. These large format duratran transparencies depict mobile phones in mundane detail, each set against a background of traditional Korean ‘rainbow’ fabric. Some of the images show mobile phones ‘open’ to reveal a variety of domestic, intimate and humorous screensavers: a couple in evening dress, a bug-eyed cutesy kitten and the aforementioned tribute to ‘Warnie.’ These images display mobiles singularly, in clusters and, in 2 shots framing the exhibit, in grid formation. All are personalised, some adorned with keyrings, animal charms and various articulations of everyday ephemera. Establishing notions of immediacy and presence as major preoccupations for this exhibition is the photograph of the camera phone displaying on its screen the time of 6.26. Echoing On Kawara’s famous “date paintings”, this image calls attention to the strong desire to archive the present within contemporary socio-technological communication.

As photographs of photographs and screen shots of screen shots, this exhibition functions simultaneously at the level of representation and meta-commentary. Let me hasten to add, however, this is defiantly not some po-faced, tortuous rendition of art theory 101. Hjorth has too much of a sense of humour for that. How else to explain the image of a mobile dwarfed in size and, one suspects, weight, by its attached robotic-looking bear charm. Yet there is also a luxurious quality, a luminosity to these photographs which owes its heritage to the light box.

Made famous, as Alison Nordstrom has explained, by Eastman Kodak’s Colorama installed at Grand Central Terminal in the 1950s, the light box has at its very inception, the display of domesticity. For more than 30 years, these huge advertisements (the light boxes were 5.5 metres high by 18 metres wide and required 1.5 km of cathode tube for illumination) celebrated the Norman Rockwell dream, literally and figuratively demonstrating the lightness of the American domestic being. As Nordstrom puts it “the coloramas taught us not only what to photograph but how to see the world as though it were a photograph” (Alison Nordström, Colorama, Aperture, NY, 2005). Too prosaic to be advertising, too domestic for the gallery, Hjorth’s mobile phone is re-imagined as object of spectacle. As Jeff Wall’s photographic work has shown, light boxes help stage the everyday image, infusing it with a theatrical and cinematic power.

If Hjorth’s work evokes the majesty of cinematic screen technology with its sweeping visual gestures, it also registers the intensity of the moment utilising, what Hjorth has elsewhere called, “the miniature and personal canvas of the mobile phone” (Cultural Space and Public Sphere in Asia conference, www.asiafuture.org). In the third zone of the exhibition Hjorth insists on the intimate force of presence in her 3 “mobile movies”: films shot specifically by and for the mobile screen. Titled Losing You, Lost in Connection and Snapshots of Almost Contact, these short films explore how connectivity is produced, desired and lost through technology. Drawing attention to the whimsy and nostalgia of the technological imaginary, Hjorth includes the skeuomorphic mechanical “shutter” sound effect as a character snaps a camera photo within the film.

Snapshots evidences Hjorth’s sustained fascination with the role played by domesticity and consumerism within mobile phone culture. This is her second photographic show dedicated to charting the ethnography of the familiar framed as the tension between hi tech and “domes-tich.” A deft exploration of the opposing sensibilities of measured aesthetics and flamboyant display, this exhibition is a bit like Philippe Starck and Hello Kitty duelling with mobile phones.

Larissa Hjorth, Snapshots: Portrait of the Mobile; Spacement Gallery, Melbourne, July 13-Aug 5

On entering a clinical gallery space, visitors are greeted with lab coats, infrared headsets and a sign instructing them to don both for “field safety.” Urging us into the exhibit, Catherine Fargher's smooth call-centre voice and equally plastic smile signal the commercial nature of the domestic and scientific realms under scrutiny in her performance, BioHome: the Chromosome Knitting Project. The laboratory-kitchen is equipped with blenders, skin care products, microscopes and beakers.

Two volunteers are selected from the audience to take part in a task to isolate snowpea DNA, the process enlarged by projection on the wall behind. Meanwhile, Fargher narrates, touching on matters from DNA retrieval to human cloning. Suddenly she falls to the floor, dropping a blue liquid vial that spatters across the linoleum. This strategy (where the uncooperative body interrupts the performance) is used throughout the 45-minute show to emphasise the physical tensions that aren't being addressed by Fargher's narration. Terumi Narushima's subtle, live soundtrack escalates the tension during these episodes.

After Fargher recovers, we turn to the white stage behind us where a baby basinet (the 'BioBasinet') on wheels cradles a stern, black microscope. Fargher sneaks a peak at the 'BioBaby' lifting the cover expectantly and cooing over the microscope slide of “little Thumbelina.” The performer's account of the merits of BioHome continues as she demonstrates “DNA knitting.”

“Knitting has become more than a craft”, she says, casting on the yarn and detailing how humans can be 'knit' through DNA modification and in-vitro fertilisation (IVF). As her needles click, she adds that helpful products such as the ChromoKnit Doll are available for purchase. Her sales pitch is periodically interrupted: at one point, she sings a lullaby and later, has to lie down because she feels ill from all the hormones she's been injecting in IVF treatment. This performance directly addresses the desperation that some women face to have children and their willingness to experiment on their bodies. For those who have undergone IVF, this may prove confronting.

At times the scope of the performance and exhibition seemed overly ambitious. Analysing the intersection of science and the home is an unwieldy endeavour and a few times I was left wondering at how Fargher prioritised her subject matter—how does one decide what to address and what to leave out? Importantly, however, this work demands that its audience consider the role of biotechnologies in contemporary Australia.

Even without the narration, the exhibit stands on its own. The infrared headsets offer safety instructions, a discussion on ethics and an interview with Jo Larret on IVF egg extraction. Perhaps the audience would miss the finer nuances that come with Fargher's performance (especially on the role of consumerism in this growing market). However, the juxtaposition of the scientific with the domestic—which drives the visual element of the show-is certainly evident.

BioHome: The Chromosome Knitting Project, performance & installation Catherine Fargher, live sound mix Terumi Narushima, August 16-25, FCA Gallery, Faculty of Creative Arts, University of Wollongong, www.biohomeproject.com

John Tonkin, time and motion study<br /> (holding on, letting go), 2003/2006 courtesy the artist”></p>
<p class=

John Tonkin, time and motion study
(holding on, letting go), 2003/2006 courtesy the artist

Motion implies movement, but is this always the case? Art movement—the deliberately ambiguous trope of this exhibition title—is a term used to delineate the discursive aspect of the making, reception and onward development of an aspect of visual arts production. But is change an essential component of such motion?

The seven-person group show at the UTS Gallery avoids hard-edged boundaries but manages to draw together a (recorded) performance (by Robert Pulie) and an architectural model (by M3Architecture group). There is a line joining the 2 exhibits and the other work—not the shortest route between 2 points but the sharply contrasted gradient between 2 fields by which an affinity is proposed.

As with many of the university located galleries, exhibition curation and design have something of a role in addressing pedagogical needs. Sited in UTS’ Faculty of Design Architecture and Building on Harris Street, the excellent run of shows in recent years have all managed exhibition design within the confines of a standard room-height office building and the limitations this imposes on the physical dynamics and scale of hosted exhibits.

Art Movement: explorations of motion and change addresses these limitations by playing with the perceptual apparatus of the human eye and the mind’s fascination with time in its representational form. M3Architecture group reproduces a scaled down version of the end wall of a Brisbane school building they designed, modeled using black stripe tape applied on 2 surfaces to create a Moiré interference pattern that vibrates as the viewer walks past the façade of the gallery.

The time-slice stripes of Daniel Crooks invoke the casual wanderings of gallery visitors with the apparently aimless criss-crossings of street life represented as (DNA-like) threads of images captured by Crooks’ custom-designed and made camera. The horizontal line forms the warp of place and the vertical line the weft of human presence—a hand here, a foot there, the midriff of anonymity emerging from interlocking ribbons of wavering movement. We are intrigued by observing the magic of a technology at work, like some digital kaleidoscope, and moved to unpick the weave thereby understanding something perhaps about contemporary convergences of subject and machine.

Sarah Ryan’s lenticular photo surfaces in contrast demand an interaction that reaffirms the agency of the observing subject, even for such subtle observations: the wavering of twigs on a deciduous tree, grey, foreboding but perfectly aligned with the observer’s memory of wintry encounters. In Sun, percolating light through treetops imaged vertically above confounds perspective and expectation by being hung on a wall. How much more confounding an affect would a ceiling mounting achieve (if the Gallery had the option of ceiling height)?

Physical interaction with John Tonkin’s Time and Motion Study (Holding On, Letting Go), progresses into the visitor authoring a time-slice series which can then be retrieved—using mouse control—as a line of self-portraits retreating into a black cosmos of screen space. (This reviewer missed a second installation, withdrawn by the artist to prepare for another show—the need for galleries to acquire their own technology remains paramount).

Tom Burless’ contemplative arrangement of projection and augmented-monitor indicated binary opposites: the image of the natural world in slow change, the urban man—his sound rumbling distinctly—flickering between opposite viewpoints, in the act of consuming food. Short video pieces by Paul Bai, somewhat to one side of the main thrust of the show, delivered the visual puns and paradoxes of earlier, though related, discourses on the observed moving image.

Motion control and the framing of time and space that propose change of viewpoint must continue to be explored not simply for the celebration of the “flux of matter” that Gabrielle Finnane reminds us of in the short catalogue essay, but more particularly through the definition of concept, the immersive state and affect.

Art Movement: explorations of motion and change, curator Ricardo Felipe; UTS Gallery, Sydney, June 27-July 28, www.utsgallery.uts.edu.au

He was the young turk of Australian cultural studies in the 1980s and an architect of the emerging cyberscene of the 90s. He gave us a lexicon of key terms that shaped our understanding of the last 20 years. Like other notable Australian expats before him (Robert Hughes, Peter Carey), McKenzie Wark has settled in New York City, where he lives with his wife, the actor and writer Christen Clifford, and their son, Felix. Wark refers to himself as a New Yorker, but is quick to add that his roots (or should that be aerials) are still very much in Australia. His moniker has been notably absent from Australian literary pages in recent years and I caught up with him where he can always be found, on the net, to see what he has been up to.

Wark has been living in the United States for 5 years and has taught at a several East Coast universities before recently being appointed Professor of Cultural and Media Studies at Lang College, New School University in New York. He has been busy during this time, publishing 2 books, Dispositions (2002) and A Hacker Manifesto (2004). Dispositions is an experimental text, a kind of meditative travelogue that fuses sensation, memory and theoretical speculation on what it means to be somewhere, to occupy space in the early 21st century. A techno-savvy Rimbaud, Wark wanders in mind and space, mindful of the satellites and other surveillance devices that monitor everyday experience. He records his thoughts on paper, marking their time and exact geographical position using a handheld global positioning device. He refers to the work as a “conscious effort to change the way I write and also an attempt to deal with expatriation.”

A Hacker Manifesto is the culmination of an ongoing work in progress. It too has been influenced by his experience of living in the US. “Well, living in George Bush’s America for a while is enough to send you back to your Marxist roots! A Hacker Manifesto came partly out of observing the naked and intense class conflict here” (A long time columnist for The Australian, Wark was fond of referring to himself as a “lapsed Marxist in the pay of Rupert Murdoch.”). “A Hacker Manifesto is a book I’ve been trying to write for 20 years and it came out of my involvement in the new media scene. Alternative media practices and activism allowed me to map how capitalism is mutating under the influence of the kind of logistics I described in Dispositions.”

A Hacker Manifesto draws on Wark’s critique of the information economy in the light of key Marxist terms such as class and production. The hacker in Wark’s title, though, is not the data thief of cyberpunk fiction, but rather an innovator of ideas, often working in virtual and conceptual environments, but always producing outcomes for the realpolitik of the changing world around us. Terry Eagleton recognised the significance of A Hacker Manifesto as a re-thinking of classical Marxism in the epoch of video games, an age in which the “infoproles” or intellectual innovators are emerging as a new revolutionary class. Writing of it in The Nation, he asserted that the “time has now come for dispossessed innovators everywhere to form a collective class, and Wark’s manifesto is an opening salvo in this fresh form of class warfare.”

Well before he settled in New York City Wark was highly sensitive to the fluidity of terrain in the realm of the virtual, with its blurring of old colonial geometries of centre and periphery, world and antipodes. Wark’s aphorisms (“We no longer have roots we have aerials.” “We no longer have origins we have terminals”) provided the conceptual framework for exactly the kind of networked world we now inhabit—a world in which the internet, once the apotheosis of new media, is looking positively jaded in the face of the current generation of mobile media. Always looking beyond, rather than at the horizon, Wark has consistently prepared us for what we are about to become. He was one of the first writers in Australia to seriously put video games and game culture generally on the critical agenda. It is gaming culture that informs his recent and arguably most innovative project, GAM3R 7H30RY.

Wark was interested in exploring 2 central questions: can we consider games as allegories of the world we live in and is there a distinctive critical theory of games. Bypassing the global phenomenon of massively multiplayer online games, Wark engages with the more “obsolete” single-player console games, precisely because “we can now think of them critically as a classic form, like silent cinema.” However it is the manner in which the book is being written that is attracting considerable international attention. “I got a call from Ben Vershbow at the Institute for the Future of the Book. They explained their idea of the networked book and I suggested that GAM3R 7H30RY was something that could really benefit from dialogue in advance with different kinds of readers.” The Institute for the Future of the Book is an initiative of the Annenberg Centre for Communication at the New York campus of the University of Southern California. The concept of the “networked book” extends the 1990s shift in publishing from page to screen to a broader notion of a collaborative, distributed writing environment, “to see what happens when authors and readers are brought into conversation over an evolving text.” Wark wrote the initial text in a “modular structure” of 9 chapters of 25 paragraphs each. The idea of a “card-shuffle interface” was inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies cards, which allowed readers to be very specific and detailed about their engagement with the text.

As Wark explains, “I thought it would be interesting to share the book in its draft state to see if these questions are something other people might have ideas on or might want to pursue”. The GAM3R 7H30RY website is the hub of an experimental publishing initiative, acting out Wark’s concept of the writer as a relation, a conduit that “transcribes between readers, editors and publishers” (unlike the author who “authorises” the book as object). Anyone can read the draft chapters of the book online, post comments and critically engage with Wark as the book is being written. Readers can also subscribe to the work in progress and have chunks delivered daily via RSS feed.

As a critical engagement with the concepts of authorship, writing and intellectual property, GAM3R 7H30RY is a book written out of the social software fabric of blogs and wikis, Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia and CiteULike. In other words, it represents a new writing practice that actively decentralizes the text as an object and disseminates it as an ongoing multi-channel conversation. “For the website version I put the title in L33T [leet or gaming speak], partly in tribute to the early MUDs, but also to have a unique search string to put in Google or Technorati to track who was talking about it and where. It’s been very interesting tracking people down on their blogs and lists where they talk about it and engaging with people there too.”

There is no prescribed outcome for what the finished book will be like, given that its incarnation as process, rather than product, is central to the project. Wark is currently in negotiations with Harvard University Press concerning a printed edition, which will include revisions based on the feedback from the website. A version is likely to remain online, but Wark is quick to advise that “we’re all making this up as we go along, so no promises!”

Helaina Keeley, Joey (dummy),
Jessica Shipman, Brian Carbee,
Sarah Jayne Howard, Black Milk

In ghost dance, his 2004 work of “autobiographical fiction”, Douglas Wright recounts his life from the position of someone who feels he has already died. AIDS had taken many of his friends and lovers and held Wright in its thrall. A suicide attempt 2 years later almost saw that metaphoric state become a reality. The pain of loss had become unbearable and death seemed the only possibility. Terra Incognito, his second and most recent memoir takes us into this harrowing world of devastating depression and existential despair and Wright’s ultimate realisation that in embracing death he has found a way to live.

Douglas Wright has stated that Black Milk, his latest dance theatre work, “was conceived and gestated in a profound darkness”, yet for all its terrible inspiration there is much to celebrate within its performance. It is a complex work that delves into the dark underbelly of human frailty but also reveals moments of exquisite tenderness, fierce beauty and disarming humour. We enter a world in which base instinct collides with nobility of spirit: it’s a journey of revelation where paradox and contradiction are embraced in an attempt to make sense of the gamut of our human responses to the vicissitudes of living.

There is an ingenious simplicity about the design of the work—created by Michael Pearce—which belies the complexity of its structure. This structure creates a dynamic interplay between multiple modes of representation, a delicate balance between the intellectual experience of the unfolding verbal narrative, the written signs that reference Colin McCahon’s textual landscapes of the spirit, and the sensual world of the movement: “the lovely bravery of the dance”, as the New Zealand novelist Peter Wells observed.

Wright creates atmospheres of charged emotional states that are breathtaking in their ontological significance. We enter into the realm of states of being, a charged and polyvalent state, where the kinaesthetic and sensual world co-exists and resonates with the world of the mind.

Central to the structure of Black Milk is a ventriloquist act which soon reveals itself allied to the more serious ancient Greek notion of the prophetic and divinely inspired. It becomes a vehicle for meditations on the nature of existence as the conversation between the ventriloquist and his dummy traverses the terrain of nascent longing and desire. This is no simple engastrimythic act, for both the disembodied voices of our protagonists emanate from Wright himself. What begins as a conversation about the desire to be born escalates into a physical act of transgression in which the ventriloquist sexually abuses the dummy, setting off a chain of events simultaneously poignant, frightening and wickedly funny.
<img src="http://www.realtime.org.au/wp-content/uploads/art/1/179_lester_blackmilk.jpg" alt="Jessica Shipman, Alex Leonhartsberger,
Claire O’Neil, Black Milk”>

This unfolding narrative underscores the presence of the other performers who inhabit a landscape of the emotions in which their actions seem at times to be a consequence of the unfolding central drama, sometimes a commentary upon it and, at other times, a quiet reverie enacted in some private domain. Black Milk is ultimately a paean to life but before we get to that point we are taken on a journey of despair, into the heart of darkness, where human degradation curdles the milk of human kindness and turns it black. And yet throughout these encounters there is a glimmer of hope in fleeting acts of love in which the nobility of the human spirit reveals itself. But this is no simple tale of good triumphing over evil, for we are asked to confront the suffering in our lives and embrace the contradictions to which it gives rise. The installation which precedes the show has a sex doll slowly inflating and deflating on a bed of nails accompanied by a sign that reads “Pain examined without prejudice is metamorphosis”, as the haunting, angelic voice of Antony (and the Johnsons) sings his pain.

There are so many pungent images and passages of exquisite dancing: it is dance in which we experience the embodied presence of flesh and blood human beings rather than those machine-like presences that pervade so much contemporary dance. These characters truly inhabit this world of Wright’s fecund imaginings, where movement resonates with multivalent affect, and technique is at the service of a state of being. Each of the accomplished performers in a grand cast brings a luminous presence to the work.

The giant teat or birth canal suspended from the ceiling pervades the space and becomes a powerful metaphor for birth and death as characters arrive and depart the performance. It heralds the arrival of the fierce beauty and erotic danger of the naked (except for red shoes), scissor-wielding Fate (Sarah-Jane Howard) as she dances her demented Flamenco and the departure of the ventriloquist dummy’s still-born child. The ventriloquist (Brian Carbee) never mouths in the entire performance yet literally embodies his verbal content in a sophisticated modern dance mime.

A young man embraces the stage in a solo of such elegance and eloquence that bespeaks a state of grace. There is a male duet that evokes the tentative thrill of forbidden desire and the melding of spirits. Dancers become human projectiles, narrowly missing each other as they hurtle through the space, plummeting to earth. The lyrical rolling, now done on their knees, suggests the wind whistling through grass.

Joey—the not so dumb dummy—brings the house down when he wonders why a young woman is running. It’s the question everyone has asked at some point during a dance performance: ‘What does it all mean?’ While incredibly droll, the statement risks reverting to meaning making through intellect at the expense of other modes of apprehension. Asking that question treads a fine balance!

The Abu Ghraib scene also disturbs me, not for the blatant inhumanity it represents but the overlay of a commentary of anguish and despair that seemed to blunt its force. Perhaps the innocent questioning of our naïf-philosopher might have sharpened its impact.

Colin McCahon’s often quoted “New Zealand has too few lovers” suggests the need to connect the spirit of place and our relationship to each other. Douglas Wright has done that by confronting the dark recesses of the human psyche and reclaiming the will to live. He is a courageous lover. The whole cast and production team are to be commended on the realisation of the work of this great ‘imagineer’.

Douglas Wright Dance, Black Milk, director, choreographer, writer Douglas Wright, performers Craig Bary, Brian Carbee, Sarah-Jayne Howard, Helaina Keeley, Alex Leonhartsberger, Kelly Nash, Taiaroa Royal, Guy Ryan, Jessica Shipman, Zoe Watkins, design Michael Pearce, lighting design Robrecht Ghesquiere, composer/sound designer David Long; Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, July 19-29

Darwin has, almost by accident, become Australia’s great multicultural experiment. By virtue of its location (desert on one side, tropical South East Asia on the other) and its population mix (young and transient with strong South East Asian, Aboriginal and Greek communities, as well as Anglo-Saxon), the Top End capital has quietly evolved into a unique place that, as one recently arrived Southerner put it, “feels like you’re not in Australia.” Enter Progress: now in the midst of a resource-fuelled property boom, and with a giant waterfront development underway, Darwin is about to change forever. Mr Big, the latest work from Tracks Dance Theatre, is both an ode to the old town and a celebration of the influences that have contributed to the character of modern Darwin.

At sunset, against a city backdrop of cranes, cleared earth and rising apartment buildings, Mr Big begins back in the ‘old’ Darwin, a frontier town of cowboys and outback pubs. A barmaid wipes her bar and surveys the horizon for signs of life. Come evening the bar is full—and friendly—with all welcome for as long as they can keep pace with the drinking. From here develops a series of vignettes about the evolution of a city where people of different cultures live cheek by jowl. A place where the locals, as Marilynne Paspaley says in the program notes, “are more comfortable in a multicultural gathering than they are in a white Anglo-Saxon one.” Joining the cowgirl/boy (Vera Tabuzo), there’s the soldier (Erwin Fenis), the hippy (Corina Nichols), the Southerner (Kelly Beneforti), Bob the Builder (Imanuel Dado) and the Asian Princess (Karajayne Handberg). Some of these characters emerge from a group (the soldier from a marching, khaki-clad regiment, the hippy from a gaggle of afro-topped tree-huggers, the builder from a group of tradesmen) while others arrive alone (the Southerner and the Princess). Either way, as they strike out on their own, each is transformed by the influence of others and the spirit of the place. As the show progresses this is, most literally, demonstrated in costume exchanges—soldiers swap their caps for Asian peasant hats, builders don hippy tie-dye t-shirts—and a melding of dance styles where hip hop meets line dancing meets traditional Asian dance.

The Southerner’s transformation from high-heeled city girl is particularly remarkable—Beneforti dances a frenzied metamorphosis that calms to a mesmerising tango à trois with the Builder and the Soldier. All the lead dancers—also credited as youth choreographers—are strong. Fenis and Dado are the show’s hip hop dynamic duo with requisite handstands, headspins and somersaults; Handberg—graceful, balletic and with a mean karate kick—is every bit the exotic princess;and Tabuzo and Nichols are engaging. The entire ensemble of 30 dancers, drawn from regional Darwin and the remote Aboriginal community of Lajamanu, is tight and energetic. They dance with relentless joy to a soundscape that ranges from a Wild West cowboy lament (Chris Isaak) to Japanese rap.

Mr Big is non-stop action, and by the 50-minute mark the lead characters are clearly pushing their physical limits. Indeed, at an hour’s duration, the show is perhaps 10 minutes too long: the otherwise clear narrative descending into a show of repetitive group dancing reminiscent of a school rock eisteddfod. The set, too—a chain-metal fence of the type used to mark off construction zones—seems a little gratuitious. At the point where it is moved and reassembled by the dancers it does not particularly further the narrative.

Mr Big is a collectively devised piece, performed by people who evidently feel as if they own it. This is everything community theatre can be: not the domain of petty tyrants, weekend drama queens and teetering sets but a collaborative effort unleashing local creativity and expression; a living story created by people with a real connection to their audience.

Tracks Dance Theatre, Mr Big, director-choreographer David McMicken, director-designer Tim Newth, choreographer Julia Quinn, guest choreographer Nick Power; Shell Terminal, Darwin Festival, Darwin, Aug 11-19

Find