WHILE FOLK OF VARIOUS ORIGINS CAME TOGETHER FOR THE STYLISED MACHISMO PROVIDED BY PRO-WRESTLING AUSTRALIA IN THE MAIN FOYER OF CASULA POWERHOUSE, EXPERIMENTAL PERCUSSION ENSEMBLE CLOCKS AND CLOUDS BROUGHT TOGETHER EXOTIC RITUALS OF AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT NATURE IN THE MAIN THEATRE.
Drawing upon sources as diverse as Harry Partch’s 1973 work US Highball as well as his identification with the meta-culture of Anaphoria (a conceptual landmass whose inhabitants’ key characteristic is a “desire to be foreigners”), composer and general C&C head honcho Kraig Grady’s work, Terrains, Winds and Currents, provided an absorbing listen.
The centrepiece of the work was the set of twelve Meru Bars, an instrument of Grady’s own creation, that rose like mesas behind a harmonium and pair of vibraphones, all microtonally tuned. The Meru, which is fundamentally a set of gigantic bass vibraphone bars, lent the work a gripping solemnity, the hour-long through-composed piece remaining mesmerising for its duration, due in no small part to the skill with which it was approached by Grady as well as Terumi Narushima behind the harmonium and Finn Ryan on vibraphone.
With Narushima establishing a drone on the harmonium, Ryan trod carefully amid the Meru, striking each note with precise reverence, a liturgical quality being compounded by a single bowed note on the vibes. The sound of the Meru seemed to emanate from deep within the earth, its blended resonances suggesting imaginary ceremonies unfolding in forgotten caves. When this opening ‘terrain’ section closed with the exit of the Meru from the texture, the remaining instruments seemed bereft without its subterranean heat.
Meru bars, Clocks and Clouds
photo Gail Priest
Meru bars, Clocks and Clouds
This sense of desolation faded as Grady and Ryan generated a new urgency on the vibes, the harmonium providing flashes of melodic material, the effect being that of wind over wet rock, swift and indefinable. Indeed the music here was elemental, almost lysergic, the aesthetic bringing to mind the broken musician in Tim Winton’s Dirt Music. Consigned to hermitude, he finds solace in a makeshift drone, the sound of which seems to contain the world, “like the great open spaces of apnoea, the freedom he knows within the hard, clear bubble of the diver’s held breath. After a point there’s no swimming in it, just a calm glide through thermoclynes, something closer to flight. Within the drone, sound is temperature and taste and smell and memory, wucka-whang.” Grady seemed to be striving for something similar here, the rapidly oscillating tones suggesting rippling clusters of light, refractions in which the mind might become lost.
All of which would be so much twaddle were it not for the extreme discipline that Grady, Ryan and Narushima brought to the material, seamlessly coaxing distinct shifts in texture from the preceding flux. None more effective than the return of the Meru, the roiling bouyancy of the previous section giving way to a solemnity worthy of the disappearance of species, static vibe chords reverberating in isolation over the terrestrial groan of the bass bars. This was an hypnotic and moving song for the earth.
Aurora Festival of Living Music: Clocks and Clouds, Kraig Grady, Terumi Narushima, Finn Ryan, Casula Powerhouse, Sydney, May 5; www.auroranewmusic.com.au/
FOR THE 2012 NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR EMILY SEXTON INTRODUCED A SIMPLE PROVOCATION: THE SPACE BETWEEN US WANTS TO SING. ARTISTS RESPONDED INTENSELY WITH WORKS THAT BUILT UP AROUND THE CITY, AROUND THE PEOPLE WHO OCCUPY THE CITY, AND AROUND THE POLITICS THAT INFUSE THE EVERYDAY.
Liesel Zink’s fifteen at Flagstaff Railway Station builds a dance work against the backdrop of peak-hour pedestrian traffic. From a vantage point above the concourse, the audience watches as four dancers perform through the space and through the commuters. Our focus is held with headphones melding music and dialogue about personal space and the movement of the pedestrians. We are not only attuned to the performance of the dancers, but also to the commuter social ritual.
Rather than making large artistic and physical statements of its own, Zink’s choreography is a subtle intervention into the space. Highly deliberate, with the dancers moving through and around the space, often working in pairs or as a group, the choreography is remarkable as a product of its location rather than as movement in itself. There are moments when dancers are noticed, but the commuters more often than not revert to their routine. The absence of interaction from hundreds of commuters infuses the work with a very real sense of sadness about connection in our society.
Yet despite this sadness, Zink manages to create a dance work that is, ultimately, a joy. She infuses the work with humour in the matching of choreography to recorded and live narration, and in the juxtaposition of commuter routine and dancer movement. While fifteen suggests despair at a lack of connection, the connections Zink makes in the space become a beautiful thing.
Monster Body, Atlanta Eke, Next Wave Festival 2012
photo Sam Ackroyd
Monster Body, Atlanta Eke, Next Wave Festival 2012
Atlanta Eke’s MONSTER BODY at Dancehouse assumes the space of performance more conventionally, but doesn’t allow the audience the typical safety net of a theatre in the dark. The audience enters to Eke hula hooping on top of a mirrored platform, naked except for a molded plastic monster mask. The lights shine just as brightly on the audience as on the dancer and remain this way for most of the performance. There is no space for an audience to hide from Eke’s view: our watching of her body is constantly monitored.
The work is built from scenes that take images of femininity and twist them into feminist statements. Eke infuses much of the work with an uncomfortable humour, our discomfort made all the more stark by our exposure.
Eke positions her strong dance technique up against guttural yelling—aural expression against the ‘effortlessness’ of dance. She stands centre stage and looks sadly out at her audience, urinating, as Britney Spears’ I’m Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman plays. Twice she is tenderly cleaned by a man in a biohazard suit. She cuts her hair while women hold wooden poles with plastic hands on the end that caress her body.
During a “five-minute interval,” four other dancers, naked except for black bags covering their heads, join Eke dancing to Beyonce’s “Run The World (Girls).” The song proclaims a victorious power for women in society, but speaks to an equality not yet reached. Eke’s dancers are proudly and defiantly naked, taking control of their place on the stage and in the world, and yet stripped of any autonomy. Despite the strong and celebratory choreography, they are presented solely as bodies.
MONSTER BODY is an overtly feminist work built from a place of deep anger and sadness. The emotional power of its fractured segments take longer to build than the actual duration of the show, waiting to come together in subsequent hours and days. Yet, as Eke takes complete control and ownership of her vision as an artist, her body as a performer, and of the space and her audience, the work becomes deeply exhilarating.
The Stream/ The Boat/ The Shore/ The Bridge is built from a place of love for Melbourne and the people who inhabit it. Taken by four people at a time, the journey is a series of one-on-one interactions on and around the Yarra River.
The work is opened to the four as a group before each individual visits three of the four locations referred to in the title. After these interactions are over, the four are brought together again on Pigeon Island under the Southbank Pedestrian Bridge to collectively ‘work through’ their journeys and discoveries.
My journey started by being taken across the Yarra on a rowboat by Dan Koop. The work asks the audience to give as much of themselves to the work as they hope to get out of it, and Koop plays wonderfully with the balance of pushing past barriers without causing discomfort.
Continuing my journey to the stream and then onto the bridge, my relationship with each of the artists and with the river seemed to follow a logical growth— from the deeply personal conversation with Koop to learning about the river from Jamie Lewis, to a dialogue-less communication on the bridge powered through body language, headphones and handwritten notes.
The work is most successful when the communication is turned back on the participant in the boat and on the bridge, centralising them within the city with a perspective on the self. This reaches a peak when the performers are removed, and all that is left are the participants each pulling apart their three journeys and trying to piece together the fourth they didn’t participate in.
Tahni & Tom, Shotgun Wedding, NO SHOW, Next Wave Festival 2012
Photo Sarah Walker
Tahni & Tom, Shotgun Wedding, NO SHOW, Next Wave Festival 2012
Shotgun Wedding takes our interconnected and personal relationships and throws them into that loudest and brashest of social situations: the wedding. And while I thought I gave over-personally to The Stream/ The Boat/ The Shore/ The Bridge, in Shotgun Wedding I found myself giving my hand in marriage.
Directors Bridget Balodis and Mark Pritchard detail for us the idea they had for a new social construct: the union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others, in what they have dubbed “marriage.” The bride and groom—until now unmet—are selected from the audience, while the rest become the guests. Soon, the company of strangers are working together to create and join in a celebration balancing a perspective between the imaginary and the real.
Delivered without irony or discontent, and more to the point, as a celebration, the work quite cleverly and acutely manages to question the place of marriage and the wedding ceremony within our society—archaic regulations in vows contrasted with the high level of excitement.
The creators’ highly detailed construction of the façade of an actual wedding is clear. Yet, once the work itself begins, they have to do very little to instil in their guests the sense that they are part of a very real celebration. Even in front of a crowd I did not know, marrying a man I’ve never met, a real sense of ownership and of giddiness about the event develops. People cheer, toast and dance as if they were with old friends, all the while knowing their emotions are manufactured. It’s an overwhelming statement of our innate connection to social events.
Across the festival, young artists are learning—deciding how to define their careers, practices and the world they want to live in. Through these works, they have all demonstrated a deep connection to and interest in this world—sometimes angry, sometimes joyous; excited to be sharing.
2012 Next Wave Festival: fifteen, choreographer Liesel Zink, Flagstaff Station, May 21-25; MONSTER BODY, Atlanta Eke, Dancehouse, May 22-27; The Stream/ The Boat/ The Shore/ The Bridge, Dan Koop, Andrew Bailey, Lauren Clelland, Caroline Gasteen, Georgina Humphries, Max Milne, Yarra River Southbank, May 19-27; Shotgun Wedding, directors Bridget Balodis, Mark Pritchard, with Zöe Rouse, Dan Giovannoni, NO SHOW, St Peters Church, Melbourne, May 19-27
Slow Art Collective, Tony Adams, Chaco Kato, Dylan Martorell, Double Happiness B&B 2012
TO ENTER BELLOWING ECHOES YOU HAVE TO SKIRT THE CURVE OF A TALL WOODEN FRAME OBSTRUCTING THE GALLERY SPACE. THIS STEP TO THE SIDE STARTS A DETOUR THROUGH PAST TIMES AND OTHER PLACES BY WAY OF FIVE IMAGINATIVE INSTALLATIONS. IT’S NOT EXACTLY TIME TRAVEL, BUT THE EXPERIENCE IS SUFFUSED WITH THE QUIXOTIC FANTASY OF LEAVING BEHIND THE EVERYDAY.
The first work you see is a purpose-built installation by Slow Art Collective (SAC) made of things collected on foraging trips around Gertrude Contemporary. Cane mats and suspended bits of bamboo cordoned off a little structure hung with chains of dried fruit and bags of aromatic spices. The space is designed to engage the senses: it’s lit with different colours and animated with little heaps dancing and rattling on exposed speakers. The objects SAC combine to make this fabulous aviary cum Asian beach hut are hard to characterise. They couldn’t be called junk. They aren’t kitsch either. Rather, it’s that innocuous stuff that circulates around the world before finding its way to the shop down the road, slowly accumulating in our lives.
Bringing this stuff into the gallery makes us aware of its movement, of the kind of littoral drift that deposits it nearby. But we’re also invited to think about the wandering movement of SAC’s combing trips through the neighbourhood. A double movement of things and people informs the recombinant realism of Double Happiness B&B 2012. On the exhibition’s performance day, SAC served up stir-fry from a little portable stove in their installation. With this gesture of sharing they invited us to stop for a moment—or for a while—and to think about global flows of bodies and things populating our environments.
Jess Johnson, For Protection Against the Modern World, 2012
courtesy the artists
Jess Johnson, For Protection Against the Modern World, 2012
Leaving this installation brings us to Jess Johnson’s For Protection Against the Modern World, which transforms an alcove at the back of the gallery into a subtly ominous interior. Its tessellating carpet of blues, greys and greens ends abruptly, as though supernaturally spliced into place. The wall’s diamond pattern is too decorative to be domestic, seeming eldritch or occult. But this wall is also hung with a series of painstaking drawings that belie their contemporaneity. Their Lovecraft-meets-comic-strip aesthetic melds runic patterns and lines rendered with meticulous obsessiveness with day-glo accents and drawings of cartoonish aliens or lunar landscapes. Slathered across each drawing is an obscure slogan alluding to a personal crisis. This mise-en-scéne holds viewers at the threshold of a fantastical and paranoid world, the secrets it hides in plain sight resisting our entrance as they keep us tantalised.
On a pair of plinths between Johnson’s and SAC’s installations sit Tessa Zettel and Karl Khoe’s Land-escapes, two mishmash masks made of bark and ephemeral objects scavenged from city streets. Each mask has a View-Master, an old optical toy used to view three-dimensional images, grafted where its eyeholes would be. Peering through these salvaged devices offers glimpses of natural landscapes: monochromatic forests in which a masked figure stare back from the trees. These vision machines introduce momentary hallucinations of the natural into the gallery space, their fetish-like character connecting them to age-old ceremonies used to set the imagination free.
Anna Kristensen, Indian Chamber 2011
Courtesy of the artist, KALIMANRAWLINS, Melbourne and Gallery 9, Sydney.
Anna Kristensen, Indian Chamber 2011
Placing Land-escapes facing Anna Kristensen’s Indian Chamber on the other side of the gallery can’t have been accidental. From the outside, Kristensen’s work is a large, plain wooden drum. Within, we’re presented with a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree painting of the Jenolan Caves in the Blue Mountains. Kristensen’s rendering of these marvellous natural spaces flirts with the fantastical to unworldly effect. Entering this work is like momentarily stepping into the congealed time of the dream, an ou-topia or non-existent space flush with enigmatic significance. Land-escapes and Indian Chamber use natural scenes to dissociate the senses from time’s forward movement, if only fleetingly.
A flimsy piece of circular card painted half red, half yellow sits on an ad hoc stand outside of Indian Chamber. Its centre is split with a black line and looks for all the world like a kid’s attempt at a racing stripe. It faces a flat, penetratingly blue surface suspended in the angle of a corner. The disc is hooked up to what looks like a cheap toy motor, wobbling as it revolves lazily in space. There’s a relation between these two elements that I don’t understand at first. It clicks into place when I enter the space between them. There’s a tiny pair of wings pinned to the wall on the other side of the installation. When I keep both disc and plane in view, that impression you get when an aeroplane finishes banking and gravity reasserts itself overwhelms me.
These parts represent an abstraction of flight. Not flying, but that turn-of-the-century quest for flight that’s called up by the Wright brothers. For me, what Marcin Wojcik ekes out of these simple elements is that barely-conscious sense of coming back to earth after having left it behind for a little while. That moment when the flight’s over and you’re landing again, the experience of weightlessness receding into a mental space accessible only during rare moments of credulity and nostalgia. V-Glider (Fawkner Park) wonderfully realises an unsuccessful flight that Wojcik attempted in his own homemade glider, coaxing the audience into the process of a heroically failed enterprise.
Curators Marcel Cooper and Bronwyn Baily-Charteris took the story of George Arden, who founded a newspaper called the Port Phillip Gazette in 1838, as the point of departure for these excursions. By accompanying the exhibition with a new edition of the Gazette filled with playful artworks, Cooper and Bailey-Charteris reached back into a peculiar part of Melbourne’s early colonial past to fashion its future anew. This counter-document intercedes in Melbourne’s history, introducing eddies and tributaries into its flow. The theme linking these works is a sense of wonderment, an abiding but not uncritical conviction that possibilities exist just over the horizon or outside of the normal flow of time. Bellowing Echoes induces us to believe that the right combination of elements might just bring that elsewhere within reach.
Bellowing Echoes, curators Marcel Cooper and Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris, exhibition artists Jess Johnson, Anna Kristensen, Tessa Zettel and Karl Khoe, Slow Art Collective (Tony Damas, Chaco Kato and Dylan Martorell) and Marcin Wojcik, publication artists Bindi Cole, The Holy Trinity Collective, Kirsty Hulm, Sam Icklow, Laith McGregor, Sonja Rumyantseva, Carl Scrase, Hannai Tai and Annie Wu, publication designers Naasicaa Larsen and Geoff Riding from CopyBoy, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, 16 April – 26 May, 2012, performance day 19 May, 2012.
Shelters, Joseph L Griffiths, Next Wave Festival 2012
photos Sam Ackroyd
Shelters, Joseph L Griffiths, Next Wave Festival 2012
NEXT WAVE’S DAY PASSES INVITE AUDIENCE MEMBERS TO SHARE A CURATED JOURNEY THROUGH THE 2012 PROGRAM, A NEW WAY TO EXPLORE THE FESTIVAL. THROUGHOUT THE DAY, PARTICIPANTS ARE INVITED TO STICK WITH THE RING LEADERS AS MUCH OR AS LITTLE AS THEY LIKE.
The structure was not without problems: in particular when separated there was no way to get back in contact, only the hope you would find your way to the next location and re-find your group there.
Starting with Breakfast Club, participants are engaged through table-based conversations in response to talks by invited speakers. Turning the conversations back into small collectives created a democratic space where everyone in the room was given a voice.
Day Pass Two then moved on to visual art. Taking inspiration from Melbourne’s Docklands, Joseph L Griffiths’ Shelters sits against the chrome of the new suburb while Laura Delaney and Danae Valenza’s Hull embraces the 150-year history of Mission for Seafarers.
Griffiths’ installation of a series of three sculptures built from found materials from the Docklands juxtaposes seemingly liveable wooden structures of handcrafted, small-scale beauty against the harsh high-rises of the Docklands.
Walking through the mission chapel we find that Hull shares the space with old stained glass windows and music from the rehearsal of a young group of international students. Hull comprises installation sculptures, ice spheres suspended from the domed roof of the gymnasium and a storeroom seemingly taken over by salt. These sit alongside found archival material of photographs, maps and film distributed throughout the mission. However the routine activities of the mission and the melding of old and new outshines the work brought to the space. While the surrounds illuminate Griffiths’ work, in some ways Hull is obscured by them.
PHYSICAL FRACTALS, Natalie Abbott, Next Wave Festival 2012
photo Pia Johnson
PHYSICAL FRACTALS, Natalie Abbott, Next Wave Festival 2012
Day Pass Two also focused on dance. Natalie Abbott’s evocative PHYSICAL FRACTALS places the audience in a circle surrounding the performance space. From total blackout, the work begins as Abbott and Rebecca Jensen are revealed to be standing startlingly close to the audience. The performance builds in a series of repetitions, torsos bent over and arms circling as feet scoot back across the floor, before the dancers return to stand on the rim of the circle. Patterns repeat, so when one of the dancers moves in a slightly different direction it is startling. Just as this pattern seems unbreakable and about to outstay its welcome the dancers move into another pattern across the wooden floor.
Daniel Arnott’s live soundscape is built from the sounds of the room. At first we hear just the unamplified sounds of Abbott and Jensen’s movement. Then microphones, trained onto the wooden floor, allow sound to cycle and build with the performance.
As Govin Reuben’s lighting again plunges us into darkness, the room is filled with the noise of the performers swinging microphones above their heads. When lit, the taut cords are revealed to appear dangerously close to the audience. When the microphones are dropped the pair run around the room, lights oscillating in time with their circling.
If at 50 minutes the work occasionally appears to be too repetitive, it is not until it ends that the full sensory impact of the work is felt, and you are left reeling.
Wintering, Aimee Smith, Next Wave Festival 2012
photo Pia Johnson
Wintering, Aimee Smith, Next Wave Festival 2012
Choreographer Aimee Smith, currently studying her Masters Degree in Sustainability, developed Wintering after travelling to the Arctic Circle. In a deep performance space, Smith’s choreography carries with it representations of water mutating from a slowly fracturing ice state into a dynamic water flow.
Smith’s choreography through these changing states takes on an assured beauty in the bodies of dancers Rhiannon Newton and Jenni Large—Newton in particular with a performance built from controlled tension, her joints cracking over each other.
Trent Suidgeest’s lighting sees solitary shafts of light in the dark rising in intensity and reach, while Ben Taaffe’s sound design also grows as it moves from the deep crackling of ice through to full electronica encompassing the space.
It seems unfavorable to Smith’s theme that the work is at its most dynamic with the speed and vitality the dancers exhibit during the ‘warmest’ state. While Newton and Large present this work with facial expressions suggesting stress, Smith fails to engender in her audience a sense of urgency about climate change, much less a call to arms.
While travelling from venue to venue, works were discussed in detail with fellow Day Passers. Seeing works together you had a greater sense of the festival as a whole, although comparisons were an unfortunate side effect for some works on the curated journey. But the group experience, from morning to night, made you feel less like you were observing Next Wave and more like you were a part of it.
Next Wave Festival 2012: Shelters, Joseph L. Griffiths, Docklands, May 19-27; Hull, Laura Delaney and Danae Valenza, Mission to Seafarers, May 19-27; PHYSICAL FRACTALS, creator, dancer Natalie Abbott, dancer Rebecca Jensen, sound design Daniel Arnott, lighting Govin Reuben (Rubix Cube), dramaturg Matthew Day, Footscray Community Arts Centre, May 19-26; Wintering, choreography, direction Aimee Smith, dancers Rhiannon Newton, Jenni Large, lighting Trent Suidgeest, sound design Ben Taaffe, Arts House Meat Market May, Melbourne, 19-27
MY RIGHT EAR HEARS MERZBOW IN FULL BLASTING GLORY (SUSTAINING TEMPORARY DAMAGE). MY LEFT, PROTECTED BY A BLOB OF YELLOW FOAM, RECEIVES UNDIFFERENTIATED RUMBLES. NOISE REQUIRES CHOICES: MY HEARING, OR THE MUSIC—ONE MUST BE COMPROMISED.
Japanese noise artist Merzbow (Masami Akita) is in the centre of the Riverside Theatre main stage. Long-haired and clad in black he is a lone, lean crow behind a table of electronic noisemaking gadgets, pedals and laptop. His main instrument is a cyber-guitar/banjo with wires strung across a rotating metallic disc. Whether it is the source of all the sound is unclear, but it certainly augments the shifting dynamics as Merzbow scrapes at it with something like a pasta spoon, or bangs and plucks it to create swathes of highly differentiated static. He fills the whole sonic spectrum, his shearing sheets using a range of static grain sizes and frequencies from sub-bass under-rumble to blasts of mid-tone texture, to piercing high-pitched screeches.
Merzbow starts big, and doesn’t perceptibly get any bigger. This is not a music of crests and troughs but of one mountainous plateau of sound. Merzbow digs around within it, his forces of compression and combustion changing the molecular structure of the seams of static, burr and hum to produce new geological layers within the same chunk of rock. This creates a stasis, there’s no real forward momentum yet a tension is maintained. It takes a lot of calm and meticulous attention to tend this mass of brutal sound.
This music is physical. Sounds target different parts of the body: undertones rumble through bums via the seats; thwumping bass notes create flutters in the thorax; shearing screams flay the scalp as if with metal filings; and a particular hum seems to target the thyroid. At times it feels as if we are penetrated by pure electrical energy. Is this somehow therapeutic, our hormonal balance shifted, toxic blockages blasted?
This music is spiritual. Its force is immediate; contemplation beyond the sonic tempest in which we are the centre is impossible. It’s a total envelopment in the now and we are powerless to do anything but capitulate to the music’s force. We are listening to the abyss—the sound of everything and nothing—and it’s curiously comforting.
Merzbow, Oren Ambarchi, Noise Duo, Cambelltown Arts Centre
photo John Humphreys
Merzbow, Oren Ambarchi, Noise Duo, Cambelltown Arts Centre
For the closing night of the festival, Merzbow teamed with Australian guitarist Oren Ambarchi. Thinking of the vastness of Merzbow’s sound, it was hard to imagine how a duo might work. Does Merzbow hold back, only distributing half his layers of grit? It seems that anything but full-bore would not work, but is there room in that mountain of sound? However Merzbow and Ambarchi are consummate noisemakers and they find a subtle (in strategy rather than sound quality) approach to collaborating.
There seems to be a commitment to maintain the overall force and power of the sound—Ambarchi provides more bass, with comparatively less grit, more pure hum and oscillating tones, while Merzbow tops things with squalls of shredding feedback. There is a feeling of searching around each other to find the cracks, seeking out the frequencies yet to be filled or removing a contribution that is muddying the scape. While in demeanor they appear to be forging their own paths, there is an ever so subtle sense of turn-taking, one adding more ‘specialty’ layers to the mix then dropping back to let the other add a sheet. This creates a higher rate of change within the core of the sound and more of a sense of urgency than the tensile stasis of Merzbow’s solo show.
Merzbow, Oren Ambarchi, Noise Duo, Cambelltown Arts Centre
photo John Humphreys
Merzbow, Oren Ambarchi, Noise Duo, Cambelltown Arts Centre
Like the Riverside concert, the effect was unarguably visceral, perhaps more so as we sat on cushions on the floor of the Campbelltown Arts Centre performance space, soaking in the sub-bass frequencies. Another interesting aspect to the Campbelltown performance was that it was part of the closing night festival party, so the audience, though smaller than the black-jeaned noise aficionados at Parramatta Riverside, was more diverse, with many people perhaps hearing this kind of music for the first time.
Though it may have been too much for some, the inclusion of significant international noise artists within a festival that, until now, has pursued a largely contemporary classical agenda, was a bold and welcome move. It opened the event up to wider audiences and has contributed to the erosion of perceived barriers between exploratory music scenes in Sydney. If future Aurora festivals can continue this inclusiveness, the event will become a significant force not only in NSW but also within the national and international music landscape.
Aurora Festival of Living Music: Merzbow, Riverside Theatre, Parramatta, May 11; Noise duo: Merzbow & Oren Ambarchi, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney, May 13; www.auroranewmusic.com.au/
WHILE AURORA 2012 PRESENTED AN IMPRESSIVE DIVERSITY IN ITS PROGRAMMING, IT ALSO ALLOWED FOR INTERESTING CONNECTIONS BETWEEN ARTISTS AND WORKS. THE CONCERTS BY CLOCKS & CLOUDS AND GREG SCHIEMER (WITH HIS POCKET GAMELAN PROJECT) OFFERED A MINI-THEMATIC OF ALTERNATIVE TUNINGS, INTRODUCING AUDIENCES TO THE SUBTLE AND IMMERSIVE PLEASURES THAT LURK BETWEEN THE 12 NOTES OF THE EQUAL-TEMPERED SYSTEM.
clocks and clouds, terrains, winds and currents
For this concert, Clocks and Clouds consisted of Kraig Grady, Terumi Narushima and Finn Ryan performing a 40-minute work by Grady, Terrains, Winds and Currents (2012). He takes inspiration from the microtonal master of the 20th century, Harry Partch, writing music for alternative tunings performed on instruments of his own devising.
Grady composed this work for his two Meta-Slendro Vibraphones, a Meta-Slendro Harmonium (a slendro implies an Indonesian pentatonic scale) and the most intriguing of all, the Meru Bars—PVC conduit of different lengths, placed vertically and topped with thick metal bars suspended on elastic. The objects are equally musical and sculptural and, at a distance, their faux marble paintwork makes them reminiscent of ancient objects of ritual. Grady has in fact created a whole meta-culture around his instruments and tunings, suggesting that this is the musical legacy of a place called Anaphoria. (His commitment to the idea is such that you find yourself Googling to see if it’s a real island!)
With Grady and Ryan on the Meru Bars the sound is immediately captivating. The bars produce a deep boom with soft attack and long decay. As the metal slabs vibrate on their elastic chords it’s easy to visualise the waveforms emanating from them, the air displaced in big swooping arches pushing out across the room.
Then the vibraphones are introduced, their bright and brassy timbre filling the upper spectrum. Grady and Ryan play complicated, repetitious rhythmic sequences, creating melodic cycles that are overwhelmed by their resonances. The tones beginning to shimmer, glancing off each other and the architecture of the room. They have to play hard and fast to keep the tones aloft and the frequencies colliding.
Terumi Narushima, Kraig Grady, Clocks and Clouds
photo Corrie Ancone
Terumi Narushima, Kraig Grady, Clocks and Clouds
Underpinning this vibrancy is Terumi Narushima on the Meta-Slendro Harmonium, the notes produced by manually pumping air through the reeds with a foot pedal. In the upper and lower registers these long nasal drones serve to offset the harmonics of the vibraphones, comingling to thicken and agitate the mix. However in the middle register the timbre of the instrument stands too much on its own, its closely tuned notes sounding thin and whiny. Nerushima’s playing is not at fault, rather it made me realise how my acceptance of alternate tunings is timbre-dependent.
The shifts between sections of Terrains, Winds and Currents were subtle, yet somehow by its conclusion, it seemed as though vast territory had been traversed. Overall it was a mesmerising piece creating such a dazzling array of acoustic resonances as to completely obliterate the competing sound of the roaring crowd and violent smack downs from the Rock & Roll Wrestling Tournament that was taking place simultaneously in the foyer of Casula Powerhouse. While the tone of the competing events was markedly different, perhaps both audiences were similarly transported into fantastical realms.
Greg Schiemer has also been inspired by Harry Partch, but while Clocks and Clouds’ explorations are acoustic Schiemer employs the wonders of technology, though in curiously analogue ways. He composes using computer-mediated systems but the delivery is via mobile phones, placed in little pouches connected to strings, which are calmly swung in circles around the performers’ bodies. The resulting Doppler effect adds more microtones and, in combination with the room resonances, diffuses the sound through the space. For this concert he worked with Janys Hayes, Lotte Latukefu and drama students from the University of Wollongong to perform his pieces.
Schiemer presented two of his Mandala works. The first, Mandala 7 (2008) uses 12 phones deployed by six performers. The piece works with a 35-note scale based around the Combination Product Sets (CPS) system discovered by Erv Wilson (a leading Mexican/American microtuning specialist) which allows for harmonic cohesion without the formation of a central tone. The 18-minute piece has a quiet insistence with small crescendos and shifting tensions. The delicate electronic drones harmonically bind in one moment then slip away to become supporting and secondary in the next. While the music remains elusive it is strangely calming.
Mandela 6 (2007) uses a scale attributed to Al Farabi, an 8th Century Persian theorist. While in Mandala 7 the performers have to activate the sounds, here the phones are synced via Bluetooth, essentially playing themselves. The performers become the delivery mechanism, a sentient sound system. This work based on a seven-tone diatonic scale offers more rhythmic and melodic material, creating a lovely polyphonic complexity.
In Butterfly Dekany (2012) for four iPhones the performers move around the room. It is the most spacious of pieces and the changing directionality adds a greater three-dimensionality to the sound. Working with Janys Hayes, Schiemer has found just the right performance mode for the performers where the neutral, task-based focus allows for the subtlest hint of ritual to emerge without overstatement. It made me daydream about an alternate world where this was the normal way of performing/presenting music.
Greg Scheimer (far right) and Pocket Gamelan team, Campbelltown Arts Centre
photo John Humphreys
Greg Scheimer (far right) and Pocket Gamelan team, Campbelltown Arts Centre
An interesting addition to break up the electronically generated sounds was Sacris Solemniis 2 (2009) performed by mezzo-soprano Lotte Latukefu, a female chorus and four iPhones. Based on a hymn by St Thomas Aquinas using a diatonic scale, the harmonic slippages are deceptive, at first seeming familiar yet shifting at moments to more challenging harmonies offset by the electronic tones on the phones.
It’s tempting to want to walk around these works to experience their shifting complexities from different perspectives but, the danger of twirling phones aside, the very delicate nature of the music could be so easily shattered by any extraneous movements and careless shuffling. In Greg Schiemer’s introduction to the concert he described the listening experience to be akin to “sitting inside the instrument,” an effect he definitely achieved. Pocket Gamelan: mobile voices was a deeply meditative, immersive and memorable experience.
Aurora Festival of Living Music: Clocks and Clouds, Terrains, Winds and Currents, composer Kraig Grady, performers Terumi Narushima, Finn Ryan, Casula Powerhouse, May 5; Pocket Gamelan: mobile voices, composer Greg Schiemer, dramaturg Janys Hayes, mezzo-soprano Lotte Latukefu, performers Damon Bartlett, Justin Clarke, Claire Fenwicke, Samara Gardener, Rebecca Hurd, Sara Kahn, Rebekah Robertson, Billie Scott, Laryssa Sutherton, Kirstie Willoughby; Campbelltown Arts Centre, May 13; www.auroranewmusic.com.au/
Greg Schiemer has recently been appointed Artistic Curator of the 2014 Aurora Festival of Living Music.
TO HEAR GEORGE LENTZ’S INGWE WE WALK INTO THICK FOG AND MYSTERY. THE TITLE TRANSLATES AS “DARKNESS,” APT FOR THIS HOUR-LONG REVERIE, OR DELIRIUM EVEN, AN EPIC COURSING THROUGH THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL FOR SOLO ELECTRIC GUITAR WITH THE DOUBT, PASSION AND WIT OF A METAPHYSICAL POET CUT ADRIFT FROM HIS GOD.
Guitarist Zane Banks appears before us shrouded in mist, armed with guitar, foot pedals and music stands ready to explore the Mysterium (2003-09), a larger work of which Ingwe is part. A series of movements ensues, each oscillating internally, between cool, liquid reflection and starbursts of awe and anger.
I’d seen Lentz praised in print for his eschewal of rock guitar cliches. However, this should not obscure the fact that the composer and his virtuoso instrumentalist deploy an array of recognisable electric guitar tropes that lend the work a wider resonance than the category ‘contemporary classical’ might suggest. Sudden note flurries, feedback, reverberation, heavy chording, thrashing, and rapid ascents and descents are vertiginously juxtaposed with quiet jazz-inflected near-melodies, soft brushing of strings and recurrent, transcendent harmonics, chiming and sparkling against a pervasive darkness. Almost ironic, power driven anthemic phrasings, marches and hymning pulse angrily through Ingwe while delicately fingered passages bring temporary reprieve. But a gentle brushing across the strings can turn abrasive, chugging, fast, destructive. The darkness that is Ingwe is alive and volatile.
Zane Banks, Ingwe, Campbelltown Arts Centre
photo John Humphreys
Zane Banks, Ingwe, Campbelltown Arts Centre
Banks, a practising rock guitarist, is at one with his instrument, swaying back as he sends notes soaring, leaning deep into the attack when he cracks the cosmos with a quaking roar. Ingwe constantly conjures vast earthly and heavenly spaces with an astonishing depth and breadth of field. Yet, its agonised declamations never made literal, Ingwe is felt as a deeply interior work that makes viscerally palpable the vastness of inner anxieties. Composition and performance are also wonderfully at one, yielding a unique and memorable experience, not one that hums through you like a tune, but jangles, buzzes and thunders like a place, familiar but not, recalled from a dream.
You can hear Zane Banks play Ingwe on Naxos CD 8.572483.
Aurora Festival of Living Music: George Lentz, Ingwe, from Mysterium (Caeli enarrant…VII), for solo electric guitar, guitar Zane Banks, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney, May 12; www.auroranewmusic.com.au/
THE IDEA OF CRITICAL MASS CAN DENOTE A COLLECTIVE ACTION THAT IS BENEFICIAL TO ALL, REGARDLESS OF INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTION. BUT IT ALSO IMPLIES A CERTAIN INERTIA: A CREATIVE BEAST THAT LURES YOU INTO ITS MACHINATIONS AND USES YOUR PERCEPTION AS A SORT OF ARTISTIC PLASMA.
Super Critical Mass, a sensuous and atmospheric exploration of sound devised by Julian Day and Luke Jaaniste, featured at the opening event of Aurora Festival of Living Music, Aura. Their project had aired in Australian cities and UK festivals already so it had the expected weight of success to get the ball rolling for the Aurora Festival of Living Music.
Blacktown Arts Centre was piqued for pomp with food platters, booze and an edgy photographic exhibition documenting the back-yard lives of beer-guzzlers, corrugated iron fences and gaming consoles depressing sunken sofas. There was no doubt we were in Western Sydney, where high and low culture meet, and proud of it. An appropriate mood was set for Super Critical Mass: a mixing pot of amateurism and professionalism, performance and authentic living.
The composer-sound artists had set out to explore ambience, spatialised sound and the complexities that emerge from simple patterns and actions. Vocalists from Singing Streets and Simply Voices combined in a sort of algorithmic, wordless chant in a darkened room. Each time singers wished to contribute they would stand up and make an extended vowel sound for as long as desired and then sit down again. Staring straight ahead and uniformly dressed, the group operated as a mass of individuals rather than a team. Each participant appeared to be contributing at random intervals in terms of time and pitch. Whether or not any pattern was observable by the audience seemed less important than the mass of sound generated by the group.
The audience was invited to cohabit the performance space, walking freely in between singers, getting up close, contributing percussion with our heels. While the concept was good and the execution very real, it went on for too long. And just when we the critical masses thought it was done, they did it all again…with harmonicas.
Super Critical Mass, Aura
photo Alex Wisser
Super Critical Mass, Aura
In the second iteration of Super Critical Mass, each of the singers played mouth organs in place of voices. Long tones at seemingly random intervals were layered to evoke the memory of a trampled piano accordion, long after the bullies at the circus had gone in search of the next bearded lady. In this second round of chaotic drone combinations the performers were not locked to their fixed locations in the room. Rather than standing and then sitting to frame each utterance, the performers were free to roam, slowly, and to engage us and each other eye to eye. Coming after the vocal Turing Machine of the first part, this felt connected, like the smartphone generation. Perhaps the harmonica set was more successful than the vocal round, but by this time the concept had out-warbled its welcome and I was left feeling trapped in a vortex of expiring wheezes: a place where irritating ringtones go to die.
Super Critical Mass was highly affective. The sounds generated certainly had an effect on me and others. It challenged my concept of chamber music, community and interactivity. This critical mass swept me along but what would it have taken, I wonder, to make me join in?
Aurora Festival of Living Music: Super Critical Mass, composers Julian Day and Luke Jaaniste, performers Singing Streets and Simply Voices; Blacktown Arts Centre, Sydney, May 4; www.auroranewmusic.com.au/
MUSIC APPEARING THROUGH SPACE, INSEPARABLE FROM PLACE, IS A THEME OF THIS RECITAL IN THE BLUE MOUNTAINS. HARPIST MARSHALL MCGUIRE EXPLAINS THAT HIS SOUND WILL BE PRODUCED BY PLUCKING “THROUGH THE AIR” RATHER THAN BY STRUMMING THE HARP.
Resonance and sonority are the focus for several of the contemporary composers in the program. Many of the works have a sense of looking back to the origins of the harp in order to understand the evolution of the instrument’s idioms. The Birtwhistle work Crowd in particular makes use of many extended techniques like slapping and stabbing, scratching and muting. It’s a masterpiece study in sound, articulation and texture but never comes across as a sequence of tricks. While the techniques are noticeable and fascinating they are not so important as the way the resultant sound travels outwards, radiating from a source, communicating more about the nature of the room and its occupants than McGuire’s dexterity.
The program is punctuated with Five Studies in Radiance, short interludes by Andrew Ford. One of these, Amoroso, has a bell motif, a low chiming jow that tells, “It’s Time… this is God speaking.” Then the tolling softens. It resigns to peace and tranquillity. Life goes on and we’re still here.
One of the most significant pieces, the Australian premiere of The Pearl Divers by Douglas Gibson, is for prepared harp. Written in memory of pearl divers in Broome in Western Australia, a Japanese aesthetic is present. Not only does it sound Japanese but the process of preparing the harp mimics koto (Japanese table harp) technique. Like a koto player, McGuire uses a pencil to mark the strings at the right ratios for harmonic overtones and pitch bending.
The Harp and the Moon by Ross Edwards similarly features Japanese motifs as well as tying together many disparate themes in the program. Referencing Renaissance style it has Spanishy statements, folk fancy and film soundtrack mystery as well a bit of a cheesy ending. It’s a great piece. The magic of Edwards’ craft is to merge these genres and elements with such skill, creating a distinctly Australian voice out of fusion while maintaining and expanding harp idioms.
Comfortable and adroit, McGuire gave a stunning performance, engaging the audience with tantalising facts and witty asides. He even explained the construction of his instrument. Different woods are used in each part of the harp for their flexibility or strength. He confessed, “Three trees died to make this harp…it’s a total environmental catastrophe!” This drew our attention to our surroundings and made us hear the birds in the trees behind the altar and stained glass.
St Finbar’s Catholic Church in Glenbrook, set at the base of the Blue Mountains, is a sensuous modernist space. It’s warm in spirit but chilly like any timeless church. Exposed curvaceous sandstone walls merge seamlessly with native wood ceiling. Alternating flat-screened TVs and flat visaged Renaissance pastiches colour the main wall. This building seems to have been designed to house an 1881 ornamental English Organ. The church feels like a cocoon—safe away from the realities of life—the perfect space for Marshall McGuire’s intimate reflection.
As the sun came closer to the horizon outside, birds shrieked and squawked as only Australian birds can, without an ounce of song. This concert felt firmly planted in the mountains. Its location was just right for a recital of music that looks back in order to look forward.
Aurora Festival of Living Music: Marshall McGuire, harp recital, St Finbar’s Catholic Church, Glenbrook, NSW, May 6; www.auroranewmusic.com.au/
THE FORCES THAT INHIBIT OR EXAGGERATE OUR BEHAVIOUR ARE NOT ALWAYS VISIBLE TO US, VEILED AS THEY ARE BY IDEOLOGIES OR DRIVEN BY THE UNCONSCIOUS OR OUR GENES. IN QUEST, A WOMAN (MIRANDA WHEEN) ATTEMPTING TO MOVE SYMMETRICALLY THROUGH A BARE WORLD APPEARS TO BE CONTROLLED BY FORCES FROM WITHIN—INVOLUNTARY CONSTRAINTS AND EXCESSES.
These might be external, but are not revealed to be so—no literal miming here—and are more likely to be internalised. Initially we see her from behind, black high heels, hair slicked, tight short little black dress. She might have stepped straight out of a Robert Palmer music video or Robert Longo’s 1980s Men in the Cities series. But her apparent confidence and sexiness is about to be undone. Her shoulders tense emphatically. She walks slowly towards us on a circular trajectory, an arm reaching out, leading her as she goes in small turns, both arms now extended.
She looks back at us, her centre of gravity off-centre but remaining strangely stable as she leans or is pushed back almost impossibly far in a near floating gyration. The quietly evolving, plangent music builds to rich glissandi and deep foghorn-ish notes on viola and saxophone. More of the body comes into play, or is played as the dancer leans deeply to the side, knees lowered, the music aptly more angular, until she finds herself on the floor—at two points only, toes and hands, held as if trapped. Her arms lift her, her feet drag, the saxophone rumbling empathetically. But standing, her arms and legs now move discretely, one leg shoots out on its own, the sway of the body seems to push her up, her journey tumbles into totterings. A shoe is lost, prelude to dissolution which takes her to the floor, spinning wildly like a frantic insect. Stop. She stands. She takes control. She starts again.
The considerable demands of Martin del Amo’s choreography are met with unflinching commitment by Miranda Wheen who manages to combine exquisite precision with a very open, engaging performativity. Alex Pozniak’s fine score, played onstage by Andrew Smith on saxophone and Luke Spicer on viola, melds beautifully with the choreography, subtly underlining the physical exertions on the dance with a certain melancholy, even in its most dramatic, but never overly so, moments.
To witness such a determined struggle with invisible forces was exhilarating, a reminder of the ways our bodies are buffeted by new experiences whether erupting from within or battering us from without. Let’s hope Quest will be seen again—it’s a fine addition to each artist’s repertoire, not least Wheen, fast being revealed to be one of Sydney’s most accomplished dance artists.
Daniel Blinkhorn’s frostbYte cHatTer offers a more material interiority, the sound of arctic ice in its sonic straining and cracking dance and its mutation into water. In near dark and surround sound, the ice crunches, slides and squeals about us on an epic scale, like an imagined shift of tectonic plates, realised by the composer/sound designer’s use of microphones in the open and hydrophone recordings of “icebergs and iceberg fragments as they melt, collide and dissolve” (program note).
Blinkhorn takes these sounds, and others of a sailing ship in another piece, sustains their essential character but also composes them into sometimes quite musical creations building on the icebergs’ ceaseless and increasing chatter as they draw near each other. The sounds are fascinatingly multifarious although when heard at some length after having witnessed an already exacting dance work, there were times when I was thinking of ice cracking as not unlike paint drying. And then I’d be snapped out of it by some seismic shift. To do justice to the works in Blinkhorn’s program I’d most certainly need to have more than another listen—there’s a lot going on: an honouring of composer Luc Ferrari, the deployment of prepared piano and the use of sources that include field recordings made on coral reefs in Australia and the West Indies.
A closer connection with Quest was to be found in frostbYte—cReEpEr, “produced by some of the frenetic actions and (sometimes bizarre) gestures produced whilst walking on ice” with microphone in one hand. The struggle to maintain balance nicely matches Quest’s involuntarism, and it even dances, if for far too long (such is the idiom), by slipping into found sound-based electronica.
Aurora Festival of Living Music: Invisible Forces, Quest, choreographer Martin del Amo, composer Alex Pozniak, dancer Miranda Wheen, musicians Luke Spicer, Andrew Smith; frostbYte cHatTer, sound artist & composer Daniel Blinkhorn; Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney, May 12; www.auroranewmusic.com.au/
CHOKE, FELL, FLOAT, PAWL, SHED, SHAFT, SHOT, SHUTTLE, SLEY, THRUM, WARP, WEFT. ANY WEAVING GLOSSARY WILL PROVIDE YOU WITH SOME OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WORDS KNOWN TO MANKIND. WHILE ORIGINATING FAR FROM THE GREECE OF DAVID YOUNG AND MARGARET CAMERON’S OPERA MINOTAUR: THE ISLAND, THEY NEVERTHELESS FIND THEMSELVES EXPRESSED IN THE WORK’S DRY, WHISPERED TIMBRES AND BRISK ARTICULATION.
Watching the ensemble quietly going about their performance, handbags on heads, one feels in the “worshipful company of weavers” unravelling and re-weaving a myth before your very eyes.
The ceremonial intensity of Minotaur The Island is heightened by the intimacy of the opera’s sound sources. Deborah Kayser’s versatile voice spins Cameron’s text into silken and woollen strands before letting them disintegrate in her mouth; glass balls are held close to the ears while they are rubbed, hit and twittered to; a man in drag struggles to make a sound on a double bass before falling asleep and victims of the Minotaur hum a chorus from inside a basket. In a momentary gesture towards traditional concert practice Anastasia Russell-Head, dressed as a seagull, plays a virginal before ‘sad walking’ off stage. The virginal (a nod to the lost Minotaur opera of Monteverdi), so called for its association with young women, is inscribed “noli me tangere indocta manu,” or “let no untutored hand touch me.” Alongside The Island’s undeniable sensuality is a tutored symbolism that is difficult to decrypt.
Anastasia Russell-Head, Minotaur The Island
photo Phil Sharp
Anastasia Russell-Head, Minotaur The Island
In reweaving the myth of the Minotaur some threads are brought to the surface while others are dropped. The story of the Minotaur—to whom seven virgins are sacrificed every year or so—has always been one of diminishing returns. Fittingly, only one aria from Monteverdi’s L’Arianna survives: Ariadne’s bitter lament as she is abandoned on the island of Naxos by Theseus after giving him the thread that led him out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth. This air of confusion, death and abandonment haunts The Island, in which Ariadne appears on the island of the Minotaur to rewitness the slaughter of Athens’ youth in dream-like ecstasy. In another artfully placed anachronism one hears the story—parallel to that of Ariadne’s thread—of the labyrinth’s architect Daedalus threading a conch shell by tying a thread to the leg of an ant.
Mark Cauvin, Minotaur The Island
photo Phil Sharp
Mark Cauvin, Minotaur The Island
Is there a thread out of Young and Cameron’s meandering architecture of exquisite visions? I left Parramatta’s Riverside Theatres resonating with Young’s intensely quiet timbral formulations. With the minimum of sources Young crafts a perpetuum of ever-changing interest and subtlety absolutely wedded to the opera’s woven and wooden stage design. As the first part of a trilogy, The Island sets a stunning precedent for the future works, and as Ariadne puts it at the beginning of The Island: “even if I were to die, I would return.”
Aurora Festival of Living Music: Chamber Made Opera, Minotaur The Island, composer David Young, writer, director Margaret Cameron, performers Deborah Kayser, Caroline Lee, Hellen Sky, Ida Duelund Hansen, double bass Mark Cauvin, percussion Matthias Schack-Arnott, harpsichord Anastasia Russell-Head, Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, May 11-13; www.auroranewmusic.com.au
HIS LONG HAIR HANGING OVER HIS GLASSES, MASAMI AKITA (AKA MERZBOW) ASSAILED THE AUDIENCE AT PARRAMATTA’S RIVERSIDE THEATRES WITH A WALL OF WHITE NOISE HARKING BACK TO HIS MID-90S PERFORMANCES.
Apart from a short period of rhythmic scraping, you could not tell by listening that the roar filling the hall was produced by menacing a metal plate lashed to a power board with a pasta ladle. So generic is the sound of a distorted signal that it could once have been a pop song, a symphony or a bantam clucking and you would not know the difference. This lack of distinguishing characteristics gives Merzbow his power of universal address.
Beyond the artist’s mythical status, the concert setting may have helped to elevate Merzbow’s ‘trashy’ noise to a site of spiritual communion. The walk from the train station was like a pilgrimage route with Merzbow seekers excitedly rushing down Parramatta’s Church Street to the theatre. The diversity of the audience cramming the hall to witness folkloric, hearing-loss-inducing, stomach-turning noise suggests that a Merzbow concert still represents a singular experience for many. You don’t so much hear Merzbow’s noise (not least because you are probably wearing ear plugs) as feel it moving through your body. There is something inherently attractive about the idea of a music beyond ‘liking’ and ‘disliking,’ a music that you physically encounter.
Rather than a singular, intense experience, I felt that Merzbow’s set was an in-between time where the cocoon of sound gave you time to think and dream. If Oren Ambarchi’s solo set at the Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre reminded me of an erased painting, Merzbow’s reminded me of nature: wind howling, the earth rumbling, water bubbling and splashing. Camped in my plush seat I sank into the storm, waiting for it to pass. Others shared this experience of waiting outside time. Some were lulled into trance, some even slept.
Both experiential singularity and meditative sanctuary are removed from Merzbow’s early understanding of noise as a cheap, visceral, low art. In the mid-80s Merzbow packaged a series of noise tapes in collages of pornography pulled out of the rubbish in the subway, associating noise with ‘base’ physical desires. It is interesting that Merzbow’s worldwide fame should coincide with the exponential proliferation of pornography and general dissolution of social taboos, but the argument associating these facts would undermine itself. If our social consideration of all sensory stimulation were equalised, then you could also equate Merzbow’s popularity with the sugar content of soft drinks or average hours spent in front of screens, disregarding listening and understanding sound as a dynamic cultural process. Rather, I think we have learnt to listen to noise more closely over the years and the association of noise with sex and sadomasochism was one of the first steps in coming to understand it. If anything, the breakdown in social taboos has given us the freedom to judge noise on its own terms.
Aurora Festival of Living Music: Merzbow, Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, Sydney, May 11; www.auroranewmusic.com.au/
IT TAKES A COUPLE OF HOURS TO GET FROM SYDNEY’S CITY CENTRE TO THE JOAN SUTHERLAND PERFORMING ARTS CENTRE IN PENRITH. WALKING THROUGH THE SUBURB’S SHOPPING PRECINCT BROUGHT ME IN CONTACT WITH SUBURBAN CULTURE THE LIKES OF WHICH I HAVEN’T SEEN SINCE I LIVED IN ADELAIDE’S DEEP SOUTH.
I remembered that getting into noise in a suburban environment was both a natural progression through pop’s quirkier and darker sides, as well as a reaction against what appeared to be a sterile and hopeless environment. In city centres short noise gigs can become one stop in a long night’s carousing, but by the time I was seated in the Q Theatre at the Joan, I was in no way under the delusion that I was just ‘popping in’ to catch a little noise before kicking on. Locals—apart from the elderly couple who left after five minutes—seemed similarly committed to the rare performance.
Sitting back in the cinema-style seats of the amphitheatre, I had an almost bird’s eye view of the technological forces shipped out for the gig. Noise is not only heavy because it is sonically loud and dense, but the physical weight of the equipment used to generate it gives a sense of permanence and authority to its performance. Framed by giant speaker boxes like two ancient monoliths, Oren Ambarchi walked silently on stage, picked up his guitar and sat down to his table of mixers, pedals, springs and synthesisers.
The drone began to build and undulate. Ambarchi’s noise struck me as a sonic equivalent of erasure in painting. Shapes introduced into the rig from the guitar are rendered barely discernible between a bed of deep tone and scratchy, high-end interference. The result is a constantly shifting and incredibly detailed sonic canvas that holds the listener in an ecstatic, flight-or-fight, deer-in-the-headlights trance. As the set progressed Ambarchi’s erased shapes became clearer, taking the form of the open tones and harmonics of the guitar strings.
To get the idea of open strings and harmonics think of the bright sound of a bugle, a hunting call or even the warble of seagulls. The heroic harmonic series provided a contrast to the minor modes of most metal and drone. What was this image obscured by the apocalyptic, deteriorating sonic wash? A flag? A parade? An 80s guitar solo? Was this exuberant drone in fact humorous? The intrusion of this unexpected tonality made me suddenly aware of the Aurora festival’s daring effort in taking performers and audiences out of their comfort zones, both physically and aesthetically.
Emerging from the half-hour of drone in the hulking Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre, it seemed incongruous for Ambarchi to saunter off with a shrug as though he had somewhere else to go, then creep back on stage to pack up his equipment. A crowd gathered around to taxonomise Ambarchi’s boxes, switches and leads before dispersing into the very different noise of a Thursday night in Penrith.
Aurora Festival of Living Music: Oren Ambarchi, Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre, Penrith, NSW, May 10; www.auroranewmusic.com.au
EVEN WITH THE COMPUTER GAME BLIPS AND YELPS OF CRYSTAL CASTLES BEING PIPED IN THROUGH THE SPEAKERS, THE Q THEATRE, THE SMALLER OF THE JOAN’S VENUES, SEEMED UNNATURALLY QUIET AFTER BEING IMMERSED AMONG THE CHEERFUL ADOLESCENT INFORMALITY HOLDING SWAY OUTSIDE. THE MAIN HALL WOULD HAVE SWALLOWED THE PERFORMANCE TONIGHT (THE PENRITH VALLEY CONCERT BAND USING IT FOR A REHEARSAL IN ANY CASE) BUT EVEN THE MODEST SEMI-CIRCULAR SPACE OF THE Q SEEMS SPARSELY OCCUPIED—A SHAME THAT MORE YOUNGSTERS COULDN’T BE COAXED INSIDE.
Oren Ambarchi walks onstage without fanfare dressed for comfort in skinny jeans and check shirt, sits down with the barest acknowledgement of the audience and gets going. Before him sits a collapsible plastic table, forests of twisted wiring erupting from slabs of equipment, a guitar resting in his lap, three huge speakers standing behind him like monoliths. And, but for the muted hum of the air-conditioner, silence.
Ambarchi works with careful focus, his face composed, establishing a looped drone, noodling a string on the instrument with his left hand, adjusting input-output levels with his right. The guitar’s sound is transfigured here to suggest subterranean caverns, dripping water, running footsteps, though its imitative potential is elsewhere used to suggest the whine of a drill, the sawing of an entire string orchestra. Sudden shifts can and do occur, overtones setting the entire room rattling, planes of texture converging then dissolving into one another. Specific tones break through, the suggestion of chords emerging from the whirring flux, the swells gaining intensity, as if some creature is in the throes of birth or metamorphosis.
Around the 15-minute mark an E drone cuts through the absurdly complex layerings that Ambarchi has accumulated. One might view his equipment as constituting a single gigantic instrument, one vehicle for creative expression to and from which specific components might be included or subtracted. Vicious striations lash the surface of the thickly layered accretions, harmonics punching the air like a striking snake. It is almost as though Ambarchi is groping his way towards functional harmony, G, D and A wavering uncertainly through the texture, like ideals hovering above a battlefield only to be forgotten, trampled and defiled.
At the half hour mark a piercing major seventh reaches an almost unbearable intensity, a high water mark that signals a reversal, the entire texture beginning to recede, flailing tics being subducted back beneath the drone, like chain lightning seen from a distance. Establishing a new drone on a low G, Ambarchi seems to turn the frequency down to the lower limit of human hearing, the vibrations being more felt then heard, the fury unleashed only 10 minutes previously being diminished to a few light spatterings above the distant rumble—and then nothing.
Aurora Festival of Living Music: Oren Ambarchi, Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre, Penrith, NSW, May 10; www.auroranewmusic.com.au
ANOTHER THURSDAY EVENING IN PENRITH: THE RETREATING SUN THROWING THE BLUE MOUNTAINS INTO SILHOUETTE, FLOCKS OF CHITTERING PARROTS SETTLING AMONG THE LEMON-SCENTED GUMS, A SEA OF BRAKE LIGHTS GLITTERING ALONG THE M4.
Meanwhile on the grass and raw dirt ‘community space’ between the plaza, the area’s venerable mall and the Joan Sutherland Centre (its more recent rechristening “The JOAN” sitting uneasily with its determinedly highbrow aspirations), groups of young people huddle in clusters, hanging out, catching up and filching cigarettes while experimental guitar quartet Ampere present Amped, a free performance of works recently commissioned through Chronology Arts.
Julian Day’s appropriately named Dusk matched the lengthening twilight, wrenching descending tones from Zane Banks’ solo electric guitar, punctuated only by the dull murmur of teenage courtship. Next was Steffan Ianigro’s Music of Symmetry, wailing dissonance counterbalanced with closely spaced, almost claustrophobic chords; a stepwise ascent suggesting impending horror. A strange atmosphere resulted, the well-mannered attention offered by dedicated nu-classical listeners on the grass sitting at odds with random yelps of female laughter, Ianigro’s careful conducting of the quartet (Banks, his brother Jy-Perry, Matt McGuigan and Mat Kurukchi) seeming overly precise beneath the fluorescent glare of the mall.
Fausto Romitelli’s TV Trash Trance, presented by Jy-Perry Banks on solo electric guitar, was apparently not to the liking of some, “Fuck you!” being yelled in the background— though it was unclear at whom the ‘you’ was directed. Although the volume was criminally low (Banks’ curly mop failed to flail nearly enough), the whirring loops of static established early in the piece provided ample basis over which to squeal and whine in the latter portion, the sound of a faulty connection being used to rhythmic effect before the lot collapsed into Lovecraftian sludge, eliciting some enthusiastic applause from at least one group of junior critics.
Alex Pozniak’s Small Black Hole, followed suit, the quartet gradually building a sliding, groaning texture redolent of the collapse of buildings or tectonic drift. Amid the shifting layers, tremolos suggested the distant ascent of a space shuttle, the hulking sound of aircraft engines emerging from dobro-style slides. While kids stole each other’s baseball caps, providing a clear invitation for a good chasing, a cataclysmic crash loomed in the air, the music spiralling towards an unavoidable impact before fading to nothing. Well received and highly effective.
The experiment in community engagement was rounded off with Phill Niblock’s Guitar two, for four. Emerging unhurriedly from its opening drones, the work was accompanied by a complementary black and white film (as is Niblock’s wont) featuring industrial imagery—gauges, whirring gears, liquid metal being poured—matched to piercing overtones, the guitar’s potential for violence finally unleashed, a blaring surface licked by flares of feedback perhaps unavoidably bringing to mind the consumption of workers’ bodies in Metropolis. And that was that, scattered applause dispersing amid puffs of underage smoke.
Aurora Festival of Living Music: Chronology Arts and Ampere Quartet, Amped, Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre, May 10; www.auroranewmusic.com.au
RealTime issue #109 June-July 2012 pg. web
Synergy
photo Karen Steains
Synergy
SOME STRANGE CONJUNCTIONS THIS EVENING, AN INVIGORATING PROGRAMME OF NEW MUSIC PRESENTED BY SYNERGY PERCUSSION BEING PERFORMED ADJACENT TO A KICKBOXING AND PRO-WRESTLING MEET IN THE MAIN FOYER OF CASULA POWERHOUSE.
Though some seemed uncomfortable with this situation—“Oh my god!” the festival director was heard to mutter as muffled grunts and thuds mingled with the first sounds of James Rushford’s Go—the sound bleed added an element of indeterminacy to proceedings that was not entirely incongruous with the prevailing aesthetic, though the recording technicians from the ABC could probably have done without the challenge.
Rushford’s music conjured an eerie fragility, chirrups, squeaks, tinkles and chimes suggesting the cradle or even the emergent consciousness of the embryo. Utilising the soft hiss of gravel and sand as well as bowls of marbles, the performers busily created a sparse, playful texture, resting only as the swell of a pre-recorded electronica track, drowned the live sounds with menacing imminence—an effect somewhat undercut by the cheering next door.
No such problems with Alex Pozniak’s Groove Destruction. Taking its cues from “noise music [and] heavy metal,” Pozniak’s first piece for percussion aimed to explore the “extroverted” side of the ensemble, the four players attacking a phalanx of un-tuned drums with gusto. Establishing then annihilating rhythmic cycles, the piece moved through phases of instrumental delicacy before allowing the group to indulge an unadulterated joy in hitting things, Timothy Constable becoming so involved in the energy of the music that he inadvertently smashed a cymbal to the floor.
Inspired by Xenakis’ Pleiades, Amanda Cole’s Intermetallic provided a calming counterbalance. Writing for metallic blocks of ostensibly indeterminate pitch, Cole worked out at what frequency each vibrated, pairing “similarly dissimilar” tones to achieve a shimmering, not-quite-consonant effect. Growing from an almost-pure fifth, the piece seemed suspended in liminal space, redolent with the half-heard, the almost glimpsed. Armed with soft mallets, the performers offered some of their most sensitive playing of the evening, producing a gentle rippling that recalled all the dappled grace of the gamelan.
Synergy upped the energy once more with their own work, The Fives, with Alison Pratt taking a breather while Constable, Bree van Reyk and Joshua Hill returned to the drums. Using various items, including Constable’s suit jacket, as dampeners, the piece quickly descended into a Kurtzian nightmare, pounded skins suggesting the brutal certainty of a midnight jungle.
More whimsical, though perhaps less effective was Marcus Whale’s Puff, so called because of the composer’s instruction that toy harmonicas be breathed through by each performer for the duration of the piece. Gradually evolving patterns were articulated on wood blocks and thick golden cymbals to create an effect not dissimilar to “a year two’s birthday party,” as Whale drily put it. Although certainly unusual, it was difficult not to breath a sigh of relief once the incessant high-pitched whine of the harmonicas receded into silence once more, leaving nothing but the dull murmurs of ritualised violence next door.
Aurora Festival of Living Music: Synergy Percussion, performers Timothy Constable, Bree van Reyk, Alison Pratt, Joshua Hill; Casula Powerhouse, Sydney, May 5
A COLLABORATION BETWEEN CHOREOGRAPHER MARTIN DEL AMO AND COMPOSER ALEX POZNIAK, QUEST IS THE FIRST BABY OF COLLABORATIONS BETWEEN MUSIC COMPANY CHRONOLOGY ARTS AND DANCE ORGANISATION DIRTYFEET. THEY INTEND TO BRING TOGETHER MORE CHOREOGRAPHERS AND COMPOSERS TO MAKE NEW DANCE/MUSIC WORKS.
The story is immediately recognisable but time-dilated: a snippet of life made fantasy. A woman in a slinky black dress and fierce, businessy heels finds herself trapped in a pool of light. She is navigating what resembles an imaginary obstacle course, “she opens herself up to invisible forces that she might or might not be able to control” (program note).
Dancer Miranda Wheen is transfixing. She commands our attention from the get go. Even when I try to turn to the musicians who are visible on stage she draws me back with del Amo’s jagged choreography and her piercing gaze. She dances the whole piece with the appearance of intense scrutiny but never once lets us see what she is looking at. This keeps us with her, interested in the narrative and its perfect component moments.
From out of silence the musicians gradually set a mood of quiet isolation. Wheen begins, her muscular but feminine back to us, twitching subtly. At first it’s not obvious whether she is moving because no one is watching yet, out of discomfort or with intent, but as the gestures become larger it is clear that every twinge and shudder is scripted. Charged with meaning, her movements and stillnesses are cells of experience, listed in sequence but standing alone.
Performed by Andrew Smith on saxophone and Luke Spicer on viola, the music is independently engaging but complements the dance. The moments where dancer and musicians lock into synergy are magical. As the woman’s journey draws to a close, the music returns to the fore and then icily recedes.
This provides an apt segue to the next work, an electronic set by Daniel Blinkhorn based on field recordings of ice made in the Arctic near Norway. Blinkhorn introduces us to the sounds of glaciers cracking and water undergoing transformation. In one piece he borrows sounds of ice chirping and whispering to itself and “frictionalises” these sounds in order to portray types of sea and air vessels that usually travel the region. CreEpEr is inspired by the wild flailing gestures of the composer trying to balance while walking on ice holding a microphone. It’s loosely informed by dubstep and other current electronica and finishes the night’s entertainment on a very different note.
Blinkhorn’s music is immersive and transporting and the messages from his icy, inanimate companions transcend language. When a child in the audience started to cry, it took a long time for me to discern that this sound was human and not another aspect of living water from Blinkhorn’s frosted scape. This project reminds us of our fragility, our dependence on the Earth. Or maybe it’s just that we personify nature and hear our own condition reflected within: it was not at all baffling that those dwindling icebergs might have been crying. We’re all sacks of walking warm water. We search the most formidable landscapes on the other side of the world to hear familiar sounds.
Performed by Chronology Arts & DirtyFeet at the Seymour Centre, 2012.
Composer: Alex Pozniak Dancer: Miranda Wheen Choreographer: Martin del Amo Film & Recorded by Hospital Hill Recordings
Aurora Festival of Living Music: Invisible Forces: Quest, choreographer Martin del Amo, composer Alex Pozniak, dancer Miranda Wheen, musicians Luke Spicer, Andrew Smith; frostbYte cHatTer, sound artist, composer Daniel Blinkhorn; Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney, May 12; www.auroranewmusic.com.au/
In this video interview Australian Dance Theatre's Artistic Director Garry Stewart talks with Keith Gallasch about Be Your Self which recently played Sydney Theatre, May 31-June 3, 2012.
In this video interview Australian Dance Theatre’s Artistic Director Garry Stewart talks with Keith Gallasch about Be Your Self which recently played Sydney Theatre, May 31-June 3, 2012.
THERE ARE MANY AVENUES VIA WHICH TO LOOK AT, LISTEN TO AND ENGAGE WITH THE BOX, THE LATEST PRODUCTION BY CHAMBERMADE OPERA AS PART OF THEIR LIVING ROOM SERIES. IT IS NOT SIMPLY A PIECE OF MUSIC THEATRE IN AN INTIMATE SETTING—THE SPACE IS A CENTRAL COMPONENT OF THE COMPOSITION. THIS WORK PULLS ATTENTION TO THE SOUND OF THE ROOM, EXPLORING RESONANT SURFACES AND ACOUSTIC QUIRKS.
This living room is situated in one of the leafier parts of Kew, in a house above the Yarra River, hovering among the treetops. Entering, we are led down a staircase to find our seats covered in white sheets, facing a curved glass wall of a window looking out into the trees, a suspended sheet to our left and a curious box-like structure on legs.
Throughout The Box there is a fine balance between the content of the work and the space in which it is situated. The trees in the window are more than a backdrop—they bring an aliveness to the work. There is a stark reality in the fact that we are sitting in someone’s home, yet as soprano Deborah Kayser moves about the area outside, cleaning various surfaces with a white cloth and singing small birdcalls, her gestures are obviously performative. There is a barely audible tam tam roll coming from somewhere inside the house and faint, pulsating scratching sound coming from inside the box.
As we become aware of these three sounds, we also become attuned to the resonant and reflective surfaces within the space. These somehow become clearer in contrast to Kayser’s voice, heard through the glass. We dwell within this simple soundscape for an extended duration, as the sounds blend and draw out the subtler aspects of the space. Once Kayser has entered the room she recites fragments of Willoh S Weiland’s highly visual text, which seems to speak directly to the surrounding space. The lengthy silences between these fragments of text hold our attention within the room.
We cannot help but wonder; what is the relationship between this woman and that box? She speaks, sings wordless sounds to it and the box responds. It is more than a structure within a building—it is a kind of creature. Acousmatic wooden scratching develops and morphs with a surprisingly versatile range of timbre. Inside the box, percussionists Matthias Schack-Arnott and Leah Scholes scratch and rub its interior surfaces with various objects. The repetitive back-and-forth motion of the scratching is reminiscent of electronic tape delay; however what is most salient about this sound is its tactility. The performers remain hidden from view throughout the performance, allowing the box to retain its mysterious character.
The relationship between the woman and the box is never revealed. It is impossible to know what she perceives it to be. This incomplete narrative thread is only one of several aspects of a composition woven through the space we engage with not only visually but sonically. Towards the end of the performance, Kayser moves to the balcony (hidden from view) above the audience to perform a duet with percussionist Eugene Ughetti on woodblocks. Instead of exploring musical gestures, this duet draws focus to the way that sounds are reflected from the river and the environment outside.
No single aspect of this performance dominates the space in which it is performed. All three percussionists remain hidden from view throughout. The sounds they produce all find ways to integrate with the space and the unfolding narrative. The Box is a work of extreme subtlety that blurs the line between living space and performance space. Having watched the sun set in the course of the performance, we are left in a room that is almost dark as the woman departs. Although, for me at least, the work seemed to have reached an obvious end, there was an extended period in which we lingered between the fantasy of performance and the reality of the surrounding living room.
Chambermade Opera, The Box, concept, music, space, object Fritz Hauser with Boa Baumann, libretto Willoh S Weiland, soprano Deborah Kayser, percussion Eugene Ughetti, Matthias Schack-Arnott, Leah Scholes; private residence, Kew, Melbourne, March 17-24
THERE’S A LABORATORY IN THE US THAT APPARENTLY HOLDS THE RECORD FOR THE WORLD’S QUIETEST PLACE—SO ACOUSTICALLY INSULATED THAT ANYONE INSIDE THE ROOM WILL HEAR NOTHING BUT THE SOUNDS OF THEIR OWN BODY.
To hear your very blood circulating, your organs heaving, is supposed to be an alarming experience and few can last long in the anechoic chamber without risking their sanity. I don’t know if that’s true, but the story has some psychic pull to it, given the way it dramatises something nigh impossible in our lives today: the idea of being completely alone.
Theatre, for the most part, doesn’t play with aloneness all that much. It’s a social art, and if a work addresses solitude at the level of narrative, you’re usually witnessing it in a roomful of fellows. Even if you’re the only person who’s fronted up on the night, or it’s a play-for-one, you’re likely in a space with another human being performing in some manner. Theatre is shared.
alma mater
That’s why UK duo Fish & Game’s Alma Mater proves such a striking encounter—striking in the sense of a blow, a box about the ears. It’s deceptively simple to describe. The lone audience member is given an iPad and headphones and sent into a small, artificially constructed room where they close the door behind them. The interior and its minimal furnishings—a bed, chair, dresser–is entirely white, a blank. The short film that plays out on the tablet’s screen, it becomes apparent, takes the same point of view as the person watching it, scanning the room as you pan in each direction. And then the ghosts appear. The device becomes a puncture in space, two pale children suddenly emerging and acknowledging the presence of the viewer.
While it doesn’t sound like much, the construction of the environment is integral to the phantasmic experience. It’s as if the mind struggles with the idea of being so completely alone, and gives the images on the screen more weight in reality as a result. Of course the kids aren’t in the room with you, but there’s an uncanny sense that they might be, in some way, or have left some real traces that hover behind you.
The drama that unfolds expands upon this prickling haunting: the room onscreen gradually becomes more embellished, the children discovering a bird in a cage, colour on walls, a family. A mystery begins to develop, involving a possible death, a transformation, a sinister sister with a murderous baking habit. We’re now in a space where something terrible may have occurred, and the children still regularly turn to look at us, their inscrutable expressions raising too many questions: are they asking us to help? Or to merely bear witness? Or is there something accusatory in there? Who, in the end, are we?
The whole encounter lasts barely 20 minutes but it’s riddled with enigmatic meanings that linger well after you exit the room. I left wanting to call someone, to talk to some real person if only to rid myself of the eerie sense that being so very alone opens up the possibility of visitations from places I’m pretty sure don’t exist. Which, some might argue, is one effective definition of art.
the seizure
Naomi Rukavina, The Seizure
photo Lachlan Woods
Naomi Rukavina, The Seizure
The Hayloft Project’s latest work explores the hellishness of solitude in another form. The Seizure takes up the story of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, a soldier abandoned on a miserable island after an injury to his ankle. Here he has spent a decade in isolation, eating birds, picking at the festering wound that never heals. His only interlocutor is a crow, and in keeping with writer Benedict Hardie’s modern and secular interpretation, this chorus may well be a projection of Philoctetes’ own mental state. The divine is a pointed absence in this adaptation—there will be no salvation from Beyond.
When other humans do arrive—Neoptolemus and Odysseus, hoping to convince their fallen comrade to return to the war effort—we see how Philoctetes’ plight has become his being. He refuses to rejoin society, having seen how the fight itself is an undying machine that feeds on the bodies of men. If his wound is the thing that removed him from the cycle of death, then perhaps that is why he cannot allow it to be mended—this is the puncture that allows him a glimpse of the reality of war.
It’s a sparse and solemn production. In the past Hardie has proven a wonderful ability to show how words may both convey and obscure meaning (the outstanding Yuri Wells, for instance; RT94, p8) but here he holds back the linguistic fireworks in favour of a subtle, reverential poetry that serves its source well. The design is also unobtrusive: an almost featureless white space, with only a slash of black ink cutting a scar across the otherwise blank vista. Despite all of this, there’s much contemporary resonance to the piece, suggesting as it does that freedom is a sentence, not a gift.
the histrionic
Thomas Bernhard’s The Histrionic presents another vision of a self-imposed solipsist. The titular pomp, Bruscon, is a theatre-maker who has fashioned the entirety of human existence as his own reflection. He tours the country with his epic The Wheel of History, in which he dramatises the lives of great men by playing them himself. We find him in a pitiful backwater where he is attempting to stage a production of the play, facing down local safety regulations, substandard staging conditions and the resentful members of his family he requires to play supporting roles. He brings to all of this the kind of outrageous arrogance that at first seems to situate Bernhard’s work in farcical territory, but quickly expands to become something much more.
Bruscon is a fascinating tyrant who rails against the residual fascism he sees infecting post-war Europe while acting as its most potent expression. His art transforms human experience into a grotesque parody of itself, serving only to bulwark his ego at the expense of those around him. It results in literal violence against his family, just as it enacts its own form of symbolic violence. On a surface level this maker of a world is Hitler, but he is also the essence of the artist for whom the work stands above its subjects.
Bernhard’s brilliant creation here is also a condemnation of himself, the writer, and there are pointed connections between his monster and his own professional history. This is absolutely necessary, for to remove himself from the frame would be to commit the very same crimes of which he accuses Bruscon. To write himself in, of course, is to admit that those crimes are ones he’s guilty of already. It’s a slippery move but it adds immeasurably to the compelling complexity undergirding the entire work.
Where Philoctetes’ plight makes loneliness a tragic demand of freedom, and Alma Mater suggests that isolation breeds demons, Bruscon is the artist who seeks to remove himself from the degradation of civilisation by reducing the world to something he may command. While there’s plenty of laughter involved, especially given Bille Brown’s masterful performance, this theatre-maker may offer up the most chilling implication of creative solitude: to truly stand alone, free of influence and interpretation, is liberation as an act of annihilation.
Alma Mater, created by Fish & Game, directors Robert Walton, Eilidh MacAskill, cinematography Anna Chaney, music John De Simone, performers Lucy Gaizely, Albie Gaizely-Gardiner, Lyla Gaizely-Gardiner, Raedie Gaizely Gardiner, Gary Gardiner, Becki Gerrard, Thom Scullion, Mr Feathers, Ensemble Thing, design Phil Bowen, Hugh Speirs, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, Apr 18-May 13; The Hayloft Project, The Seizure after Sophocles’ Philoctetes, writer, director Benedict Hardie, performers Christopher Brown, Haiha Le, Brian Lipson, Naomi Rukavina, dramaturgy Anne-Louise Sarks, design, costumes Zoe Rouse, lighting Lucy Birkinshaw, sound design Alister Mew, Studio 246A Brunswick, May 3-19; Malthouse Theatre & Sydney Theatre Company, The Histrionic, writer Thomas Bernhard, translator Tom Wright, director Daniel Schlusser, performers Bille Brown, Kelly Butler, Barry Otto, Josh Price, Katherine Tonkin, Jennifer Vuletic, Edwina Wren, set, costumes Marg Horwell, lighting Paul Jackson, sound design, composition Darrin Verhagen, CUB Malthouse, Apr 2-May 5; STC, Jun 20-Jul 28
RealTime issue #109 June-July 2012 pg. 24
Eugenia Raskopoulos, Vestiges #3 (2010),
courtesy the artist and William Wright Artists Projects Sydney
Eugenia Raskopoulos, Vestiges #3 (2010),
ART PRIZES THE SCALE OF THE JOSEPHINE ULRICK AND WIN SCHUBERT PHOTOGRAPHY AWARD CAN TEND TOWARD THE SMASH AND GRAB VARIETY, HOWEVER THIS IS NOT THE CASE WITH THIS AWARD. NOW IN ITS 11TH YEAR, IT IS CERTAINLY ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT MEDIA SPECIFIC AWARDS IN THE COUNTRY WITH A GENEROUS PRIZE PURSE, BUT ALSO STANDS ALONE AS AN EXHIBITION OF HIGH QUALITY CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY.
Selected and judged in 2012 by Kon Gouriotis, Director of the Australian Centre for Photography (a different judge is chosen every year), the prize is thus a curated selection, which lends it a critical strength and relevance as an exhibition of contemporary photography. This year’s prize presented a veritable smorgasbord of Australia’s leading photographic artists and as with all smorgasbords, the temptation is to indulge—indeed, it’s almost impossible not to when faced with 75 works, selected from over 360 entries.
The result was a salon hang of names, from well established and mid-career artists such as Petrina Hicks, Anne McDonald, Tamara Dean, Merilyn Fairskye and Darren Sylvester (who also gave a talk as part of the opening events), through to more emerging artists. Works ranged too in physical scale from huge to small lending the exhibition some more intimate moments. The thoughtfully chosen final field offered a snapshot, albeit subjective, of contemporary practice, a litmus test of the sector as it were.
The most important aspect to note is that the prize belongs to Gold Coast City Art Gallery (GCCAG), one of the biggest regional art galleries in Australia with an impressive collection begun in the 1970s. GCCAG is in the process of campaigning for bigger digs, motivated by the collection’s growing size and calibre; the continued success of this prize should add more weight to the argument. A word too about the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Foundation: it’s nothing short of a national treasure, given the dearth of private philanthropy in this country. Its reach extends across literature, poetry, photography and ceramics and a variety of universities, museums and galleries. The photographic award’s first prize of $20,000 is supplemented by an additional $10,000 to the Gold Coast City Collection for acquisitions, which in 2012 included, at the judge’s discretion, works by Chris Budgeon, Ella Dreyfus, Merilyn Fairskye, Sam Scoufos and Chris Herzfeld in collaboration with Thom Buchanan: all handsome and welcome collection additions.
Chris Herzfeld in collaboration with Thom Buchanan, Superhero 3
courtesy the artists
Chris Herzfeld in collaboration with Thom Buchanan, Superhero 3
Thus The Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award truly is nothing short of a gift to the gallery, and to the nation too. Fitting then that the winning work was Eugenia Raskopoulos’ Vestiges #3. On the surface an abstract study, the work is also a study in simplicity. A photograph of the remnants of a birthday gift—the discarded wrapping paper—it constitutes a happy accident of sorts, in the spirit of Irwin Wurm’s three-minute sculptures. Raskopolous’ larger project concerns itself with language, the complexity of making oneself understood as an immigrant in a strange land. In his award notes Gouriotis explained, “What started off as birthday wrapping paper, ended up as another shape which is then photographed offering a new interpretation to the object. The new meaning this shift creates, recognises the incomplete over the complete. It supports the possibility of other changes rather than no transformations.” It is an eloquent work that speaks with gravity to the immutable power of visual language in the absence of a voice. As the winning work too, its humility takes on greater significance: it’s the gift that keeps on giving.
Other notable inclusions were Petrina Hick’s work Untitled #1 (The Perfomance, 2011) best described as a witty conflation of religious painting and Benetton advertising. In this ‘performance’ however, young women play the roles of Jesus and doubting Thomas investigating Christ’s wound. Hicks’ bright-eyed teenagers might be metaphors for a contemporary culture that is spiritually bankrupt, or emblematic of youth itself: beautiful and bereft. Superhero 3, 2012 created collaboratively by Chris Herzfeld and performative visual artist Thom Buchanan (and acquired as part of the fund) follows in the Marvel Comic tradition. Here a group of caped crusaders unite to smack down a dishdash-wearing Muslim foe. It’s a fun but ultimately serious work. Linsey Gosper’s Alone in my room (little death), 2011 with its pathetic, exposed protagonist is wonderfully dark. Murray Frederick’s magnificently malevolent clouds in Hector #12, 2011 evoke the cloud paintings of Matthys Gerber. It’s a particularly painterly work, eerily similar to Simone Douglas’s two cloud studies Ever III and Ever VII, 2011. Then there was Cherine Fahd’s whimsical and humorous 365 attempts to meditate, 2011, composed of 50 small images of a person blowing up a balloon. All in all the 2012 was a rich selection with something for everyone, like the perfect ‘all you can eat.’
The award coincided too with the biannual Queensland Festival of Photography, a series of events and exhibitions held across the state, and was complemented at Gold Coast City Art Gallery by Lorikeet Island, an exhibition of collaborative work by Alana Hampton and Marian Drew. An ambitious installation, Lorikeet Island consisted of photographs and immersive new media works produced over an extended period of time onsite at a mangrove cay in one of the labyrinthine Gold Coast waterways. The artists aimed to highlight the incredible natural beauty that lies just at the edge of Surfers Paradise’ ‘glitter strip,’ the aquatic playground that brings in the tourists. Lorikeet Island captured the largely unseen beauty of one small island that disappears with the vagaries of the tidal changes, exposing the mangroves and complex ecosystem. Hampton and Drew have worked together before but this exhibition crystallised their individual practices with its clarity of vision and execution. After the very fulfilling experience of the award, walking into the exhibition was not unlike diving beneath the water: cool and sating.
The Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award, Gallery 1, The Arts Centre, Gold Coast, March 31-May 13
Roy takes a break after showing Kelton the best fishing spots (detail) with Roy Kennedy and Kelton Pell sitting at APN billboard site, Waterfall, NSW; Appropriated Circumstances, 2012
photo, Derek Kreckler 2012
Roy takes a break after showing Kelton the best fishing spots (detail) with Roy Kennedy and Kelton Pell sitting at APN billboard site, Waterfall, NSW; Appropriated Circumstances, 2012
MORE THAN ANY OTHER TYPE OF IMAGE, THE ROADSIDE BILLBOARD OPERATES IN THE REALM OF OUR PERIPHERAL VISION AS THE SIGN GLIMPSED OVER AND OVER THROUGH THE CORNER OF AN EYE.
For this reason, artists who venture toward the billboard as a vehicle for art typically take a forthright approach, figures such as Barbara Kruger and her contemporary successors—culture jammers who employ the graphically bold and arresting strategies of advertising, turning it against itself. In these instances, ultimately the subversion resides more in the message than in the mode of visual communication.
An oblique approach is rarer. Yet this is precisely what was encountered in artist Derek Kreckler’s two roadside billboard installations from his Appropriated Circumstances series that intrigued drivers along the Princes Highway at Heathcote on the Sydney outbound route and at another inbound site just out of Waterfall from late February until April. Devoid of any text, slogan or signifier of a commercial entity or brand, Kreckler’s billboards were essentially large photographs in the landscape that, as drivers approached, registered like a glitch upon the sight line. Gentler than most advertising images with their naturalistic tones and clean, uncluttered white background, the billboards almost blended into the surrounding landscape and vegetation. “Because they’re highly detailed as photographs, it’s a different type of push on the viewer,” suggests Kreckler. “People look twice at them.”
Anti-advertising is one description that’s been suggested for the signs but it’s a term that perhaps doesn’t quite register the rich complexity of their visual rhetoric. The pair of billboards present two photographs taken by Kreckler that record a meeting between well-known Wollongong Dharawal activist and storyteller Roy ‘Dootch’ Kennedy and actor Kelton Pell, a Noongah man from South Western Australia, captured in front of a 19th century landscape painting in the City of Wollongong Gallery. The seemingly anachronistic gilt framed scene which is the object of their attention is colonial artist Eugene von Guérard’s View of Lake Illawarra with distant mountains of Kiama (1860). Its sweepingly picturesque and pristine view of the local topography pre-industrialisation presents a striking contrast to today’s developed coastline.
Titled “Dootch takes a break after showing Kelton the best fishing spots” and “Strewth” (a clue to one of the billboards’ precursors?) Kreckler’s self-funded installations have more in common with visual strategies such as new objectivist image-making than the methods of public art as they’re typically understood. Commenting on the impetus of the work, Kreckler identifies a number of antecedent threads including a long held fascination with the museum photographs of Thomas Struth (b1954) which capture crowds of spectators looking at iconic paintings in the Louvre, the Prado in Madrid and other famous museums. When Kreckler encountered von Guérard’s near photographic oil study in the Wollongong City Gallery, he began to consider the work in this context (incidentally, Kreckler points out that both Struth and von Guérard trained at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in Germany). It was a meeting with Dootch Kennedy, though, that eventually shifted Kreckler’s thinking into a more temporal terrain.
“To me, the von Guérard painting appears quite old, but to Dootch it’s just another moment in time,” says Kreckler. The artist suggested to Dootch the idea of photographing him in front of the work and once he’d agreed, Kreckler introduced him to Pell. When the two men met in the gallery the painting immediately became a catalyst for cultural exchange as Dootch spiritedly imparted his considerable knowledge of the plentiful food source sites around the lake (Lake Illawarra is also regarded as having been an important location for Indigenous ceremonial and traditional activities). Kreckler took a large number of photographs without a particular construction in mind, simply observing the moment and shooting until the camera became invisible. Afterwards, he gave some thought as to how to exhibit the images. “I was feeling that I didn’t just want to put a photograph in a gallery and photography is so ubiquitous these days. I wanted to honour the work in a different way.” It was only later, driving past a billboard at Waterfall which at the time was displaying the now infamous “Want Longer Lasting Sex” advertisements, that Kreckler was struck by the possibility of appropriating the boards.
Derek Kreckler, ‘Strewth’, from the series Appropriated Circumstance, 2012, Princes Highway, Heathcote NSW
courtesy the artist
Derek Kreckler, ‘Strewth’, from the series Appropriated Circumstance, 2012, Princes Highway, Heathcote NSW
A multidisciplinary artist embedded in conceptual modes of thinking and making, Kreckler’s photographic practice interrogates the conventions of seeing. With images that are coolly precise and quietly performative, the apparent everyday quality of the scenes typically belies the web of temporal and perceptual concerns that cook and simmer with prolonged looking. Driving around the gentle bend and over the crest of the road on the approach to the “Strewth” billboard at Heathcote, the immediate impression of encountering two large-scale figures looming over the traffic with their backs turned away from the stream of passing cars was almost disconcerting in its denial of the viewer’s gaze. But following the direction of their line of vision into the painting, guided by Pell’s gesturing toward the von Guérard with an outstretched hand, absorbs the viewer into the men’s shared act of observation. Momentarily, looking takes on a surprisingly participatory dimension. For the drivers who passed the billboards on their daily route along the Princes Highway the back story of the images’ construction would have been irrelevant—what the observant driver encountered was a puzzle, a cryptic story with a network of referents that yielded more clues with each repeat viewing, while refusing any revelation.
Paintings like von Guérard’s View of Lake Illawarra increasingly hold interest for their ‘time capsule’ effect and there’s an aptness in Kreckler’s appropriation of this work given the recent reappraisal of the artist’s oeuvre. Long dismissed as too European in his perceptions of the Australian landscape but now gaining a new appreciation for the sublime qualities and scientific motivations of his paintings, von Guérard’s unspoiled landscapes carry greater resonance in an age of environmental crisis. The fact that an artist can undergo such extremes of reception is a reminder that all perception is cultural and susceptible to destabilising twists and turns. Kreckler’s creative appropriation of the billboard likewise reveals the shifts that can occur when a conditioned habit of seeing, or not seeing, is disrupted and fixed relations are unmoored, imaginatively set adrift into unexpected reconfigurations.
Derek Kreckler, Appropriated Circumstances, billboard installations at Heathcote, Feb 27–March 25 and Waterfall, NSW, Feb 27 – Apr 22
PAUL CELAN, POSSIBLY THE GREATEST POST-WAR POET IN THE GERMAN LANGUAGE, WAS BORN A ROMANIAN JEW WHOSE PARENTS WERE MURDERED IN THE HOLOCAUST. HE HIMSELF SURVIVED NEARLY TWO YEARS IN THE LABOUR CAMPS THEN LIVED MOST OF HIS ADULT LIFE IN PARIS BEFORE COMMITTING SUICIDE IN 1970. HIS MOST FAMOUS POEM, TODESFUGE, OR DEATH FUGUE, WITH ITS IMAGERY OF THE “BLACK MILK OF DAYBREAK,” REMAINS A STARTLING, EVEN SHOCKING ELEGY FOR THE DEAD JEWS OF EUROPE.
Todtnauberg is the title of a less well-known but perhaps equally significant poem written shortly after Celan’s visit to the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s mountain retreat in the town of the same name as the poem in July 1967. The text recalls Celan’s inscription in Heidegger’s visitor’s book, expressing the longing for a word “from the heart” from the great thinker. Heidegger reportedly provided nothing of the kind. The meeting of a survivor of the Nazi regime and one of its most famous apologists is the subject of Dennis Del Favero’s video work, also titled Todtnauberg, which focuses on Celan imagining the conversation they might have had. It is one of two works that comprise Del Favero’s solo show, Magnesium Light, at Perth’s John Curtin Gallery.
The video is shot in subdued, black and white tones and evokes a certain melancholia as the figure makes his way through the woods (just as Celan and Heidegger walked through the woods together). Yet there is no attempt to represent the significance of the occasion. The monochromatic tones and short duration of the work recall the similar restraint of Celan’s poem (a single sentence in eight stanzas). The audio track relates the dream of Heidegger’s apology, the fantasy of a mutually felt disgust. Celan imagines their tears flowing together, expressing his hope that the thinker can reflect on the infinite suffering that resulted from his chosen political orientation. Heidegger’s voice is also heard as he goes on to say that their personal views are now irrelevant from the perspective of history…but the logic of this work is that this is clearly not the case. The work engages the selective memory of both participants: Heidegger’s ongoing silence about his support for the Nazis and Celan’s wishful thinking about Heidegger and his often expressed guilt about his own survival when so many died, including his own parents.
Jill Bennett has written beautifully about the function of memory and forgetfulness in Del Favero’s work: “memory is never simply a matter of recall, as Dennis Del Favero’s work persistently demonstrates. If trauma, pain and emotional distress must pass into the narrative of memory in order to become livable, these experiences do not bear constant replay. The work of narrative—and of the visual imaginary—is to process and house such memory in ways that enable transition, allowing remembering to occur at the same time as placing trauma (which haunts the present) in a past over which the narrator has some measure of control” (catalogue essay to Forgetful Sky, Boutwell Draper Gallery, Sydney 2009).
Dennis Del Favero, You and I, 2009
video still, courtesy of the artist
Dennis Del Favero, You and I, 2009
In the other work presented here, You and I, Del Favero explores this kind of displacement in the context of the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs of 2006. This is not immediately clear from the video which shows an anonymous woman writhing in sexual pleasure. A voiceover, with an American accent, suggests that the woman is a female soldier based somewhere in the Middle East. The video performs an act of displacement in which, as Bennett has pointed out, the woman chooses to overlook her abuse of a prisoner by focusing on the memory of her sexual conquest.
In Del Favero’s opus there is a consistent investigation of traumatic memory, memories that surface reluctantly if at all, seen in works such Cross Currents (1999), engaging with the experience of sex slaves, and Deep Sleep (2004), which deals with the artist’s own personal memories of treatment at Chelmsford Psychiatric Hospital in the 1970s. Most recently in Scenario (2011), an iCinema project directed by Del Favero and a world first interactive and immersive 3D cinematic experience, we see the same structure. His works all use new media devices to explore dimensions of memory interactively and to engage an audience with material that both wants to remain hidden but which continually rises forcefully to the surface of memory. Art has always played this role, to bring the unseen or overlooked into focus, and for Del Favero this is also a key function of his own new media art.
In the title of the work Pentimento (2002), which deals with a case of brother-sister incest, we can read a clue as to how Del Favero sees his work as the exploration of what art historians call ‘pentimenti,’ the visible traces of an earlier version of an artist’s layout beneath layers of paint on a canvas. Del Favero aims to activate the hidden dimensions of memory in society or the human psyche and, in this sense, the works in Magnesium Light show the dynamic nature of memory that refuses the logic of either simple loss or recall. These works show a memory that resists erasure but equally avoids the repetition of traumatic recall and forms instead the basis for a partly fantasmatic but entirely workable relationship with the self and the world.
The works in Magnesium Light may not look like user guides to an ethical life but they purport to explore the ways that victims and perpetrators of violence can refocus on how “one might live in a world increasingly haunted by its past” (Del Favero, artist statement, Australian Video Art Archive. www.videoartchive.org.au/dfavero). His art explores and performs the essential displacements and substitutions we all make in memory and so enables an ethical examination of our perspectives on such complex values as innocence and guilt. Magnesium Light complicates a reading of victimhood as innocence and a visual rendering of the perpetrator as an unfeeling “anaesthetic protuberance” (Susan Buck-Morss,”Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” October 62, Fall 1992). In achieving this, the work enables a significant re-evaluation of the codes of trauma and memory in visual culture.
Dennis del Favero, Magnesium Light, John Curtin Gallery, Curtin University, Perth, June 1-Aug 5
IT IS A GREAT PLEASURE TO SEE THIS EXHIBITION HONORING AND CELEBRATING THE PERFORMANCE PHOTOGRAPHY OF HEIDRUN LÖHR AT THE AUSTRALIAN CENTRE FOR PHOTOGRAPHY. RECENTLY THE ACP HAS INITIATED A GREATER NUMBER OF SOLO EXHIBITIONS WITHIN ITS PROGRAM AFTER A LONG PERIOD OF THEME-BASED GROUP EXHIBITIONS UNDER THE DIRECTORSHIP OF ALASDAIR FOSTER.
Foster, as the longest serving director at the ACP (at 14 years) curated many vibrant and broadly inclusive exhibitions. Aware of Löhr’s work due to his role on the Board of Performance Space, interim director Tim Wilson instigated Parallax which was developed in a short time period, making its achievement all the more impressive.
Curated in a collaboration between Löhr and ACP staff, images were selected from an archive of approximately 300,000 photographs. In a museum style exhibition, images are confidently installed at different scales and mounted on dark charcoal and grey walls. Approximately half the images are colour and the other half black and white, covering a timespan from 1989 to the present.
It is a bold and stylish exhibition. Rather than taking an historical approach to selection the curators have embraced Löhr’s own identification of her creative strengths in photographing performance and more specifically the human body in expressive movement.
Immediately obvious is Lohr’s decision not to be bound by the photographic conventions of sharp focus. This represents the confidence of an extremely experienced photographer and a philosophical choice to move away from the expectations of realism.
Talking to her, Löhr tells me her style developed on the job. Her assignments evolved from theatre to dance to performance, commonly requiring photographic skills to deal with challengingly dark spaces. Her camera aperture was of necessity open and she experimented with shutter speeds. Always at odds with the print media’s requirement for a moment of acute clarity, she says this is not the point in this exhibition. Over time her interest in the sequencing of movement grew as did her collaboration with the artists she was photographing. She increasingly pushed boundaries and experimented, trying anything and everything with the camera.
Martin del Amo, A Severe Insult to the Body, 2003 (detail)
photo Heidrun Löhr
Martin del Amo, A Severe Insult to the Body, 2003 (detail)
“I see my work as a collaborative process. Sometimes in exquisite moments, photographing becomes a duet between performer and photographer, both accomplices in the creation of images”. (Heidrun Löhr, Parallax, Room Notes)
There are two main values to this exhibition. Firstly, as indicated in Löhr’s own words and as evidenced on the walls of the gallery, there is an outsanding ability to record movement within the single image that has then transformed over time into an expression of the stages of movement through the use of sequences. With this strong style Löhr establishes a bridge between the stillness of a single image and the motion of cinema.
As Merce Cunningham has said, “No stillness exists without movement and no movement is fully expressed without stillness.” In a long sequence of small images featuring dancer Martin del Amo at the Omeo Dance Studio in Sydney (A Severe Insult to the Body, 2003) we are reminded of Muybridge’s famous studies of movement in humans and animals. In another bold series from the same performance with del Amo wearing high heeled shoes, the large scale is that of contemporary art photography.
There are many entrancing sequences that reinforce the relationship of cinema to movement and the inadequacy of the single image to fully express it. My favourite is from a pre-production publicity shoot of choreographer Kate Champion (in About Face at Scots Church and performed at the Studio, Sydney Opera House, 2001). In four images (three small, one large) Champion’s partly clothed body, impossibly flying through space, appears about to drop to a ground of concrete and rubble in exquisite images of part strength, part vulnerability.
Julie-Anne Long, Miss XL, 2002
photo Heidrun Löhr
Julie-Anne Long, Miss XL, 2002
In the ACP entrance corridor a sequence of Julie-Anne Long swirling like a whirling dervish (Miss XL, Seymour Centre, 2002) is mounted directly onto the wall at non-symmetric angles uniting the wall’s horizon line. In these sequences and other single images (Yael Stone and Geoffrey Rush in Belvoir’s 2010 production Diary of a Madman) the sense of photography as art in homage to painting makes this work by Löhr look highly collectable.
Within the context of the photography I was most excited by a 13-minute video work constructed from 2,500 still images which Löhr edited and sequenced collaboratively with Peter Oldham and with an evocative soundscape by Gail Priest. Recapturing the Vertical is an exciting extension of the experimental sequencing that Löhr has been developing. She is working on a further animation with Martin del Amo called Shallow Water. I hope she continues this project, a true hybrid between stills and film.
In an improvisation staged solely for Löhr’s camera, performer Nikki Heywood enacted a work about her mother’s bouts of dizziness and falling in the now empty Edgecliffe apartment where she had lived. Captured in five days by Löhr’s camera and edited into a stunning animation, we see Heywood embodying her mother’s vulnerability. The pacing of the editing speeds up and slows down to emphasise the emotionality of the relationship.
The second significant achievement of the exhibition is the historical mapping of the performers and performances that have collaborated with Löhr’s camera. There is one cluster wall covered with images that elicits an enjoyable game of name spotting of well-known Australian actors. This is in effective contrast to the more fascinating documentation of extraordinary performers and companies seen in multiple alternative arts venues around Sydney.
Heidrun Löhr has exhibited her work as art before. She has participated in group exhibitions and in 2007 at Critical Path she showed 700 images as projections, using four projectors and one digital slideshow, again with a score by Gail Priest. This event, developed as a result of a Fellowship from the Australia Council for 2007–2009, was focused more on historical documentation but within an experimental presentation.
Photographers like Heidrun Löhr who specialise in their work and who have had exposure to significant histories are often caught within a kind of invisibility. I therefore congratulate the ACP for creating this exhibition to honour one of the important working photographers in Sydney. Löhr’s images of the human body in spaces and in space, on chairs, on the floor, against black or white walls, freefalling, deal with human expression, emotion and spirit. Her contribution is unique. Moving through the large exhibition space at the ACP one has a sense of being at a theatrical performance of the body at its most heightened capacity, in all forms of expression, alive and revealing of emotion, pure human expression.
Heidrun Lohr, Parallax, The Performance Paradigm in Photography, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, March 3- April 15
Commercial Travellers’ Association, Martin Place, Architect: Seidler & Associates
photos Paul Green / Kaldor Public Art Projects
Commercial Travellers’ Association, Martin Place, Architect: Seidler & Associates
observation
When Sydney people walk into an unfamiliar room the first thing they do is head for the window. Everything—including the art on the walls—is sized up only after a quick assessment of the quality of the view. Sydney is a view city—even beyond white yachts bobbing on a sparkling harbour.
The Rear Window effect of looking into the rooms of others, the lovely mute blankness of windowless brick, a neighbour’s frangipani or the shiny seduction of a retail strip all make good views, as they would in other cities, but in Sydney it’s more important. The view reigns. Sydney seems to look outwards; looking inwards is inappropriate behaviour. Disturbing. As is randomly opening the door to a hotel room you haven’t booked.
The Commercial Travellers’ Association houses a little-known, little hotel—a mid-70s Harry Seidler designed concrete mushroom in the centre of Sydney’s financial district. On one of the above ground floors, 16 little bedrooms look out radially onto the high-end retail and grand bank facades of Castlereagh Street and Martin Place. This was the setting for German artist Thomas Demand’s The Dailies, where a polite attendant in black invited me to start anywhere—so I opened the door to room 413 and went to the window.
through the window
Prada, in an Art Deco building, Martin Place.
on the wall
A photograph of a window in a brown wall. The window has a cheap-looking venetian blind covering it. The lower third of the slats is dishevelled—a word normally used for hair or clothing that also works for mussed up venetians. The ceiling is standard office-commercial. Cheap. Utilitarian. All of the above is meticulously constructed from paper, photographed, then beautifully and expensively printed using an almost obsolete process called dye transfer, by Thomas Demand. The result is a slickly real image that doesn’t quite add up.
on the dresser
A tiny electric jug (everything is tiny in these rooms), a little telephone, a small bottle of wine, one glass, a laminated sheet of house information that ends predictably with…
“THIS IS A NON SMOKING ROOM
THANK YOU”
and laminated in the same hotel-room manner, a story fragment by American novelist Louis Begley…
“THE WHITE CORRIDOR WHEN
THEY ARRIVED AT
GREGOR’S FLOOR
MAKES HIM THINK OF A HOSPITAL.
HE TELLS THAT TO LENI.
She explodes in laughter and explains how on every floor the corridor circles the building.
On some floors there are only double rooms.
This is the floor of singles.”
in the air
A fragrance designed or specified (not sure) by Miuccia Prada.
the dailies
Kaldor Public Art Project 25: Thomas Demand’s The Dailies, installation view of Daily #3, 2008
photos Paul Green / Kaldor Public Art Projects
Kaldor Public Art Project 25: Thomas Demand’s The Dailies, installation view of Daily #3, 2008
One circular floor, level four. Sixteen rooms. Fifteen, each with a photograph, a fragrance, a view and a fragment of story about Gregor the commercial traveller and Leni the receptionist. One room is locked, a red swing tag on the handle reading, “Please do not disturb.”
begin
Turn the handle and push against one of the tightly sprung doors; so tightly sprung that it feels locked, until the attendant in black tells you to push a bit harder. A touch of guilt about randomly barging into a hotel room that isn’t yours, then a hint of relief in discovering that no-one is there. The lunchtime city outside is soundless through the double glazing. The only sound in the room is the humming of the air conditioner through the grate in the bulkhead, sounding for a moment like a shower running in the room next door. Look at the photograph on the wall above the bed. Read the text on the dresser. Look out the window. Step back (not far in this tiny room) and frame all three—the picture, the dresser with the text, the window—in your field of vision. Turn back to the door. Turn the handle, open, realise it’s the door for the bathroom, and a slight sense of disorientation sets in.
Few of us miss this point, that regardless of where you are in the world, these mean little hotel rooms, apart from all looking the same, have one other thing in common: they’re non-places. Places between other places. In The Dailies, Demand’s photographs pick up on this and push the fourth floor into another level of disengagement.
loaded emptiness
Demand has described the subjects of his photographs as simply places you pass by, things that are formally interesting (no more than that), revisited memories fixed in photography or the nuclei of narratives. The refreshingly non-interpretive John Kaldor calls them little observations in the city (see website), and this is essentially what they are. But it’s the effect of moving through the gaps, being in-between these little stories, that draws you in to another, less worldly place. A description I once heard used for the loaded emptinesses of Berlin comes to mind and seems to fit the feeling perfectly: ghostly present absences; and picking up on the theme I did find myself doing this door-to-door visitation a bit like a commercial travelling wraith. Cut off, removed, silenced, disconnected—but at the same time hoping that the group of jabbering school kids I saw earlier had finally pissed off and left me to wander alone—to be trapped in the gaps between someone else’s story, each door opening to reveal just a sampling of what wasn’t there.
give and take
Begley was delightful. His words played with me—and the building, and Sydney, and Australia, and readers, and Kafka, and airports, and commercial travellers and lousy little hotel rooms. Regretfully, Prada’s fragrances didn’t do a thing—but only because of the limiting effects of asthma and a cold. On the other hand, Thomas Demand seemed to be provoking a type of reflection, and presumably insight, that only comes about through displacement. Demand gives, prescribing the vision, as he says, and Demand takes, handing you the moment and at the same time cutting it away. The subject in the photograph is a construction. It has an aura of reality but at the same time it doesn’t add up. It’s the slightly disturbing, preternatural silence of the spaces that exist either side of these disconnected moments that I find overwhelmingly seductive.
Thomas Demand, The Dailies, with contributions by Louis Begley and Miuccia Prada, Kaldor Public Art Projects, Commercial Travellers’ Association (CTA), MLC Centre, Martin Place, Sydney, March 23-April 22; education kit and video interview with Demand at http://kaldorartprojects.org.au/project-archive/thomas-demand
Michaela Gleave, Our Frozen Moment, 2012, installation view, Performance Space
photo Jennifer Leahy, Silversalt Photography, image courtesy the artist and Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne
Michaela Gleave, Our Frozen Moment, 2012, installation view, Performance Space
STANDING OUTSIDE MICHAELA GLEAVE’S WEATHER-INSPIRED INSTALLATION, OUR FROZEN MOMENT, I’M HOLDING THE POSTCARD ADVERTISING PERFORMANCE SPACE’S DIMENSION CROSSING SEASON IN MY HAND. PRINTED ONTO THE CARD IS A PHOTOGRAPH SHOWING TWO ORDINARY GARDEN SHRUBS AND A TIMBER LATTICE FENCE BATHED IN A LUMINOUS, ALMOST SPECTRAL, WHITE GLOW.
The image captures a natural phenomenon that mostly goes unnoticed, a fogbow, caused by light hitting tiny water droplets of fog producing either muted colours or an ethereal white halo; it’s also attracted the slight misnomer, ‘white rainbow.’
The photograph by Gleave is a telling image that reveals a heightened attunement to the subtle intricacies of natural phenomena and the ways in which we perceive them. It’s this sensitivity to the intertwining of nature and culture that largely informs Gleave’s practice and was strikingly apparent in her dramatic, large-scale contribution to the Dimensions Crossing program. Coupled with Robyn Backen’s site-specific work, Whisper Pitch, these two experiential architectural structures activated the Carriageworks site, luring visitors into engaging spaces where one felt more like a receptor than a mere spectator.
In keeping with her desire to transport the viewer, Gleave located the installation’s entry at the rear of the Bay where a dressing room housing the protective wet weather gear awaited. Having navigated my way into a black plastic poncho and slipped on a pair of heavy-duty gumboots, I plodded toward the blackened environment of the main exhibition space. Like swimmers contemplating a dip in the ocean, some visitors stood hesitantly at the threshold while others ventured boldly inside where a continuously strobing white light spliced through the darkness. At the centre of the room, cloaked spectators ascended the stairs onto a stage-like platform fenced by a wire balustrade where water drizzled from the ceiling. As we stood on this platform beneath the artificial rain, the visual spectacle at the heart of the work unfolded as the white light of the strobe refracted off the tiny particles of water, poetically transforming the droplets into what resembled an all-enveloping confetti of star dust. It was an otherworldly optical phenomenon that re-imagined such barely perceptible natural effects as the fogbow into a full-blown cinematic style atmospheric event.
While her installations recall the sensorial art-science experiments of Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, where Gleave differs is in her more playful engagement with our infatuation with epiphanic moments, lending itself to work of a more performative character. The theatricality of Our Frozen Moment evolved from an earlier project which involved creating a storm sequence for a play and Gleave was interested in recreating the stage within a black box environment for this installation. What was unexpected about the spectacle was its somewhat unnerving and abrasive edge—the effect of the strobe lighting soon shifted from dazzling to disorienting and the water irrigation closer to a drenching than a fine mist. It’s hard to know whether this was intentional as the installation was to some extent technically unresolved with the management of such large quantities of water proving particularly difficult. A gentler immersive environment might have given viewers more contemplative time amidst its wonder-provoking effects. Yet for those able to withstand a certain level of physical discomfort Gleave did offer an unusually intense collective experience that emphasised the destabilising influence of environments upon mental states and the fine line between the joys of illumination and the terrors of hallucination.
Coinciding with the installation period of the Dimension Crossing program, Carriageworks hosted an unrelated fashion event over the last weekend of April that ramped up the ambient noise of the space to a maximum—testing conditions for Robyn Backen’s Whisper Pitch installation at the southern end of the foyer. Here, this architectural anomaly of a pair of twin parabolic brick structures was seamlessly inserted as a space within a space, beckoning the odd stray photographer or curious fashionista into its encasing, womb-like interior. From the outside, the brick walls with their roughly applied sand coloured mortar recalled a fragment of a ruin or the imperfections of vernacular architecture. By contrast, the smooth grey render of the interior mirrored the existing Carriageworks brickwork and created a sense of resonance with the surrounding architecture.
Robyn Backen, Whisper Pitch, installation view, Performance Space
photo Ian Hobbs, courtesy the artist
Robyn Backen, Whisper Pitch, installation view, Performance Space
The physical form of Whisper Pitch took its cues from the parabolas of the acoustic architecture of such sites as the Whispering Gallery of Gol Gumbaz in Central India where sounds can be echoed seven times, and in ideal conditions Backen’s installation would have sought to reproduce these echoing effects. Amid the ambient noise of the Carriageworks site, however, Backen sensibly elected to work with the more controllable medium of recording technology, which opened up its own unique possibilities. Looking directly through the rear entry and down a narrow passageway, a projection of unobtrusively placed black-and-white film was visible—a ‘ghost image’ from Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) showing the scene where Marcello receives a marriage proposal from his lover spoken via an echo chamber. Within the spare and minimal confines of the brick parabolas, the intimate estrangement of the characters made an uncanny return as the script of their disembodied conversation (“Marcello, can you hear me?”) was spoken in the hushed whispers of female voices in seven different languages, the recording bouncing back and forth between four black rectangular speakers embedded in the installation walls.
By situating the speakers within the walls, Backen drew visitors into an intimate relationship with the architecture as they leaned closer and paced their perimeter to discern and trap the source of the whisperings. Whether or not the visitor was aware of the origins of the audio array as translations of the Fellini script (the projection was unfortunately situated some distance from the installation due to constraints in blackening the space), this slippery and ever shifting cacophony of voices, sometimes singular and coherent and at other times overlapping and polyvocal, evocatively conveyed a sense of the broken and incomplete nature of communication and the inherent difficulties of meaning.
Complemented by scribbly black lines of Morse code inscribed onto the walls in charcoal, the sound installation pointed out both the limitations of one-sided communication as well as its generative possibilities as the mind works to fill in the blank spaces with its own imaginings, revealing communication to be a seductively expansive and relational exercise. Backen’s installation also gracefully commanded the void of the Carriageworks foyer with a human-scaled intervention that thoughtfully engaged the senses at multiple levels. Gleave’s installation was more raw, yet despite its engineering imperfections at a visceral level, it too succeeded in forging ephemeral phenomena into a memorable art experience where the viewer’s own embodied shift in perception took centre-stage.
Performance Space, Dimension Crossing: Michaela Gleave, Our Frozen Moment, Robyn Backen, Whisper Pitch, Performance Space at Carriageworks, Sydney, April 20-May 19
Anthony Hunt, Pascal Herington, In the Penal Colony
photo Louis Dillon Savage
Anthony Hunt, Pascal Herington, In the Penal Colony
A WIDE ARC OF BLOOD SPATTERS ACROSS A WINDOW; IT IS BLUE—THE BLOOD LITERALLY AND METAPHORICALLY OF THE OFFICER WHO, IN DESPAIR AT HIS LOSS OF POWER IN A PENAL COLONY, HAS SUBJECTED HIMSELF TO AN EXECUTION DEVICE THAT, OVER 12 HOURS, IN A TORTUROUS TATTOOING, NEEDLING DEEPER AND DEEPER INTO HIS SKIN, SPELLS OUT THE COMMANDMENT A CRIMINAL HAS BROKEN.
Believing that at the moment of death the criminal achieves transcendent self-awareness, The Officer desires it for himself, but, its maintenance underfunded by a new commandant, the machine brutally malfunctions.
For The Officer, the power of one body, authority, over another is justice enough—the criminal need not know his offence (until the moment of death) or have the right to defence. As ever, Kafka (even if this is denied by those who regard him simply as a metaphysician) is prescient—fascism was to be supremely exercised by physical force—and historically alert. Although the Enlightenment tide began to turn against torture and violent execution in the 18th century, these contested punishments persisted, not least in European colonies in the 19th and 20th centuries, and into our own. In Kafka’s story, the setting is a penal colony in the tropics, the sweat and grit as palpable as the ugly specifics of the machine and cruelties more explicit than in Philip Glass’ opera.
However, in editing the story and paring back detail, composer Glass and librettist Rudolph Wurlitzer have provided the opportunity for directors to circumvent the demands of too many specifics, including historical placement, without necessarily reducing the potential for horror. The machine need not appear, the execution need not be seen—the anxiety and shock can be expressed principally in words and the haunting pulse of Glass’ score. Glass’ affinity is, after all, with Baroque opera rather than the denser theatricality of its 19th century successor.
Director Imara Savage and designer Michael Hankin make the most of this opportunity, filling the width of the stage with a long, shallow, starkly white room with vertical blinds at the back. These are later half-opened to reveal what appears to be an identical room behind glass, housing the implement of execution, which remains hidden and therefore all the more anxiety-inducing. The sheer lack of identity of the rooms is nightmarishly, if predictably Kafka-esque. A lone water cooler stands to one side, its contents ominously turning blue shortly before the execution device fails. A screen descends on which The Officer shows The Visitor (the Explorer in Kafka’s tale) the machine; the images are not of a concocted device, but made up of old black and white film footage of 20th century industrial machinery—spinning cogs and lathes counterpointing Glass’ insistent pulse—and worrying scientific implements of unknown purpose. Like the Officer’s uniform, appearing to be from the 1940s or 50s, they suggest a not too distant past that still lingers, while The Visitor is in modern dress.
The Visitor at first seems to be the character with whom we’ll identify. Like us, he’s a stranger to the penal colony. He’s keen to maintain an emotional remove, to simply be an observer. But The Officer treats him as confidant, fascinating and finally repelling The Visitor with his account of the machine and its torments and his attempts to inveigle his guest into suppressing any opposition to the device. That The Visitor takes so long to express his concern distances us from him, despite our understanding of his unenviable position; at the very same time we fully grasp the mania that inhabits The Officer and feel as helpless as The Visitor. The reversal, when it comes, the Officer substituting himself for the Condemned Man, is a shocking climax to a chilling tale.
Paul Goodwin-Groen, Anthony Hunt, Patrick George, In the Penal Colony
photo Louis Dillon Savage
Paul Goodwin-Groen, Anthony Hunt, Patrick George, In the Penal Colony
Director Savage’s direction is as effectively straightforward as the lucid libretto which is delivered with clarity and power by tenor Pascal Hetherington (The Visitor) and baritone Paul Goodwin-Groen (The Officer). Hetherington conveys detachment, curiosity, then horror and panic without embellishing The Visitor with any too distinctive character traits, underlining the man’s attempts to keep his distance, while Goodwin-Groen seizes the opportunity to reveal a slide from apparent rationality into neurosis and then self-destructive psychosis—a frightening portrait of the impact of quasi-religious, self-centred ideology, utterly devoid of empathy.
The singers met the challenging score boldly, as did the offstage conductor and string quintet, sustaining the music’s complex oscillations between driving motifs and reflective decelerations. There are moments in Glass’ score that offer director and performers little in the way of dramatic impulse (for example, when The Officer is installing himself, out of our view, in the execution device). Elsewhere this was, however, an issue of direction: the performers had little to do in some passages, appearing occasionally awkward or aimlessly repetitive in their movement. Likewise the opportunity to exploit the design space was not always taken. As numerous directors have shown in recent decades, Baroque opera, and oratorios even, offer great opportunities for dramatic realisation without it becoming superfluous. The same should apply to In the Penal Colony. Nonetheless the production maintained its sense of suspense, horror and ethical unease.
I was impressed by the Sydney Chamber Opera’s production of In the Penal Colony, for its intimacy of scale (so rare for opera in this city), excellent design, thematic conviction, fine performances and offering the hitherto unlikely opportunity to see this work. This is a company to watch.
Sydney Chamber Opera’s next production is a double bill, Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale and UK composer George Benjamin and librettist Martin Crimp’s Into the Little Hill, with conductor David Stanhope, director Sarah Giles and performers Halcyon at Carriageworks, Sydney, July 24-28. Crimp wrote the plays The Country and The City and created the English version of Botho Strauss’ Gross und Klein (Big and Little Scenes) for Sydney Theatre Company. If you’re interested in hearing In the Penal Colony, after touring the UK with their production in 2010, Music Theatre Wales has released a CD of In the Penal Colony on the Orange Mountain Music label.
Sydney Chamber Opera, In the Penal Colony, composer Philip Glass, libretto Randolph Wurlitzer, performers Pascal Hetherington, Paul Goodwin-Groen, Anthony Hunt, Patrick George, conductor Huw Belling, director Imara Savage, set, costume design Michael Hankin, lighting, AV Verity Hampson, string quintet Doretta Balkizas, Madelaine Slaughter, James Munro, Mee Na Lojewski, Rhiannon Oakhill; Parade Theatre, NIDA, April 7-14; http://sydneychamberopera.com
JOHN CAGE, MUSHROOM LOVER AND CULTURE HERO EXTRAORDINAIRE. BY ALL ACCOUNTS A REALLY NICE GUY. AND, TO CELEBRATE THE CENTENARY OF HIS BIRTH, CLOCKED OUT ASSEMBLED THREE NIGHTS OF CONCERTS IN BRISBANE.
Before each concert is an hour or so of Cage’s Musicircus, with artists spread throughout the space to perform more or less disconnected art-like actions. No reflection on the performers, but for me these “Happenings” are a bit long in the tooth. The moment for some of Cage’s work has gone—particularly for the pieces that focus on the presentation of uncorrelated (random) events. Cage became heavily influenced by Zen Buddhism, and “with our thoughts we make the world” fitted well with someone born into the glory days of US hegemony and a culture of hyper-confident individualism. For Cage the world was “teeming,” buzzingly random, and an individual could impose upon that world whatever structure they wanted. Cage’s work was then directed to producing an environment of randomised events that could be given structure (meaning) through individual contemplative attention.
Biology, though, shows us that our sensory, emotional and cognitive systems are coupled to a highly structured world with meaning derived from the adaptive value of that coupling. It seems that, even after his famous ‘silent’ 4’33” encouraged people to hear the world without addition, Cage continued to compose works for the concert hall that he felt—mistakenly as it turned out—reflected the sounds and dynamics of the world. The challenge of listening deeply to the actual world as a compositional strategy would later be taken up en masse with the advent of cheap recording equipment and the expansion of the, now quite large, field recording movement.
Decibel’s thoughtful performance of the eight Variations, written between 1958 and 1968, demonstrates the limitations of the randomisation strategies Cage used. The Variations focus on chance in compositional process, performer choice and audible output, and illustrate Cage’s philosophical commitments to removing personal taste from his work—to let sounds ‘speak for themselves.’ Using a range of graphical constructs, the scores have instructions like “For any number of players and any sound producing means.” The results are generally not that interesting to listen to. The exception for me is Variation 4—where a chart laid over a map of the venue sends performers off to various parts of the stage and beyond. Very sparse in execution, this piece articulates space through its acoustical properties. We hear the auditorium in new ways; we become more in-the-world than in a model of the world (and hence apart). Harking back to biology, using sound to indicate spatial structure and the properties of the objects that compose it is highly adaptive—the emotional valence of the spatialised sound flows naturally from the coupling of our sensory apparatus and properties of the world that are useful to us as animals within that world.
More engaging is the superb second night performance by Swedish percussionists, Kroumata. They begin with Cage’s Radio Music from the mid 50s: played quiet, spread either side of the stage for some nice call and response. Using the current radio channels—rather than trying to recreate a 50s radio program as Cage would have heard—this piece nicely illustrates Cage’s interest in composing as the provision of specific containers for constrained events. Timing, duration and content domain (radio sounds) are determined, but the specific instant of the radio sound is undetermined. Degrees of chance.
The next piece, Music for Carillon, was also scored within a ‘container’ paradigm—with rectangles as containers of points (notes)—the horizontal axis for time, vertical for pitch. It does not really matter that Cage used an elaborate system of folding and cutting paper to find a process of randomisation to generate the score—the score is quite explicit and determined as far as performance goes. And the performance (on glockenspiels) is delicate and lovely—spread across the space like rain on a canopy of bells.
Again we have delicate and lovely for the next work, Amores 2, perhaps the highlight of the festival. Softest hands on the drum skins, subtle shakes of seed pods, great ensemble work with short riffs and rhythmic fragments passing between the players to give each phrase tremendous subtlety (parts remind me of Webern’s short, shared fragments). Cage was an absolute master at the orchestration of sound—in his development of new instruments such as the prepared piano, in his stacking of different sounds and in his understanding of movement between sounds.
Another illustration of the mix between determinism and chance, Williams Mix, has a huge score that provides a precise one-to-one mapping from score to lengths of audio tape. But the contents of the tape segments are suggested rather than locked in. On the first night we hear both the original recording and a new version by Werner Dafeldecker and Valerio Tricoli. The original is not that long, a looney-tunes cartoon frenzy. The new version is much longer—much closer to the intentions of score, Tricoli claims. Sounds are less recognisable—more abstract—although still with the feel of early tape music. Far too loud (thank you free earplugs). But if you use earplugs you don’t hear the piece as intended. And if you go without earplugs then your hearing is damaged and you don’t get to hear anyone else’s music with the same acuity. Ever again. Physically damaging volumes are a longstanding bugbear of mine.
Of the remaining pieces, Lawrence English and Scott Morrison’s reworking of Cage’s final film, One11, is better than the original. Streaming white noise, rough white surfaces, hinted figures, venetian blinds blurred into gritty lozenges of light, the improvised soundtrack starts like a David Lynch/Alan Splet combo for wheezing water heater and ostinato piano. Sounds to let you know there’s something you don’t want to know.
Though my view is that Cage’s later works often fail as music to be listened to, his ideas have been enormously influential. And the earlier works are truly beautiful. Clocked Out—in a tour de force of funding aggregation that deserves applause in itself—have presented an excellent and important festival that, quite amazingly, covered the full scope of one of music’s greatest innovators.
The Cage in Us, presented by Clocked Out, performers Valerio Tricoli (Italy) and Werner Dafeldecker (Germany), Kroumata Percussion, Decibel, Rebecca Cunningham, Lawrence English, Joel Stern, Erik Griswold, Vanessa Tomlinson, Ba Da Boom, the QCGU New Music Ensemble. The Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, Brisbane, April 12-14
FOR ITS 13TH MANIFESTATION THE ANNUAL SOUND AND MUSIC FESTIVAL LIQUID ARCHITECTURE REVEALS A SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT APPROACH TO PROGRAMMING. ARTISTIC DIRECTOR NAT BATES HAS TAKEN A BACK SEAT WHILE GUEST CURATORS PHILIP SAMARTZIS AND LAWRENCE ENGLISH HAVE CRAFTED A PROGRAM OF CONCERTS, EXHIBITIONS AND TALKS FOCUSSING ON THE ANTARCTIC.
Over the last decade a range of opportunities has opened for artists to visit the great polar regions, north and south, exploring these unique, treacherous and increasingly endangered environments. (See Matthew Lorenzon’s coverage of Alice Gile’s project for harp, voice and electronics, Alice in the Antarctic, RT104; and Urszula Dawkins on her experiences as part of The Arctic Circle international arts/science collaborative residency Svalbard, Norway, RT100). In the spirit of these initiatives Liquid Architecture’s Antarctic Convergence brings together a selection of sound, video and installation works drawing inspiration from the region.
Both Melbourne and Brisbane legs of the festival will include an exhibition component with core artists including international guests Chris Watson (UK), Werner Dafeldecker (Austria) and Andrea Juan (Argentina) along with locals—audiovisual artist Scott Morrison, installation artist David Burrows and the curators. In Melbourne, New Zealand musician Phil Dadson will also perform in the gallery.
Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth are treated to two multi-speaker concerts. In concert One, Robin Fox will present his most recent work, Zero Crossing, developed during a residency at Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart utilising the data from wave-rider buoys in the Southern Ocean to create an immersive audio-visual experience. US Sound designer and naturalist Douglas Quinn makes up the other half of the bill with accompanying video by French artist Anne Colomes. Concert Two offers Philip Samartzis and the Monolith Project which brings together Lawrence English and Werner Dafeldecker with visuals by Scott Morrison.
The Monolith project will also feature as part of the National Film and Sound Archives’ The Longest Night (June 22) which celebrates the centenary of Douglas Mawson’s Antarctic expedition. On the same night, Arc Cinema will feature The Thing From Another World (1951) and other films from the archive based around the polar topic. Extreme Film and Sound: Stories from Antarctica will be on display in NFSA Foyer gallery until August. RT
Liquid Architecture 13, Antarctic Convergence, Perth (June 25), Bendigo (June 27), Melbourne (June 28-July 14), Sydney (July 3), Brisbane (July 4-22); http://www.liquidarchitecture.org.au/; National Film and Sound Archive, The Longest Night, Arc Cinema Canberra, June 22; Extreme Film and Sound: Stories from Antarctica, NFSA Foyer Gallery, Canberra; until August; http://www.nfsa.gov.au/calendar/event/3522-longest-night-nfsa/
FINITUDE (V2) BY KEITH ARMSTRONG IS A TOUCH-SENSITIVE INTERACTIVE INSTALLATION COMBINING 3D IMAGERY, TRANSPARENCY, MOVING SCULPTURE, LIGHT AND SOUND. IT INVESTIGATES THE CULTURAL DIMENSIONS OF SUSTAINABILITY THROUGH THE LENS OF ‘TIME’ AND HAS SHOWN AT (M) ART AND GALLERY ARTISAN IN BRISBANE’S FORTITUDE VALLEY.
Armstrong has just returned from handing over an earlier work, Intimate Transactions, to Germany’s ZKM (Centre for Art and Media) who have acquired it for their permanent collection. I spoke with him about the handover and about the new work, Finitude.
What are some of the issues/challenges that have arisen through this process of acquisition—particularly in terms of how the work is installed and then invigilated by staff at the museum? How does ZKM propose that the work is maintained and do you have any responsibility for that?
I guess I’d expected that finding a home for such a beast would be no easy feat. I should probably explain what Intimate Transactions is for those who may not have experienced it. In essence, it is an experimental form of telepresence-based interactive installation that allows two people in geographically separate spaces to interact simultaneously using only their bodies. Each participant uses a physical interface called a “Bodyshelf” and wears a sound vibration transmission device around their necks called a “haptic pendant.” By gently moving their bodies on this ‘smart furniture,’ they instigate ‘intimate transactions,’ which influence an evolving ‘world’ created from digital imagery, multichannel sound and tactile feedback. This conjoint individual and shared experience allows each participant to gradually develop a form of sensory intimacy with the other, despite the fact that they are geographically separated and cannot physically see or hear each other.
I was familiar with ZKM and its ambition, having visited it when Jeffrey Shaw was at the helm well over a decade ago. I knew Peter (Weibel) had taken over and that the museum held significant examples of work in the genre of telepresence, alternate interface experiments and performative inflected experience. Examples are Paul Sermon’s Telematic Vision (1993) and Tables Turned (1997) or Masaki Fujihata’s Impressing Velocity (with Simulation Platform) (1994-99)—all works that had some influence on our piece.So I approached him and he was positive because I guess he could also sense the links and resonances.
I spent a full week working with their team in Karlsruhe, Germany, which included some very experienced and fast working technicians, a team of conservators, IT specialists and a range of administrative staff. My key role was to take them through every stage of the work: unpack, install, assembly, testing, running and the performative processes that surround it. And as we went through it each day they documented each stage exhaustively and with great enthusiasm! They also worked out a great deal of how it went together which is testament to their experience as world leaders. I then handed over the complete documentation archive for the work which includes a 135-page book edited by Jillian Hamilton and the full gamut of CAD models, plans, schematics, code, images, documentation of each site and setup and running instructions.
I then did a two-hour recorded interview with the conservators and they asked me questions about how it should be presented, maintained and conserved—going through everything down to the details of where electronics modules could be bought and what specifications of hardware would be needed in the event of failure. So they now own the work and can access the requisite IP, and it can be shown either at ZKM in the Media Museum or lent out to international galleries. I am not directly responsible for maintenance, although of course I’d be on hand and willing to assist at any stage.
Finitude, Keith Armstrong
photo Carl Warner
Finitude, Keith Armstrong
It is interesting that your works are themselves like the complex ecosystems that seem to inspire your practice generally; and that the difficulty in maintaining the works themselves seems to add a layer of meta commentary to them, in the sense that they are both about questions of sustainability and that they invoke their own issues in regards to sustainability. Could you comment on this in relation to your latest work, Finitude?
I think it was Fritjof Capra who once said that for systems thinkers the relationships are primary. Thinking back to my earliest training as a systems engineer, I realise that what has always driven me is the exploration of the systemic and the relational. Initially I believed that the role of my works could be to examine and maybe illuminate how much we have misunderstood ecology. But then I began to see that simply raising awareness was quite a different motivation from moving through an embodying of that knowledge towards forms of learning: we ‘know’ much but what have we ‘learnt?’ The works I have created over the past two decades are, as you suggest, a working through—invoking your “meta commentary” idea. Privileging that relational approach often ensured ‘impracticalities.’ The tacit requirements for work to be hangable, to be low labour when showing or able to be packed into suitcases for transit, haven’t been ‘keystone’ aspects of my thinking to date. This conflates with the ‘education in error’ that we have all received, our education into unsustainability. We often think our way through things technologically in ways that may exclude as well as include. These things add up, as relationship-building factors that in part conspire to elicit such paradoxes.
The challenge I face with every new work is which path to take. Pragmatism is all around us in our politics and our culture. But despite its short-term attraction it’s also a profoundly limiting force. And so it can be in media art too. I’ve also become used to many people spending maybe 15 minutes or more with my works. I like that power for temporal engagement which most artwork that is seen and not experienced in a literal or embodied sense can rarely muster. So while Finitude represents a much easier system to show and maintain than Intimate Transactions, there are the relative problematics of one-at-a-time operation, the physical requirement to get in underneath the work (requiring a hanging structure), the experimentation with relatively new forms of self-made touch screen and special new screen materials, new software to connect to 3D engines and the like. These all add up and also extend the making process, but the outcome I think then really surprises and offers something that truly imprints! I started with a reasonably distilled idea—time has become finitude—that is, ‘time left’ for us and many other species is literally running out, so how might we give time back to the future? Combined with strong thematics derived from residencies in the Australian mallee heartlands, we created an outcome that honoured embodied exchange, deep engagement, time to settle and multi-sensorial qualities that took much time and probably shortened my ‘time left!’ On that note Paul Carter experienced the work at the Mildura Palimpsest last year (his timely book Ground Truthing: Explorations in a Creative Region [UWA Publishing, 2010], inspired the work) and very sweetly noted that I had “somehow made sense from his incoherent ramblings.”
Both Intimate Transactions and Finitude are much more about process than product. Your references to “embodied exchange, deep engagement, time to settle” are indicative of this dynamic quality of the works. While the ‘machinery’ of the works can be stored and reactivated, it is harder to capture (and hence evaluate and archive) the effect that they have on those who engage with them. How do you deal with this, or do you?
Each is a tangible work/event that requires audience durational attention: and in that way they have the conventionality of a recognisable practice. The works in themselves are really for me catalysts for, or openings out to, something quite different from how they initially appear. Obviously, this effect is something I can’t directly control or therefore even re-create.
Many will take these works for what they seem to be, with all of the hooks, immersion and problematics that come with both eco-theoretical and technological possibility-imbued experience and interfaces. But if you dig a little deeper, see the pointers, maybe think more about the ecosophical intentions, I’d hope they might catalyse a journey for some, a relational journey for their own time and place and context. This is where new knowledges, I believe, can emerge through practice and become embodied and therefore get their teeth.
This openness to the best possibilities is concurrent with my current thinking and recent collaborations, typified by our NBN-based project, Long Time No See, or my forthcoming ANAT-Synapse Residency, Reintroduction, with the Australian Wildlife Conservancy. These new research ventures have emerged from experience around our recent Remnant Emergency Artlab collaborations that have taken my practice into a relationship with the rich new territories of urban planning, mammal ecology, speculative architecture, experimental engineering and ‘ontological design,’ among others. And so, while I have always felt passionately directed, these are daunting but exciting times ahead in this practice of intentional eclecticism!
Finitude (v2) by Keith Armstrong, collaborators Roger Dean, Stuart Lawson, Darren Pack, consultants Professor Tony Fry and Dr Liz Baker; Artisan, Brisbane, April 12-June 9; www.embodiedmedia.com
Keith Armstrong and Gavin Sade were recently awarded one of the Australia Council Broadband Arts Initiative grants for the project Long Time No See which will involve an installation and online presence exploring a range of community responses to questions around what the nation might look like, not just a few decades, but a few centuries into the future. The work will be based at The Cube, QUT’s new Science and Engineering Centre.
Kristina Chan, Timothy Ohl, SuperModern Dance of Distraction
photo Tim Thatcher
Kristina Chan, Timothy Ohl, SuperModern Dance of Distraction
FROM THE DARKNESS FOUR FIGURES EMERGE. THEY STAND CENTRED IN A LINE. THE LINE IS NEATLY FRAMED BY A SQUARE. FOUR FACES LOOK DIRECTLY OUT TO THE AUDIENCE, FINGERS TWITCH WHILE LIMBS TWIST. A CONGA LINE, OR STRANGE LIMB MACHINE.
Body parts hinge along creases: fingers, hands, elbows, arms—spoking out every which way. Their voices rise in unison from a whisper, repeating: “something is going on, while this is going on.” What is the “something?” What is the “this?” We are immediately drawn into choroegrapher Anton’s inquiry motivated by his question: “what is it to be human in our modern world?”
Pre-modern, postmodern and supermodern are terms turning upon and around the modern. The modern is a consistent descriptor of our present human condition, especially the cultural, economic and technological dimensions. If Frederic Jameson is right, then the modern is a reference point to be fragmented in its post-isms, nostalgically reflected from in its pre-isms, and tempo-spatially reoriented in its super-isms. SuperModern Dance of Distraction turns perceptively on the modern, describing the speeds, spaces and textures of human and human-machine relations in a techno-saturated world.
From formations of four to three observing one, the dancers (Kristina Chan, Timothy Ohl, Robbie Curtis, Sophia Ndaba) rapidly migrate from one configuration to the next, their histories wiped away with large Malevich-inspired blocks of light that scrape the black space. The lighting design (Guy Harding) is consistently constructivist in form, clean, deliberate, boldly white and, on occasion, epileptic and fractious.
When four, the dancers constitute a visual spectacle. In synchronous movements they generate images of a machinic ballet and tessellations of legs and faces spinning hypnotically in a Busby Berkeley water parade. In one sequence, the dancers raise white, hollowed-out squares above their heads, optically thickening their presence. Bodies calibrate: frames for looking through and graphically inscribing the space, frames to frame, shaping these carrier bodies into angular geometries. In another sequence, collapsed white trestle tables provide vertical surfaces that slide along rectilinear lines to block and bounce slamming bodies. The dancers take turns to operate the system, hiding, trapping and distorting the space: a concrete mediation implying a digital logic.
Robbie Curtis, Sophia Ndaba, SuperModern Dance of Distraction
photo Maylei Hunt
Robbie Curtis, Sophia Ndaba, SuperModern Dance of Distraction
In a more literal demonstration, clear perspex held between faces becomes a touch screen: connections are unequivocally established between fingers, glass and manipulated expression. The audience laughs rapturously (perhaps those with iPhone or iPad much harder). The perspex intercepts the kissing lips of two lovers in a moment of ‘distal loving.’ Pressed together they exaggerate the mediated space-time distance that Skype technology attempts to bridge. Their embrace lingering beyond comfortability, they take turns to ferociously straddle each other. The intimate made intensely public raises the real possibility that someone could be watching.
Communication. Upstage in blackout, torch lights flash intermittently, each emitting an idiosyncratic sound. We giggle in this close encounter of some kind. The dancers speak, sing and sound effortlessly, giving some vox to their pop. In an ingenious quartet of couples, they sing into long cabled microphones that swing and swoon like serenading lassos, supporting overall the seamlessly produced pop-inspired score by Nick Wales and Timothy Constable with vocals by Jai Pyne. Tracks of silky-synth smoothness ballasted by crisp hypnotic beats blow an asymmetrical fringe deeper into the eyes—all so distractingly modern.
Connection. The gags and prop-play exaggerate familiar scenarios, like the absurdity of the automated voice machine that never understands us. Caution must be taken, however, when the fast, fragmented and fleeting are both dramaturgical points of departure and justifications for the difficult experience in watching the episodic, disjointed and excessive. I wonder at what point structure and form should resist content. Luckily the more enduring solos reflect a deeper physical ontology (not a mere symptomatic engagement with a world on fast-forward) and so tap into what Raymond Williams calls the “structures of feeling.” Chan, delivered under a red haze, quivers in primordial gasps of arrest, every cell agitated in controlled contortions, tiny, gathered up to the bone, implosion imminent. Ndaba conversely convulses in jelly-like explosions, her jouissance, escalating into maddened laughter, a pressure-built response. Curtis wanders the stage with a disorganised body. Afflicted with “this something,” he is fuzzy and out of focus, snapping joints at the mercy of malfunction.
Refreshingly, there is nothing dystopic nor utopic said about ‘this’ condition, it is not Anton’s point. We are invited to experience, rather than critique. SuperModern is a work of fine collaboration, five dedicated years in development, with places to go, and hopefully in spaces where the carefully constructed geometries of the stage and lighting design can be realised.
FORM Dance Projects & Riverside Theatres, Dance Bites 2012: SuperModern Dance of Distraction, choreographer Anton, performers Kristina Chan, Timothy Ohl, Robbie Curtis, Sophia Ndaba, producer Michelle Silby, composers Nick Wales, Jai Pyne, Timothy Constable, lighting designer Guy Harding, dramaturg Joshua Tyler, set design consultant Julio Himede, Lennox Theatre, Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, March 28-32
Vicki van Hout working on the installation/set of Briwyant
photo Marian Abboud
Vicki van Hout working on the installation/set of Briwyant
IN JUNE 2011, AFTER SEEING BRIWYANT I WROTE, “VICKI VAN HOUT’S CHOREOGRAPHY IS SOME OF THE MOST IDIOSYNCRATIC AND INVENTIVE SEEN IN AUSTRALIAN DANCE FOR A LONG TIME AND HER TEAM OF DEXTROUS DANCERS EXECUTE IT WITH HIGH PRECISION, UNBELIEVABLE ENERGY, HUMOUR AND ATTITUDE.”
Briwyant is touring to Melbourne and Brisbane, offering audiences the opportunity to experience something quite unique in contemporary dance. The choreographer, who also appears in the work, writes, “Briwyant is inspired by bir’yun: brilliance, shimmer and shine. In Yolngu traditional painting, bir’yun is the effect of intricate crosshatched patterns creating a sensation of shimmering movement over the painting’s surface, a manifestation of ancestral forces.” With her dancers, her own design and her media arts collaborators Van Hout creates resonating physical, aural and visual shimmerings in Briwyant. KG
Briwyant, Malthouse, Melbourne, July 4-14; Brisbane Powerhouse, Aug 1-4
Jannawi Dance Theatre, Megamaras, film, Blacktown Arts Centre
photo Andrea James
Jannawi Dance Theatre, Megamaras, film, Blacktown Arts Centre
WHO WOULD EVER HAVE THOUGHT THAT WESTERN SYDNEY WOULD ONE DAY BECOME A BASTION OF INDEPENDENT CONTEMPORARY DANCE? SURE, THERE HAS LONG BEEN A TRADITION OF SOCIAL AND FOLKLORIC DANCE IN WESTERN SYDNEY, PARTLY DUE TO ITS STRONG LINGUISTICALLY AND CULTURALLY DIVERSE DEMOGRAPHIC. THERE HAS ALSO BEEN A LONG-TERM HIP HOP DEVELOPMENT IN THE REGION AND THE EMERGENCE OF PARKOUR CREWS IN BANKSTOWN AND THE FAIRFIELD AREA. BUT CONTEMPORARY DANCE?
It is true that artists such as Anandavalli (Lingalayam Dance Company) and Annalouise Paul have been presenting contemporary culturally diverse dance at venues like Riverside Parramatta for quite some time. And yet, there is no denying that in recent years a growing number of NSW-based independent dance artists have switched their attention to Western Sydney, where a variety of arts organisations and presenters offer ample opportunity to both develop and present new work. So what is the reason for this sudden boom.
According to Kim Spinks, who formerly managed state funding for theatre and dance and is currently Manager Capacity and Development at Arts NSW, there are several factors. One is the implementation of Arts NSW’s Western Sydney Arts Strategy, a long-range initiative drawn up and put into effect in 1999. It had a substantial funding program attached to it ($37m 2001-2010) and targeted all artforms. However, as Spinks points out, at the time the University of Western Sydney (UWS) offered the only tertiary dance degree in New South Wales which became a factor for organisations such as Ausdance NSW to invest in dance in Western Sydney and attempt to build an infrastructure around it. Ironically, the dance course at UWS folded after a few years but, by then, the rise of dance development in the area was well on its way.
Another great shift occurred through a major capital commitment of over $20m from the Carr government in the mid-2000s and a combined spend of over $55 Million from state and local governments. It affected the arts centres in Campbelltown, Blacktown and Casula and involved turning visual arts spaces into multi-art centres. As a result several of these organisations incorporated dance into their programming. So let’s have a look at some of the key players:
form dance projects
FORM Dance Projects, known until recently as Western Sydney Dance Action (WSDA), was founded in 2002, evolving from an outreach initiative Ausdance NSW set up in response to the Western Sydney Arts Strategy in the late 1990s. Since its inception, the organisation’s most important partnership has been with Riverside Theatres under the directorship of Robert Love. Initially an auspiced project, FORM now operates independently from Riverside but presents work in partnership with them. The cornerstone of its presentation program continues to be the long-running Dance Bites series. Initiated by WSDA’s inaugural director Kathy Baykitch in 2003, Dance Bites has gathered momentum in the last couple of years with highly successful productions such as Narelle Benjamin’s and Francis Ring’s Forseen, Craig Bary’s and Lisa Griffith’s Side to One (see interview, RT105) and most recently Anton’s SuperModern Dance of Distraction (see p4). Later in the year, Tess de Quincey will present Framed, a new instalment in her acclaimed “embrace” series.
In spite of the increasing number of high calibre artists seeking out FORM as presenting partner, the fragility of the organisation’s funding situation is an ongoing concern for its current director, Annette McLernon. She explains: “FORM’s core funding is very secure. We have just received triennial funding (2012-2014) from Arts NSW and Riverside Theatres is a key partner. However, the project funding for the Dance Bites presentations is less certain as the producers or individual independent choreographers are still very dependent on successful funding to develop and present their works.”
However, FORM does not only present work, it also offers a significant education program. Its various initiatives include master classes for young choreographers from Western Sydney and the popular Learn the Repertoire, See the Show series, as part of which presenting artists teach workshops and offer post show discussions.
campbelltown arts centre
Lizzie Thomson, PANTO
photo Heidrun Löhr
Lizzie Thomson, PANTO
In the wake of the redevelopment of Campbelltown Arts Centre (CAC) into a multi-arts centre, Lisa Havilah, its director 2005-2010, put a five-year strategic plan into action that included dance alongside visual arts, theatre, new music and live art/performance. For the first couple of years, dance at CAC was mainly presented in the form of individual projects. This changed when Emma Saunders was appointed as dance curator in late 2008. She was given the brief to develop a three-year framework for a Contemporary Dance Program and curate artists as part of it. Saunders, a well-respected member of the NSW independent dance community, best known for her work with the irrepressible dance trio The Fondue Set, rose to the challenge and put a multi-strand model in place which combined long-term development projects and residencies for local and international artists with the presentation of new work, both full-length pieces and short work commissions. Saunders says about her curatorial approach, “The CAC Contemporary Dance Program promotes interdisciplinary and intercultural projects. We support artists interested in questions around process, form and community engagement.” As a prime example Saunders cites the work of dance artist Lizzie Thomson who collaborated with an ensemble of community participants drawn from local amateur dance and theatre companies during her 2010 residency and then featured them in the finished work, Panto (see RT105), the following year.
Now in its fourth year, CAC’s 2012 dance program will culminate in a three-day festival project in October titled Oh! I Wanna Dance With Somebody. It will showcase outcomes from the program’s various strands and include 20 Australian and international artists as well as 150 Campbelltown locals across 15 projects, occupying the entire arts centre.
blacktown arts centre
Unlike Campbelltown Arts Centre with its variety of artform specific programs, Blacktown Arts Centre (BAC) runs a multidisciplinary contemporary arts program, of which dance is part. According to Kiri Morecombe, Acting Performing Arts Development Officer until recently, BAC is largely focussed on the development of new work from local and Western Sydney artists. In 2010, for example, Katy Green, a young performance practitioner born and raised in Western Sydney, was awarded a three-week residency as part of BAC’s performing arts program to explore cross-artform collaboration together with composer and sound artist Tom Hogan. A second stage development will take place at BAC in August this year.
Another dance project recently supported by BAC was Megamaras by Indigenous dance artists Peta Strachan and Rayma Johnson, together with media artist Michelle Blakeney. Based on the story of Daringyule (dancing woman), who broke the law, and combining choreography with projected underwater imagery, the work was developed in residence at BAC in late 2011 and pitched at the Australian Performing Arts Market earlier this year. BAC has an Aboriginal Arts Development Officer, Andrea James.
Asked about the future of dance at Blacktown Arts Centre, Director Jenny Bisset, says, “With a stronger emphasis on dance in recent years, we have started to build an audience and expectation for this and will continue to look for new work through our performing arts residency program and our Aboriginal Arts program. We are particularly interested in hybrid work as we continue to build cross-disciplinary programming.”
youMove company
The Parramatta-based youMove Company was founded by dance artist Kay Armstrong in 2008, starting operations at the beginning of 2009. It is designed as a platform for emerging dancers and graduates. Even though strongly supported through a partnership with Western Sydney Dance Action, things didn’t go smoothly for Armstrong and her troupe initially, having missed out on funding during their first year. “The first year was about surviving basically,” Armstrong says. “The focus was on finding platforms for presentation, building our reputation and achieving industry credibility.” Gradually developing a repertoire of short works choreographed by herself and various independent choreographers such as Anton and Ian Colless, Armstrong worked tirelessly in the following years to raise public awareness for the company and create performance opportunities for her dancers. The company’s many gigs have included performances at the 2010 Under the Radar program (Brisbane Festival) and presenting work in a double bill with the Sydney Dance Company in Parramatta Park as part of the 2011 Sydney Festival. It didn’t take long until the company started to attract project funding and the business side of things consolidated. Last year the company incorporated and received program funding for the first time.
YouMove’s activities now comprise three strands: performance, mentorship and education. Of these strands, education is the most recent addition to the company’s program. It includes performance presentations and post-show workshops by the company for students (5-12 years) in Western Sydney schools. It’s an area Armstrong feels especially passionate about: “I’m a huge proponent of the idea of education being a transformative process. So what I’m hoping to do is to create and build future dance audiences. Now, the way to do that is to hit them young, you’ve got to get into the schools when they are at an impressionable age and give them really positive, expansive, unique, imaginative, inspiring dance experiences.”
THE FIRST TWO PARTS OF AN EVOLVING TRILOGY BY SELF-CHOREOGRAPHING DANCER MATTHEW DAY WILL SOON BE JOINED BY THE MUCH-ANTICIPATED THIRD WORK, INTERMISSION, AT THE PACT THEATRE IN SYDNEY. THOUSANDS AND CANNIBAL WERE AT ONCE CONTEMPLATIVE AND VISCERAL, MINIMALIST AND COMPLEX. I SPOKE WITH DAY ABOUT THE NEW WORK AND ITS RELATIONSHIP WITH ITS PARTNERS.
What was your motivation when you started out on the trilogy?
In Thousands (2010; see RT100 I was interested in stillness because I wanted to go back to something very simple, to what I was thinking of as the ‘degree zero’ of choreography because it was my first solo and I’d been reading Andre Lepecki and his writings on Nijinsky’s use of stillness. I was also interested in considering my position in dance history. So [it was] something about being still to allow other things to enter the space, for the audience to read the work in their own way—and also for other references to land on the body. Some of these I specifically choreographed into the work. There are Nijinsky references and then other things it’s up to the audience to project. But certainly it was about stillness or slow movement.
Steve Paxton is another reference and Vanessa Beecroft’s work—those models standing in galleries for long periods of time. It’s a bit different from Paxton but I thought, isn’t this interesting how there’s an unconscious choreography going on in the body.
When you say “unconscious choreography,” do you mean in the everyday or in stillness in dance?
My next project will be looking at the everyday. But I think in this series, the trilogy, they’re constructed theatrical settings. What I found looking at stillness was this vibration that’s happening without me producing it. What I’m doing is trying to be still. I try to think of this as the surface of the choreography or my intentional or conscious choreography as a score about stillness and how I do that.
That stillness is, I think, still evident in Cannibal (2011; see RT 102) although you’re moving in quite a large circuit. It’s still slow and there’s a sense of vibration.
The vibration that came up from underneath the stillness is what I consider the unconscious choreography, just in the sense that I’m not actively producing it.
Is that because, for instance, in the starting position of Thousands, you’re putting your body in a fairly stressful position?
The whole thing is stressful but I’m not interested in stress.
Is it more about intensity then?
Intensity. My objective with the piece is not to show any effort and to be as calm as I can be and not to fatigue. And the work should never look like I can’t continue. I’m not interested in failure or fatigue in that sense.
So they’re not endurance works?
They’re more about duration and what can happen if we just look at one thing for a long time and how something can change and how that reading of the same thing can change further if we sit with it for a long time. And I think this also came about by watching dance, where I feel like the dancers have just had a big shot of adrenaline backstage, run onto the stage and just go like move, move, move, go, go, go, counting to the count. Not that all dance does this any more. So it was really me challenging myself to make a choreographic work and not just dance, because that’s what I’d been trained to do and that’s what I love doing. So I got really excited about this vibrational quality.
It’s interesting that you made an observation about the stillness of Cannibal because while I was working on this, I started to think about the difference between the works. In Thousands I feel like I’m working very fast on a conscious level to refresh my attention and my perception. It’s happening very slowly and, to keep it alive, I need to work very fast, whereas with Cannibal, because there’s quite a lot of movement I drop into a much calmer place internally. Maybe that’s what you’re talking about.
The third part of the trilogy, what’s that springing from?
On the last day of Cannibal I had two performances to do and I’d done 10 shows altogether and it’s quite stressful to do twice in one day—or so I thought. But on the very last performance on the last day, I said to myself before I started, “Just take as much time as you need. This one’s for you. Find out what you can about the work. Do it and get what you can because this is the last chance you’ll have for a while.” And, while I was performing I started to discover a wave in the vibration. It’s just a very simple thing about the weight shifting between the right and the left foot, the transference of weight across the body and across space—the eternal wave that’s present underneath that. Waves are a pretty basic physical property and I just started to realise that it was present. It’s a feeling. So that kind of indentified that this would be the next thing. This is the future. The works each revealed themselves in different ways.
Thousands and Cannibal are both very sculptural, but Thousands is almost on a fixed point while Cannibal has a circuit and the works correlate with very different stage design and deployment of sound. In what way have you approached Intermission?
It’s a really good distinction you’re making—the movement’s relationship to pathways in space. I feel like maybe what I do is, I think about a wave—and it’s very naive the way I work. I just say okay, you’re going to do waves in the body for 10 minutes and see what happens and then I do it and I think this bit was interesting, or this happened. So I’ll do it again and maybe notice it again and just keep working. I’m realising this is not the way everyone works. I just do the piece when I rehearse. I just do the thing for about as long as I can. I do it for 30, 40 minutes and, okay, that’s what the thing is today. And then I slowly shape it over time.
I work with duration, which is the way I need to because it’s very hard for me to work on, say, a section. I think maybe the way a lot of people work is on sections: ‘I’m interested in this leg thing or this image here’ and maybe they look at ways of composing the order of these things. But when it comes to really making choreography and composing the thing, it happens as I’m doing it in the time that I’m doing it—performing the wave and seeing how it talks to me.
And in that process do you discover the space that you will occupy?
Yes. At first I start working just physically on, say, a wave and don’t worry too much where it goes in space. Then there’s a point where the pathway becomes the important thing that then determines the movement. So there’s this back and forth relationship. For example, I’ve had two main development periods and in the first I didn’t really think about the spatial map until the last couple of days and then started playing with something, mainly because I was having a showing. Then I had the Culture Lab residency [at Melbourne City Council’s Arts House] for two weeks and I kept that map and I said, okay, this is the map, how can I explore this as much as possible. Now I’m about to go back into the PACT Theatre [in Sydney where Day performed Thousands and Cannibal] and I’m actually going to question the pathway in space because I know more about the wave by articulating a pathway. Now it’s time to find out, to do it in reverse. There’s this constant negotiation between the pathway in space and the movement itself. In some ways they’re quite separate things.
There’s a design element that seems quite integral to your work. When do you start thinking about how you’ll create that space beyond the body?
Quite early I think but I don’t make decisions till quite late. With Thousands it was very pragmatic: I’ll make a piece with one spotlight and a backing track. That’s about touring the work; it’s about sustainability; it’s about keeping things simple; it’s about wanting the work to exist on its own terms choreographically. But these are also design principles: It’s also about minimalism. When I first did Thousands, it was in Northcote Town Hall, which has a massive gold velvet curtain. So I think of Thousands as a gold piece even though when it was shown at PACT, where you saw it, it was against a black wall. I wear gold sneakers. When it was at Dance Massive, it ended up looking quite orange.
So, what’s the future of the trilogy in terms of design. Cannibal is very white—floor, walls, outfit, your hair.
I’m trying to get white curtains made for Cannibal. So, they are in a sense an inversion of the usual black curtains of a space. Then the idea is that I can just request white tarket and chuck the white curtains in a normal touring suitcase. If that’s possible, then the future of Cannibal is quite open. And the thing is in Europe there are lots of white spaces anyway. As for the future of the trilogy, I’m going to present Thousands again in Melbourne in October and Cannibal in November and, hopefully, Intermission at Dance Massive in 2013. So this will be the first time that they’ll all be done within a five-month period and I think that’ll teach me a bit more about what it’s like to perform them back to back. The idea would be that they would be programmed across three nights. It’s impossible to do them all in one night and I don’t think it’s desirable either. They can tour as a trilogy across three nights so that each work has its own independence.
Why the title “Intermission”?
Intermission is about always being in the middle: never being here or there, never arriving completely, always being in a state of in-betweenness or becoming. It also problematises the idea of linearity. What is the order of these works? Even though we started out talking about how one work seeds the next, I found out things about Thousands by performing Cannibal. The works start to speak to each other in different ways. There are structural things I’ve discovered in Intermission that I’m going to retroactively apply to the other works. So they start to have this non-linear discussion with each other, which I find exciting.
The reason I liked the title was that I had this idea. We go and see a show and I was thinking of one of these big old amazing pros arch theatres. Everyone’s in there for the first half of the concert or ballet. And then everyone leaves. They’re outside drinking champagne or whatever in the foyer. And I just had this sense of what happens in the theatre in that intermission when no one is there. I like this idea of the life of the theatre without an audience, this in-between moment. What is the energy of this space at this moment? That’s what I’m interested in, that invisibility, the silent thing that you don’t actually see. That suspended moment of energy and stillness.
YUMI UMIUMARE DANGLES US WITHIN INNER AND OUTER WORLDS. HER BODY MEDIATES A UNIQUE COLLISION OF MOVEMENT STYLES, WHILE HER WORDS AND TEARS INVITE US TO REFLECT IN THE FACE OF OUR BEING, “I SWALLOW MY MIRROR WHILE I’M WATCHING MYSELF.”
EnTrance does not merely ask us to observe energetic transformations through word, rhythm, ritual and symbol; it navigates us through hyperbolic worlds that are indeed nothing other than who we are. Emotion, memory, everyday mediations and constructions, life, birth, death, spirit and love: EnTrance brings us home to ourselves.
Umiumare’s opening movement vocabulary is a heavy, slow shuffle; her head is tilted upward, oriented toward something in the distance. She seems to bear a cumbersome weight—a story involving a cat, a dusty window and the loss of her fingertips into a garden with a fountain that explodes with feathers of rich colour. The stage fills with projection, rolling out a bustling metropolis, all reds, yellows and blues. Umiumare absorbs the street rhythms like a blank canvas. We see it on her dress. Her dance is a strange mix of ‘go-go traffic conducting,’ forearms hinged at the elbows creating vectorial variations to wave the world in, and air-like pistons pumping the forces around. This pattern is punctuated by reverse star-jumps, arms straightened like bolts into a horizontal crossbar. Her martial stance complements five, six-foot-high erect masts, sails tethered at the waist. The image is positively nautical. Untethered, single threads fall outward to form a broken surface the width of the stage, a versatile design by installation artist Naomi Ota that metaphorises fragility, malleability and unpredictability.
Bambang Nurcahyadi augments each vignette with large-scale visuals, projecting scenic and urban backdrops and swirling, animated Umiumares, replicated in various guises on the screens. In one scene, the dancer, dressed in a black leather jacket covered with flashing thorns of tiny embedded LEDs (design David Anderson), thrashes about in concert with obnoxiously loud post-punk noise—guitar pedals of assault—and picks up a large LCD screen to use as a face mask. The image is a portrait of her inner Avatar, scratched and irritated by the superfluity of a hyper-existence.
Drifting into a different rhythm, Japanese characters cascade delicately down the threads spilling onto an umbrella held by Umiumare, now looking like a bleached-white Mary Poppins. She weathers the words in patient reprieve. We too wait, soothed, suspended, somewhat transported.
Umiumare tells us that in Japanese there are different names for different tears. Each type, or mode of crying, is named after the sound that the crier makes, an onomatopoeic nomenclature. “Cachuckachuck, cachuckachuck”, the crumpled wail of a woman who has lost her child. Tears like rain soak the cheek. I am reminded of a scene from Michael Haneke’s The Time of The Wolf where a mother weeps inconsolably at the death of her son. Sounds of soaking.
Umiumare emerges like a fake plastic flower to entertain us with a love song, singing off-key. We giggle along with this awkward serenade. When it ends we are plunged deeper into her primordial wail. She transmits something not belonging to her, something more universal; there is deep silence in the sonority of grief.
A bird of paradise, Umiumare engages with the ritual and dress of her traditions. A transcendent phase, almost ecclesiastic, she raises her arms, a stole of red and gold draped symmetrically over her arms. I think of the fountain and the cat that ate her fingertips. All images, words and sounds that formed disparate episodes momentarily speak one language. I am home.
Tangled in threads, Umiumare paints her body white with aggressive brush strokes. This final costume change shatters the coherency of two-dimensional image, each screen torn down by this monster of chaos. She stirs the space. Medusa. Her feet rooted, the base of her tongue driven from pelvic depths, viscera like magma ready to overflow. Her body is gnarled at the joints like an ancient tree still growing. Nothing more present than presence itself. Beneath the hypnotic birdcalls, drums and didgeridoo, the sorceress licks with flickering tongue those fingertips. Her eyes unnaturally wide, each a window open for all to see, each an opaque window reflecting back. Transformation.
For the most part I felt overwhelmed by the excessive mélange of cultural influences, aesthetic choices and movement styles. But by the end, experienced an unmooring of something indescribable, a deeper unitary movement that for me is a rare occurrence in performance. Entranced.
Performance Space, Dimension Crossing: EnTrance, performer, creator Yumi Umiumare, collaborator Moira Finucane, costume designer David Anderson, lighting designer Kerry Ireland, sound designer Ian Kitney, media artist Bambang Nurcahyadi, installation artist Naomi Ota; Performance Space, Carriageworks, Sydney, April 18-21
VICTORIA HUNT’S COPPER PROMISES: HINEMIHI HAKA IS A ‘THEN’ MADE ‘NOW,’ A PAST CONJURED IN A PRESENT THAT WALKS THROUGH PORTALS INTO ONGOINGNESS. IT IS EPISODIC, WITH EACH ACT DETERMINED BY DISTINCTIVE BUT MUTATING LIGHTING STATES THAT ARE BOTH SHARPLY AESTHETIC AND THICKLY ATMOSPHERIC, AND BY AUTOCONVOLUTED SOUND THAT SPEAKS, SHATTERS, RUMBLES, ROARS, GRATES, GRINDS AND TRICKLES.
At the same time Hunt’s body moves amidst light and sound as one of these elementals; sometimes swept along or drawn by light, sometimes tortured by compacted screeches, possessed of sound. But at other times it is her moving body that controls the skies.
Copper Promises: Hinemihi Haka is a condensation of Hunt’s journey back into her Maori ancestry. [Hinemihi is a female ancestor and a ceremonial house connected with Hunt’s cultural heritage. Eds] It is a lament of alienation and a celebration of repatriation. It is a finding, a gathering, a travelling, a wandering and a landing. It is a work built over “a decade of embodied research across three countries…collecting video imagery, recording sound and interviews and making a series of short dance works” (program notes).
So those voices and actions and images that elude specific understanding are still understood: clarity is born of heartfelt and rigorous research, stretching out across continents and generations and coming back to a body. Victoria Hunt’s body as the human centre of Copper Promises becomes a place, reconciling the apparent conundrum of a cultural emphasis on “collectivity” and “community” (program notes) with this very solo work by dancing with ancestors and giving voice to ghosts which hang behind and around Hunt’s fleshy contortions.
There were so many resonant moments: like the dust cloud that seemed at first like smoke but had the shape of a figure, haunting on invitation, or the ghostly bride who pads solemnly soft along an aisle of white, her hair gently steaming. But two crescendos screamed louder than them all.
After another train has rattled past Carriageworks’ Track 8, after the slow lateral stalking of the stage by a nearly invisible body with only half a face, after the ghosts have whispered softly then echoed loudly on top of rumbles that gently shake space, after Hinemihi body has pushed itself into becoming rock, metal and rubber, after this molten non-body has bent, opened, twisted and sunk, Hunt, her skin glistening with sweat, spits gorgeous globules of beautiful saliva into the air and her hands become ‘pois’ (Maori performative devices which are swung by hand. Eds) that flick and twitch into a madness-trapped claustrophobia in a sharp white box of asylum light hanging in a sea of black, until a cloudy sky greyness drifts her and her madness into near invisibility again.
Later. After disappearing into a chasm of nothingness, Hunt’s chin and mouth appear, tattooed and moving. Her mouth and the mouths of the soundtrack speak in strangled distortions that are electronic and ancient, now and then. Hunt is a mask made by light, speaking in tongues with the rhythms of sharpening breath and dog screams, a sonic mountain of intolerable cruelty that hurts with its disturbing and frantic energy. Then, it is gone.
Afterward, it took some time to leave the silences and roars of Copper Promises behind. The past had taken hold of the present, so the world became liminal, a neither here nor there, a then and a now.
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Performance Space, Dimension Crossing: Copper Promises: Hinemihi Haka, concept, choreography, dance Victoria Hunt, lighting Clytie Smith, sound James Brown, producer Fiona Winning, Performance Space, Carriageworks, Sydney, May 4-12
l-r Ninian Donald, Veronica Shum, Tim Rodgers, Jessica Statton, Involuntary
photo Sam Oster
l-r Ninian Donald, Veronica Shum, Tim Rodgers, Jessica Statton, Involuntary
KATRINA LAZAROFF’S INVOLUNTARY SPEAKS OF HOW WE ARE ORDERED AND SHAPED THROUGH THE VARIOUS MECHANISMS OF COMMUNICATION WE ENCOUNTER OR USE, BEGINNING, TONGUE IN CHEEK, WITH PROJECTED TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR THIS PERFORMANCE. THESE BECOME MORE AND MORE ABSURD AS THEY ARE SCROLLED THROUGH.
An extended dance sequence, clearly drawn from an investigation of involuntary movements, follows with toe-tapping music. The dancers are then asked a series of questions. They are clearly under duress, the suggestion being that they need to pass some test. They bend and twist in response.
The great appeal in Lazaroff’s dance projects lies in the humour that informs each performance and her determination that the dancers appear as ‘regular people.’ These two aesthetic choices are not unrelated. In Involuntary she borrows from clowning to achieve the various vignettes and the performers also frequently address the audience directly. Four ladders are used to great effect. Climbing up a ladder becomes a clown routine of entanglement because of the obstacles presented by ‘the OH&S supervisor.’ A dance routine is made from spectator behaviour, what we do in the privacy of lounge room television watching. We also watch the dancers on Skype—private projections of self—talking, gaming, masturbating.
Two dancers have a conversation via computer in text language. This is shown to be a little limiting. They also meet up via video on their mobile phones—a fairytale image as these two tiny screens dance together to music box tinkling. Always we see the struggle for the individual to squeeze into narrowly determined situations and behaviour, longing to break free of constraint, as exemplified beautifully by an office chair routine that starts with listening to a telephone answering service and becomes a ballet of flight as the dancers give up waiting. The performers are equal to this task—engaging to watch, physically skilled and bold.
The knock-about humour, easy polemic and engagement with the audience reminded me of the Aussie performance aesthetic championed and immortalised by Circus Oz. At one stage the dancers compete for air time to tell us their complaints. An audience member is then invited on stage with the performers to speak of what infuriates them.
The technology is used skillfully. The witty projections are seamlessly and elegantly woven into each vignette. The music is fun. The dance material in solos, duets and quartets captures the awkwardness of being not quite in control of one’s body. The final duet is a simple homage to touch and connection as performed by two dancers, though the true message of this piece, and of interaction with technology as a disciplinary force, is ‘be playful.’
One Point 618 & Adelaide Festival Centre: Involuntary, director, choreographer Katrina Lazaroff, performers, creators Tim Rodgers, Ninian Donald, Veronica Shum, Jessica Statton, lighting, projection design Nic Mollison, sound design Sascha Budimski, set design Richard Seidel; Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, May 1-5
PARI PASSU…TOUCH IS AN INTRICATE WEAVE. IT TAKES PLACE WITHIN AN EXQUISITE MARY MOORE DESIGN—A PERFECTLY CIRCULAR WHITE FLOOR WITH TWO WAVE FORM SCREENS OF DIFFERENT LENGTHS POSITIONED NEAR THE BACK OF THE CIRCLE AND SEPARATED BY A GAP. THE WORK BEGINS WITH A LIGHT GLANCING ACROSS THE SCREENS REPEATEDLY, REVEALING THE TEXTURE OF WHAT COULD BE THE MOSAIC OF ROCK ON A SHORELINE.
The lights dim and solid becomes fluid, rock becomes mud. A distant shadowy figure walks towards us, a projection, but then a live male body takes over. The dancers are initially figures behind, appearing to be in the wall—the work presents mutability as order. The screens are revealed to be touch screens. The dancers emerge from behind the wall and return there throughout the piece. The surface changes throughout with beautifully selected projections by Adam Synott. Sometimes the surface shifts in response to the dancers—patterns scatter or collect.
Though the media technology is part of the ‘here and now,’ the references that haunt the work are of some ancient time. My mind wandered to cave paintings and tribal rituals. Some version of our past lurked as a referent. The sound shifted between wind instruments, strings and drums as the dancing changed rhythm and dynamic. Though touch was the declared focus, the dancing away from the screen/wall was a relentless, almost restless, articulation of body in confined space, body in relation to floor and body in relation to other bodies. The dancers performed solos, duets and unison quartets.
Behind/in the wall the movement slowed, opened out, changed shape. The dimensions of the space and wall made the dancers appear larger than life, godlike. At a certain point I was struck by the thought that a cosmology was being represented. I looked up and the lighting bars were in arcs; the heavens appeared. At another point an orange glow dominated the stage, that unmistakable orange that has come to represent Australia. I am struggling to describe the intricate unsettling of solidity, of surface, of depth of field, of time, of symbols and cultural positioning in this dance (Warren has had a long commitment to supporting and working with Indigenous dancers and choreographers).
The duets were a case in point, involving a knotting and unknotting of bodies. There was not the usual rhythm of separation and coming together that often marks this duet form. In the quartet a simple walking forward and back in unison and also the detail of the shoulders and upper backs moving on four hunched dancers was profoundly moving. They were working at the edge of their ability to stay accurate and present. This was thrilling. I found it tantalising to watch a work where referents hovered but had been relegated to the outskirts; where I focused instead on patterns in process and the feelings and meanings these generated. I was reminded of my pleasure in watching Lucinda Childs’ dancers stepping along geometric spatial pathways swinging their arms in the 1980s and was glad of this Australian dance project.
Leigh Warren & Dancers, Pari passu…touch, artistic director, choreographer Leigh Warren, dancers Lisa Griffiths, Bec Jones, Tim Farrar, Jesse Martin, set design Mary Moore, music composition, projection design Adam Synnott, lighting Benjamin Cisterne, garments Alistair Trung, Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, May 17-26
HUMANS ARE SENSATES, THERE IS NO OTHER WAY TO PERCEIVE THE WORLD OUTSIDE THE BODY. ACCORDING TO ANTHROPOLOGISTS, MEMORY IS THE HISTORY BOOK OF OUR SENSORY EXPERIENCES WHERE WE STORE AND RESTORE EACH SENSORY DIMENSION WITHIN THE OTHER, MAKING IT DIFFICULT TO SEPARATE AND VERBALISE OUR SENSATIONS. TIM DARBYSHIRE’S COLLABORATIVE PERFORMANCE IS BASED ON THEORIES OF SYNAESTHESIA, SENSORY EXPERIENCE AND MEMORY.
In More or Less Concrete, the audience witnesses a kind of abstraction of the body and its movements. The slow, dreamy pace makes this as much a study in sculptural forms as dance. Through sensory-challenging sound and lighting, it is also a retelling of these snatches of memory through performance.
In a darkened theatre, headsets deliver the minimalist and hypnotic sound. A car in the distance, a creaking chair, a metal street sign in the wind? The recordings are central to the piece, as in the dance itself they explore the intersection of sound and movement of artificial or natural environments. Microphones near the stage pick up the sound of limbs slapping the stage, heads knocking on the wooden stage and the breath and grunts of the performers. The containment and editing of sound through headphones coupled with darkness heightens our visual perception.
Three performers in boiler suits appear in a haze of low watt blue light, their heads tucked away out of sight. Without the visual reference point of heads, the performers appear to be disembodied sculptures. For much of the performance, faces are hidden, giving the performers an anonymous, inhuman nature. The unfamiliar positions of the bodies—such as upside down torsos—leave behind unrecognisable, twisted forms, like the casts of animals made at Vesuvius or Richard Goodwin’s concrete sculptures of cast bodies, Mobius Sea. The title of the performance refers to the shifts between the concrete reality and the more ephemeral forms of bodies. Movement transforms the body from recognisable states as human or animal, to something more abstract, to machine or ‘other.’
Darbyshire’s work is informed by visual art and film—initially the frequent pausing in the choreography allows for the same contemplation as visual art. Then there are the filmic qualities. We are warned in advance about loud noises—after a somnolent start there is a sudden bang, the kind that keeps you on the edge of your seat during a thriller. In a dark, controlled sensory environment this keeps the audience alert and tense.
A former star swimmer, Darbyshire evokes memories of swimming through the colour blue—the effect is immersive and cold, much like blue tint in film. We see the bodies as if underwater, with oscillating arms. The forms the body makes when suspended in water are strange yet recognisable. There are other playful impressions from childhood: sprinklers and the swooshing, claustrophobic brushes of a car wash.
More or Less Concrete is a quietly unsettling and revelatory investigation into the crossroads of our senses. We walk away having experienced bodies as abstract forms while movement is perceived sonically as well as visually.
More or Less Concrete, choreographer, director Tim Darbyshire, performers Sophia Cowen, Tim Darbyshire, Matthew Day, sound designer Myles Mumford, lighting, production Bluebottle, dramaturg, sound theorist Thembi Soddell, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, April 18–22
WE MEET AT THE CROSSROADS IN BOWDEN, A ONCE-INDUSTRIAL INNER SUBURB OF ADELAIDE, NOW UNDERGOING TOO-SLOW TRANSFORMATION. THE PERFORMANCE WILL TAKE PLACE IN A WAREHOUSE, A PRE-FAB COLORBOND ENCLOSURE, SLUNG UP TO HOUSE A BROAD CONCRETE SLAB. OUTSIDE, A FESTIVAL CROWD MILLS IN THE DUST.
We are invited inside, as the show gets underway. Hard to be a God is performed off the back of two semi-trailer trucks. Set at right angles to each other, one truck is a platform for on-stage action, the other a screen for projections. The audience is seated, rather comfortably, in the rectangle between, on tiered banks of plastic chairs.
This is transient theatre with an interventionist feel. Its politics are transportable, the scenario universal. Hungarian director Kornél Mundroczó explains in the program: “this transitory situation is very familiar: being at someone’s mercy while being on the road illegally, fleeing from somewhere.” We are witness to their transit suspended: three young women, sewing jeans in a truck-top sweatshop, are kept busy by a bossy fourth, who enslaves them to their work, and trades them to the men for sex. The motley gang of men use the women, one after the other, to make porn in the other truck. We have been warned.
In this off-stage action—relayed by hand-held video camera, with live feeds projected onto screens—a naked woman screams as her back is scalded with hot water; another’s neck is broken, or so it seems, from too much rough handling; a third, now pregnant, struggles at the prospect of being buried alive. These pornographic scenes of sadistic violence are spliced into an on-stage flow depicting forced labour, industrial accidents, medical interventions—urine tests, an abortion. Violent sexuality mixes with lyrical solidarity. The characters sing and dance at times to alleviate the boredom, the degradation—and to cheer us up, it seems.
Mundroczó draws the moral dramaturgy of Hard to be a God from the sci-fi novel of the same name by the Russian brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. The novel lends a political sub-plot of extremism and extortion to the performance: a sister raped, a son turns on his politician father. It also lends a theological dimension: witnessing the cruelty of God’s creations, an angel-man exacts revenge on our behalf in a final splatter-act of retribution. The performance closes on an ethereal moving image of this angel-man, floating backwards in a boat along the wetlands of eastern Europe.
The performance also seeks to extend its moral reach with a retro-soundtrack of emotional devastation: Dire Straits’ “Brothers in Arms” accompanies the closing image; Gene Pitney’s “Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart,” Burt Bacharach’s “What the World Needs Now” and the Pop-Tops pan-European hit “Mamy Blue” momentarily elevate our interest and sketch the contours of hope. At other times, the look and feel of the performance is grimly realistic, desperate and fatalistic. The sweatshop set is meticulous in its clutter, greasy with machinery, with steaming racks of clothing and factory waste. It is work-wear, industrial protection and trade tools for the men; stretch-knits, tracksuits, underwear and nudity for the women.
The production’s mediation of off-stage sexual violence is realistic, but somewhat numbing in effect. The day after, I felt flat. Like surgery under local anaesthetic, I could see violence inflicted but I didn’t feel the pain. For me the moment of greatest agitation was a disturbance in the audience half-way through. The lights came up, the stage manager intervened, and a couple walked out, before one of the actors sought our permission to continue. At first, I thought they were a plant: an act of staged objection to highlight our inaction. And then I wondered nervously: were they actually offended? But no. Next morning, in an email, the festival’s senior publicist sought to reassure us with innocuous affect: “the audience member who was unwell last night has a pre-existing medical condition. He recovered quickly and apparently this happens to him regularly.”
Isabelle Hupert, Florence Thomassin, A Streetcar
photo Shane Reid
Isabelle Hupert, Florence Thomassin, A Streetcar
A Streetcar from Odéon Théâtre de L’Europe seems likewise premised on assumptions about anaesthesia and the audience. Director Krzysztof Warlikowski overcomes the intimate stage realism of Tennessee Williams’ play with a production of grand expanse, hard surfaces and voluble performances.
The performance opens at Adelaide’s largest theatre with actor Isabelle Huppert as Blanche Dubois babbling behind glass. She is encased in an elevated bathroom-hallway that extends horizontally across the stage, rolls on tracks in the stage like a streetcar, and is glazed with ‘electronic privacy glass’—ceiling-to-floor plate-glass panels that switch between transparent and opaque. In opaque mode, they serve as screens for video projection of live action, black-and-white in evocation of Elia Kazan’s 1951 film.
What I feel foremost of this performance is the smoothness of its surface. The main area of the stage is a suite of ten-pin bowling alleys that reach into its depth. Yet when Huppert descends onto the stage my depth perception is at a loss. The emotional volatility of Blanche’s intervention between Stella and Stanley (played by Florence Thomassin and Andrzej Chyra) is flattened by the monophonic consistency of the actors’ voices. As in music theatre, they wear microphones to amplify their voices. The disarticulation of actors’ voices from the spatiality of their presence makes me feel like I have lost my sense of touch. It is as if the entire performance were playing out behind glass.
Warlikowski’s direction seems driven to overcome the prospect of an audience at a distance from the actors, cut-off and out-of-touch. Tiny interactions and minute gestures are retrieved by video from inaccessible spaces—in the bathroom, under the bed, beside the couch—and magnified with projection to amplify their presence on such an expansive stage. Transformations in the actors’ portrayals of their characters’ emotional trajectories are ‘telegraphed’ with an intricate plot of wig and costume changes.
Transformations in the dramaturgy of minor characters amplify the psychic theatricality of Blanche’s plight. Her homosexual husband—”un jeune homme” played in grand-guignol style by Cristián Soto—is brought back from the dead to dance the tango on stage with Mitch (Yann Collette). The role of Eunice, Stella’s friendly upstairs neighbour, is enlarged by Renate Jett into singer-interlocutor—belting out Pulp’s “Common People,” Eric Carmen’s “All By Myself” and other songs, juxtaposing key moments with the delivery of inter-texts (from Oedipus, apparently, from Wilde, Flaubert and Dumas), and stepping into the audience at the interval for some light-hearted banter about love, romance and relationships.
Warlikowski’s directorial strategy is multi-channel amplification, blasting through the script to expose the theatricality of the psycho-sexual on an operatic stage. I make contact with the work. But was this contact premised on an assumption that I wouldn’t? That without the amplifiers, I’d feel nothing?
By comparison, Gardenia from Alain Platel and Frank van Laecke of Les Ballets C de la B transacts a simple encounter with its audience. Nine elderly people of transitive genders, a ‘young guy’ and a ‘real woman.’ Wearing suits, they each undress revealing the frocks they wear beneath.
One tells jokes, one sings, another reminisces. They address the audience directly. They mince and pose and pout as an ensemble. They don wigs, slap on make-up, slip on heels. They swing handbags to Ravel’s Bolero and mime the words to songs. They spread red carpet on a parquet floor. They walk.
As a performance, Gardenia is not much more than that. “The journey is so dear to us,” advise Platel and van Laecke. “We advance without hurrying.” The show unfolds at walking pace. There is no assumption that I feel nothing. And no demand that I feel more.
2012 Adelaide International Arts Festival: Hard to be a God, director Kornél Mundroczó, Old Clipsal Site, Bowden, March 8-14; A Streetcar, based on A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, director Krzysztof Warlikowski, Odéon-Théâtre de L’Europe, Festival Theatre, March 14-17; Gardenia, directors Alain Platel, Frank van Laecke, Les Ballets C de la B, Dunstan Playhouse, March 2-5
Jessie Misskelley Jr, Paradise Lost 2: Revelations
AMERICAN CINEMA IS SO RIFE WITH STORIES OF THE WRONGLY ACCUSED YOU COULD BE FORGIVEN FOR THINKING THE UNITED STATES SPECIALISES IN EPIC MISCARRIAGES OF JUSTICE. OR PERHAPS THE OPENNESS OF AMERICAN SOCIETY SIMPLY LENDS ITSELF TO THE EXPOSURE AND DRAMATISATION OF LEGAL ERRORS.
The recently completed documentary trilogy Paradise Lost, detailing the story of the West Memphis Three, certainly features some extraordinary access to courtrooms, but the result is a far from reassuring portrait of American justice.
Director Joe Berlinger unveiled the final part of the Paradise Lost trilogy in March at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), leaving viewers with more questions than answers about this nightmarish case.
Berlinger recalls that when he and his filmmaking partner Bruce Sinofsky began shooting the first Paradise Lost film for HBO—The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996)—they thought they were documenting “an open and shut case.” The police claimed they had strong evidence implicating three local teenagers in a particularly horrific triple homicide in West Memphis, revealed when the mutilated bodies of three eight-year-old boys were found naked and hogtied beside a creek on May 6, 1993. Seventeen-year-old Jessie Misskelley Jr, 16-year-old Jason Baldwin and 18-year-old Damien Echols were quickly arrested and charged with the murders. Misskelly confessed to police about his involvement in the crime and implicated the other two.
It quickly became apparent to the filmmakers, however, that there was no physical evidence linking the teenagers to the murders. Jessie Misskelley Jr, who had an IQ of just 72, had been interrogated by police for 12 hours before making his confession. Only 46 minutes of the interview had been recorded. Despite the fact that Misskelley quickly recanted his statement, arguments in court that the confession was false and extracted under coercion were dismissed by the jury, and he was sentenced to life in prison.
In the separate trial of Echols and Baldwin, the prosecution argued the boys were members of a satanic cult and the murders part of a bloody ritual. The teenagers’ love of Metallica and Stephen King was introduced as “evidence” to support these claims. Each was found guilty on three counts of murder, and Baldwin was sentenced to life imprisonment. Echols was sentenced to death.
Amazingly, Berlinger and Sinofsky were permitted to film both trials, an experience Berlinger describes as “jaw-dropping.” Their lenses captured the flimsy prosecution case and the inept, scattershot approach of the boys’ defence lawyers. They also revealed the impassioned hatred felt by the parents of the murdered boys and the rumours of Satan worship that swirled around Memphis in the wake of the murders.
Half a decade later, Berlinger and Sinofsky returned to the case to make a second film entitled Revelations (2000). The first documentary engendered a storm of controversy about the trial proceedings and dubious nature of the prosecution’s case, but the second film revealed little conclusive new information about the murders and subsequent trials. The filmmakers were also denied access to courtrooms during various fruitless appeals. Instead, Berlinger and Sinofsky spent a lot of time with John Mark Byers, father of one of the victims; his deranged religious zealotry makes Robert Mitchum’s character in The Night of the Hunter look restrained.
Questions had already been raised about Byers in the first documentary after he bizarrely gave the film crew a knife as a present, which was later found to hold traces of human blood that matched the type of both Byers and his dead son. By the time of the second film, Byers’ wife had also died in mysterious circumstances. Various theories developed in Revelations imply Byers may have played a part in the murders, but at the end of the film a lie detector test suggests that he believes he is telling the truth when he denies any involvement. On the other hand, at the time of the test he was taking a cocktail of five mood-altering drugs, which may have skewed the result somewhat.
The recently completed third part of the trilogy, Purgatory (2011), avoids the sensationalist tone of the second instalment and traces developments that led to the release of the West Memphis Three in August 2011. The biggest shock is seeing the effect of time on the accused. Misskelley, a slight teenage boy in 1993, is now an overweight middle-aged man. Echols and Baldwin are in better shape, but they are similarly on the edge of middle-age and as the film opens, all three have spent more of their lives behind bars than living free.
The decisive development traced by Purgatory is the analysis of DNA from the crime scene, utilising technology not available at the time of the original trials. Tests find that none of the DNA material from the scene can be linked to the accused. Intriguingly, the tests do show that a hair on a shoelace used to tie up the victims may have belonged to the stepfather of one of the murdered boys.
After various protracted legal machinations the state offers the West Memphis Three a deal that will see them released, based on the time they have already served. The trio agree rather than endure a protracted retrial. In this sense the final part of Paradise Lost provides something of a resolution, but many questions are left hanging, not least the riddle of who really murdered the eight-year-old boys. The films suggest many possibilities, but in the end all the leads only serve to demonstrate just how slippery the notion of truth really is, whether it’s on screen or in the courtroom. Errol Morris’ celebrated The Thin Blue Line (1988) similarly showed up the mutability of supposedly factual evidence, but where Morris’ film basically detailed two conflicting versions of the same crime, the only certainty left by the end of Paradise Lost is the fact of the original murder. Director Joe Berlinger admitted at the ACMI screenings, for example, that much of the evidence presented in the second film implicating John Mark Byers has since been discounted, providing a sobering lesson in the power of cinema to lead viewers to conclusions that aren’t necessarily correct.
Most horrifyingly, however, the Paradise Lost films dramatise how three teenage lives were ruined based on the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence. Were it not for new DNA technology, one of the trio would almost certainly have been executed. Watching the legal saga play out over two decades and across three films, the entire process of ‘justice’ ends up looking almost as monstrous as the original crime.
Paradise Lost 1: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills; Paradise Lost 2: Revelations; Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory; directors and producers Joe Berlinger & Bruce Sinofsky; 1996, 2000, 2011; HBO; USA; screened at ACMI, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, March 1-4
NOW IN ITS 15TH YEAR, PERTH’S PREMIER FILM FESTIVAL SHOWS NO SIGNS OF SLOWING DOWN. FESTIVAL DIRECTOR JACK SARGEANT EXPLAINS HOW THE REV MANAGES TO COMBINE THEMATIC SOPHISTICATION WITH ITS RENOWNED YOUTHFUL SWAGGER.
As the festival’s July start date draws closer, Sargeant acknowledges that he is still under the gun, dealing with the staggering number of submissions that Revelation receives. “This year I’ve chased down three or four hundred movies,” he estimates. “And we get submitted I don’t know how many hundreds that Richard (Sowada, Revelation founder, now working at Melbourne’s ACMI) and I wade through. It’s pretty mammoth. Rev seems to grow exponentially each year—there’s just more and more happening.”
But while Sargeant eschews the notion of selecting films for the festival based on a preconceived overarching theme, he will concede that a dominant throughline does tend to form as choices are made and the pile of hopefuls is winnowed down. “It works out that we have got a theme this year,” he says. “Well, actually, there are two: community and family. But you don’t look for things—these things just start emerging.”
It’s a fitting theme. Revelation is, after all, one of the key events on the Western Australian film community calendar. Inaugurated in 1997 as a showcase for a handful of independent shorts, it now encompasses a program in excess of 100 films and attracts a large number of international guests. It could easily be argued that the notion of community is present every year, inasmuch as the festival acts as a hub for the Perth film scene.
Rev in 2012 boasts a notably strong documentary stream. “This year we’ve got a lot of documentaries,” Sargeant says. “I think 15 or 16 documentaries at this point. Documentaries are really on the ascendant. I don’t think we’ve seen any ‘Occupy’ documentaries, but we are seeing a shift away from environmental stuff to economic and political stuff coming in. I think we’re seeing a shift in film in that direction.”
Davy Chou’s Golden Slumbers stands out as a powerful example. A haunting examination of the decimation of the Cambodian film industry under Pol Pot’s regime, Sargeant describes it as “an incredibly moving documentary, because obviously most of [the filmmakers] were murdered under Pol Pot in the mid 70s. There’s literally only a half dozen or so of those filmmakers left, and they just talk about the industry. You get a sense of this incredibly vibrant community, but now there are only five or so films dating from that period left. They made hundreds and hundreds of films, and now there are only five. But Golden Slumbers will, I imagine, soon be playing everywhere; it’s an incredibly powerful movie.”
Another film which will no doubt reach a much wider audience before long is Undefeated, the American sports documentary by Daniel Lindsay and TJ Martin. A look at a year in the life of the Manassas Tigers, a woefully underfunded and ill-equipped high school football team who attempt to reverse a century-long losing streak, the film won the 2011 Oscar for Best Documentary, and should hold the same crossover appeal as Steven Riley’s Fire in Babylon, the film on the West Indies cricket team of the 70s which opened last year’s festival.
“We’ve also got a film called Battle For Brooklyn,” Sargeant continues, “which is about a whole community in New York fighting against their neighbourhood being demolished to make way for a stadium and blocks of designer flats. It’s a very interesting documentary going towards that notion of community that I was talking about.”
That theme carries over into the festival’s fiction stream as well, with the Australian horror film The Caretaker, from first-time feature director Tom Conyers. The film postulates a discordant community of necessity that emerges when a disparate group of strangers hide out in a rural mansion after a plague of vampirism sweeps the globe. Matters are complicated when they must strike a deal with a vampire, played by producer Mark White, who also dwells in the mansion. Having already drawn acclaim on the North American festival circuit, it will make its Australian premiere at Revelation.
The Caretaker
Unusually, The Caretaker was one of only a few horror films submitted to the festival. “Normally we’re inundated with average to fair films made by people about chainsaws and zombies, and there’s actually very little of that this year,” says Sargeant. “I don’t think horror’s going away, but I think it’s changing. It’s getting kind of absurd right now. I was joking with somebody the other day that sooner or later you’re going to get a found footage horror film that’s shot in 3D. Horror has become so self-referential. So we’re seeing less horror.” However, Sargeant maintains that it’s the shifting genre landscape that makes programming a festival like Revelation so challenging and rewarding.
“You can see change happening slowly in film.” he says thoughtfully. “The big secret of programming cinema is that you’re not just curating films, you’re curating the relationships between the films. Once you start programming, you start thinking about how the films will work together, because you have to go forward on the assumption that people will see more than one film. Also, you don’t want to define yourself too rigidly or lock yourself into too small a place. The whole curatorial process is a really interesting one. On a personal level, I think you should always be pushing yourself and looking in different places for things that will pique your interest. We’re always looking for new things that are out there—you have to do that.”
Revelation Perth International Film Festival, The Astor Theatre, Perth, July 5-15, www.revelationfilmfest.org
Horst Hörtner, photo courtesy Plektrum Festival and Ars Electronica Futurelab
HORST HÖRTNER IS SENIOR DIRECTOR OF THE ARS ELECTRONICA FUTURELAB IN LINZ, AUSTRIA. HE HAS BEEN ON A RECENT TOUR AROUND AUSTRALIA SETTING UP A NUMBER OF SMALL INSTALLATIONS AND SEMINAR PRESENTATIONS TO DEMONSTRATE WHAT THE FUTURELAB IS ALL ABOUT.
Organised by Richard Vella, from the University of Newcastle, and assisted by Australian Futurelab employee Kristefan Minski, the mini-tour provided the opportunity to ask Hörtner about the genesis of the Futurelab project and the central role of transdisciplinarity.
Hörtner speaks enthusiastically about a new kind of research that is being championed in his lab-cum-museum. RealTime readers will be familiar with the work that Ars Electronica has been showing for many years in their annual festival. The Futurelab is the latest incarnation of this project, providing a working model of the ways transdisciplinary research and practice can produce engaging results.
Can you explain what the Lab’s take on transdisciplinarity is?
“Well it’s actually been there from the beginning of Ars Electronica in 1979. It started out as a festival around the topics of art, technology and society, which already involves pretty much everybody and everything! At the Ars Electronica Centre, we are very much looking to the future. What is influencing our future, what trends are coming. What are the new technologies that are rising up that may change the paradigms of society in much the same way as ICT has over the last 20 years?”
The Centre provides hands-on experience for visitors (providing courses for kids to clone plants for instance). As a place of inquiry, the Centre showcases projects that Hörtner calls “sketches of the future” in a range of areas including nano-technology, robotics, gene technologies and the most advanced fabrication methods.
Hasn’t the future already arrived?
“The future arrives regardless of Ars Electronica,” he jokes, but what they’ve been doing for the last 30 years can now in some ways be seen as a “history of the future”. Their R+D department has 50 people from a wide variety of disciplines (architects, physicists, biologists, sociologists, game designers, industrial designers, media planners, telematicians, and civil engineers) working on art-based experimental projects. The Futurelab provides a context for a very diverse group of people and disciplines, and it’s this context that Hörtner recognises as crucial.
Do you see a huge difference between interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity?
“Well, according to experts, the major difference is that interdisciplinarity promotes exchange between the disciplines, whereas the transdisciplinary approach takes into account the fact that there are fields which don’t even exist yet. If there is no discipline for a certain area yet, we need to expand across to fields where no discipline is home. The reason there are so many areas covered by the Futurelab is because we approach problems from a large variety of angles. In order to see the problem and to understand it more deeply, you often have to leave the comfort of your discipline if you want to see the full picture. This is the place where crazy ideas come up that may not survive in their own discipline, but which make a lot of sense to those in other disciplines. That’s what I call the soil for growing innovation. This is where cross-over ideas can happen and where we can grow new things.”
How did you manage to get such a huge experimental arts centre like this funded?
“The Lab is a logical extension to a festival that only has a small window of public exposure. Having a permanent institution and network that would operate the whole year had enormous advantages and opportunities. The Ars Festival had grown interest locally, and educated the wider public to see that there must be something in the work that attracts many of the world’s leaders in the field of experimental art and research.”
In Australia, it would be hard to imagine government officials and local councils being convinced of such a proposition. Not so in Austria, where the Mayor and the City of Linz were convinced to “jump into this adventure”. Ars Electronica is a private company owned by the city of Linz, and funded 75% by the local city government and 25% by regional Austrian authorities. The Futurelab also has industry partnerships with companies such as Honda, Audi, SAP, Siemens and Vodafone. “Mostly they come to ask whether they can do something really cool, and don’t really come with a problem to be solved.”
Have artists changed their ways of working in terms of art and science?
“There is a very close intersection between art and science. Science generates knowledge about our world and art generates experience about our world. These are just two different words for discovering what lies beyond the horizon, what lies beyond the borders. Scientific practice has drastically changed in the last 20 years. A lot of scientific outcomes are actually judged by public opinion prior to the existence of the outcome. For instance, everybody has an opinion about gene technology, talking about designer babies and so on, even though we are miles away from that step.”
Hörtner argues that scientists now have to “perform” their work in a way that they didn’t have to in the past. He is quick to point out that artists are used to confronting an untrained audience, and suggests that there are methods and strategies in the artistic process that are capable of being imported into the process of scientific research. “Artists can play a new role in helping scientists do that research in front of an untrained audience.”
He stresses this is not about the beautification of scientific outcomes, but represents the possibility of a convergence of artistic and scientific work in what he calls a “space of action.”
So do artists need to be transdisciplinary, or do they need to work in a transdisciplinary context?
“That’s a good question! If you want to do transdisciplinary work, it doesn’t make any sense to tell other disciplines that they have to work in transdisciplinary ways, but that artists don’t have to work in that way because, you know, ‘I’m an artist.’ There has to be a willingness to share knowledge and to share approach.”
Are artists being trained in the right way then?
“Everybody’s talking about Art and Science, but in many ways the outcome is still poor. But there’s potential. In terms of education however, I would say we’re not at all prepared. 100 years after the Industrial Revolution we’re still teaching our children the curriculum that has been founded a century ago. We should probably think about that!”
Daniel Crooks, Static No.14 (composition for neon), 2010
courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery
Daniel Crooks, Static No.14 (composition for neon), 2010
EXHIBITIONS ALWAYS SEEM TO APPEAR MAGICALLY IN MUSEUMS, AS IF THE OPENING IS REALLY THE BEGINNING, RATHER THAN THE END OF THE PROCESS. THIS IS EVEN MORE THE CASE WHEN THEY ARE INTERNATIONAL SHOWS, THE RESULT OF INTRICATE PROCESSES OF NEGOTIATION—AND ANY CURSORY READING OF THE FINAL LIST OF ORGANISERS, PRESENTERS, PARTNERS AND SPONSORS, BOTH CORPORATE AND GOVERNMENTAL—GIVES US AN IDEA OF THE SHOW’S ‘BACK STORY’ AND THE CONSEQUENT MIRACLE OF ITS REALISATION.
It’s not easy to judge the effect of an international show in a local context if you come from the same place as the show itself because you are not seeing the show that the local audience sees.
So, in Taipei, I come as a virtually blind person to Wonderland: New Contemporary Art from Australia—in a situation not unlike that apocryphal story a prominent gallerist once told me of a blind Sydney art critic who took his partner to shows; together they would stand in front of the art and the partner would describe the work for the critic who would write accordingly about it. It seems like a good method, even more possible in the post-visual space of the contemporary museum, when work can be heard and felt and so I thought I would try it, if not with eyes shut, then certainly with ears open. Actually it is not such an outlandish idea but describes pretty well the process of having one’s eyes opened to work within the hermeneutic processes of viewing, experiencing, listening that interpretation always involves. And besides, all exhibitions now have ‘partners’ to lead us into the process, suggesting what we might see.
In my case, my guides are my very bright grad students, imaginatively remaking pieces from their own thoughts and feelings and transforming them before my eyes, and to walk with them through the spaces of Wonderland is to be re-enchanted. Although I am captivated by Martin Walch’s Mist opportunities (2011) that seems so much like a Chinese painting, my students are less moved by it. Perhaps this is because in March in Taipei it is already so misty every day that it seems too close to home. The pleasure really begins with Alex Davies’ Dislocation (2005) and loud shrieks of joy and surprise emanate from the room as viewers encounter uncanny shadows behind the images of themselves peering into the peepholes of the work. Already feeling a guilty pleasure in their voyeurism, they find themselves ‘caught in the act’—and want to go back for more. The ‘ghost in the machine’ finds an easy resonance in a culture where ghosts abound. This is a popular work and queues form outside it.
Cath Robinson’s Thought noise/wave-form preludes (2009) draws another crowd wanting to play the sounds of inspiration and to listen to the melodies of combination. It is a work that gains the particular and enthusiastic approval of the numerous school groups always visiting the show. The tinkling sounds of these delicious waveform preludes subtly score Matthew Gingold’s Flying Falling Floating (2007) effectively installed above the stairwell.
Audiences are drawn to George Khut’s work in droves, willing to wait for up to 20 minutes to experience it. Heart Library (2009) seems to be strangely effective, though to me it is not an especially visually satisfying work, and even the biofeedback process is a bit hit and miss. But the expressive potential of the work is effectively extended in the hand-drawn ‘body-maps’ that audience members willingly produce by the score. And they do so with the seriousness of purpose of the most serious artists, somehow impressed by this encounter with the nature of the creative process and its links with the moments of reverie that the bio-feedback technology produces in the tense or relaxed time spent listening to one’s own heart beating. Perhaps it’s also the empowerment that comes from having one’s work exhibited in an important art museum in a process of interactivity that somehow works because it has both a technological and a directly analogical component. And it plays to an audience embracing ‘user-created content’ in the real time of visceral experience, using old media forms—paper, coloured pencils, crayons.
Daniel Crooks’ superb Static No 18 (2010) benefits from its location alongside Khut’s Heart Library because the audience moves backward and forward between the two pieces, while waiting to experience the latter. This allows both an uninterrupted and a disrupted time for experiencing the former that seems just right for the particular temporality of the Crooks’ piece. The abstraction of the movement here captures the precision of the original action more effectively than either a real time viewing or a slow motion rendering would demonstrate, bringing us into contact with the particulate nature of space-time itself in a way that we can say is both true to the nature of the technology and the software deployed.
Kylie Stillman’s brilliant Flock (2010) impressed, as did Bindi Cole’s transgender photographs and Fiona Lowry’s spectral paintings. By the time it closed, the show had attracted record crowds to the museum, helped no doubt by the consistency of curator Antoanetta Ivanova’s tireless efforts to serve the work throughout the show’s duration. Nine official sponsors supported the 22 artists represented here but the greatest subsidy was clearly the curator’s own time and energy, animating audiences, engaging their curiosity. In the end, no-one seemed to notice very much that the work was from Australia; it just seemed to audiences to be a bunch of cool stuff to experience, coming from a curious place where artists spoke directly to an audience whose language they did not speak except through these encounters of feeling. This, in the end, is the best fate for a touring show: that it loses its origins and enters its destination as a welcome guest.
Wonderland: New Contemporary Art from Australia, curator Antoanetta Ivanova, artists Bindi Cole, Daniel Crooks, Anna Davern, Alex Davies, Elizabeth Delfs, Julie Dowling, Matthew Gardiner, Matthew Gingold, Chris Henschke, George Khut, Fiona Lowry, Jasmine Targett, Jess MacNeil, Jon McCormack, Cath Robinson, Julie Ryder, Kuuki (Priscilla Bracks, Gavin Sade), Kylie Stillman, Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski, Martin Walch, Yvette Coyle; Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, Taiwan, Feb 10-April 15
Lizzie Thomson, Panto, Campbelltown Arts Centre 2011 Dance Residency Project
photo Heidrun Löhr
Lizzie Thomson, Panto, Campbelltown Arts Centre 2011 Dance Residency Project
More and more dancing and more places to dance in Western Sydney: that’s the good news from Martin del Amo’s report in this edition of RealTime. The development of arts centres west of the city is one of the happy legacies of the Carr Labor Government. Campbelltown Arts Centre has a dance curator; in Parramatta FORM Dance Projects presents works in partnership with Riverside Theatres; and Blacktown Arts Centre includes dance in its performance program. Not only do these offer opportunities for dance artists and communities in the region but also engagements for Sydney-based artists as choreographers, teachers and mentors, enlarging the sense of community in NSW dance. There’s further good news from Angharad Wynne-Jones, the Creative Producer for City of Melbourne’s Arts House—Dance Massive will make its third appearance in 2013 thanks to the enduring partnership between Arts House, Dancehouse and Malthouse. It’s pretty much a sell-out event and a great opportunity for artists, audiences and presenters to connect. If you want to keep track of Australian contemporary dance, take a look at RealTimeDance on our website: this invaluable resource provides free access to all of the dance articles and reviews in RealTime from 1994 plus profiles of leading choreographers, video interviews and a feature on dance on film. Dance. Dance. Dance.
GEOFF DYER’S CURIOUS NEW BOOK ZONA CALLS ITSELF “A BOOK ABOUT A FILM ABOUT A JOURNEY TO A ROOM.” IT COULD EQUALLY BE CALLED A BOOK ABOUT A MIDDLE-AGED MAN WHO LIKES TO SPEND ALL DAY IN HIS PYJAMAS WATCHING HIS FAVOURITE DVD. “SO WHAT KIND OF WRITER AM I,” DYER LAMENTS, “IF I AM REDUCED TO A SUMMARY OF A FILM?…WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF SUCH AN EXERCISE?”
These are pressing questions that never quite go away for both the writer and reader of Zona. How could a recount of an author’s favourite film be considered a valid subject for a book? And why should an author feel the need to defend the existence of a book he is writing? Matters are not helped much when Dyer tells us his “deepest wish” for Zona is nothing less or more than “success, enormous success,” by which he means publication:
“If it is published, if someone will deign to publish his summary of a film that relatively few people have seen, then that will constitute a success far greater than anything John Grisham could ever have dreamed of.”
He needn’t have worried. Canongate in the UK, Random House in the US and Text Publishing in Australia came to the party.
What rescues Dyer’s book from the bonfire of inanity is that this very problem, this dance with meaninglessness, also pervades Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, the film that Zona is so emphatically about. A recognised masterpiece of cinema, a sci-fi epic in its own way, Stalker is nevertheless disconcertingly insubstantial, “a film almost devoid of action,” as Dyer puts it, that leaves us to question whether anything is achieved at all by the conclusion of the narrative. The plot is indeed slim. Two men (one a writer simply called Writer and the other a scientist called Professor) are led by a third (called Stalker) on a journey that takes place over a single day. Their purpose is to travel from point A (a bar), through a magical and forbidden area (called the Zone), to ultimately arrive at point B (a room simply called the Room, where one’s innermost desires are said to be realised). Unfortunately, when they eventually do reach their goal, no-one appears willing to enter.
As Dyer notes, Tarkovsky leaves much space for doubt in his films and in the case of Stalker it is the space to doubt whether the Zone is anything more than just a place, the Room anything more than just a room. Although his main character, Stalker, is emphatic about the miraculous power of these places, there are more than enough reasons to reject his view. Indeed the more one pays attention to the film, the less believable Stalker’s explanations become. Although normally a fervent promoter of the miraculous, Tarkovsky himself was surprisingly open to the idea that the Zone and the Room are nothing special, that they are “a dream of something that does not and cannot exist,” (Tarkovsky, A, Sculpting in Time) “created by Stalker in order to instil faith…in his reality” (Tarkovsky, A in Tassone, A, “Interview with Andrei Tarkovsky (on Stalker)” in Gianvito, J (ed), Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews).
Zona
So what then? A pointless book about a pointless film about a pointless journey? This may well be the point. As Dyer writes:
“The thing about the Zone is that it’s always subtly reconfiguring itself according to your thoughts and expectations. You want it to seem ordinary? It’s ordinary… whereupon it does something briefly extraordinary. (Or does it?)”
In other words, it’s by virtue of Zone’s potential emptiness as a place, and Stalker’s implicit emptiness as a narrative, that the film can acquire actual personal meaning for the viewer. Just like life, it’s the action performed not by the Zone or by the film’s characters but by the viewer that makes Stalker a meaningful experience. And with this understood, Zona offers even a Tarkovskian pedant like me something new: proof that a film seen by a thousand different viewers is a thousand different films. In fact what Dyer wants to emphasise in Zona is that Stalker seen by the same viewer a thousand times is a thousand different films! Beyond his close analysis, it is Dyer’s own experience of the Zone over 30 years of viewings that he wants to convey by ‘reciting’ Stalker, as it were, line for line. “This book is an account of watchings, rememberings and forgettings; it is not the record of a dissection.”
Perhaps it’s a new sub-genre being invented here: a kind of pseudo-critical, stream-of-consciousness film analysis, where details from the film trigger associations for the author (memories of other films, of girlfriends, of old apartments, of playing in abandoned buildings and railway stations as a child, of the grey sky on Sunday, of his father’s aversion to spending money on ice-cream). Sometimes Dyer attempts to contain these associative thoughts within footnotes. But ‘footnotes’ isn’t really an apt term for his sprawling annotations. They are more like sidetracks, and often they take over the text completely. Other times Dyer simply lets the main text go where it may, like the character Stalker, in a way, plotting a route through the mysterious Zone. The path he maps out claims the authority of a narrator, but there’s an undeniable feeling here that he’s just making this shit up as he goes along.
What works in Zona is that Dyer’s loose associative memories provoke further associations for the reader. ‘Ah yes, all those cigarettes in Godard’s Breathless! I remember them too. How it reminds me of being 22, standing in the rain in Paris.’ And so on. This happens all the time when we read a book or watch a film. But in Zona Dyer is trying to make this associative subjective process an explicit aspect of the text (which is exactly what Tarkovsky is trying to do in Stalker). We shouldn’t confuse the two: Stalker is an amazing artistic accomplishment by the standards of any art form; Zona is a light and occasionally funny read with moments of depth. What Dyer has offered by piggybacking on a masterpiece is an extension of Tarkovsky’s artistic project, a quite literal fulfilment of the creative contract Tarkovsky makes with his (devoted) viewers: “whereby the artist obliges the audience to…think on, further than has been stated…[putting] the audience on a par with the artist” (Tarkovsky, A, Sculpting in Time).
Geoff Dyer, ZONA: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room, Text Publishing, Melbourne 2012; Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair, Austin: University of Texas Press, Austin, 1986
giveaway
Courtesy of Text Publishing we have three copies of ZONA to give away.
Email giveaways@realtimearts.net with your name and address if you'd like to be in the running.
The Silence of Dean Maitland (1935), left: Frank Hurley (cinematographer); seated: Ken G Hall (director); photo courtesy of National Film and Sound Archive
TRUE TO ITS SUBJECT, THE SHADOWCATCHERS IS A VISUALLY RICH HISTORY OF AUSTRALIAN CINEMATOGRAPHY. ALMOST 400 PHOTOGRAPHS, OFTEN THE WORK OF STILLS PHOTOGRAPHERS ON LOCATION, CAPTURE GENERATIONS OF CAMERAMEN LABOURING IN STUDIOS, IN THE BUSH, UNDERWATER, PEERING AT INSECTS, SWEATING OVER TINY CLAY FIGURINES, PERCHED IN TREES, HANGING FROM SPEEDING CARS AND INVENTIVELY ENGAGING WITH EVER EVOLVING EQUIPMENT.
The Shadowcatchers, published and produced by the Australian Cinematographers Society (ACS), is much more than a beautifully designed, very big picture book in glorious widescreen format. Not a book to browse on the lounge or in bed, once opened out on a table to reveal its full visual impact, it equally offers engrossing, informative and entertaining reading. Author Martha Ansara, a cinematographer herself (and producer and director), writes elegantly, tracing the history of the craft across key periods of the development of filmmaking and television in Australia, interpolated with detailed accounts of the lives, styles and achievements of ACS Hall of Fame members. As well there are quotations from cameraman (drawing on the ACS’s substantial archive) that are variously insightful, amusing and alarming.
Given that Australian cameramen (including a handful of women) have been integral to Australian film and television history, Ansara deftly delineates the various social and political forces that have inhibited and encouraged development for over a hundred years. You can come to this book without a knowledge of that history and come away well informed, having also been introduced to some of the technical aspects of camera craft. Much of this is fascinating as we read of cameramen in the 1920s and 30s developing film in their kitchens, making an optical printer out of Meccano or inventing lenses while ‘slushy boys’ fight to keep dust out of processing. Most of the technical information is quite intelligible—only occasionally I found myself turning to Wikipedia to check out blimps and fluidheads.
What gives The Shadowcatchers wonderful cogency is, first, its sense of lineage and heritage and, second, the idiosyncratic Australian character of the history that Ansara unfolds. As you turn the pages you’ll see cameramen grow older, you’ll witness their assistants becoming cameramen and innovators in their own right across the generations. The use of the term ‘cameraman’ is critical. As Ansara tells it, the cameraman from the beginnings of Australian film (not ‘film industry’—we were long denied that) was remarkably multi-skilled and there was no such thing as a simple career path. As camera operator, director, editor and processor, the early cameraman deserves retrospective acknowledgment as filmmaker. Although specialists very gradually supplanted these roles, Australians frequently continued to display superb skills as visual journalists (Neil Davis and David Brill in 1970s war zones) and technical innovators as well as moving into directorial and producer roles. ‘Cinematographer’ is self-defining, but it was interesting to read that cinematographer John Seale insists on being his own cameraman. (The section on Seale is a good example of the book’s brisk, evocative delineation of character and craft.)
As well as the sense of lineage, there are other strands that emerge, for example the considerable number of cameramen who found their way into film through photography, sometimes as a childhood hobby, sometimes maintaining that career side by side with filmmaking. More than a few worked their way up from the periphery of the trade and a surprising number, even up to recent times, didn’t complete secondary schooling or suffered learning problems. Cameramen are frequently revealed to be battlers, especially in the early days—denied good film stock and equipment (hence the drive to innovate), working long hours, sometimes in dangerous circumstances, mocked (by fellow cameraman as well as management) for artistic pretensions into the 1950s, and subordinated to foreign cinematographers on imported productions (but signing up as cameramen for the experience, new ideas and, sometimes, quality equipment, if shocked by the overseas caste system of filmmaking).
In the 1960s and 70s cameramen who once might have worked for commercial studios or television found their niche in the exploratory work of the Commonwealth Film Unit or established themselves as freelancers. Geoff Burton, Peter James, Russell Boyd, Don McAlpine and others took with them their own crews from feature film to feature film from the 70s onwards (including to the US). As Ansara writes about technological change, ironically many filmmakers today are like their antecedents—multi-skilled, now working inventively with inexpensive soft and hardware. Top cinematographers work with incredibly expensive technology but are no longer lone masters of their craft—the video spilt while filming allows all the ‘creatives’ to see the shots, eliminating the need for rushes and reducing the cameramen’s sense of having got it right on their own. As well, post-production has become hyper-elaborate, the final look of the film moving further and further away from the shooting and requiring even more sophisticated technical knowledge and collaborative commitment from the cinematographer. Ansara estimates that “50% of current Australian product is news, sport, current affairs and variety/light entertainment.” Cinematographers are “reliant on the same kind of work that was the mainstay of the old Cinesound and Movietone cameraman, albeit in a modern form.”
The photographs are consistently revealing, a perfect match with Ansara’s history and the anecdotes and the Hall of Fame profiles. We see the sheer bulk of both early feature film cameras and the very latest too (with an undaunted Andrew Lesnie standing before them) alongside generations of small newsreel cameras and the most recent digital portables. The filmmakers of the first half of the 20th century, in studios or on the streets, wear suits (as in the photograph of Frank Hurley behind the camera on this page). Another image of Hurley shows him, without suit, washing his film in the Antarctic ocean after shipboard processing for Hour of the Blizzard (1913). The book’s mix of portraits and unposed shots makes for a variety of perspectives on the people behind the camera and the circumstances of their work.
The elegant, suited shots of studios in production mode sometimes belie the demands on filmmakers: the Bondi Junction skating rink, much used as a studio in the 30s, had to be vacated at night for skaters, or the Cat Pavilion at the Sydney Showground emptied of heavy film equipment to make way for competitive cats. Bill Trerise, a leading newsreel maker, looks gentlemanly enough in the pictures, but was known as Bloody Bill for his tyrannical behaviour. He won acclaim for a clever strategy to create a slow motion film finish to a Melbourne Cup. He was criticised by local management but the New York office applauded the innovation.
Bill Carly, a leading cameraman who collaborated with Trerise on Jungle Partrol (1944), was furious when Howard Rubie, a young assistant cameraman, posted a quotation about film as art from the great documentarist Howard Grierson on a staff notice board. Carly tore it down and no one on the staff spoke to Rubie for a week. Hugh McInnes, who apparently “took to Trerise with a spanner” at one time, was dismayed by the intrusion of directors and “film society people” in the 50s. Ansara tells us that filmmakers largely comprised left wing Catholics, further bonded by meeting at particular pubs, mateship in often tough working conditions and an emerging need to unionise. This bond was not very accommodating for a young female clapper loader even in the 1970s as Jan Kenny (later a cinematographer and teacher at AFTRS and the only woman in the ACS Hall of Fame) explains in painful detail—the crew waiting for her to fail or drop heavy equipment until she’d proven herself. Not something that would happen today, she says. (Although many women work in film these days, Ansara points out that only 3% of the 700 ACS membership are women.)
Damien Parer, 1943, with New Guinean assistant Cyril and Newman Sinclair camera
Frame enlargement courtesy John Hosking
Damien Parer, 1943, with New Guinean assistant Cyril and Newman Sinclair camera
The contribution of the newsreel, ethnographic and commercial promotional film to the evolution of Australian cinematography is never underestimated by Ansara. The documentation of World War II by the federal government’s Department of Information Film Division (later the Commonwealth Film Unit) expanded the approach to filming through the work of Damien Parer who had trained with Arthur Higgins, a leading cinematographer in the 30s in features and documentaries. Influenced by European filmmakers, Parer proved that the handheld camera could provide authenticity and convincing journalism. His Kokoda Front Line (1942) won an Academy Award. He was killed in battle in 1944. His heritage has been realised in the work of Neil Davis (who died filming a coup in Thailand) and David Brill, particularly in their coverage of the Vietnam War. It was Brill who declared, “I’m a video journalist.” These were cameraman who, as Ansara, points out, constructed stories as they filmed.
Risk is a substantial theme in the book, covering everything from lugging backbreaking equipment to working in appalling weather and cruel locations. Then there are the accidents—Keith Gow, left with the imprint of a camera on his face for the rest of his life when a plane taking off over him dipped in an air-pocket, nearly killing him. Les Walsey recalls shooting a bush fire in the 50s in a suit: “the flames were leaving the railway line and the ash falling on my nylon pop-on shirt and it was going ‘Pshheew! Pshhew!’—holes all over. I ended up with a shirt like a colander. Here we were covering a bush fire in shirts and ties—this is how we dressed because we were professionals.” Howard Rubie admits, “because you had the camera you felt that nothing could happen to you.”
Another recurrent theme is the famed ability of our cinematographers to deal with extremes, and subtleties, of light. Ross Wood says, “When you go overseas and come back again, you notice how hard our light is…those heavy shadows under. I’d like to utilise that midday sun, I think it’s terribly characteristic of this place…this hat with no face underneath it, I’d like to use it: almost a Ned Kelly feel about it, I suppose, the square head with no detail—just a block.”
The lineage theme so strong among cameramen since filmmaking’s inception here continues into the 70s and beyond with Australian directors and cinematographers forming significant teams here and overseas while cinematographers and their crews continue, writes Ansara, to display the characteristic ability to work fast, across genres, in harsh conditions and with a sense of team.
The book gives substantial space to documentary cinematographers including the great innovator Jim Frazier, whose Panavision-Frazier Lens has allowed for intense, stable close-ups and depth of field that have found their way into his work for David Attenborough, Mark Lewis’ Cane Toads: An Unnatural History (1987) and Jurassic Park.
Many other cinematographers are accounted for in Ansara’s history or in numerous images of them at work. The Shadowcatchers is a monumental and generous representation of those skilled artists who work with and behind the camera, largely unknown to the audiences who enjoy and admire their work. Here they are made visible. Ansara and the ACS have proudly celebrated the achievements and legacy of the profession with superb design by Ana May and production by Eddy Jokovich of ARMEDIA, fine writing and superb documentation.
Read Tina Kaufman’s interview with Martha Ansara and Calvin Gardiner in RealTime 108.
Martha Ansara, The Shadowcatchers, ACS, Austcine Publishing, North Sydney, 2012; 288p, soft cover $66, hardbound limited edition signed by Academy Award-winning Australian cinematographers, $250
THE FINAL REPORT OF THE CONVERGENCE REVIEW RECOMMENDS FUNDAMENTAL CHANGES TO THE REGULATION OF MEDIA ENTERPRISES IN AUSTRALIA. INSTEAD OF DIRECTING MOST OF THE REGULATION AT TV AND RADIO LICENSEES, THE REVIEW PROPOSES TO REGULATE ‘CONTENT SERVICE ENTERPRISES.’
The big questions now are whether or not a vulnerable minority government a year away from an election will endorse the plan; which organisations might be covered by the definition of ‘content service enterprises’; and how the complex transition from the current rules to any new ones might be managed.
A government wanting “to examine the operation of media and communications regulation in Australia and assess its effectiveness in achieving appropriate policy objectives” had many places to focus.
It could have concentrated on the ‘socialisation’ of media through applications like Facebook; the proliferation of media channels and the fragmentation of audience choices; or the growing power of media users.
why convergence?
It chose ‘convergence,’ targeting the increasingly blurred boundaries between broadcasting and telecommunications. These are the two sectors of the communications industry around which the most important legislative fences are drawn.
Convergence is not a new concept. For decades, speakers at media conferences have brought Venn diagrams to illustrate the growing overlaps between broadcasting, telecommunications, information technology, publishing, film, music and much else. When radio broadcasting was new, it seemed to be a convergence of wireless and recorded music. Early television was conceptualised as a convergence of radio and cinema. Cable TV brought together TV and telecoms.
Nor is convergence a steady, one-way drive to the sweet spot in those Venn diagrams. Anyone who has watched new enterprises, industry sectors and sub-sectors emerge to exploit opportunities in online and mobile communications might have wondered just when the ‘convergence’ those conference speakers promised would finally show up. When we finally got our media devices down to a laptop, a mobile phone and a TV, along came tablets, a ‘fourth screen.’
more than media
And convergence is not just about media. Print, radio and TV have long looked for territory outside their own borders; other industry sectors see themselves converging with communications. Newspapers got into radio and newspaper/radio operators into television. Later, they bought sporting competitions, venues, ticketing operations, leisure resorts. In the early days of radio, department stores, equipment manufacturers, trade unions and churches set up broadcasting stations. Now, banks are muscling into Facebook.
So convergence is a hard concept and it is not the only thing going on. The early papers produced by the long-running Convergence Review spread out in many directions. They asked almost every question you could ever ask about media, many of them more than once. The final report does not try to answer them all, choosing to concentrate most of its energy on a few big topics that are profoundly affected by ‘convergence.’ These are spectrum management; diversity and competition; respect for community standards in media content; and finally, requirements for Australian production and local news and information.
spectrum management
On spectrum management, the review recommends that spectrum for TV and radio broadcasting be allocated in the same way, for the same duration and at the same price as it is allocated for telecommunications uses like mobile telephony and broadband. To some extent this has already happened, because the large amount of ‘digital dividend’ spectrum that will be released for alternate uses when analogue TV is completely switched off at the end of 2013 will be re-allocated by auction and probably acquired by telecom companies for mobile broadband. The even tougher step is to shift all the spectrum which TV and radio broadcasters continue to use over to a new scheme of allocation and charging.
re-regulation
On the other three major issues, the review recommends a fundamental change to the way broadcasting regulation works. Until now, diversity and competition, respect for community standards and requirements for Australian and local content have all been dealt with through conditions attached to TV and radio licences. When that scheme was put in place, commercial TV and radio stations held a uniquely significant place in the electronic media landscape. ‘Convergence’ and other changes mean this is no longer the case.
Having decided that diversity and competition, respect for community standards and Australian and local content all still matter, and are likely to require regulatory intervention, the Convergence Review had to come up with a structure for it that didn’t depend on the most important electronic media enterprises all holding broadcasting licences.
The concept it produced is the “content service enterprise.” These will focus on “large enterprises that provide professional content services to a significant number of Australians.” They will continue to have their ownership scrutinised more closely than the general competition law allows, although the review proposes replacing most of the current strict cross-media limitations with a more flexible “public interest” threshold for approving mergers. They will also have to “meet community expectations about standards applicable to their content” on matters like sex, violence, accuracy and fairness in news and current affairs and “contribute in appropriate ways to the availability of Australian content.”
content protection
The Convergence Review thinks Australian program genres that need regulatory support in 2012 are still Australian drama, documentary and children’s programs. (PwC data published as part of the report estimates that without the existing quotas, spending on children’s programs would be wiped out completely, spending on adult drama would fall by 90% and on documentaries by 50%.) But “the situation may change in the future and the regulatory environment should be flexible enough to allow for this.”
It wants a “uniform content scheme” under which all content service enterprises have two options: to invest a percentage of their Australian market revenue from professional television-like content in new Australian drama, documentary and children’s content (the “investment option”) or to contribute to a central converged content production fund (the “contribution option”).
Once that scheme is in place, the review wants Australian content quotas abolished; but while the transition is occurring, it wants them changed: first, to increase the commercial TV drama sub-quota by 50% but allow it to be met by programs screened on digital multi-channels as well as main channels, and second, to require subscription TV children’s and documentary channels to spend 10% of their program budgets on new Australian programs, like the movie and drama channels.
who are the content service enterprises?
What all this might mean depends crucially on who the ‘content service enterprises’ are. The proposed definition is intended to catch “only the most substantial and influential entities.” They will be organisations that have control of the professional content they deliver, meet a threshold of a large number of Australian users of that content (proposed to be at least 500,000 unique viewers/users per month), and meet a threshold level of revenue from supplying that professional content to Australians (proposed to be $50 million per year).
The precise thresholds of users and revenue will be determined and periodically reviewed by the communications regulator. Rough calculations included in the report suggest the proposed thresholds are designed to preserve the status quo for now: incumbent broadcasters are caught; Google (more than enough monthly users but not enough revenue according to PwC), Telstra and Apple (not enough monthly users or revenue yet according to PwC, although according to Nielsen, iTunes had a unique monthly audience of 2.8 million as far back as June 2011).
Given the requirements imposed on “content service enterprises,” a big part of the policy battle ahead will be waged by online and mobile media enterprises that have never had to deal with the regulatory apparatus that applied to TV and radio broadcasters.
They are already working hard to ensure the convergence that has taken their platforms and services so deeply and profitably into the lives of consumers does not also lead them into new kinds of public obligation.
The Convergence Review: an independent review established by the Australian Government to examine the policy and regulatory frameworks that apply to the converged media and communications landscape in Australia. March 2012, www.dbcde.gov.au/digital_economy/convergence_review
Heather Mitchell, Jane Harders, Hugo Weaving, Justine Clarke, Geraldine Hakewill, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Sydney Theatre Company
WITH CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE THIN ON THE GROUND IN THE LAST TWO MONTHS, MY ATTENTION WAS ON THEATRE PRODUCTIONS AT THE SYDNEY THEATRE COMPANY AND BELVOIR. IT’S DIFFICULT TO GO TO THE THEATRE THESE DAYS WITHOUT HAVING A META-THEATRICAL EXPERIENCE, THANKS TO CONTINUING DISCUSSION ABOUT RE-INTERPRETATION, ADAPTATION AND HERITAGE IN PRESS REVIEWS, BLOGS AND LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. HAPPILY, THIS SEEMS HEALTHY AND ISSUES ARE UNLIKELY TO BE RESOLVED, EVER.
Resident Belvoir director Simon Stone contributes to the debate with a substantial program note for his remake (I’ve decided to borrow that term from the movies here by way of apt if somewhat indirect analogy) of Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude. He has little to say about the play and much about theatre’s long and undeniable history of adaptation and borrowing—and, one would like to add, wilful plundering and bowdlerising. Surprisingly, despite the considerable success of The Wild Duck and Thyestes, Stone feels the need to mount an argument for his practice, seeing himself as sustaining tradition while at the same time renewing it in terms of our own milieu. Fair enough, but it’s not the fact of such engagement with heritage but whether the result is a gain, an exceptional work in itself. Not only that, but it has to have said something significant about the original itself to make its mutated resurrection worthwhile. I hope for that much.
sydney theatre company: les liaisons dangereuses
The set for the Sydney Theatre Company production of Christopher Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses is an elegant, aristocratic city apartment, of a style originating in the late 18th century and sustained, if less ornately, into the present by the French bourgeoisie and their betters. The costuming, with its expensive, fashionable formality, likewise suggests past and present, if in a more but not too contemporary vein. Alan John’s music equally evokes classical restraint and a moody jazz-inflected modernity. Consequently Sam Strong’s production doesn’t quite live up to the press release claim that he would “acid-wash a familiar story, stripping it back to its essential layers in the intimacy of the Wharf 1 Theatre.” Instead, the overall ambience, if free of frills and courtly etiquette, suggests a cool balance between now and then, impressionistically accentuating historical similarities with regard to upper class indolence, sexual license and corruption.
Hugo Weaving as Valmont finely grades the viscount’s progress from rampant seducer to a man trapped, by love, in his own plotting, if without defining his character as distinctly as, say, he did so memorably with the doctor in Uncle Vanya. Black suit and white shirt in increasing dishabille signals singularity of purpose, lack of ostentation and decline, whereas his co-conspirator, La Marquise de Merteuil is attired (masked even) in a series of elegant gowns. With exquisite near-stillness, Pamela Rabe exudes power and determination, delivering to perfection the Marquise’s rationale for her behaviour—her very vulnerability as a woman in a patriarchal society. It’s significant that she is the only character in the play who reveals a back story, and although it’s Valmont’s dilemma and his death that generate some climactic empathy, it’s the Marquise who epitomises the moral complexities and ironies that Hampton summons out of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ novel of 1782.
This is a straightforward production, safely realised, letting fly the wit inherent in Hampton’s writing and neatly treading the play’s thin line between grim comedy and bleak social commentary. The experience set me thinking that perhaps the play has passed its use-by-date (in form it feels faux historical) or that the casting of 30-somethings as Valmont and La Marquise, closer in age to their young victims, might have been more meaningful and more disturbing. A much more contemporary context than Strong has offered is also conceivable, one further removed from the 18th century than the director has taken it.
belvoir: every breath
Shelly Lauman, Dylan Young, Every Breath, Belvoir
photo Heidrun Löhr
Shelly Lauman, Dylan Young, Every Breath, Belvoir
Benedict Andrews’ stature as a director is in no doubt—his production of Botho Strauss’ Gross und Klein has been a huge success in Sydney, Paris and London, adding to a long list of achievements. In turning to playwriting he has to reach the very benchmarks he has himself established as director, not least when directing his own writing. Every Breath is sparely scripted, cinematic in the brevity of its dialogue and scenes (along with frequent ungainly blackouts) and dominated by an overtly symbolic set design (as if the dysfunctional family the play centres on is likely to be crushed by its wealth as embodied in architecture).
On the page, the play reads as an intriguing screenplay, but on the stage it feels cumbersome, short on words if strong on images, scenes expiring before gaining momentum and performances, whatever their individual merits, lacking ensemble cohesion. That doesn’t mean that Every Breath was entirely lacking. The scenario in itself is worth addressing (before being tossed out by some critics as, in effect, class warfare).
A naive young security guard, Chris (Shelly Lauman), protecting a well-off middle class family facing an unspecified threat, finds himself the object of each member’s projections, not least sexual. He obligingly has sex with everyone, but learns that such relations are limited to the house, to the point where, in a dream he recounts, he experiences himself—or herself—as an object of display. It’s not clear after a while what gender Chris is: it depends who is fantasising. In the end that includes us too (as if it hadn’t all along) as Chris, on a new security job in an empty building and freed from the burden of projections, strips naked alone centrestage. Shortly before this, the father, Leo (John Howard), gives up his writing from which he has become alienated; Olivia (Eloise Mignon) the daughter discovers she can write (if only to create on ongoing fantasy around Chris); while her twin brother Oliver (Dylan Young) is desperately bereft; and the mother, Lydia (Angie Milliken), although revealing more self knowledge than the others, longs too for Chris’ return. This curious aggregation of monologues at the play’s end is more satisfying than much of what has gone before.
Andrews prefaces the playscript with a quotation from Karl Marx explaining the notion of alienated labour. Alienation takes multiple forms in Every Breath: the father whose writing and others’ perception of him no longer make sense; the wife whose loss of a job, “the threat” and Chris have unanchored her, “hollowed her out”; the daughter whose twinness has denied her a sense of difference; the brother who is shy of his sexuality until the security guard arrives; and Chris, the only literal labourer in the scenario, refused identity by the projections of others, until he seizes solitude. He remains a worker not in control of his labour—but what would it be to own ‘security’? As a kaleidoscopic refraction of alienation the play is at its strongest and strangest.
Every Breath bears a broad resemblance to Marxist filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini’s fantastical Teorama (1968), an almost metaphysical foray into alienation in which a young man (not Andrews’ she-he) enters the life of an upper-class family, has sex with all of its members and leaves them to face crises of identity—the father, for example, hands over his factory to his workers and wanders off naked. Perhaps in acknowledgement of Pasolini’s influence, Andrews has the father in Every Breath declare in his final speech, “Before [Chris] came to us my writing had become a factory. Now he’s gone I’ll send the workers home. I’ll unplug the great machines, shred the files in the filing cabinets. I’ll open the gates so anyone can come in and take what they want.” Every Breath is an intriguing work, perhaps only at the first stage of its development in whatever form. Regardless of the production’s failings, the excellent low-key performance by Shelly Lauman as Chris lent the work coherence and gravitas.
belvoir & force majeure: food
Emma Jackson, Kate Box, Food, Belvoir & Force Majeure
photo Heidrun Löhr
Emma Jackson, Kate Box, Food, Belvoir & Force Majeure
Food, written by Steve Rodgers and directed by Rodgers and Kate Champion, is an amiable, intimate fable about aspiration and self-belief focused on two sisters who bond anew. The elder one, Elma (Kate Box), a talented cook (who has given up on finding a male partner), is prodded by hapless younger sister Nancy (Emma Jackson) to transform their humble cafe into a restaurant, aided by an enthusiastic Middle-Eastern immigrant, Hakan (Fayssal Bazzi). Success ensues, but so do complications: Nancy encourages Hakan to court Elma, which he does, out of feelings of sympathy and obligation, but not attraction; overcome by his inauthentic behaviour he leaves. In a cathartic finale, the sisters have to face some incredibly grim truths about themselves and their relationship.
The spare plot is thickened with gently choreographed playfulness (with food or wrestling), not always discernible projections onto a wall of copper cooking pans (or home movies magically manifesting inside saucepans) and informal movement that arises out of the everyday—such as escapist showering and limb-tangling drunkenness. Projections also assist Hakan who, in a stylistic swerve for this production, addresses us directly with a slide show of his lovers (“a string of one and three-night stands”).
Hakan’s jokiness and joyousness, his comic mangling of English and a poetic inclination steer the characterisation towards stereotype, but Bazzi undercuts it by adroitly capturing the man’s sense of failure and loss. Kate Box is admirable as Elma, blunt, wounded and withdrawn (“I’ve disappeared…I can no longer see myself”), and then released, while Jackson subtly reveals a slowly maturing Nancy, an unlikely, but believable agent of change.
belvoir: strange interlude
Strange Interlude set, Simon Stone, Belvoir
photo Heidrun Löhr
Strange Interlude set, Simon Stone, Belvoir
I can’t call it a cyclorama, it’s too sculptural for that, too firm, and the label is demeaningly functional. Robert Cousins’ design for Strange Interlude and Damien Cooper’s lighting of it suggest some eternal, enveloping emptiness in which characters hover as if hologrammed, likely to evaporate, but digitised, seen more sharply than reality might ever allow. It flows smoothly on the horizontal, ignoring the theatre’s right-angled corner walls, and in a subtle curve pours down onto the floor where it appears, at some unimaginable time, to have set. Together Cousins and Cooper have created a stand-alone artwork akin to the elusive new media artefacts of the likes of James Turrell. But it works even better with people inhabiting it as they oscillate between exterior engagement and interior musings, these delivered as easeful asides that, for the most part, work quite effectively (Groucho Marx famously quipped in Animal Crackers in 1930, “Pardon me while I have a strange interlude”). Objects too—a low timber jetty, an electric train set assembled by a child—have a heightened presence in this seemingly ephemeral space in which decades pass.
It’s a pity that this updated version of O’Neill’s 1928 play doesn’t improve the melodramatic plot even though it renders the characters and the dialogue more plausible (and in some cases much more interesting), radically trimming the number and volume of novelistic asides and offering the performers some fine opportunities. For all the apparent modernity of the language and design, the play remains rooted in its essential datedness. So, it’s an interesting curio on which considerable attention has been lavished to some good effect. It is very funny, exactly because the original is melodramatic; but Stone and his performers manage to maintain the emotional ugliness of the scenario while letting the improbabilities fly by as if utterly plausible, so that we feel we are laughing with, not at.
Emily Barclay rightly dominates the first half as Nina Leeds, a petulant, brittle child-woman who has lost her lover to war, her will to live diverted into promiscuity with wounded soldiers, then a wrong marriage and infidelity. She’s less central in the second half, a pity, where loyalty and resignation, played out by Barclay with cool elegance and stillness, dominate, even though her soul still belongs to a long-dead soldier. Instead, we watch the men in her life crumble. Doctor Ned Darrell (Toby Schmitz), an authoritative rationalist sinks into self-pity after having fathered a child with Nina, whom they pass off as her husband’s—the impotent Sam Evans (Toby Truslove in a rich performance of boyish jocularity mutating into drunken, egocentric assertiveness). Completing the despairing trio is novelist Charles Marsden—Mitchell Butel exquisitely realising the transformation from severely repressed mother’s boy into a bitterly alert would-be lover of Nina).
One of the most effecting scenes is between Nina’s son Gordon (Nicholas Bakopoulos-Cooke) and Darrell. The boy hates the attention the doctor lavishes on his mother, while Darrell, faltering inadequately, attempts to form a relationship with his son. Schmitz captures a sense of depressed helplessness at the loss of both love and child, emotionally locked-in except when with the unresponsive Nina. Bakopoulos-Cooke’s Gordon is observant, blunt, determined and self-contained, his wariness of Darrell at once realised as cruel and comic.
Strange Interlude was a well-received stream-of-consciousness experiment in 1928 (it won the Pulitzer prize for Drama) and it remains one now, updated as much as it can be here. Rewarding design, adroit adaptation and fine performances can’t make it something it isn’t, but it is strangely watchable, not least for its marvellous scenography.
sydney theatre company: under milkwood
Paula Arundell, Cameron Goodall, Helen Thomson, Sandy Gore, Bruce Spence, Under Milk Wood, Sydney Theatre Company
photo Heidrun Löhr
Paula Arundell, Cameron Goodall, Helen Thomson, Sandy Gore, Bruce Spence, Under Milk Wood, Sydney Theatre Company
I was 13 when I played First and Second Voices in a high school production of Dylan Thomas’ Under Milkwood (directed by Adelaide man of the theatre Myk Mykyta). Like Jack Thompson and Sandy Gore as the Voices in the STC’s stage account of the radio play, I performed the lines from a mix of memory and reading from a hardbound copy of the script. My young brain simply wasn’t up to the mind bending task of accommodating a seemingly vast prose poem. Perhaps it was the case of older brains in the STC production, or simply a storytelling device, which worked so well. When we were addressed directly, the effect was magical: Thompson’s opening lines spoken on a dark, bare stage, the delivery lucid, the poetry unforced, as he moved slowly to the edge of the stage, taking us gently into the dream world of the Welsh village of Llareggub.
In my copy of the play, the sexy bits had been marked for deletion by the deputy headmaster; needless to say, although sensing the pervasive eroticism of the play, I didn’t understand quite a few of those bits, whereas I know now that, as unlikely as it seems, she certainly did. Kip Williams’ direction preserves all the magic I still recall of the play, reigniting for me its passion, sensuality, playfulness and ghostly chill. Wisely, Williams avoids too much literalising, sustaining the integrity of the radio play’s capacity to generate potent images. Costume changes are minimal, the Voices flow around the villagers, vividly revealing more than we see on stage. Performers slide an armchair, school desks, a bed and Organ Morgan’s organ on and offstage with apt ease, or transform from one character to another in a second or two with a change of hat or unfurling of long hair. No-one adopts a Welsh accent, and the poetry still sings.
The sense of ensemble is strong, everyone shines in this dynamic village of the living and the dead: Drew Forsythe alternating between the benign Reverend Jenkins and the womanising Waldo, Paula Arundell between the licentious Polly Garter and the lovelorn but eternally virginal Myfanwy Price and Mae Rose Cottage (“You just wait. I’ll sin till I blow up!”), Helen Thomson realising sundry idiosyncratic women including the ghost of Rosie Probert (in one of the production’s most affecting scenes), beloved of Captain Cat, beautifully played by Bruce Spence. When not doubling as a village gossip, Spence pairs with Forsythe as the hilariously sad Mr Ogmore and Mr Pritchard, the late husbands of the tyrannical Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard. Sandy Gore drops out of Second Voice to create this daunting figure—an interesting touch that makes Second Voice more a part of the village fantasia. In terms of consistency, it’s an odd gesture since First Voice is offered no such opportunity—not that it would be welcome. However, it does raise the issue of the deployment of the Voices. Thompson and Gore wander through the action or often stand, sometimes awkwardly, to the side of it. I suspect there are opportunities for further integration.
The stage is bare save for the flow of people and furniture, but as day breaks three sets of flower-potted windows appear upstage, through which we see a naturalistic horizon of water and low lying hills, the landscape brightening into bristling daytime and then subsiding into the twilight and night of ghosts—gliding out from between the windows—and ever returning dreams. The apparently simple design by Robert Cousins (set) and Damien Cooper (lighting) lends a painterly aura of solidity and transience to the half-dream world of Llareggub. Likewise, Alan John’s compositions for the songs of Polly Garter and Mr Waldo raise the play’s poetry to an even more transcendent level—particularly with the organ’s Bachian counterpoint to Arundell’s marvellous singing, amplifying at the same time Organ Morgan’s profound love for the great composer (at his wife’s expense). Forsythe’s lamenting baritonal account of Mr Waldo’s childhood is equally moving. Having the composer playing the role of Organ Morgan at his organ onstage lends particular power to these scenes and the mood of the production throughout.
Kip Williams’ Under Milkwood is true to the spirit of Dylan Thomas’ creation: it is wildly funny, tender and melancholy, poetically voiced without force in our own accent and everyday dress inventively deployed (costumes Alice Babidge) and, above all, plays out as an hour and 40 minutes of delicious dreaming we take away with us into our own night.
Sydney Theatre Company: Les Liaisons Dangereuses, writer Christopher Hampton from the novel by Choderlos de Laclos, director Sam Strong, performers Justine Clark, Geraldine Hakewill, Jane Harders,James Mackay, Ashley Ricardo, Heather Mitchell, TJ Power, Pamela Rabe, Hugo Weaving, set Dale Ferguson, costumes Mel Page, lighting Hartley TA Kemp, composer Alan John, sound design Steve Francis; STC Wharf 1, Sydney, April 5-June 9; Belvoir, Every Breath, writer, director Benedict Andrews, performers John Howard, Shelly Lauman, Eloise Mignon, Angie Milliken, Dylan Young, set design, costumes Alice Babidge, lighting Nick Schlieper, composer Oren Ambarchi, sound design Luke Smiles; Belvoir Street Theatre, Sydney, March 28-April 29; Belvoir & Force Majeure: Food, writer, co-director Steve Rodgers, co-director Kate Champion, performers Kate Box, Emma Jackson, Fayssal Bazzi, design Anna Tregloan, AV, lighting Martin Langthorne, composer, sound designer Ekrem Mulayim; Downstairs, Belvoir Street Theatre, April 26-June 3; Belvoir, Strange Interlude, writer, director Sam Stone after Eugene O’Neill, performers Akos Armont, Nicholas Bakopoulos-Cooke alternating with Callum McManis, Emily Barclay, Mitchell Butel, Kris McQuade, Eloise Mignon, Anthony Phelan, Toby Schmitz, Toby Truslove, designer Robert Cousins, lighting Damien Cooper costumes Mel Page, composition and sound design Stefan Gregory; Belvoir Street Theatre, May 5-June 17; Sydney Theatre Company, Under Milkwood, writer Dylan Thomas, director Kip Williams, performers Paula Arundell, Ky Baldwin, Alex Chorley, Drew Forsythe, Cameron Goodall, Sandy Gore, Alan John, Drew Livingston, Bruce Spence, Jack Thompson, Helen Thomson, designer Robert Cousins, costumes Alice Babidge, lighting Damien Cooper, music Alan John, sound design Steve Francis: Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, May 26-July 7
ARTS HOUSE, A MAJOR CITY OF MELBOURNE CONTEMPORARY ARTS INITIATIVE, IS BASED AT THE OLD NORTH MELBOURNE TOWN HALL. PERFORMANCES ARE PRESENTED IN THE HALL, AT THE ADJOINING WAREHOUSE AND THE NEARBY MEAT MARKET. ARTS HOUSE HAS BECOME A PIVOTAL CULTURAL CENTRE FOR THE CURATED STAGING OF INNOVATIVE LOCAL, NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL PERFORMANCE. I SPOKE WITH CREATIVE PRODUCER ANGHARAD WYNNE-JONES ABOUT ARTS HOUSE AND ITS PROGRAM FOR THE SECOND HALF OF 2012.
What attracted you to the job as Creative Producer at Arts House?
In 2008 I came back from the UK where I’d been artistic director of the London International Festival of Theatre [LIFT] for three and a half years, and one of the things I really noted was how exciting it was to feel that there was a venue in the city that was presenting work that felt internationally aligned. There’s not a huge percentage of the work that is international, for obvious reasons, but international work was consistently being programmed. It was of a scale and scope that connected really strongly for me with the way that artists were working in the city, which I think can be quite different from some of the work we see within the international arts festival scenarios. There it’s often brilliantly spectacular, big scale and impressive in other ways but I really enjoyed that sense that Arts House was a kind of connecter on the international network of contemporary practice.
Also, it’s interesting for me that Arts House is a council venue with a sense of history, of being connected to a residential community in North Melbourne and having become a cultural centre. I was interested in re-locating some of those connections between the venue’s historical civic function and its cultural function.
Is the Meat Market still a significant part of your ambit?
It is and it’s a most amazing asset. It’s owned by Arts Victoria but managed by the City, which cannot invest its own programming funds into the Meat Market. Any program we do there has to come from funds outside of the City. It’s an incredible resource both for the city and for the state but it is clearly under-used currently. I think that’s generally understood by all of the stakeholders. I feel confident that there will be an investment in it as a really critical cultural space.
We’ve also got a new space that’s just come online—the Warehouse, just out the back of the Town Hall. It’s very small with a capacity of 60 but already we have a program of work called Warehouse Salon where artists can talk about their work, have a beer and a pizza.
Angharad Wynne-Jones
courtesy Arts House
Angharad Wynne-Jones
You have a strong interest in the environment and its survival. Is that reflected in your directorship? [Wynne-Jones is currently the Producer of TippingPoint Australia—an international network of scientists and artists engaging with climate change; RT100]
Yes. I think the City of Melbourne—also the City of Sydney—is exemplary in terms of government organisations in setting standards. The target for City of Melbourne is zero emissions by 2020. That’s a necessary framework to be working within. Culturally, I’m really interested in how artists engage with the idea of radical carbon reduction and what the impact of that might be on the way we make work, the way we participate in it and engage with it. If there is anything not completely terrifying about climate change it is the opportunity to re-imagine some of those old modes of cultural production that have serviced a particular kind of economy, again, often at the expense of the individual artist. This is an opportunity to re-imagine some of those relationships.
Arts House has been a player in some large events such as the Dance Massive contemporary dance festival. Is that still within your purview?
It is. When I first came into the position at Arts House, there was a kind of ‘All Change’ of artistic directors in terms of the Dance Massive consortium. Marian Potts took over at Malthouse, Angela Conquet at Dancehouse and Minerva Draeger at Ausdance. You could have imagined the model might be up for discussion—and certainly we’ve talked about it at length—but there’s no doubt that there’s 100% commitment to the event. It’s one of the most successful and interesting models of consortium and festival collaboration around. It’s a brilliant way of developing audiences, enabling artists to re-present work that maybe hasn’t been seen by a large audience, facilitating those connections and critical discussion between artists and audiences and reviewers and also inviting international presenters to come in and see some of the really extraordinary work that we have here.
Dance Massive combines with the National Dance Forum creating a really strong focus that is very exciting. We just had the Expression of Interest submissions for Dance Massive 2013 and we received 60, which is great in that it shows the sector’s aspirations.
Australia has been so long in need of this kind of event. Through a combination of forces Dance Massive has been quite a success.
Thankfully, we’ve now had confirmation from Arts Victoria that they are going to be partners this time. The overall budget is incredibly small for an international festival but I think the idea of working with venues who know their own audiences, who have their own connections into the artistic community, and really capitalising on that, I think that’s really interesting.
We’re coming up to the second half of the year, what does Arts House have lined up for us?
It’s multi-art form and across different scales. Its distinctive character is its very multifaceted-ness which creates its dynamic. We’ve got companies like Melbourne’s Atticus—an amazing ensemble of young musician/composers—Phoebe Green, Zac Johnston, Lizzy Welsh and Judith Hamann. They’re working with Jon Rose (see interview RT108) on Metapraxis, presenting a series of concerts over three nights. They have a nose for ways that new music can appeal to broader audiences and a very strong performative approach to their work. I think it’s a really good crossover for Arts House audiences. There’s a whole generation of emerging artists like Zoe Scoglio, a really interesting young performance maker, installation maker, sculptor and video artist who is creating a work, Shifting Ground, that‘s come through the CultureLab project.
Then we’ve got Back to Back. They’re doing Democratic Set (RT101), which is screening as part of Mobile States. Their other work is a performance that uses the text of an evangelical American pastor called Hell House, which is apparently one of the most performed community plays in the United States. It’s a so-called “morality” tale—anti abortion, anti-gay, anti-drugs, with very vivid re-tellings, tableaux that show the audience the path to eternal damnation [resulting] from certain behaviours. The pastor who wrote it has freely given the licence to anyone who wants to produce the play. So Back to Back are going to be presenting it along with a number of community participants from Geelong. They’ll do three presentations of the work with three public forums—on Provocation, Morality and Belief after each showing. We’re working with ABC Radio National’s Rachael Kohn and Scott Stephens and former ABC RN presenter Peter Mares, now at the Grattan Institute.
To me it’s really exciting that Back to Back have the integrity and the perspective to be able to look at that material and really engage in a discussion on the issues it raises. [Otherwise] it would be potentially very hard to have, I think, a fulsome discussion around it.
Are they likely to parody Hell House?
No, I think they’ll use it as an anthropological object—’This is the work, now let’s talk about what’s embedded within it; what are its assumptions?’ I think [Artistic Director Bruce Gladwin] is really fascinated that this piece of right wing propaganda is one of the most popularly performed pieces of community art in the world. Why is it that the Left is not able to articulate its views in that way as successfully? There are so many things to unpick. We’re very excited to be hosting that. Democratic Set is a lovely companion piece, a celebration of diversity in every way. Its intention is for very different people to have visibility and to express themselves. I suppose in that way it is the perfect counterpoint to Hell House.
What else do you have on the bill?
We have Black Lung doing DOKU RAI (“you, dead man, I don’t believe you”) a piece they’re working on with artists from East Timor. I actually missed out on the Black Lung explosion, as I was overseas at the time. But you can still feel the ripples and the resonances of their earlier work. Talking to director Thomas Wright about this piece it feels like it’s definitely a deepening and development of their work. They’re engaging in intercultural exchange but absolutely clearly stating that they are collaborating as artists—their starting point is the creative exchange and not necessarily the political scenario around that. It’ll be another very challenging work and it’s something that’s also happening at the Darwin and Brisbane Festivals with Arts House as a co-producer.
We also have a collaboration with Melbourne Festival, presenting Sydney artist Jeff Stein and his work Impasse, a piece he’s developed with William McClure and Denis Beaubois. It’s an installation created out of massive foam blocks. It’s a one-on-one experience, an invitation to find your way through the ‘laboratory’ of these massive shapes impregnated with sound and visual installations. At the same time we have the [performance installation] work, Hold (RT101). I experienced this at Performance Space in 2010. David Cross is the artist and he invites the audience to enter a huge inflatable structure. These will be two interesting works to experience side-by-side.
Impasse and Hold demand a certain physical courage and emotional tenacity from the audience, which feel like appropriate skills to be rehearsing at this particular time.
At the end of the year we have Going Nowhere, an ideas laboratory for artists and others to think about ways we might imagine international cultural exchange without anyone getting on a plane.
I know the carbon footprint issue is a subject close to your heart.
That’s right. We’re working with five Australian artists including Willoh S Weiland from Aphids, Sarah Rodigari and Dan Koop and One Step at a Time [a Melbourne-based group of artists who create participatory, locative and site responsive works. Eds]. They’ve each identified their international collaborators and they’ll be developing ideas together and presenting draft concepts at this three-day event.
Your program reflects the changing role of the audience over the last two decades. The work is increasingly experiential but also offers thoughtful, practical engagement.
A lot of the works in this program are really reliant on an audience to complete them—to be part of a forum after a performance or to step into work designed for the experience of one person, as with Impasse or Hold. There’s a really strong commitment to the relationship with the audience.
Also in the Arts House program are: Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey’s Gauge, Laura Caesar and Malcolm Whitaker’s Star******s and Christine Johnson and Lisa O’Neill’s RRAMP.
THE PUBLICITY PHOTOGRAPH FOR BRINK PRODUCTIONS’ LAND AND SEA IS EVOCATIVE. THE LANDSCAPE IS UNMISTAKEABLY SOUTH AUSTRALIAN, JUST SOUTH OF ADELAIDE, I GUESS. THE DRY LAND FORM IS LOW, THE FLAT SEA IS SHALLOW, AND THE SKY IS BRIGHT WHITE-BLUE. IN THE FOREGROUND, A FIGURE IN PYJAMAS SITS IN A BATHTUB, HEAD TURNED TO THE HORIZON, AND ROWS WITH TREE BRANCHES AS OARS AS IF OUT TO SEA.
The composition of this photograph encodes the settler lifestyle of Australia. Between land and sky the sea intervenes as the past-and-future medium of arrival and departure. In other Australian plays, I have learnt to read this turning of the face to the horizon, to where sea and sky meet in the beyond, as a white man’s aspiration, a neo-spiritual gesture that would transcend the hard politics of the land.
A publicity photograph is not performance. In the flow of production, it is created early on. It announces an aesthetic impetus, but does not govern the direction. Yet visual meanings are associative, part of a chain of meanings that seep into the experience of stage action and set design. In Nicki Bloom’s new play there is a beach. A man is washed ashore. His face is washed and, in a ritual, whipped with wet branches from a tree. Later there is an imaginary bathtub. But the script never settles on the image. It is also quite elusive in signifying time and place.
Wendy Todd’s design for Land and Sea is beautifully conceived. The Queen’s Theatre is Adelaide’s oldest; its old walls and iron roof enclose a deep expanse of space. Our chairs are arranged half-way around a circle of pale sand enclosed in billowing white drapes. At first, the curtains remain drawn. We watch the first scene play out through diaphanous panels. These are removed, creating wave-like scallops, defining the edge of a circus ring space. Later the curtains are fully raised, and then the action partly transitions into a realistic box set.
Director Chris Drummond explains that he and Bloom share an interest in the contemporary theatre of German director Christoph Marthaler (see RT76, p8). The elusive play of time and place in Bloom’s script suits the post-dramatic. But this production also shares its tent-theatre aesthetic and Brechtian musicality with the legacy of the ‘new wave’ Sydney-style. Actors entering and exiting mid-way through the audience recalls the distinctive architecture of the Stables and Belvoir. There are stylistic echoes of the colonial plays of the 1970s, John Bell’s Shakespeares at Nimrod, Louis Nowra’s The Golden Age, Michael Gow’s Away and Neil Armfield’s production of Cloudstreet. The costuming is loose, unbuttoned, in the pale earth colours of the colony. Elemental props—a basket of eggs, a ukulele, cardboard signs, a bottle—are handled with simple theatricality.
Land & Sea, Brink Productions
photo Chris Herzfeld
Land & Sea, Brink Productions
The performers play character strings in related stories, starting with a settler scene where food is scarce and lighting is by hurricane lamp. Mr Greene (Rory Walker) sends his daughter Vera (Danielle Catanzariti) to gather eggs, and colludes with neighbour Essie (Jacqy Phillips) to inhibit Vera’s excitement when Poor Tom (Thomas Conroy) is washed up on the beach. Next the settler story translates into a family melodrama of displaced aristocracy and misrecognised relations with King Billy (Walker), Queen Esther (Phillips), Prince Tomason (Conroy) and his lost love Vera the True (Catanzariti). Later, in the present, the young lovers are homeless, strangers to each other, on the beach and cold—with only alcohol, Hawaiian melodies and their imaginations to keep them warm.
Music is omnipresent: medieval ostinatos, Christmas lullabies, an aria from Gluck’s Orfeo, French nursery rhymes, echoes of Dietrich and Satie. These snatches are delivered by the performers—Jacqy Phillips sings throaty cabaret in French, German and Russian—with Hilary Kleinig on cello, piano and sound effects. But this is ‘post-melodramatic’ theatre: the music doesn’t amplify the characters’ emotions; it heightens the performers’ contributions to scenography.
Beyond the sand-circle and white curtains, the box set is hidden with black flats. The reveal is somewhat clumsy. But the scene set in this house—with its 1930s furnishings, its dark wooden doors and window frames, its wartime speeches on the radio and a ringing telephone that delivers death—is the play’s most imaginative transportation. I enjoyed the lurch of this phase shift into a different space. I wanted to move with the production into the house—and then onto the land. But, in the spirit of circular completion, the performers are lured back onto the sand to gaze—beyond us, through us—to the horizon of sea and sky.
Brink Productions, Land & Sea, writer Nicki Bloom, director Chris Drummond, performers Rory Walker, Danielle Cantanzariti, Jacqy Phillips, Thomas Conroy, designer Wendy Todd, music director Hilary Kleinig, lighting designer Geoff Cobham, producer Kay Jamieson; Queen’s Theatre, Adelaide, May 12-26
TRAGICALLY, IN DECEMBER 2011, WE LOST OUR DEAR FRIEND AND COLLEAGUE ROSIE LALEVICH. HUNDREDS GATHERED TO REMEMBER AND CELEBRATE ROSIE’S PASSIONATE LIFE IN TWO BEAUTIFUL, EMOTIONAL CEREMONIES—ONE AT ROOKWOOD CREMATORIUM AND ANOTHER AS ROSIE’S ASHES WERE SCATTERED IN THE BLUE SEA AT CLOVELLY, A PLACE SHE LOVED. HERE WE SHARE SOME OF THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF ROSIE’S LIFE WITH THE GREATER PERFORMANCE COMMUNITY, MANY OF WHOM WORKED WITH HER AS WE DID AND CAME TO KNOW AND LOVE HER TOO.
Rosie was born in 1955 in Sydney. At first, with her shock of black hair, it was thought she was a boy, but very soon after it was confirmed this was a girl. And what a girl! Rosie loved telling us this story. She grew up in Haberfield, working after school behind the counter in her Macedonian-Australian parents’ fish shop. But from age 14 Rosie dreamed of becoming an actor. She even fantasised about her stage name—Rosie Candice Lalevich—inspired by the beautiful, blonde Candice Bergen. Rosie would become the dark version!
In 1975 she relocated to Adelaide and joined the Saturday Company where she proved to be an adept ensemble player from the outset, beginning with an energetic performance in Helmut Bakaitis’ epic production Carlotta & Maximillian for the 1976 Adelaide Festival. In 1977 she was engaged by Roger Chapman to appear in Care ‘n’ Control with Magpie Theatre in Education.
In 1983 Rosie graduated in Drama from the Victorian College of the Arts. During her time there, she forged many lifelong relationships both personal and creative that laid the foundations and provided the direction for a creative life that would cross many diverse theatre forms and functions. She later teamed up with fellow Magpie Val Levkowicz to co-write, produce and perform the groundbreaking Ethnic Au Go Go (Spoleto Fringe Festival and Melbourne Festival, 1987) which prefigured the boys’ Wogs Out of Work. She was one of the co-founders of the Melbourne Women’s Season for the Spoleto Fringe Festival. Later she performed in and co-devised with Nöelle Janaczewska and Khristina Totos Crossing the Water (an adaptation of Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, Performance Space, 1988) and in Tess Lyssiotis’ Forty Lounge Café (1990), the first production in the new CUB Playbox Theatre in Melbourne.
Rosie always shared her political and spiritual leanings with her audiences and the industry, to the extent of lobbying the unions about more multicultural writing and performing opportunities. To this end she secured the rights and funding to produce Anthony Minghella’s A Little Like Drowning (Belvoir Street Theatre, Sydney 1992). This production launched Teatro di Migma, a company of NESB artists she co-founded. With Literature Board support, Teatro di Migma commissioned Louis Nowra’s Miss Bosnia, which premiered at La Boite in Brisbane (1995). Set in a Bosnian refugee camp, this was a work that spoke to Rosie’s political heart. She was always strongly motivated by the need to communicate the reality of women’s lives as well as those of oppressed minorities. Works such as Eve Ensler’s Necessary Targets (Darlinghurst Theatre, 2003) reinforced Rosie’s prowess as a theatre producer. Necessary Targets, in which she also performed, toured to the CUB Malthouse (2005) and was nominated for a Sidney Myer Award for best drama. In the same year she was nominated for the Ros Bower Memorial Award.
Squeezing in a postgraduate degree in theatre at UNSW, Rosie also produced two highly successful V-Day events, the first a benefit performance of Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues to raise money to stop violence against women and girls. In 2004 she produced Sydney V Day at the Footbridge Theatre, a benefit production with over 45 performers. Another of Rosie’s many talents was the ability to bring together a varied and wonderful assortment of people. She did this in both her professional and personal life. Her passionate ideas and love of life were infectious!
In 2002 she relished playing the role of Caliban in Lee Lewis’s production of the Tempest at New Theatre. Her final and wonderful performance was in Missing the Bus to David Jones with Theatre Kantanka (2009) a work she proudly helped to develop and that dealt with another vulnerable group, the aged. Rosie dedicated her performance to her late and beloved mother, Tasa Lalevich.
Rosie Lalevich’s political integrity and creative intelligence brought us some profound theatrical works. Her great love of life was always the source of her inspiration—and, through her, of ours. We miss you Rosie.
“… when you left, a strip of reality broke
upon the stage through the very opening
through which you vanished:
Green, true green
true sunshine, true forest…” Rilke
In RealTime 107, John Bailey wrote in “Ethical ventriloquism,” his review of Strands, “Given the abundance of outstanding actors with perceived disabilities in Australia today, is it problematic to cast an abled actor in the role and risk denying employment to someone whose opportunities on the stage are already unfairly limited? I think so, with qualifications.”
He concluded: “…disability isn’t merely gestured to here; whatever the reality behind the production, its fictional world produces sincere insights into the complexities of living with a disability, while working this into a narrative that is never itself defined by that disability. It’s not patronising, and the excellence of the production itself goes some way to alleviating concern. But, for me, it’s not an entirely comfortable work.”
to john bailey, may 7
John
In your review of Strands you write of the number of performers with perceived disabilities in Melbourne and why it is problematic not to cast one in that role in Peta Brady’s play.
To me that is a tenuous argument, for in the same vein you would have to cast a lesbian to play a lesbian, wouldn’t you? Or a wife beater to play a wife beater? Or an amputee to play an amputee? Or a cancer sufferer by a cancer sufferer? Where do you want to stop?
The point is that an actor was chosen for that role because the production didn’t seem to me primarily to be about the level of (dis)ability or what have you, but more about the sisters and their relationship in the wake of their mother’s death. The disability of one sister is entwined within that character—yet the greater drama concerns the relationship between the two sisters.
I understand what you are saying in that it should be a done thing that opportunities are afforded artists across the spectrum, but for a small show by an emerging or developing writer—at a venue like La Mama—the main concern is trying to get the thing on in the first place, struggling to work against severely limited resources as opposed to funded companies such as Back To Back who are actually engaged with the sort of work that has a basis in the experiences and abilities of those it chooses to work with.
If Peta was going to attempt to make work with a disabled performer, could that performer pull off the role in the way it was performed? Potentially, but this would involve an entirely different set of circumstances—and most likely a different outcome. This is a contentious issue, and I welcome further discussion on it. Angus Cerini
to angus cerini, may 21
Hi Angus,
Thanks for responding to my comments on Strands. They were intended as provocation rather than criticism, precisely because I think there’s a conversation that can be had now that’s worth having, and in the past might not have been possible at all. Once upon a time the idea that a female character could be played by a woman wasn’t very popular; a hundred years ago in Melbourne there was nothing politically incorrect about white Australians playing Indigenous Australians. Things changed, and people began to explore the ways that power is bound up in these kinds of representation. I’m really interested in the lines of power and access that we deal with today.
That’s why the idea of finding the best person to play the role is never simple, because there are so many barriers that different people face well before they’re allowed a chance to audition, or make their way onto a director’s radar, or even go to see a performance themselves. Strands allowed me to think about this, because it’s very much (and very effectively) about the experience of living with a disability, for both characters. The production made me contemplate the invisible barriers these sisters face everyday, and being someone with a fair investment in theatre I inevitably situated these considerations in the broader environment of disability and the arts in Melbourne today.
Of course, my raising all of this in the context of an independent production at La Mama is deeply problematic because a show such as this faces its own barriers—it’s not the Melbourne Theatre Company or Malthouse Theatre or the like. That’s why, again, I didn’t intend to be seen to be criticising Strands itself. It’s a ridiculously difficult endeavour to mount an independent production, and I don’t think artists who are themselves trying to deal with all of these obstacles should necessarily feel responsible for changing the landscape of Australian theatre at the same time.
I guess my point was that there’s a lot of change occurring—as you note, there are companies working with artists with disabilities that are producing (what I think is) astonishing work. And that’s political. It was always political, but now we’re talking about it, which is a good thing. I want to see where that conversation leads us, and pay attention to who’s listening in.
interactive bicycle-power lighting installation in the Long Gallery, Frog Peck and Bluebottle
photo Craig Opie
interactive bicycle-power lighting installation in the Long Gallery, Frog Peck and Bluebottle
THE BIG WEEKEND CELEBRATIONS OF THE 35TH YEAR OF OPERATION FOR SALAMANCA ARTS CENTRE OFFERED A POTENTIAL OVERLOAD OF EXPERIENCES. THE EVENT WAS TRULY A HYDRA; ONE COULD BE TREATED TO A WONDERFUL PARADE-PAGEANT THAT TRUNCATED 35 YEARS INTO A PERFORMANCE BY EVENT PRODUCER IAN PIDD, OR TO A VERY OBNOXIOUS BUT EXCITING ANTI-ART PROTEST BY THE WELCOME PARTY, WHICH ALSO DUG INTO THE HISTORY OF THE BUILDING THAT NOW HOUSES THE ARTS CENTRE, OR YOU COULD READ LETTERS FROM HOBART EX-PATS EXPLAINING WHY THEY NO LONGER LIVE IN THE PLACE.
The idea that somehow, somewhere, the piss was pretty actively being taken loomed large over the events in and around the centre on the final weekend of March. It was ostensibly an anniversary, and while it qualifies as a milestone, who celebrates a 35th? Still, it had been five years since the last celebratory shindig, Dream Masons, and it did seem about time for a different kind of party and this is what Hobart got: a series of events that seemed to wish to quibble with the notion of what an event in an art centre might be.
The Big Weekend also aimed to give the Arts Centre something of an overhaul, to turn it inside out and have a good look at its innards and secret bits. Being a heritage building and a warehouse has given the actual structure a design that seems chaotic at worst and can charitably be described as eccentric—there are stairs and corridors and tiny rooms and quite enormous spaces all hidden away around corners and in roofs. The well-known spots, like the Peacock Theatre, The Long Gallery and the Courtyard where musicians busk every Friday evening (elaborate busking indeed, but busking it is) are familiar to all and were used but avoided: the thrills and intrigue were to be found elsewhere.
Friday night launched proceedings with a big mob of bands playing up and down and around Kelly’s Steps. The bands on the steps squeezed into the corner as the usual slightly bemused Salamanca diners and drinkers wandered past. The bands further up, in a garden, rocked right on with people risking life and limb, bouncing off the sandstone. No harm was done to flesh or masonry although a few got minor neck injuries from watching bands two storeys above Kelly’s Garden for too long, but this didn’t deter the revelling.
Dirt Cheap
photo Allana Blizzard Jones
Dirt Cheap
Salamanca Market, itself an institution that has developed along with the Arts Centre, has, to all and sundry, grown somewhat staid: there are still, and will always be, great stalls there, but there are a few too many generic stalls selling ‘World’s Best Dad’ T-shirts. The opportunity this afforded for satire was not missed by the Big Weekend crew: phantom stalls appeared, mostly created by artist Elizabeth Woods. These hybrid works were almost the pick of the entire event: one stall sold sample bags of Genuine Tasmanian Dirt, with proper labels, priced according to rarity. You could pick up a precious handful of red-brown grit from the legendary Queenstown gravel footy oval. Across the way was the tap water stall—again, professionally labelled and presented. Tap Water from more affluent Hobart suburbs cost extra, and given the looming introduction of water meters—something very new in Hobart—the comment could not have been better timed. Capping it was a carefully labelled “Useless Object” stall with exactly the sort of packaging one encounters in a great many craft shops the country over. The straight-faced presentation carried it off, and gossip suggests ‘regular’ stall holders were annoyed indeed. Good work Elizabeth Woods.
Saturday evening presented the focus event of the weekend, Space Invaders. There were performances all through the centre, far too many for any one person to take in, which had the effect of creating enigmas and excited gossip. Some queued with determination to ride Tristan Stoward’s bicycle around the Long Gallery space in the dark (the bike had a light, powered by effort—the harder you pedalled, the more it glowed). Others concentrated on seeing various burlesque acts. You could get lost in the rather wonderful John Bowling Memorial 70s Techno room. This was a great spot, filled with artefacts like really old, nostalgia inducing gaming machines, vinyl players made of that dreadful fake wood veneer stuff and a slide project, which produced a cascade of historical images from the Arts Centre’s archives. Almost unnoticed throughout the evening were tiny touches that noted what had been going on in this diverse space for the last 35 years. There was a lot to see and a lot to miss, but this was the real achievement of the event: it was truly a chance to choose your own adventure.
A subtle presentation, The Occupant by Briony Kidd and Jane Longhurst, was a standout. A small audience was led deep into a storage area and towards an encounter with—well, it’s hard to say, but the character in question (expertly created by Longhurst) appeared to be an elderly bag lady living amidst hoarded items deep within a closet. Sinister and yet harmless, this small performance was perfectly formed, quiet, intense and very memorable—creepy but not too seriously.
Also worth mentioning is the exuberant Luke George. Clad in vibrant orange, he emerged from beneath a vast pile of beanbags in the Salamanca Arts Centre Courtyard, dancing with vacuum cleaners and leading the audience in a sun worshipping all-in dance routine. This bold experimental dancer takes quite bizarre work to the masses with a bravery that could be confronting if it wasn’t so funny. There’s a lot to say about what Roberts does, but the key to his Big Weekend moment was his ability to hold a crowd in what was a chaotic mess made of history, rumour and a bit of satire. If the point was to invite people to look at the building itself and see its potential, the Big Weekend was a success; but if you just wanted a fun event filled with some really odd and thrilling moments, you could have that too. Never has the cliché “something for everyone” been quite so well realised, and subverted.something wild for everyone
Salamanca Arts Centre: SAC35—The Big Weekend, programmers Martyn Coutts, Ian Pidd, Sam Routledge; Hobart, March 30-April 1
Greatly admired in the Adelaide and Sydney Film Festivals, Michelangelo Frammartino’s Le Quattro Volte (The Four Times; 2010) is “a sublime fiction that does away with language and conventional plotting, tracking the mysterious transmission of a soul from nature to man to domesticated animal to tree and—via ritual and artful rural manufacture—to fire, smoke and charcoal. All of this is achieved without any sense of religiosity (a seasonal church pageant is quite comical if juxtaposed with a moment of poignancy) and constantly surprises with its unpredictability and glorious cinematography. We’ll certainly now regard goats in a different light, observed here with the same acuity usually given human subjects.” RT102
3 copies courtesy of Madman Entertainment
ZONA: A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room
A remarkable book about the film experience, ZONA is UK writer Geoff Dyer’s acclaimed personal account of his relationship with Andrei Tarkovsky’s classic film Stalker. As Dyer recounts the events of the film and evokes its imagery, he spins a web of rich associations with other films, the nature of cinema-going, growing up, his girlfriends, stories about the making of Stalker, the role of boredom in film, Tarkovskian suspense and much else. It’s also very funny, hypercritical of other people’s favourite films (including Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia) and informed by vast cultural knowledge. As Tom Redwood writes in this edition, “What Dyer has offered by piggybacking on a masterpiece is an extension of Tarkovsky’s artistic project, a quite literal fulfilment of the creative contract Tarkovsky makes with his (devoted) viewers whereby the artist obliges the audience to…think on, further than has been stated…[putting] the audience on a par with the artist” (see review). ZONA is an entertaining provocation.
3 copies courtesy of Text Publishing
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“WHAT IS A REVELATION?” J DARK ASKS ME. “A DOOR OPENS IN FRONT OF YOU AND YOU HAVE TO GO THROUGH IT, THERE IS NO OTHER WAY TO MOVE FORWARD.” “WHAT DOES IT FEEL LIKE?” “A WEIGHT BEING TAKEN OFF YOUR SHOULDERS.” “WHAT IS THE TEMPERATURE AT YOUR SHOULDERS?” “THEY ARE COOL.” “AND COLOUR?” “BLUE.”
I was anxious about attending this show. In high-stress, intimate situations, we tend to rely on our social masks. This is one-on-one, site-specific participatory performance aimed at de-activating these masks. With carefully worded, probing questions J Dark asks us to reveal the warmth under our facades. Like a matryoshka doll, layer after layer is yielded.
After scheduling an appointment with J Dark you receive a calling card and an SMS giving you directions to a venue. It begins to feel like something between a spy drop-off and a clinical appointment; a dark laneway leads to a waiting room with a yellow envelope with a form to fill out. J Dark arrives and you travel by lift to another floor.
Performer Melanie Jame Walsh is a confident and reassuring conductor; this is her second turn as J Dark, having performed at Sydney’s Underbelly Festival last year. There’s nobody better to lead you down the rabbit hole, because the night becomes surreal and unflinchingly personal. Wearing a dark pantsuit, J Dark’s voice is thoughtful and affected as she asks you questions like, “Do you have something to hold you up? Is it a system or a structure?” She steers conversation along this almost psychoanalytic line of questioning.
This is art as therapy and it’s intimate and risky, almost like a first date. We kneel at a mirror and she asks me to talk about my face while she takes off her ‘sexy librarian’ glasses and bobbed wig. Losing her earlier affected tone, she asks me whether she has changed. The clothing is symbolic of our own layers and personas. A table of hats offers a chance for me to find a costume for a newly discovered persona. Similarly, J Dark’s gradual disrobing down to a slip reflects the inner world we are heading into.
Walking through corridors, doors and up staircases we go both deeper into the strange Victorian fun-house depths of Arts House, as well as into the crucial question—what makes us unique? Everything is up for analysis; beliefs and desires are turned over and need to be backed up. I choose a matryoshka doll from an array of displayed objects on a hallway table. It seems an apt metaphor, as does my earlier admission that a revelation is like walking through a door. Just how much of this performance did I direct?
By the end of 50 minutes, unguarded, I lie down on a makeshift bed in an attic and sing an 18th century Russian lullaby to a stranger. J Dark returns the favour and croons more adeptly. Resisting her enigmatic charisma and kindness is almost impossible; we relish the chance to reveal ourselves.
An appointment with J Dark, performer, writer, creator Melanie Jame Walsh, director, writer, dramaturg Katerina Kokkinos-Kennedy, Triage live art collective in association with Savage Amusement, Arts House, Melbourne, April 18-May 6
Katia Molino, Neridah Waters, Jo Turner, Railway Wonderland
photo Grant MacIntyre
Katia Molino, Neridah Waters, Jo Turner, Railway Wonderland
A WONDERLAND USUALLY DESCRIBES A PLACE, REAL OR IMAGINARY, WHERE CURIOUS, SOMETIMES BEAUTIFUL THINGS HAPPEN. LEWIS CARROLL’S ALICE STORIES ARE THE CLASSICS OF A GENRE CHARACTERISED BY STRANGE JOURNEYS SHIFTING FROM THE REAL TO THE IMAGINARY, JUMPING ACROSS TIME AND DISPLAYING NOT A LITTLE NONSENSE.
Lismore railway station, the site for NORPA’s new collaboratively devised production Railway Wonderland is a very real place. Abandoned in 2004, a fading icon from another time, the station now sits idle except for a bus that drops by to ferry commuters onto the Sydney-Brisbane line in another town.
Approaching the station, there is a buzz. The audience is ushered across a walkway to seating above the rails. Looking back to the platform is like viewing the scene from a passing train. Through large windows, the waiting room is lit for the arrival of three present-day characters, there to catch the bus. Johnny Nasser’s George, a laid-back, 30-something hippie, is suitably familiar; so too, is Neridah Waters’ loud yet frail teen runaway Kelsie. Then there is Leonard, whose compulsive behaviours become a clever comic expository device, performed with studied physicality by Phillip Blackman. Later, they will be joined by George (Jo Kennedy), the not-so-talented winner of a local karaoke competition on his way to compete in Australia’s Got Talent. The action opens with Kelsie on her mobile anxiously searching for her boyfriend who never arrives. When Kelsie hangs up, a whistle blows and the lights cross-fade to reveal the spectral Ana, an old Italian woman dressed completely in white, sitting outside on the platform away from the rest. It is at this point that the station morphs and our wonderland journey begins.
Over the next 80 minutes, we are treated to a curious montage of incident, convention and style. Actors double roles. Their doubles sometimes seem to echo the experience of their contemporary characters. The performance jumps frenetically from comedy to melodrama, from song and dance to choreographed movement. Characterisation is broad, the tone irreverent. Several sequences are enacted as silent film; in others, romantic scenes from Hollywood’s golden years or Vietnam War footage form projected backdrops for the action. There are many magical moments. Two of my favourites: a tiny film projected on a suitcase and the metamorphosis of a luggage trolley into a steam train using snare drum and guitar. Present and past overlap in swiftly moving vignettes, incident piles on incident with arrivals and departures as the characters’ stories are revealed. At times, the shifts are almost anarchic; like Alice, sometimes we might wonder just where we are.
It is Ana who pulls together these disparate elements. A proxy bride of 16, she emigrated to Lismore in the 1940s; an epic journey to a hard place. Now Ana waits for a train to take her back home. We know the train will not come. Is she mad? Or is she, as her antique costume suggests, a spirit? Ironically, it is through Ana’s eyes that the action makes sense. Played with humour and verve by Katia Molino, Ana is central to this wonderland. She is our white rabbit. We feel her disappointment with her new husband. We see her estrangement from her son who moved away after returning from Vietnam. She transports us across time with the aid of a similarly costumed choir whose song medleys frame different eras. Her journey evokes a panorama from the romantic age of steam through to the present with Vietnam (and Nimbin’s infamous Aquarius Festival) as the turning point. It is to Ana the other characters reveal their secrets: Kelsie stole money from her mother for the tickets, George is gay but hasn’t come out to his mum, and Garry hasn’t seen his daughter for five years. Leonard has no secrets. When Leonard reveals Ana has escaped a nearby nursing home, that she often comes to the station to wait for the train that will not come, we are brought back to the pathos of a prosaic present. Ana and the abandoned station become one, their fates intertwined in the inevitability of time.
Despite the at times slapstick humour, the alienation of the migrant experience is at the heart of Railway Wonderland. I was reminded of writer and co-devisor Janis Balodis’ play Too Young for Ghosts (1985). In this light all the characters are like migrants. Railway Wonderland began its gestation two years ago with the sourcing of community stories about Lismore railway station. Since then it has undergone extensive collaborative development. Director Julian Louis and everyone involved have fashioned a memorable piece of community theatre, a celebration of the site itself and the passing of a bygone era.
NORPA: Railway Wonderland, concept, direction Julian Louis, devisor, writer Janis Balodis, devisors, performers, Philip Blackman, Katia Molino, Johnny Nasser, Jo Turner, Neridah Waters, composer, musical director Michael Askill, musician Shenton Gregory, choreographer Emma Saunders, designer William Kutana, lighting designer Richard Morrod, video designer Salvador Castro, dramaturg Deborah Pollard, creative producer Marisa Snow, NORPA Generator Creative Development Program; the former Lismore Railway Station, NSW, March 27-31
I’D BEEN TEACHING STEPHEN SEWELL’S PLAY MYTH, PROPAGANDA AND DISASTER…EARLIER IN THE DAY TO A BRIGHT BUNCH OF DRAMA STUDENTS AND THE LIVELY DISCUSSIONS WE’D HAD ABOUT TOPIC, THEME AND APPROACH WERE STILL WHIRRING AROUND MY BRAIN AS I SAT IN THE AUDIENCE FOR RICK VIEDE’S A HOAX THAT NIGHT.
The students loved the fearlessness and muscularity of Sewell’s writing; his hyperbolic depiction of post 9-11 American paranoia delighted them. They admired the way he hit on the nation’s raw nerve at a sensitive time, and set upon it with a dental drill and ultrasonic scaler. No anaesthetic involved. The American exchange student didn’t appreciate Sewell’s handiwork. She found it arbitrary and borderline negligent.
a hoax
There’s a recklessness to Rick Viede’s writing—one punter described it as unapologetic—that I suspect will elicit similar responses from audiences; there are raw nerves tapped upon here that individuals with unique subject positions in relation to the material will not find easy to stomach. They may need to be warned in advance.
A Hoax is a farce that lampoons some of the most egregious recent literary scandals of authorship identity. Ant Dooley (Glenn Hazeldine) has written a ‘memoir’ about surviving childhood sexual abuse. His survivor though, the ‘I’ in his memoir, is an Aboriginal girl named Currah. Ant conscripts Miri Smith (Shari Sebbens) to assume Currah’s identity. Miri is initially tempted by the money and then seduced by the attention. She disturbs a hornet’s nest when she meets would-be publishing and publicity team Ronnie Lowe (Sally McKenzie) and Tyrelle Parks (Charles Allen). She hasn’t actually read the memoir all the way to the end. When they press her for salacious details about what heinous events took place ‘in the cellar,’ Miri/Currah bluffs and feints. She’s clueless. She eludes—and alludes—as counter-defence. She shrugs in a ‘no-biggy’ kind of way and simply states: “I enjoyed it.” The publicists are appalled—and rapt. The farce ensues from there.
In a post-South Park, post-Family Guy (post-feminist, post-ideological) world, anarchy trumps taste every time. This is a play that would struggle to find an educated audience in the 1990s. It may still struggle in Melbourne. And yet, it’s not gratuitous. The writing has confidence and nuance; the characters are two-dimensional stock farce functionaries, but delightfully so. This is a study of greed, narcissism and disposable culture. An intriguing scene in the second half when a broken and disillusioned Tyrelle violently forces personal accountability from the others dog-legs the piece out of played-for-laughs comedy and probes a little deeper. There may not be redemption here, but there is at least some momentary self-scrutiny.
Lee Lewis’s direction controls the tone and dances adroitly around the ethical dilemma at the heart of the drama: Jason Glenwright’s sharp lighting and Renee Mulder’s pristine white hotel room set sterilise the dis-ease affecting these self-seeking characters; Steve Toulmin’s attractive AV projections of plusher and plusher hotel decors chart the characters’ descent into avarice. This is a tight and feisty production that may ultimately be more entertaining than incendiary and perhaps less scandalous than the scandals that inspired it. It’s terrific theatre.
making the green one red: virtual macbeth
Making the Green One Red
photo Keith Novak
Making the Green One Red
Across the stark QUT Creative Precinct courtyard (where the ghosts of military drills and assembly are never far away) is The Block gallery space. The precinct wears the haunting of its barracks origins lightly. This is somewhat apt for a housing of Kerreen Ely-Harper and Andrew Burrell’s exhibition/installation of a Virtual Macbeth piece, Making the Green One Red. It is also fitting that the piece is located adjacent to two theatre spaces (La Boite’s Roundhouse and QUT’s experimental Loft space). It references—obviously—Shakepeare’s original text; indeed, it spins co-existently off Macbeth’s axis. The question I had in my mind as I entered and explored mixed reality’s digital media homage to the parent text was whether the piece stood on its own feet, or needed the viewer’s familiarity with the play in order to generate meaning. There isn’t a simple answer to this question.
Ely-Harper and Burrell explain the title and the decision to use the witches’ ethereal inner world—their psyche, you could say—to scaffold the piece. The title comes from the point in the text where Macbeth has just killed Duncan and the witches’ prophecy is manifesting as reality: “The vast green waters of the ocean are turned to blood in a process that should be one of cleansing and washing away” (program notes). Instead the green water turns red with blood. For Ely-Harper and Burrell, this is an image not only of transformation, but of transubstantiation. Matter changes form as a result of action and belief. Guilt infects Macbeth and he enters a kind of psychotic state that the witches have manipulated.
Entering Virtual Macbeth is akin to entering this psychic state/world. It is also a little like entering the Haunted House or the House of Mirrors at an amusement park. There is a jouissance of anticipation involved in taking this step into the darkness; anything might happen as the soundscape immerses you (echoed strains of…is it Natalie Cole’s “Unforgettable”?; disjointed phrases of witch-speak; an occasional frightening explosion) and the underworld tour begins. The viewer walks through a series of chambers, each housing a digital media display that evokes Macbeth’s fate. The first is a data projection of the witches’ cauldron on the floor. We see symbols (a crown, a chalice) that conjure Macbeth. The next is the Hall of Psychological Enlightenment—my favourite. A video-recorded projection of a psychologist provides Freudian and Jungian therapy for Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. In other rooms there are recitations of text emanating from a golden light on an empty plinth (The Room of Golden Opinions) or eerie evocations of nightmare as a storm builds and an owl hoots in a lurid red room (the Chamber of Blood). Several of the installations are sound or movement-activated. Some installations are more effective and comprehensible than others (the videoed sequences of actors’ performances didn’t do much for me in this context), but the cumulative effect is tantalising.
The Australia Council provided substantial support for this enigmatic project as part of its digital strategy; it is a well-considered and complex digital media exhibition, ultimately as ephemeral as a theatrical performance. It packs up and moves on to another venue in another city. Does it stand alone? Perhaps not. It would make for compelling foyer art, though; and I would love to enter a live performance of the parent text through an enigmatic portal like this.
A Hoax by Rick Viede. La Boite and Griffin Theatre Company co-production. Brisbane, May 5-26, Sydney July 20-Sept 1; Making the Green One Red, Virtual Macbeth, Kerreen Ely-Harper and Andrew Burrell, mixed reality, The Block Gallery, QUT, Brisbane, April 24 – May 5
A remarkable book about the film experience, ZONA is UK writer Geoff Dyer’s acclaimed personal account of his relationship with Andrei Tarkovsky’s classic film Stalker. As Dyer recounts the events of the film and evokes its imagery, he spins a web of rich associations with other films, the nature of cinema-going, growing up, his girlfriends, stories about the making of Stalker, the role of boredom in film, Tarkovskian suspense and much else. It’s also very funny, hypercritical of other people’s favourite films (including Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia) and informed by vast cultural knowledge. As Tom Redwood writes in this edition, “What Dyer has offered by piggybacking on a masterpiece is an extension of Tarkovsky’s artistic project, a quite literal fulfilment of the creative contract Tarkovsky makes with his (devoted) viewers whereby the artist obliges the audience to…think on, further than has been stated…[putting] the audience on a par with the artist” (see 
