Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

August 2012

Age of Ease, Andrew McLellan, Lachlan Anthony, MIchael Candy, Time Machine exhibition

photo Alex Davies

Age of Ease, Andrew McLellan, Lachlan Anthony, MIchael Candy, Time Machine exhibition

THERE IS A WHISTLING GLISSANDO, THE PITCH SLIDING VERTIGINOUSLY DOWN OCTAVES. A FOLEY EFFECT FROM A WAR FILM PERHAPS, TO SIGNIFY A BOMB DESCENDING. THE DAMN THING NEVER SEEMS TO HIT US THOUGH AND I’VE BEEN HERE FOR HOURS WHILE THE WHISTLING GLIDES PERPETUALLY ON. IF IT IS A BOMB, THEN WE ARE SUSPENDED IN THE INSTANT BEFORE IMPACT.

I’m not speaking in metaphor here. The sound is not existential dread projected onto my tinnitus but bleed-through from an installation on the floor above us. Tim Bruniges’ audiovisual work, Continuum, is soundtracked by the classic auditory illusion, the eternally-descending Shepard–Risset glissando. The piece is soothing, if you stroll up the stairs for a look, all gentle blue-hued pixels. Downstairs, though: 100% harbinger of doom. The thing is, a bomb seems already to have hit the joint at least once—this place is half demolished. Last month’s hipster pop-up-performance decorations have been swept away in favour of undressed concrete. And that concrete is strewn with broken glass, splinters and dirt crowded into rude piles

Age of Ease, Andrew McLellan, Lachlan Anthony, MIchael Candy, Time Machine exhibition

photo Alex Davies

Age of Ease, Andrew McLellan, Lachlan Anthony, MIchael Candy, Time Machine exhibition

Last night, this room had mechanical sculptures in it. An ammo clip of discarded fluorescent tubes fed a machine which smashed them, one at a time. Mechanical hammers, triggered by mobile phones in IED (improvised explosive device) fashion, wrecked glass at the behest of phone-toting punters. Last night’s intricate, sculptural demolition machines are today indistinguishable from their own by-products. They were, in turn, ravaged by more sophisticated, more destructive mechanisms: the audience. The opening night party-goers raged wild, atomising the lot: garbage, sculptures, whatever. This room of artful abandon, or, if you’d like, of wanton public health hazards, is called Age of Ease, a collaboration between Andrew McLellan, Lachlan Anthony and Michael Candy (featured in the realtime tv video on Psycho Subtropics). I don’t know if they intended this magnitude of destruction; you can’t engineer a riot necessarily, but you can put people in an environment where having one will be more rewarding for everyone.

Time Machine could not have chosen a more suitable opening night special. There is more than broken glass and anxious sound effects going on here. There is a punishingly full program of events encompassing performance lectures, tours, plain old concerts, workshops, Facebook theatre, debates, beer, essays and a generous supply of the miscellaneous across five venues plus the internet. It’s impressive. It’s impossible to see it all, or to summarise succinctly.

I don’t even know what ‘time-based art’ is, except for being the subject matter of the event. There seems to be something about transience and unrepeatability. Ephemerality is belligerently, intrusively present. The artworks are temporary, spontaneous; performance lectures and live gigs sure, but even the sculptures: take Creo Nova’s Genesis of Biosynthia for example, gratingly sonifying the random fluctuations in the flow of water through an assortment of pot plants.

Age of Ease, Andrew McLellan, Lachlan Anthony, MIchael Candy, Time Machine exhibition

photo Alex Davies

Age of Ease, Andrew McLellan, Lachlan Anthony, MIchael Candy, Time Machine exhibition

More, the venues are themselves just as fleeting, like the main venue, Serial 002. Before Time Machine, it was the Queen Street Studios space on Kensington Street (Frasers to the brand-sensitive). A sop to the Richard Florida gang by the multi-billion dollar Central Park development—a lure to the creative classes—the space was born doomed to live for only four years. It was a den of rolling boutique wine bars, rampant rehearsals, temporary exhibitions and general celebrations of the precarity of creative practice (see interview with Queen Street team in RT91). It’s stripped of comfort for its ultimate appearance in this festival of entropy, unapologetic in art brut warehouse chic and peopled with the obstreperous destructive classes.

Age of Ease, Andrew McLellan, Lachlan Anthony, MIchael Candy, Time Machine exhibition

photo Alex Davies

Age of Ease, Andrew McLellan, Lachlan Anthony, MIchael Candy, Time Machine exhibition

In this fortuitous conjunction of public relations and schedule gaps, Serial Space’s curators have created an echo of the artist-run spaces that once dotted Chippendale, like a new media Brigadoon. The brief interval, of course, is utilised as an example for several sarcastic, thoughtful or vitriolic public presentations on the nature of the urban redevelopment that has housed us all for a moment and will evict us again in another. The Serial Space tram doesn’t just bite the hand that feeds it, they flense that hand and exhibit it in formaldehyde. Then they run a performance lecture about it.

No one is safe from their limit-testing mind. So I was tickled by the day-long sociological investigation that was the final Saturday’s programming. For that process, the broken glass room divided Serial 002 into two camps. In the far room, caged remote-controlled robot fights all day. Truly, there is such a thing as an international league of robo-warriors and the local chapter of Robowars is run by a chap from Pymble, Angus Deveson. He has put this battle on, not to mention a week of solder-heavy workshops in the lead-up. The competitors are mostly (or all) male and the smell of sweaty boy bedroom commingles with overheated electric motors in a den of technology-mediated violence. In the room near the front door, a program of panels and presentations run entirely by women, discussing, say, “the relationship between women and technology,” or a retrospective of Bonita Ely’s mythic Dogwoman performances.

Robowars, Time Machine

photo Alex Davies

Robowars, Time Machine

More fascinating than the content of either half of this programming is the social divide. The front row of the robowars thing is rife with teenage girls, for one thing, who don’t feel a need to voice their opinion on the relationship between women and technology. At the back of audience of the panels a couple of attendees are sneaking back and forth to check on their favoured death machine’s performance in the semi-finals as those who like to talk about their art and those who prefer to watch it destroy itself vie for time and acoustic space.

And all the while you can hear in the background that damn bomb that is about to land on us. It is trademark Serial Space, this cheeky, disruptive intervention. There’s not a neat take-home moral at the end for us all, just a deftly engineered, intriguing experience that you can’t really repeat, which I suppose is the point.

Time Machine, curated by Serial Space: Frances Barrett, Kate Blackmore, Jennifer Hamilton, Tom Smith and Pia van Gelder; July 18-29; http://serialspace.org/events/event/time-machine/

This article originally appeared in RT’s online e-dition august 2.

from the serial space team

Time Machine was the first collective curatorial project that involved all the Serial Space directors in one activity. We wanted to expand from our regular programming and aim towards building a collective vision and identity as Serial Space. We are so proud of what we achieved over the two weeks of Time Machine and so grateful for all the artists who contributed. From our point of view, the success of Time Machine has made us realise that our identity isn’t confined to the space. It made us look beyond this space, as a curatorial collective. We want to develop the vision that we realised in Time Machine and to do that we have decided to take a huge risk. The risk is that Serial Space is moving out of 33 Wellington Street.

We did not intend this to be the outcome of Time Machine, and in no way does it mean that Serial Space is no more. But it is the most logical time for Serial Space to change direction. In the next few months the collective will undertake a series of independent residencies and research endeavours. During this time we will also cut our ties to a particular space and look towards an exciting future. We will continue to have sporadic Serial Space events for the rest of 2012 and we look forward to starting up again February 2013 in a whole new way.

Serial Space team: Frances Barrett, Kate Blackmore, Jennifer Hamilton, Tom Smith and Pia van Gelder; email correspondence, August 10, 2012

RealTime issue #111 Oct-Nov 2012 pg. 28

Zhang Peili, Q + A + Q (2012). Two channel video installation with audio.

maap space

For over 15 years Multimedia Art Asia Pacific (MAAP) has been promoting media art across the Asia Pacific region. Founded in 1998 by director Kim Machan, MAAP has produced seven international festivals in Brisbane, Beijing, and Singapore. MAAP has also initiated a range of collaborative and touring projects bringing artists together from over 14 countries. (See RealTime’s extensive coverage of MAAP Singapore, 2004). Entering a new phase of operation, MAAP has opened an exhibition space in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane. The inaugural exhibition features work by acclaimed Chinese media artist Zhang Peili. Peili’s 1988 piece 30 X 30 is generally accepted to be the first video artwork to be exhibited in China. (See RT98.) Machan says that the exhibition, which presents a collection of Peili’s works from the last 20 years, sets up a ‘conversation’ between recent pieces and those from the 90s.
Zhang Peili, MAAP Space, 111 Constance Street, Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, Aug 4-Sept 15, 2012; http://www.maap.org.au/projects/maap-space/

arthere

Matt Palmer House Maroubra (from Suburban Songs), ARTHERE

A new space is about to open in Sydney focusing on photomedia. Sandy Edwards set up ARTHERE as a vehicle for promotion, mentoring and the delivery of photographic exhibitions in alternative spaces—such as shopfronts, embassies, cafes, hotel lobbies and apartment buildings. In an interview in RT102 Edwards stated “I guess it’s subversive in a way to try to find other venues in the hope that it will move things around. This is a time when lots of people are looking for different models.” (See RT102) However Edwards was always aware of the importance of a space that “speaks for itself” and so, as of September 1, ARTHERE will have its own home in the burgeoning artistic borough of Redfern. The opening exhibition will feature the work of Catherine Cloran, Matt Palmer and Julie Williams. Edwards is also seeking proposals for exhibitions for the rest of the year.
ARTHERE, opening exhibition Sept 1 -22, 126 Regent Street, Redfern; http://www.arthere.com.au/

untitled (colloquial: atrocity exhibitions), jack sargeant & linsey gosper

Jack Sargeant, Linsey Gosper

courtesy the artists

Jack Sargeant, Linsey Gosper

Also focusing on photography is Untitled (colloquial: Atrocity Exhibitions), a curatorial collaboration between Revelation Film Festival director Jack Sargeant (see RT109) and photographer Linsey Gosper (cover girl of RT62 featured in RT64). The exhibition’s title is borrowed from a J G Ballard novel, and like the book, it explores “the emergence of new manifestations of the psychosexual unconscious” (press release). The artist line-up looks provocative, featuring photography from spoken word cult goddess Lydia Lunch; Monte Cazazza, said to have coined the term ‘Industrial Music’ and frequent contributor to the seminal Re/Search publications; and Romain Slocombe, exhibiting “post-trauma fetishism” (press release). There will also be photomedia works from filmmakers Tyler Hubby and Usama Alshaibi, interdisciplinary artist Samantha Sweeting and a collaborative series from the curators. Where better to view this stimulating collection than in the car park that is ALASKA Projects.
Untitled (colloquial: Atrocity Exhibitions), ALASKA Projects, Level 2, Kings Cross Car Park, Aug 21-26; https://www.facebook.com/events/329503200472642/

arcade assembly, shopfont contemporary arts

Arcade Assembly: games by students from Beverly Hills IEC; Fairfield IEC; Lomandra School

photos courtesy Shopfront

Arcade Assembly: games by students from Beverly Hills IEC; Fairfield IEC; Lomandra School

The profile, agenda (and names) of youth theatres have changed significantly over the last 10 years and Shopfront, now titled Shopfront Contemporary Arts and Performance is a prime example. Their latest project Arcade Assembly is the culmination of outreach programs with young people aged 10 to 25 from a range of schools and organisations in southern and Western Sydney—St George Mental Health Service, Lomandra School (Campbelltown), Beverly Hills IEC (Intensive English Centre) and Fairfield IEC—as well as members of Shopfront’s Bodyline Ensemble and ArtsLab participants. Under the directorial eye of Caitlin Newton-Broad along with her team of supporting artists, such as designers Katja Handt and Jessica Sinclair-Martin, interactive expert Grant Moxom and composer Michael Moebus (aka Meem), the theatre space at Carlton will be converted into “part giant board game, part labyrinth” (press release) with a variety of games and experiences devised by the young people engaged in the project. Audience members enter the space, choose a “pocket avatar” and, as they work their way through the challenges, discover more clues about their pocket friend.
Arcade Assembly, Shopfont Contemporary Arts and Performance, Shopfront Theatre 88 Carlton Parade, Carlton; Aug 22-26; www.shopfront.org.au

micromachina aqua, scott bain

Resource Exploration, Micromachina Aqua, Scott Bain

courtesy the artist

Resource Exploration, Micromachina Aqua, Scott Bain

There’s still time to catch mixed media artist Scott Bain’s intricate creations at the South Australian Maritime Museum as part of the annual South Australian Living Artists Festival (SALA). Bain’s 2011 work Micromachina (see video), exploring the insect world, was a hit of the Adelaide Fringe Festival winning him the award for Best Visual Art Emerging Artist. For this project he turns to the creatures of the sea, creating dioramas which draw viewers’ attention to “the destruction caused by overfishing, oil spills and now gas exploration…causing irreversible damage to fragile underwater ecosystems” (press release).
Scott Bain, Micromachina Aqua, South Australian Maritime Museum, 126 Lipson Street, Port Adelaide, August 3-26; http://www.micromachina.com/

opportunities

wow 2013, wift

Given the recent Palm D’or nominations in Cannes—22 films all by male directors—it seems there is still a need for events like the World of Women Film Festival (WOW). Run by Women In Film and Television (WIFT), the 19th manifestation of WOW will take place in March 2013 and the call for entries is now open. Films must either have a female director or at least two females in roles of either producer, writer, editor, cinematographer, production designer/art director or central actor. Coming in under 55mins they can be fiction, documentary, animation, student films or digi-vodule. (A digi-vodule is a short film 4mins or less for digital delivery—see the WOW youtube channel for the 2011 digi-vodule selection). The early bird deadline is Aug 31, 2012 followed by the closing date October 19, and late entry by November 2. Meanwhile selections from the 2012 festival are currently touring around the country, as well as Sweden and Mongolia. For more information see www.wift.org/wow

2high festival, backbone

Brisbane’s Backbone Youth Arts is gearing up for the 19th 2high multi-arts festival for young and emerging artists. Guided by a team of 12 emerging producers the festival will take place over one day, November 10, transforming every nook and cranny of the Brisbane Powerhouse. The call for proposals is open to emerging artists working in performance, music and visual arts and closes August 31. For more information see http://www.backbone.org.au/2highfestival/

kickstart program, adt

Australian Dance Theatre is offering an intensive training program open to graduate and graduating tertiary dances taking place at the ADT Studios in Adelaide from October 31–November 21, 2012. Successful applicants will spend three weeks working with ADT director Garry Stewart including training and making work. There is also another intensive planned for April/May 2013. Deadline for applications is August 31. For more information www.adt.org.au/kickstart

eu culture program

In 2013, Australia and Canada are the chosen “third” countries for the European Union Culture Program. Overseen by the European Commission the program “funds projects and initiatives to develop cross-border collaborations between cultural operators and organisations” (website). Projects must involve three European partners (a lead organisation plus two supporting partners) and can involve a range of practices from performing arts to literature, cultural heritage to interdisciplinary projects. Any type of organisation is eligible and 50% of the project must take place in Australia. Funding will range from €50,000 and €200,000 per project amounting to no more than 50% of the budget. Applications are due May 3, 2013 (so there’s plenty of time to plan) and projects must take place between November 1, 2013 and October 31, 2015. For more information see http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/about_us/our_structure/market_development/eu-culture-programme (NB: this is not an Australia Council Funding program)

RealTime issue #110 Aug-Sept 2012 pg. web

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, María Pagés, Dunas

photo David Ruano

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, María Pagés, Dunas

WHILE SPRING IS CLEARLY DETERMINED TO KEEP US WAITING UNTIL ITS SCHEDULED SEPTEMBER APPEARANCE, SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE’S SPRING DANCE WILL USHER THE SEASON OF NEW GROWTH IN A LITTLE EARLY WITH A DIVERSE PROGRAM OF DANCE WORKS, LOCAL, INTERNATIONAL AND CROSS-CULTURAL.

Sydney Dance Company artistic director Rafael Bonachela has curated this year’s program of six works which offer some startlingly different approaches to contemporary dance. Returning to Spring Dance following his well-received presentation of Sutra in 2010 is Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (see RT100 Spring Dance and Brisbane Festival review), collaborating this time with Flamenco queen María Pagés on Dunas. Together they have created a work that fuses Moorish and Spanish cultures through traditional and contemporary styles exploring the undulations of sand dunes (Aug 22-25).

Mourad Merzouki's Agwa

Mourad Merzouki’s Agwa

photo Michel Cavalca

Mourad Merzouki’s Agwa

Suggesting a grittier urban feel are two works by French choreographer Mourad Merzouki working with 11 dancers from Brazil. Drawing on hip-hop, capoeira and samba styles the pieces are inspired by the dancers’ personal experiences of growing up in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Correira (Running) is described as a high-energy endurance work while Agwa (Water) explores our relationship with this vital substance by deploying hundreds of cups of aqua pura (Aug 29-Sept 2).

Duan Ni, Tao Ye, 2, TAO Dance Theatre

photo Matthew George Johnson

Duan Ni, Tao Ye, 2, TAO Dance Theatre

The third international presence is China’s TAO Dance Theatre led by Tao Ye (Aug 22-26), also presenting two works. Described as “elegantly minimal” Weight x 3 comprises a duet and solo to music by Steve Reich, using the body alone “as the defining element.” Tao Ye says, “with just two legs and two arms we can create endless possibilities” (press release). The second work, 2, a duet featuring Tao Ye himself, uses the rhythms of conversation as the musical and choreographic theme.

Antony Hamilton, Melanie Lane, Black Project 1

photo Ponch Hawkes

Antony Hamilton, Melanie Lane, Black Project 1

In an even split there are also three programs by Australian artists. It’s great to see Antony Hamilton and Melanie Lane’s Clouds Above Berlin make it to Sydney so quickly (Aug 29-Sept 2). The evening consists of a solo by Lane, Tilted Fawn, and a duet, black project 1. John Bailey wrote of the Melbourne premier that it was “a bewitching penumbral experience both stirring and unsettling (RT108, see also Tilted Fawn at Fringe World RT108).

The final two programs consist of short works. Focusing on up and coming female choreographers, Contemporary Women features pieces by Emily Amisano, Stephanie Lake, Larissa McGowan and Lisa Wilson (Aug 28-Sept 1). Local Sydney dance talent is highlighted in IOU with short works by Anton, Martin del Amo, Craig Bary, Narelle Benjamin, Kristina Chan and Timothy Ohl (Aug 22-25).

Spring Dance, curator Rafael Bonachela, Sydney Opera House, Aug 20-Sept 1; http://springdance.sydneyoperahouse.com/

While you’re in a dancing frame of mind, don’t miss the rare opportunity to experience Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Dance Ensemble ROSAS presenting two works at Carriageworks September 11-15 carriageworks.com.au

RealTime issue #110 Aug-Sept 2012 pg. web

Jon Rose

photo Hollis Taylor

Jon Rose

THE INDEFATIGABLE COMPOSER, VIOLINIST AND INSTRUMENT MAKER JON ROSE, RECIPIENT OF THE 2012 DON BANKS AWARD, IS TAKING EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC TO THE “CORNER COUNTRY” (THE OVERLAPPING OF REMOTE NSW, SA AND QLD) WITH HIS SOUND CIRCUS. ROSE DESCRIBES THE PROJECT AS “AN EXPEDITION OF SELF-EDUCATION THROUGH EMPIRICAL PRACTICE, SONIC DISCOVERY, EXPLORATION OF ARTEFACT AND ENVIRONMENT” (PRESS RELEASE).

The core of the circus is two works Rose has been developing over the last few years: The Ball Project, where the audience is invited to play with a giant sphere which generates an ever changing soundscape (see RT102), and his continuing fences project, Great Fences of Australia, in collaboration with Hollis Taylor, in which the duo explore the sonic potentials of fences in rural areas as long-string instruments (see RT82). Taylor will also be expounding on birdsong, a subject she has been extensively researching, in her lecture “The music of nature; the nature of music” (see RT89).

Accompanying Rose and Taylor will be a troupe of well known experimentalists including Dale Gorfinkel, Lucas Abela, Keg de Souza, Joel Stern, Laura Altman, Rishin Singh and Sam Pettigrew who will be engaging with the locals in all manner of musical exchanges. For example, clarinetist Laura Altman, who has been mentored in gum leaf playing by Gumbayungirr elder Roseina Boston from coastal NSW, will be sharing this skill with people in the corner country.

The travelling circus will be visiting areas in New South Wales, South Australia and Queensland including White Cliffs, Broken Hill, Fowlers Gap, Pimpara Lake, Mutawintji National Park, Milparinka, Tibooburra, Innamincka, Cameron Corner and the Warri Gate Dingo Fence.

Sound Circus, corner country, regional Australia, Aug 24-Sept 17; http://www.jonroseweb.com/f_projects_sound_circus.html

For more on Jon Rose see the artv video of Rose in conversation with Jim Denley here

RealTime issue #110 Aug-Sept 2012 pg. web

CURRENTLY I AM IN BRISBANE, THE TOWN WHERE IT SEEMS PART OF ME MUST HAVE GROWN UP. I FEEL GHOSTS HERE—SHADOWS THAT EMERGE FROM THE ECHOIC UNIVERSES THAT I HAVE WANDERED DURING MANY PAST LIVES. UNLIKE THE ARTISTS FEATURED IN THE EXHIBITION I AM ABOUT TO ENTER, I HAVEN’T ALWAYS USED A CAMERA TO RECORD THE CONDITIONS OF MY EXISTENCE. STILL, MY PERCEPTUAL FIELDING OF THE WORLD IS ENTANGLED INSIDE ENDLESS VERSIONS OF REALITY: MEDIATED TRUTHS THAT HAVE BEEN SEQUENCED INSIDE MANY DIGITAL FRAMES.

Trying to decide which of the images in my head have come from the media and which have formed inside the unstable contours of a dream, I approach the exhibition space. Just as I know that the analogue video signal is on the verge of extinction, I am also aware that the world I am entering traces early artistic interventions into the creative and political possibilities of that signal. In particular this collection of works intends to activate connections between the ‘parallel’ conceptual and aesthetic concerns uncovered by artists in Australia, Britain, the United States and Japan between 1970 and 1985. These works are organised by their placement within three conceptual streams: “performance, identity and video,” ‘media is the message” and the ‘politics of narrative.”

Inside I find American artist Bruce Nauman’s upside down face, image cropped so that only his lips are visible, repeatedly uttering the words that give the video its title: lip sync, lip sync, lip sync (1969). But the movement of the mouth is not in sync with the image I am reading. In this work video makes strange the performance of what should be a logical and repeated action. In a similar conceptual provocation, Joan Jonas’ Vertical Roll (1972) realises the potential of the rolling scan lines that were considered a mistake in broadcast. Inside the glitch a woman’s body turns, her contours punctuated and cut by the repeated visual beat of the image’s vertical roll.

In Idea Demonstrations (1972), Mike Parr and Peter Kennedy extend the possibilities that moving image offers for editing and destabilising dominant representations of the body. In this work—documenting a series of performative collaborations by the artists—Parr stares quietly into camera. Blinking, he holds his damaged limb. This sequence is embedded inside other performances. A hand removes shoes from bodies lying on a floor. A man repeatedly attaches bulldog clips to the skin around his nipples.

Like Naumann and Jonas, these artists were experimenting with the possibilities that the cinematic frame offered for editing, destabilising and re-performing stereotypical representations of the body. For Kennedy and Parr, the camera becomes a psychological tool that mediates and strategically positions the performer in front of the audience. In fact, because of this work’s emphasis on the act of recording, the artists found the emerging technology of video too unpredictable. For this reason they recorded this project on 16mm film, only later transferring the work to DVD.

Gathered together as a result of the conceptual resonance they share with Marshall McLuhan’s affirmation that “the media is the message,” the gently strobing works on the second configuration of screens unravel a conversation about the potential for video art to conceptually and structurally extend the media landscape from which it emerges. Here video offers new possibilities for reshaping cognitive awareness and altering cultural experience.

In Nam June Paik’s Global Groove (1973) video provides the opportunity to imagine a future digital world. Paik choreographs a visual onslaught of digitally saturated imagery in which the auras of ethnic dancers and musicians are made strange by mechanical shadowing. Echoes of traditional cultural performance are electronically punctuated by the artificial pulse of fast-paced cuts and hyperreal backgrounds. Australian artist David Perry’s Mad Mesh (1968) is a digitally constructed landscape which almost transports my attention into the cathode ray tube.

In the final space, I find a collection of works that explores the new textual possibilities facilitated by the video signal. Reconfiguring narrative conventions, these works unhinge the political momentum of dominant media codes. In Peter Kennedy and John Hughes’ November Eleven (1981), ‘scratch’ video techniques are used to re-imagine found media footage. Repositioning political statements, this video re-patterns the events surrounding Gough Whitlam’s dismissal as Prime Minister in 1975 to create a new story. Similarly, experimenting with repetition and visual effects, Dara Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978) deconstructs narrative strategies used by mainstream cinema, transforming expressions of feminine experience.

Dara Birnbaum, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1978 – 1979 (video still)

In the corridors surrounding the exhibition, I caught traces of a dialogue that started to evaluate the perception that video art was once a shadowy impostor lingering at the edges of cinematic tradition. When I started to think about these conversations I realised that video art inhabits a parallel cinematic space, one that begins to alter the formulas deployed inside dominant media frames. The early technical and conceptual accomplishments of the artists featured in this exhibition are not only experiments that reconfigured the media landscape, they are also important cinematic explorations that began to expand the possibilities of the moving image.

WHAT SORT OF WORKS, I WONDER, FIND THEMSELVES CORRALLED INTO EVENTS SUCH AS UNDER THE RADAR, THE ADJUNCT TO BRISBANE’S ANNUAL ARTS FESTIVAL? BY DEFINITION THESE SHOULD BE “UNDETECTED OR UNNOTICED WORKS” BUT AS IT TURNS OUT, THEY’RE NOTHING OF THE SORT. IN FACT, YOU WONDER WHY THEY EVEN NEED TO HAVE THEIR OWN CATEGORY IN A FESTIVAL THAT CELEBRATES ACCORDING TO ARTISTIC DIRECTOR NOEL STAUNTON, “THE EXTRAORDINARY TALENT WE HAVE RIGHT HERE AT HOME.”

For UTR 2012 producer Britt Guy it’s about “the most exciting independent artists and collectives working across Australia and the world” who challenge conventions and offer “fresh creative landscapes” or “raw and intimate…rough and ready” works in public spaces “that will change the way you think about Brisbane.” For those wishing to forestall the inevitability of the Campbell Newman vision of their city, UTR might be just what the doctor ordered.

The packed program of largely Australian works suggests that the hybrid performance genre is mutating nicely to include such multi-headed beasts as lighting design + live art party (Dark Matters), stand-up + left-field performance in the buff (Envoye://Fragmente) and what must be a first—a soprano (Heather Keens) communing with a nasendoscopic projection of her vocal folds to “explore the sounds and memories that return to a singer during a performance” (Conversations with my Voice).

In this context Capital, the work of Slovenian dance duo Tina Dobaj Eder and Gregor Kamnikar on the subject of consumerism sounds almost conventional—the strategy of positioning an “interactive” audience taking their chances amid a flurry of dancers being something of a live art norm these days. An onstage whip-round to fund completion of the night’s performance is edgier and suggests that the dance scene in Slovenia is in about the same state of health as our own. Many of the works in UTR would not have made the journey without Pozible.

There are many therapeutic ways to lose yourself in UTR such as Fifteen in which you can relax while you observe the quiet chaos of Liesel Zink navigating Brisbane’s peak hour. Jane Howard (in RT109 online) described this work as “infused with humour in the matching of choreography to recorded and live narration; and in the juxtaposition of commuter routine and dancer movement Liesel Zinc has created a dance work that is ultimately a joy.” And we have heard tell of people refusing to ever return from the sensory journey that is Blind Date by Big One Little One in which a stranger guides you blindfold through the city.

Underground, a Korean speakeasy run by an eccentric proprietor is “immersive to such a degree that you find yourself completely forgetting about the world outside the venue,” says Matthew O’Neill (RT107) of an earlier incarnation of this work at Metro Arts’ Independents season. “Stepping into the venue, you’re immediately flooded with all the apprehension, fear and excitement inherent in being thrust into an alien culture unprepared. This is Underground’s greatest achievement.” Director Jeremy Neideck and ensemble afford their audiences an entire world to inhabit and explore over the course of the performance. Stepping up to the plate Metro Arts offers the one thing that was missing the first time round—a real bar so you can linger longer in fantasyland.

If only total amnesia will do, you might want to tie a knot round your finger so you don’t miss Best We Forget by Adelaide’s nattily titled Is this yours in which “three characters fight off panic as they explore their fears and fascinations with forgetting.” In the spirit of Sydney’s POST by the sounds of it, is this yours “approach serious ideas in a ridiculous manner and ridiculous ideas in a serious manner.” A useful strategy in conservative times.

And what sort of a festival would it be without contemplation of the afterlife? In After All This you’re in the expert hands of the highly decorated Elbow Room (Best Ensemble, Best Director 2012 Victorian Green Room Awards; Best Performance 2011 Melbourne Fringe). Or maybe live art with video installation will take you out of yourself. Among the ephemeral offerings in UTR’s Inter Art Works program “seeping into the public spaces of Brisbane” is the experiential heaven::himmel in which one performer (Henriette Kassay-Schuster) in Berlin and the other (Hermione Merry) in Brisbane together create a liminal zone for you “to explore the joy and tragedy of (mis)communication through the use of space, multiple projection, live performance and sound.”

Accept the invitation to Katie Sfetkidis’ Dark Matter (Brave New Works program) and you’ll get music, disco balls, food and party games followed by a sobering wind-down with a “private sound and light experience in a darkened room.” Or you might feel safer in the hands of Stuart Bowden creator of the multi-award winning Loungeroom Confabulators who introduces his latest incarnation in The Beast a duet with a flickering silhouette called Winslow.

Potential peril is inherent in witnessing the early stages of any new work in development. Perhaps moreso when you enter the realm of the Danger Ensemble. But if you like your theatre edgy you won’t want to miss I WAR in which the ensemble throws OH&S cautions once more to the wind to “delve heart first into a visceral world of dance, theatre, music and media to investigate the human identity at war.” Late great RT writer Douglas Leonard described the Ensemble thus: “As a company, they seem to be exploring that friable edge which divides the tolerable from the intolerable, but they’re equally committed to physical precision, lucidity and direct expression that comes from training in the disciplines of Butoh and Suzuki method.” (RT105, Hamlet Apocalypse)

Then again, you might prefer to avoid dark thoughts in black boxes altogether and instead take comfort in ritual and the one-on-one. In The Reparation of the Heart, Jacobus Cupone, an artist who revels in “the transient and ephemeral…small histories of nothing…pays homage to his former family through painting, performance and site-specific intervention.” 1,370 paintings for each paving stone that surrounded Cupone’s family home will eventually be buried by hand after the artist has been led, blindfolded by a local resident to a place from their own past.

Indulge your paranoid projections in Communication Facilitation Devices for Everyday Conversation or Other Emotional Outbursts in which we’re reminded, “Everything is sent, tracked, recorded and updated, every piece of information accounted for.” The performance based video works of Astrid Woods-Joyce are framed as ‘thought experiments’ that aim to test or transcend the normal bounds of communication space by speculating on new and different ways to connect with individuals, spaces and place. City surveillance is also invoked in ThreeFold, a series of public video installations and interventions from Pirrin Francis, Melissa Ryke and Hayley Brandon, projected in various locations across the city.

There are many more alternative visions in this program but if, in this new-man era, nothing less than total annihilation will suffice, head for Still Night (UK/Italy). Inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and conceived by Berlin, Nevada (Silvia Mercuriali and Gemma Brocklis), Still Night “casts Brisbane as the central character,” wrapped up in a fantastical narrative where real events are mixed with imagined and mythical perspectives on the city. “The walls of the room we are in begin to split apart and the whole city starts to crumble and disappear.”

Under the Radar, Brisbane Festival Metro Arts and selected festival venues, September 8-29, www.brisbanefestival.com.au

THERE ARE MANY IRONIES THAT PLAY OUT IN QL2 DANCE THEATRE’S NOPLACE. THE FIRST IS THAT HYPNAGOGIA—A STATE BETWEEN SLEEP AND WAKEFULNESS—CAN INVOLVE A KIND OF PARALYSIS, WHERE THE SLEEP-WAKER’S BODY IS UNABLE TO MOVE. HENCE, A DANCE PIECE ABOUT HYPNAGOGIA IS PERHAPS FROM THE OUTSET OPERATING WITHIN A PROBLEMATIC PARADIGM. HYPNAGOGIA IS ALSO, REPORTEDLY, A PLACE OF GREAT DISTRESS FOR THOSE SUFFERING THE CONDITION AS A NEUROLOGICAL DISORDER.

I am not convinced the creative team explored this distress so much as the idea of moving from conscious through to unconscious states—a ‘space in-between’; nonetheless the ironies of moving bodies representing such a ‘no place’ is sufficient meat for a performance investigation.

The co-creators asked their audience to enter and walk over the stage area, beneath a suspended set like a cat’s cradle or incomplete geodesic canopy strung above our heads. We were then asked to sit in conservative figuration on raked seats. It was disappointing to remain neither re-configured, nor left to trust that conventional audience-performer relations might be overcome by means other than surround-sound or surround-design. But this could have been due to the short rehearsal time.

The performance itself is an exploration of movement, spoken text, projected images and scratchings/slidings of sound in a dim-lit space. Sarah Kaur, in her JUMP mentorship with Samuel James, had explored re-framing images of an Icelandic landscape by disappearing its horizons and flattening the visual plane, creating places not quite here, not quite there. Sometimes, unexplained memory-images appear, such as a flock of swans. At times, projections played over dancers’ bodies, rendering them liminal, as if submerged in a dream.

Christiane Nowak’s design remains, for me, the most resolved aspect of the presentation—consistent to itself but also with a strong hold on what the piece is moving toward. Overall, however, I miss a sense of internal consistency between the sound, movement and visual elements explored.

The fragmentary structure suits an investigation into the subconscious, but in general dancers’ movements, and their vocal delivery, suffer from too much coherence and flow. It takes a while for discombobulation to infect or inflect their offers. Memorably, Amelia McQueen’s performance is both muscular (coherent) and fragmented (brittle). Her miked vocal work, however, reveals beautiful but too-coherent texts and highlights the frequent inaudibility of other dancers’ words. Shoeb Ahmad’s soundscape, partly created in real time, is appropriately fractured but homogenous in volume and tone.

Over the past decade, Canberrans have seen a run of interesting pieces around sleep, dreams and hypnogogic states. Blaide Lallemand and Hilary Cuerden-Clifford’s video bank of sleeping figures was installed in CMAG’s glass walled, street-side gallery in 2009. Preceding and surpassing this, however, was Wendy Morrow’s sequence of investigations into sleep/dream states involving dance, projection and sound: Sleep, Blue, and Sleep II. Morrow’s work, created 2002-04, remains a touchstone for examining semi-conscious states, half-recognised forebodings and muted ferocities that flare but cannot be fully realised.

At this stage of development, noplace sets up an intriguing quandary: how to heighten the discombobulations of the hypnogogic state into a more consistent whole. There is evidence that with more creative development time these skilled artists will find what they are moving towards.

QL2 Dance Theatre, noplace, choreographer Adelina Larsson, performers Amelia McQueen, Holly Diggle, Alison Plevey, Janine Proost, designer Christiane Nowak, video artist Sarah Tamara Kaur, sound artist Shoeb Ahmad, JUMP mentor Samuel James, dramaturgical consultancy Paschal Berry, Gorman House, Canberra, June 9, 10

IF EZRA POUND’S ‘MAKE IT NEW!’ WAS A RALLYING CALL TO ARMS FOR THE VANGUARD OF MODERNISM, THE PHRASE HAS IN RECENT YEARS BECOME MORE OF AN ANXIOUS ONE MUTTERED COMPULSIVELY, MANTRA-LIKE, TO WARD OFF SOME VAGUE EVIL.

Artists now remain charged, by tradition and funding guideline alike, with the demand to innovate and reinvent and find novel ways of doing the same old things. It’s all-too-obvious when a sharp and beguiling idea has been lost amid a flurry of formal trickery that appears forced; when someone’s original intent has been clouded by some notion that this alone is not enough. When a work does engage with the new in ways that don’t seem anxious or unsettled, then, it puts everything in bold relief.

sex.violence.blood.gore

MKA Theatre has only been around for a few years, but has already made reckonable advances from its hit-and-miss beginnings to a program that’s always worth studying closely. At least two recent works have been unmissable—last year’s The Economist (RT107) and the even more startling and accomplished sex.violence.blood.gore. Where both offer much to encourage is in the negotiation of experiment and convention. MKA is a company dedicated to the text, seeking out and presenting to the public new works with a solid investment in the good ol’ fashioned written word. But in these later productions, at least, there has been no hint of slavish reverence to the play, and neither has there been a need to inject irreverence where not necessary. The result has been an organic marriage of text and performance that makes the two seem inextricable.

sex.violence.blood.gore was written by Singaporean playwright Alfian bin Sa’at and, given its outrageous subjects, was understandably scandalous when first performed (in relative secrecy in a basement, no less). The work is composed of a series of vignettes that defy categorisation—farcical psychosexual/historical/political playlets united less by a specific thematic or narrative line than a particular energy that runs through each. It’s a kind of uncontainable libidinal excess. It’s not that kind of taboo-breaking transgression that so often reaffirms the binaries supposedly blurred; rather, it’s a sexuality that is too much of everything—too overwhelming and everywhere, simultaneously explicit and repressed, hysterical and hilarious, but also too self-aware, too self-negating. This excess is what drives the work so urgently. At no point can an audience member think: ‘This is what’s really being said, I see now,’ without immediately being offered something to contradict such a conclusion.

The individual sequences gesture to contemporary and historical Singapore while introducing more abstract and non-naturalistic terms of reference. A local under the Japanese occupation of WWII is made a sexual slave by foreign forces; a pair of tightlaced British colonialists fantasise about their subjugated maids; trash-talking teens on a train spark up a strangely eroticised verbal slanging match with two transvestites. All is played against type, however; actors are cast cross-gender and -ethnicity, while make-up and costume are heightened to the point of absurdity.

Most of all, the performances suggest that what matters most here is identity, both individual and social, as masquerade. Nothing is allowed the aura of the authentic, but rather than resulting in a diminishment of significance, a liberation of meaning occurs in which the playful interchange of masks seems to be the catalyst. To look for the real behind the painted face isn’t even a consideration.

I wasn’t the only person to leave the theatre with a desperate desire to read sex.violence.blood.gore in its original form. Stephen Nicolazzo’s direction is most fascinating in the way it makes it impossible to tell whether he’s radically reinterpreted the text or stuck to its dictates. The whole could be played in an entirely realistic fashion and still hold great power, but I don’t know where Alfian bin Sa’at ends and Stephen Nicolazzo begins here. I probably don’t want to. The whole I saw, in all of its enveloping messiness, was more than enough to satisfy.

the golden dragon

There’s no such fuzziness in Roland Schimmelpfennig’s masterful The Golden Dragon, in which the text itself enacts an initially playful but eventually oppressive battering of its performers. Schimmelpfennig has for some time experimented in this manner, with works that foreground their own staging (and pre-staging) by having actors recite stage directions, pauses and the like. The Golden Dragon combines this mode of presentation with a tightly woven narrative passing through bleak and arresting terrain.

A broad series of interwoven plotlines circle the pan-Asian restaurant of the title. In the kitchen, an illegal immigrant has a tooth yanked by coworkers and begins bleeding to death amid the steaming dishes; the incisor makes its way into the soup of one of two airline stewards on stopover; a nearby German shop owner entices a dumped lover into his dingy upstairs apartment; and a young Chinese girl is trapped in a nightmare of sexual slavery.

Early on the postmodern permutations of the playing style position the work as meta-theatrical comedy, and there are plenty of laughs (the actors ably fulfil the demands of the required style). But as the work develops, it becomes apparent that the world on display is one of permanent displacement, with workers from all walks of life severed of rootedness and stripped of their agency as a result. If sex.violence.blood.gore finds an energy in inauthenticity, The Golden Dragon offers an opposite vision. There is poetry, as in a recurring fairytale about a foolish cricket abused by a menacing ant, but this too soon becomes a ghastly abstraction that mythologises a very real act of monstrosity.

Perhaps this is Schimmelpfennig casting a critical eye on his own practice—certainly, it calls into question the complicity of post-dramatic theatre in cultural disempowerment. Denying theatre an essential ability to speak truth might well put us all in the same position of the work’s characters, and indeed its actors, and rob us of the tools with which to imagine our own change, let alone take some action of our own. If so, what’s a dramatist to do? That Schimmelpfennig ends with a lyrical image that provides no useful answer is both encouraging and unsettling. No easy end to this night, but plenty to chew over.

from the ground up

Circus Oz’s latest production, From the Ground Up, explicitly addresses the long-running company’s own reinvention. Its design aesthetic is based around the construction site—giant steel girders descend from above, cranes and construction equipment hover around the space. It’s fitting, given the recent completion of a brand new, dedicated home in Collingwood. It’s also a symbol of how the company seems, to this writer at least, to have been undergoing renovations more than merely cosmetic in recent years.

It’s not quite right to say that Circus Oz has become more serious in the last half-decade, but it does seem to have found the next level of confidence which might suggest some kind of maturing. The clowning (always a key binding ingredient in any CO show) is more developed, less directed as kid-oriented filler between acts and more cohesive and wry. Newcomer Ghenoa Gela certainly stole the show at the matinee I attended—stirring in gentle political commentary without losing the attention of the crowd’s youngest members, and generating real laughs throughout.

But circus has one of the hardest tasks in ‘making it new’—most of its elements come with histories that may span centuries, and trying to reinvent these is more about subtle tweaking or dressing up trapeze, balance or juggling in unusual trappings. That shouldn’t be a negative. The company’s last outing, Steampowered, was one of its finest in the way it teamed strong performances with a striking steam-punk aesthetic. The spectacle of a construction site just can’t match that, really, and From the Ground Up might have sacrificed something in going for a symbolically relevant theme.

Recently entering its 30s, though, Circus Oz is definitely out of its cocky teens and there are few lingering insecurities of its 20s. Its experiments might not be as radical or showy as the kinds you see on a play stage or gallery wall, but they’re there, and we’re immeasurably luckier for it.

MKA Theatre, sex.violence.blood.gore, writer Alfian Bin Sa’at with Chong Tze Chien, direction Stephen Nicolazzo, performers Genevieve Giuffre, Catherine Davies, Matt Furlani, Whitney Boyd, Amy Scott-Smith, Zoe Boesen, Caitlin Adams design Eugyeene Teh, lighting Yasmine Santoso, sound Claudio Tocco; MKA Pop-Up, North Melbourne, Jun 29-Jul 17; Melbourne Theatre Company, The Golden Dragon, writer Roland Schimmelpfennig, translator David Tushingham, director Daniel Clarke, performers Rodney Afif, Ash Flanders, Jan Friedl, Dana Miltins, Roger Oakley, design Andrew Bailey, lighting Emma Valente, sound Russell Goldsmith, MTC Lawler Studio, Jun 22-Jul 7; Circus Oz, From the Ground Up, performers Ania Reynolds, Bec Matthews, Carl Polke, Chad Albinger, Dale Woodbridge, Flip Kammerer, Ghenoa Gela, Hazel Bock, Jeremy Davies, Luke Taylor, Mason West, Ruby Rowat, Shane Witt, Stevee Mills, Circus Oz Big Top, Birrarung Marr, Melbourne, Jun 20-Jul 15

OF THE MOST OVERUSED WORDS DESCRIBING ARTISTS AND THEIR WORK, ‘UNIQUE,’ WOULD SURELY BE THE CHART TOPPER. WHEN APPLIED TO PERTH-BASED LINK DANCE COMPANY, HOWEVER, IT’S A MATTER OF FACT.

LINK is Australia’s only graduate dance company—one of a kind. It is based at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA), part of Edith Cowan University (ECU). This year marks the company’s 10th anniversary.

LINK was originally established by independent dance maker Chrissie Parrot as part of a practice-based research project within WAAPA’s Dance Department in 2002. Subsequently, it evolved into an ongoing resident company. As a one-year postgraduate program, LINK is open to dancers who have completed a three-year tertiary dance course. It functions as an Honours Year for BA graduates and a conversion year for Advanced Diploma students, allowing them to upgrade their qualification to a BA. Each year a new company is formed.

Michael Whaites, LINK’s current artistic director, took up the position in 2006. An accomplished performer, choreographer and teacher, he was an internationally successful dancer during the 1990s, working with Twyla Tharp in the US and Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater in Wuppertal, Germany. It’s his experience of working with a wide range of choreographers, Whaites says, which has shaped his view that versatility can be a dancer’s greatest strength. He explains: “My philosophy, if you like, revolves around the idea of diversification, the ability to work with a variety of different styles and approaches.”

True to this philosophy, Whaites seeks to ensure that the two programs LINK presents each year—one in May, the other in October—are of works that expose the dancers to vastly different choreographic visions. This year’s May program, Variant, is a case in point, bringing together a 1996 creation by American modern dance legend Twyla Tharp and a more recent piece by Larissa McGowan, best known for her work with Adelaide’s Australian Dance Theatre.

The LINK experience also includes extensive touring both nationally and internationally. Performance seasons in Melbourne (Dancehouse) and Sydney (Io Myers Theatre, UNSW) towards the end of the year are complemented by a mid-year overseas tour comprising performances and workshops. Over the years, Whaites has forged the strongest connections with presenters and arts organisations in Amsterdam, Brussels and France. During this year’s tour, LINK performed at Mouvement sur la Ville in Montpellier and at the prestigious Julidans Festival in Amsterdam.

So, what is it exactly that attracts dance graduates to apply for LINK? “What the year gives them,” says Whaites “is reflective time to work out what it is that they are interested in. Most of the dance courses in Australia are so busy teaching and imparting information that it’s hard for dancers to figure out what they really want. LINK gives them a sense of being supported while also having the opportunity to start to think for themselves.”

There is no denying that the LINK year places high demands on the dancers. In addition to attending daily class and rehearsals, the members also take on production responsibilities and are expected to help raise funds for the annual overseas tour. To graduate from LINK, the dancers are further required to write a thesis, exploring a research topic of their choice. Whaites insists that the benefits far outweigh the challenges. “I haven’t done the fine lines of the statistics,” he laughs “but I would say that of the over 80 dancers who have been in LINK since its inception, more than 90% of them are still in the profession—whether they are working on independent projects or are making work themselves or dancing in companies.” The list of LINK graduates who have gone on to successfully work within the Australian dance sector is impressive indeed. It includes Jhuny-Boy Borja, dancer with Bangarra Dance for many years, Philip Channells, until recently the artistic director of Adelaide-based Restless Dance Theatre and Juliette Barton, dancer with Sydney Dance Company.

And as for the 10-year anniversary celebrations, what’s in store? “The October season is going to be a first for the company, which is exciting,” Whaites says. “It’s a co-production and in partnership with Fremantle Arts Centre. Five choreographers—Kim McCarthy, Sue Peacock, Jacob Lehrer, Jo Pollitt and myself—are going to collaborate on the work. All the choreographers will be performing in it as well. The work will be in a promenade format and will take its inspiration from the varied history of the building.” Not surprisingly, Michael Whaites named the piece Diversify.

FOR SYDNEY THEATRE COMPANY, BELVOIR RESIDENT DIRECTOR SIMON STONE AND STC CO-ARTISTIC DIRECTOR ANDREW UPTON HAVE ADAPTED FOR THE STAGE THE SCREENPLAY OF AN INGMAR BERGMAN FILM FROM 1976, FACE TO FACE. WHILE THE SCREENPLAY HAS A CHAMBER THEATRE INTENSITY THAT OFFERS EASY ADAPTABILITY, ITS FOCUS ON ONE PERSON’S NERVOUS BREAKDOWN AND HER ESCALATING IMMERSION IN VISIONS AND NIGHTMARES CREATES A SIGNIFICANT CHALLENGE FOR THE ADAPTORS AND DIRECTOR STONE, AND A WONDERFUL FILM ACTOR KERRY FOX, PLAYING THE ROLE MADE FAMOUS BY LIV ULLMAN.

Bergman made some of the greatest films of the 20th century: intelligent, visceral and darkly existential. He was also a leading European theatre director. His theatrical sensibility so informed his films that we might regard his filmmaking as an innovative synthesis of film and theatre. It’s no surprise that Simon Stone would want to direct something written by Bergman. I spoke with him about the appeal of the screenplay and how he and Upton would deal with those Bergman fundamentals—dream and the human face.

While I was writing The Wild Duck (RT102) I was reading lots of Bergman screenplays because I wanted to find a screenplay-like formula to make the sense of fate in The Wild Duck more ‘fateful,’ rather than constructed. I love that sense that the theatre just needs to bring on what needs to happen next. And I think a lot of Shakespeare’s best plays are great for the fact that there’s this passage of inevitabilities that come on to the stage. I wanted to explore something different with The Wild Duck—I wanted to explore what tragedy is like if it feels avoidable. If it feels like the structure of the show has multiplicity in it and therefore there are a million other versions that could have happened. Cinema certainly lets you feel that because the camera could have been pointing in any direction, gone to any location and have followed any character. So the sense of freedom in that makes it feel fateful. So I was reading a lot of Bergman because he’s got the same brutal honesty about the human instinct.

Just the way that Bergman is unapologetic about the way humans are towards each other was a really strong guide for me. So I watched a lot of Bergman and read a lot of Bergman screenplays. I think I’d kind of managed to not notice that he’d made Face to Face even in my reading of his autobiography. I thought, wow! How is this not a better-known film? As a screenplay it’s actually remarkably acute and really the most fascinating insight into depression and madness that he wrote, I think. But the dreams were the problem in it and Bergman certainly wrote about being unsatisfied with the way he’d resolved the dreams. I’m trying to find a theatrical solution, not just to to resolve something that Bergman felt was unresolved but also resolve something that can’t be resolved in the same way.

That’s exactly right. It’s a particular challenge because the ghost of Bergman can’t really guide me other than through all of the influences I know he had, like Strindberg’s bluntness in A Dream Play where he just brings someone on and they announce who they are and why they’re there and what they want, and the play moves on. The fact that Bergman directed that play five times in his life has been more of a guide for me in terms of how to resolve the dreams onstage in this and what else might need to be written for Jenny to get to the point of breakdown in the play.

It’s become much more Strindbergian. People come in, they convey memories, they are moments in Jenny’s past knocking on the door of her consciousness. They’re very explicable; you need to find solutions to something that has actually been written in quite a mundane way like all great dreams—like all of Tarkovsky’s dreams, and Bergman thought Tarkovsky was the only filmmaker who ever solved dream. It’s actually a slowing down of life rather than a speeding up of it turning into something more hectic and awful. It’s something much more contemplative and meandering. That’s what I’ve gone for. It’s reminded me a bit of Marguerite Duras’ La Musica (1974): two characters can talk their entire relationship through as theatrical text in a way that in real life just doesn’t happen.

No, that all happens in the audience’s mind as these series of spectres enter Jenny’s room and talk to her about her past, which is proving much more successful. The constant is that she’s in a hospital room, having survived a suicide attempt. And that’s really heartbreaking because no matter what Jenny must have been like when she was a 14-year old girl, it’s always juxtaposed with the fact that she’s in a room recovering from a suicide attempt. So there’s a melancholy in that, which is very beautiful.

Which is actually as close as you can get, I suppose, to the way cinema can move fluidly between one reality and the other—by not changing the lights, not changing the furniture or anything in the room, not using it as a tabula rasa. It is very much just one space.

A friend who’s a Bergman scholar wrote that he felt more at ease watching the films on DVD by himself rather than sharing them in a cinema with other people. They’re so emotionally raw.

For that reason, in the theatre it’s going to be even more confronting. I always have a sense whenever I read a Bergman screenplay or watch a Bergman film that he’s managed to understand something about the way my brain works that no-one else has been able to put into words for me to understand it.

There’s something at once very thoughtful and very visceral about Bergman’s films.

I remember seeing Winter Light for the first time and being astounded by the fact that the Max Von Sydow character was so terrified of the bomb, that Bergman was making films that were so unadorned and so completely cathartic of these everyday terrors. Bergman, from the beginning of his career, was unveiling these horrors at the centre of men and women. I was watching a black and white film that was so brutally honest about human psychology—not in any way melodramatic. Look at what was happening in Italy at the same time, it was as formally exciting and as wonderful in terms of its reducing life to basic truths, but the form of delivery in those Italian films was still quite melodramatic. Even in Antonioni, the performances of Monica Vitti particularly were still in the mode of 1930s Italian melodrama, whereas Bergman for some reason—probably because of his isolation geographically—had managed by the 60s to get to the point where actors were just sitting, not changing their facial expression and telling a story. Just a face. The restraint in that.

That’s the biggest challenge, a dual challenge—firstly to find a way for the equivalent of a close-up to be achieved, for an audience to see the way a person’s body language is manifesting just facial expression. How do you do that on a stage when an audience can look anywhere? Secondly, what complicated that was the way we traditionally solve cinematic language on stage in terms of creating elliptical, seamless staging, where people come on before other scenes are finished and objects appear. How to differentiate that from a dream reality was very difficult because the way we solve dream on stage is very similar to the way we solve multiple locations and multiple timescales that cinema texts provoke. There are various ways of doing that, of setting the whole thing in one place and it transforms itself. Or having it on a bare stage where things come and go and things overlap. Nevertheless, both of those will end up looking like dream.

So, I actually needed to find a journey through the show that started off focusing on the person, the face—and the show has to follow that character’s response to everything they’re watching. But then we need to resolve that into essentially a ‘second theatre’ [of dreams] so different from the first theatre that it feels so contained and concrete, rather than abstract, that the audience is very aware of the difference between those two modes. [That involves] a change of style in the text, which is slightly scary because sometimes suddenly changing a style of storytelling half-way through a piece of theatre can be disconcerting and disorientating. But it’s disorientation for good rather than evil.

Sydney Theatre Company, Face to Face, a film by Ingmar Bergman, adaptation by Andrew Upton, Simon Stone, director Simon Stone, Sydney Theatre, Aug 7-Sept 8, www.sydneytheatre.com.au

PETER BARCLAY DESCRIBED HILARY BELL’S THE BLOODY BRIDE, THE PRODUCT OF NORPA’S GENERATOR PROGRAM IN LISMORE, NSW, AS “A DARK JOURNEY INTO THE INTIMATE EMOTIONS AND CONFLICTING ETHICS OF RELATIONSHIPS AND SEXUALITY…A MOST PROVOCATIVE PIECE OF THEATRE (RT87).” THE WRITER’S WIDELY PRODUCED PLAYS, WHETHER FOR ADULTS OR YOUNG AUDIENCES, HAVE ATTRACTED CONSISTENT PRAISE, NOT LEAST FOR WOLF LULLABY (1996), AN AUSTRALIAN CLASSIC.

Bell has been busy with two works already produced in 2012: The White Divers of Broome for Black Swan State Theatre Company in Perth and Victim Sidekick Boyfriend Me for the National Theatre’s Connections Program in London. Now Sydney Theatre Company is producing The Splinter, a haunting tale of an abducted child returned to her parents—but is she in fact theirs? I met Bell to discuss what attracted her to this doubly disturbing scenario.

I have a real penchant for gothic horror and psychological drama. I read Robert Louis Stevenson (Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde), Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, (Bram Stoker’s) Dracula—some fantastic stuff—and came up with a treatment, which was all the company wanted initially for a play from me for children. They looked at the treatment for The Splinter and said, “We can’t put this on for children; they’ll be terrified!” (LAUGHS) It was a bit too scary but also it’s a play which depends on its power of suggestion. And I think you need to be a grown-up—or maybe a teenager—to understand how that splinter of doubt can grow and infect your whole view of the world. It’s a grown-up’s play.

Is it inspired by any substitute child stories in particular or did that just come to you?

I guess I’ve had a bit of an ongoing fascination with fairy law and changelings in particular. Fairytales in general are just so rich and so deceptively simple. There’s so much going on underneath.

It seems from reading the play that you aim for a kind of apparent simplicity. There’s not a lot of back-story, just hints from time to time. It’s all very much in the present, very fable-like. There’s even a fairy story in it.

Yes, that’s one of the things that Polly Rowe as dramaturg has been doing—encouraging me to lift out too many contemporary references. I want a couple. Choc-drops I wanted to keep.

You can get too ethereal. You have to be careful, don’t you, that that the play doesn’t become ‘unearthed.’

But on the other hand it feels very concrete because of the intense relationship between the couple. It’s very frank actually.

I think it’s been a really healthy marriage and they have survived that trauma of losing their child, which not a lot of couples do. I guess that was one of the inspirations for me for this play: that question of when you get everything you want, when you’ve been through absolute hell and your child is restored to you, that should be the happy ending. I read about a teenager who had been stolen from her bed and returned nine months later. It happened in the US and I was living there at the time. There were hurrahs and celebration all over the newspapers. I couldn’t help thinking, how do you as a family achieve some kind of normalcy after your child has been through that—the things she’s seen, the things she’s had to confront, the places that you as parents have been—the dark recesses that you’ve had to explore?

But in The Splinter we don’t know, which probably makes it worse in a way.

In some ways it does. And what would it be like to sit down to dinner again as a family? What would you talk about? I don’t think it would be “How was your day?” Would you talk about anything? So that was actually the first scene I wrote and I called it ‘Eggshells’ because I thought it would be like walking on eggshells—the things you couldn’t say, the dangerous territory. What bits of land are left for you to walk on when everything is so fraught but you’re also brimming over with gratitude?

Many relationships come unstuck once someone is lost. It’s like the glue that was there is gone and there’s a desire to blame. Guilt is an interesting component in your play.

A lot of it is guilt to do with the husband’s suspicious mind. Ultimately there’s a point in the final scene when his wife says, “Whatever you’ve been thinking, wherever you’ve been in your imagination, I accept you and I forgive you and I accept responsibility for pushing you there and let’s just get on with it now.” And he is forced to admit, “Well, if Laura is not that person, if she’s not everything I’ve impugned her with, then what does that make me?” He can’t bear the notion of what that makes him. It’s actually safer and more comfortable to continue on an insane trajectory. There have been many inspirations for this play but that came from The Turn of the Screw. I read it twice. The first time I thought the children were possessed and the governess was a heroine. The second time I thought she’s bonkers and she’s projecting all this stuff onto these two innocent children. And there’s a moment towards the climax where she has that exact thought: if these children are innocent, then who am I, what does that make me?

The play’s a very interesting study of a male going to pieces and you take it pretty far. It’s almost hallucinatory—and poetically so.

There were times right at the very beginning of the process where I was thinking, well does it matter which is the father and which is the mother. I thought it’d be interesting to study what it’s like for a father in this situation. And one thing that I guess I instinctively knew about—and we’ve been unpacking it in rehearsals—is that bond that a mother has with her small child. Certainly for the first year the father is pretty much excluded. [When the child is returned] he tries to be involved but something in him keeps pushing her away. And the husband and wife have probably done the worst thing they could do by removing themselves from society. They thought they could bond again but they’re just three people rattling around in this empty house.

How then do you see the wife’s role? In the beginning she’s the one who’s saying, “Don’t go outside…” She’s ultra-protective because she’s living for now, for the moment. Whereas he’s started living backwards in a way—’what’s been done to us?, ‘we’ve lost a chunk of our life.’ She’s not going through quite the crisis he is.

No she’s not. She makes a decision. In some ways she’s just as vulnerable as he is at the beginning and their relationship is also very exposed under that pressure, but there’s a point where she makes a very clear decision that she can’t live like that and that it’s not healthy for them or the daughter. So she commits one hundred percent to being with this traumatised, mute little person. When he indicates that he’s not sure about the identity of the child, the wife reacts so violently. I think that means it has occurred to her and it’s a disgusting, repellent thought. And she has rejected it. Whatever the situation, she says, this is Laura and I’m her mother and I’m going to commit.

I like that anger. It’s a strong response and she knows where he’s weak.

I’ve been fascinated for a really long time—it’s in some of the things I’ve written over the last few years—by the question of identity and people needing someone to be the person they want them to be.

The other thing this play’s about is people behaving in ways they never thought they were capable of and seeing themselves as strangers. And, yes, not recognising the person they’ve been married to for 10 years.

The way The Splinter is to be performed—with puppetry—how did that come about?

I had the treatment, which involved the mother, the father and the child. You really have to think hard about how to portray children on stage. Wolf Lullaby has a nine-year old girl as the main character. It’s pretty much always been performed by a young woman playing that part. That’s the wonderful thing about theatre, you put her in a school uniform and everyone believes in her within 30 seconds. But I did see it once with a real child and that made it a completely different play. But with The Splinter I didn’t want to have to deal with a grown-up playing a 4-year old. And I wanted her to be on stage, not just talked about. I didn’t want a real child. There would be thoughts you imagine running through the audience: “Who were the parents that let their child be dunked in a bucket of blood?” or “What a good little actress.” Those sorts of things get in the way of the show.

I was talking to Polly about it and I’d seen a production that my father (John Bell) had directed of Madam Butterfly not that long before and they had a beautiful little Bunraku puppet as the child. It was completely blank, a little lump of wood that was specifically articulated so it looked like a child but had no face. And interestingly enough in changeling law sometimes you pull back the bedclothes of your baby’s cradle and there’s a lump of wood that’s been left there. So I said to Polly, “What if we did it as a puppet? And Polly had been working with puppeteer Alice Osborne in a workshop the week before. She said, “Talk to Alice and see if you get on.”

We had a workshop soon after that. Alice made beautiful little ‘empty’ dresses. One was made of stiff paper so you could pick up and dance with it, play with it. Another was made from a garbage bag that she sewed in the shape of a child’s dress. One was a cotton dress with wire threaded through the seams so it stood up. And they had these incredible personalities, these empty dresses. You didn’t have to have the puppet child; you could create a whole world with a bunch of tinfoil and brown paper and cornflakes and bizarre props that Alice had found in the prop room.

There’s a stage direction that says, “The room turns inside out.” I saw exactly how we could do that with a sheet of plastic in front of the performers and then it was whipped round and it was behind them. And everything that you had taken for granted suddenly looked grotesque. It was thrilling to see what could be done with the simplest of means. The two performers who do the puppetry have a really beautiful sensitivity for it, an intense concentration and that ability to negate your presence while you’re working with the materials.

The Splinter features actors Erik Thomson (Packed to the Rafters) and Helen Thomson (recently seen in STC’s Under Milkwood) as the husband and wife, with Julia Ohannessian and Kate Worsely as puppeteers, directed by Sarah Goodes, with puppetry and movement created and directed by Alice Osborne and design by Renee Mulder.

Sydney Theatre Company, The Splinter, Wharf 1, Sydney, Aug 1-Sept 15, sydneytheatre.com.au

FROM OUR CITY OFFICE WE CAN HEAR AND OCCASIONALLY GLIMPSE IMPASSIONED AADA STUDENTS HARD AT WORK, REHEARSING AND IMPROVISING JUST ACROSS PITT STREET. THEY’RE IMMERSED IN A HEAVY DUTY, FULL-TIME, TWO-YEAR BACHELOR OF PERFORMANCE DEGREE COURSE WITH SIX LONG TRIMESTERS AND MOUNTAINS OF HANDS-ON EXPERIENCE IN ALL ASPECTS OF THEATRICAL CREATION.

Course Coordinator and Voice Director Alistair Toogood spoke with me about the school, the Australian Academy of Dramatic Arts—AADA (pronounced, aptly, like RADA without the R), its origins and aims. “It sprang from the mind of Andrew Davidson, who’s the Head of Department. It has a long history going back some 20 years and was purchased a few years ago by the Australian Institute of Music (AIM). Andrew developed what had been a fairly standard acting diploma course into a Bachelor of Performance. The thrust of that was a course that is really built for the Australian industry in terms of creating something unique—that our students are trained in all the aspects of producing a theatre performance.”

The basis for the course is, says Toogood, “very strong acting training, very good acting teachers and our core units in acting, improvisation, movement and voice. Students also get training in how to think in terms of creating story— mythology, archetypes, dramaturgy and adaptation. Alongside there are technical units that enable them to become lighting and sound operators and designers.”

I assume the aim is to turn out actors who if faced with the need can self-produce without feeling helpless. “Yes,” says Toogood, “but it also means they’re ready for anything that might get thrown at the actor. The reality of the Australian industry is that you have to have a number of strings to your bow. So we cover directing, design, stage management, finances, producing, filmmaking, as well as film acting and promotion, on top of the strong core acting units. This all really comes together in the second half of their course where they devise works in groups, putting what they’ve learned into practice, guided by very good mentors. They might act in the production, or direct or design it. Our graduates, for the couple of years since we started, are already out there working—producing and marketing and acting in their own work.”

I ask if some students turn away from acting and take to another aspect of theatre. Toogood says that they all “arrive dreaming of acting but some discover a passion for costume design or voiceover work—and we do training in that. As soon as they start with us they’re developing technical and stage management skills—the first year students are the crew for the second year productions. That experience gives them some ideas about which direction they’d like to go.

“We have an industry placement program at the end of the course and have found that our students often have to step in and replace someone or otherwise help out. They’re always ready to step up.”

AADA’s staff includes a strong line-up of teachers who have worked at or graduated from NIDA, WAAPA and other institutions. Toogood tells me that “core staff studied postgraduate courses at NIDA—Andrew Davidson, myself, Stefanos Rassios. Anca Frankenhaeuser is a wonderful movement tutor carrying on the work of the late, great Keith Bain, employing his movement process throughout the course. Marcelle Schmitz who used to be my acting teacher at WAAPA comes over to teach acting in the foundation stage.” Other staff include Matthew Edgerton, Sean O’Shea, Lex Marinos, “who teaches audition technique and Lynn Pierse, the great impro teacher. Helmut Bakaitis, who taught directing at NIDA for many years now teaches it at AADA.”

Courses are conducted at Pilgrim House in the centre of Sydney utilising the Pilgrim Theatre and three workspaces. The computer lab, film facilities and green screen are located at the main AIM campus in Surry Hiils.

Recent graduates include Sepy Baghaei who won Best Production at the Short and Sweet 2012 Play Festival for the one man show he wrote and directed, Something to be Done, and Melissa Brownlow who has been accepted into Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s Summer Residency Program in Chicago. Toogood says of the Bachelor of Performance degree courses that they’re “jam-packed, well structured and thought-out. The two-year degree is not a short-cut; the students are fully engaged and know at the end that they’ve done something special.”

THE CONDITION LABELLED HYSTERIA HAS BEEN LARGELY RESTRICTED TO WOMEN (AS A NERVOUS DISEASE EMANATING FROM THE UTERUS MANIFESTING IN DIFFERENT PARTS OF THE BODY AS THAT ORGAN ‘WANDERED’). HOWEVER IN THE COURSE OF THE 20TH CENTURY AND INTO THE 21ST THE TERM HAS BEEN MUCH MORE LIBERALLY APPLIED AS THE NERVOUS INDISPOSITIONS OF MALES AND FEMALES HAVE BEEN RECOGNISED AS AT THE VERY LEAST SHARING KINDRED SYMPTOMS. IN THIS ARTICLE I’LL USE THE TERM VERY LOOSELY, APPLYING IT TO A COLLECTION OF RECENT PRODUCTIONS IN SYDNEY THAT CENTRED ON MALE FEARS AND FAILURES.

the histrionic

Hysteric and histrionic sit nicely together phonologically although they have discrete etymological roots (respectively, “of the uterus” and “pertaining to acting”). Hysteria entails behaviour exhibiting excessive or uncontrollable emotion. An histrionic personality disorder is one in which the subject insists on being the centre of attention, behaves as if before an audience, is emotionally volatile and excessively sensitive to criticism. The description fits the ageing Bruscon, the actor who dominates Thomas Bernhardt’s The Histrionic. A “national living treasure” who has fallen on hard times, Bruscon and his family of performers find themselves in an Austrian backwater. So tryannical is Bruscon that he thwarts his children’s performances and has driven his wife into silence. Director Daniel Schlusser admirably realises the near chaotic state that such a personality generates. Director and designer surround the performers with a mess of decaying theatre props while the action comprises endless interruptions, emotional outbursts, fractured rehearsals and, finally, the destruction of Bruscon’s grand creation by a competing local sausage sizzle and a storm.

Fate and a backward culture deal Bruscon a cruel blow, but he is his own worst enemy. Dangerously fragile, he feels his status to be constantly threatened. The solution? Perpetual self-aggrandisement, rampant sexism, the belittling of his sons and a desire to control his daughter to the point of incest—with just a hint of reciprocity from her, despite the bitterness of their exchanges. In one of the many delicious visual asides, the daughter sits sharpening a very long knife while her father rehearses. For Bernhard, The Histrionic was a depiction of Austria, culturally decrepit and authoritarian and embodied in Bruscon who, nonetheless, is allowed a few insights into his country’s failures, if never his own. Bille Brown creates a very believable and frightening Bruscon, the primal ruler of the herd, in a performance that braves the not always manageable tendency of the play to the monodramatic and the monochromatic.

death of a salesman

Willy Loman is another tyrant, if of a more domestic kind, but equally self-important and just as punishing of his sons, although more insidiously because it is his inflated belief in them which is destructive. His great achievements are his career and his sons, and he effectively loses them all, but the road to acceptance of his condition is long and hard, and incomplete. Colin Friel’s Willy is ebullient, even when tiring and feeling his age, quick to anger and to speechify, a man who almost dances to his death.

At the centre of an otherwise bare stage in Simon Stone’s production sits a humble, white 1996 Ford Falcon sedan, Willy’s proud possession. We know this is a cipher for the American cars so lovingly spoken of in the script, but a car is a car and Stone makes great use of it—it represents Willy’s travels, it’s a refuge and it’s a site for theatre magic as characters unexpectedly emerge from within its comforting womb. It’s also unpronouncedly and humbly phallic, a natural extension of the man, patted and fondled and admired. And when Willy no longer feels up to travel it becomes a place to die, not on the road, but in the yard. By centring the performance in and around the car, Stone creates a wonderful psychological seamlessness which, along with overlapping scene shifts, makes Willy’s visions of the past more palpable as they come over him like incipient dementia.

Like Bruscon, if without that man’s inherent sadism but blindly cruel nonetheless, Willy is beset by rage, despair and incomprehension and a desire for total control that is quite at odds with his place in the world. Willy is an arrogant performer, a fabulist, an histrionic and an hysteric whose failed dreams of being the ideal, loved worker and father take him to the edge of coherence and self-control. Bruscon is exemplar, critic and victim of the political failure of the state. Willy Loman is a passionate promulgator of the American Dream, enacting the state fantasy, imposing it on his family and destroying himself—victim and executor. Colin Friel’s performance is superb, supported by a very strong cast including Genevieve Lemon as Willy’s wife, Linda and there’s an excellent Biff from Patrick Brammall. Presumably because Stone, with designer Ralph Myers, has cast his Death of a Salesman as one man’s nightmare in which past and present deliriously mingle, there is no room for the final Requiem scene with Linda’s anguished eulogy—because it’s not part of Willy’s consciousness. Failing to find a way to incorporate the Requiem without sacrificing his vision, Stone takes the knife to Miller. Male hysteria?

old man

Matthew Whittet’s Old Man is a spare account of a young father’s struggle to achieve a sense of fatherhood—a kind of junior Death of a Salesman but without any sense of the dilemma entailing his career, politics, whatever. Sam (Leon Ford) feels distant from his two children, unable to manage their behaviour and alarmed that he might become, like his own father, an absence, someone who will be forgotten. Old Man is part dream play, in which Sam wakes to find his family gone, and part naturalism, where he acts on what his nightmare has taught him and goes in search of the father (Peter Carroll) who abandoned him as a child. Unlike Bruscon and Willy, Sam is not overtly controlling, but in his dream world he is a confessional storyteller, addressing us directly, increasingly panicky, suicidal even but rescued by his mother whom he cruelly and unjustly blames for his father’s desertion. This might be a dream world, but it is very telling, indicative of deep disturbance.

Perhaps then it seems a little too easy that in the real world Sam announces to his family that he has found his father and will go to see him. The scene with the father (Peter Carroll) is the play’s best. Carroll invests a simple man with complex, often unspoken responses. It’s clear to Sam there can be no meaningful reunion and perhaps that’s all he needs to know. However, at the play’s end, at the dinner table, Sam asks his family to never leave him. Ford plays it plainly but with just a touch of pleading that takes them by surprise, and an awkward silence ensues. Perhaps the good is that he has revealed himself to his family, the bad that his anxieties are still very real. Whittet doesn’t dig deep or at length in this short play, but the evocation of the emotional crisis of a very ordinary man in an intimately staged production is palpable.

die tote stadt

Paul (Stefan Vinke) in Die tote stadt (The City of the Dead), Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s opera of 1920, has built an altar to his dead wife, Maria (Cheryl Barker), fetishising her golden locks and lamenting at length his undying love for her. A dancer, Marietta (Barker again), almost identical to the wife, enters his life and from that encounter springs a dream, in which Paul becomes her lover, inflicts cruelties on her and grows jealous as she flaunts her sexuality in the demimonde of which she is a part. He murders her and wakes to find himself much improved, eager to leave Bruges and its aura of death behind. What’s curious is the cure: the symbolic murder of his wife. In effect, he rids himself of her by transforming an idealised woman into a dangerously free spirit. In Bruce Beresford’s production for Opera Australia, Paul is admirably played by Vinke as dignified and tightly self-controlled before his breakdown commences. In Inga Levant’s production for Opera National Du Rhin (Arthaus DVD, 2001) he’s an utterly abject figure from the word go, unlikely to attract any woman’s interest let alone our understanding. If hysteria in opera has long been associated with diva roles, here it’s embodied firmly in the male—there’s an enormous amount of lovelorn, passionate and mad high-note singing which Vinke performs brilliantly. Cheryl Baker as Maria/Marietta meets similar demands with exuberance and sensitivity. The music is an odd blend of Viennese opera, Richard Strauss, Puccini and Korngold’s trademark melodic lushness. It’s an over the top opera in more ways than one, a borderline classic, but worth seeing for the singing above all—and the alarming male hysteria embedded in the libretto by the composer and his father.

bell shakespeare, the duchess of malfi

Bell Shakepeare’s brutally truncated adaptation of The Duchess of Malfi caricatures a great play, chronically reducing the time and space it needs to work its dark magic and superb testing of empathy. In an incomplete attempt to frame the work within the consciousness of Bosola—the hitman who turns just avenger of the Duchess he has murdered at the behest of her brothers— this version severely limits Webster’s fine distribution of complex characters across a large theatrical canvas. The performances are largely one-dimensional—even Lucy Bell’s otherwise nuanced Duchess is too girlish for too long; right to the bitter end in fact. The merging of Cariola and Julia is awkward. Ben Wood’s perpetually gruff, blokey Bosola undercuts the character’s politic role-playing art, Sean O’Shea’s Judge (Ferdinand in the play) is ragingly histrionic and David Whitney’s Cardinal perhaps aptly neutral—a touch of George Pell, I thought. The hysterics are, of course, the Duchess’ brothers, the Judge and the Cardinal, their motivation for not wanting her to marry and then having her killed is a mix of incestuous desire and powerplay. But in this case, it’s the adaptation that’s hysterical, as if maddened by a play that resists control, it all too hastily cuts to the plot chase.

As with Simon Stone’s Death of a Salesman, if you give the play a governing consciousness, something has to give. Here, Bosola is left alive at the end, a wiser man, but without facing the full consequences of the biddings of his conscience—death. He is pretty well reduced to a Morality Play figure, but he should be much more than the bearer of rhymed homilies. Likewise we need more time and space in which to live with the Cardinal and the Judge and their festering hysteria.

Sydney Theatre Company, The Histrionic, Thomas Bernhard, translated by Tom Wright, director Daniel Schlusser, performers Bille Brown, Kelly Butler, Barry Otto, Josh Price, Katherine Tonkin, Jennifer Vuletic, Edwina Wren, design Marg Horwell, lighting Paul Jackson, sound design, composition Darrin Verhagen, Sydney Theatre Company, June 20-July 28; Belvoir, Death of a Salesman, writer Arthur Miller, director Simon Stone, performers Colin Friels, Genevieve Lemon, Patrick Brammall, Steve Le Marquand, Hamish Michael, Pip Miller, Luke Mullins, Blazey Best, design Ralph Myers, lighting Nick Schlieper, composer Stefan Gregory, Belvoir Theatre, opened June 23; Belvoir, Old Man, writer Matthew Whittet, director Anthea Williams, performers Alison Bell, Peter Carroll, Leon Ford, Gillian Jones, Madelaine Benson/Mitzi Ruhlmann, Tom Usher/Zac Ynfante, design Mel Page, lighting Hartley TA Kemp, sound Stefan Gregory, Belvoir Downstairs, June 7-July 22; Opera Australia, Die tote stadt, composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, director Bruce Beresford, performers Stefan Vinke, Cheryl Barker, designer John Stoddart, lighting Nigel Levings, conductor Christian Badea, Sydney Opera House, July 3-18; The Duchess of Malfi, writer John Webster, adaptation Hugh Colman, Ailsa Piper, director John Bell, performers Lucy Bell, Ben Woods, Sean O’Shea, David Whitney, Matthew Moore, Lucia Mastrantone, designer Stephen Curtis, lighting Hartley TA Kemp, composer Alan John, sound design Steve Francis; Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, July 8-Aug 5

ANNE-LOUISE RENTELL’S PRODUCTION OF MARCEL DORNEY’S NEW PLAY, CHARCOAL CREEK, IMAGINES A PAST SHIMMERING WITH BRUTALITY. SET IN CHARCOAL CREEK, NSW (NOW UNANDERRA), IN THE LATE 1870s, THE LAND IS LUSH BUT DEVASTATION—THE MURDERING OF ABORIGINAL PEOPLE—HAS SCARRED THE ENVIRONMENT AND THE PSYCHE OF THE COLONIALS. THE NARRATIVE DOESN’T DEAL HEAD-ON WITH BLACK AND WHITE AUSTRALIA BUT INSTEAD RECREATES THE KINDLING OF FEAR AND PREJUDICE; THE BURNT LANDSCAPE OF THE MIND.

The play begins with its four characters—recent English arrivals, Charlotte (Olivia Beardsley) and husband Edward (Ed Wightman), and local dairy farmers Brigid (Catherine Moore) and husband Tom (Johnny Carr)—being drawn into swampy gloom to stand, like disembodied spirits, between tall, cindered trees. Running water, darkness, a metallic screeching. A slash of pulsating light reveals Brigid. Her mind ravaged by dreams, her fury fuelled by fear, she’s an Irish Elektra, an oppressed spirit seeking revenge, railing against the thunder, her husband’s snoring, her child’s crying and the unjust treatment of the Irish by the English. Her nighttime tirade foreshadows the play’s violent end and reflects Dorney’s interest in the way the past infuses terror into the present.

Charcoal Creek, humanist in perspective, asks universal questions. Does violence breed violence? Can past horrors be overcome? Can injustice be forgiven? Short scenes and poetic soliloquies unravel the shaping of a colonial community through a story of two households. Like Elektra, Brigid is the catalyst for murderous action. Although from invader stock herself, she views her new neighbours as invaders. Class division, family prejudices, historical injustices are to blame. Edward and Charlotte’s snobbery doesn’t help. Edward, a zealot for Darwin’s theory of natural selection, is in railway management and uninterested in farming. He bought the land for investment. Charlotte, a Bronte-reading romantic, gets bored and seduces Tom. Brigid’s revengeful impulses are unleashed. She sets the town against her neighbours with devastating consequences. When a raiding party passes by, flaming sticks in hand, she turns away. Dorney writes Tom as the martyr of the story. He embodies (perhaps too neatly) the clash of black and white Australia—his father responsible for hunting raids on Aboriginal people, his great grandfather, Aboriginal. Tom rushes to aid his neighbours, saving Charlotte (his child in her belly) but loses his own life.

Moore portrays Brigid as a bitter, stoic woman whose psyche is muddied by ingrained prejudices. Carr’s Tom is a good soul caught in forces beyond his control. Wightman juxtaposes Edward’s inner torment with outer jocularity. Beardsley’s Charlotte is intelligent and delightfully wicked. Anne-Louise Rentell’s theatrical landscape, moody and dark, is itself a pulsing spirit. Verity Hampson’s lighting creates a dynamic sculptural space where characters appear and disappear like magic tricks. Daryl Wallis’s sound design cleverly juxtaposes the natural with its industrial future. Imogen Ross’s costumes embody class division—Charlotte and Edward’s material lushness against Tom and Brigid’s common-sense fabrics.

There are some odd notes to this production: having decided upon an abstract set Rentell divides the forestage in two, one side for each household, and unnecessarily limits the playing space; the 20th century voice-overs seem out of place in the last moments of the play, yet would work wonderfully as the audience enters and exits; the off-stage references to children only highlight the fact they aren’t there; Moore does not take the opportunity to add vulnerability to Brigid’s interior monologues and the character’s stern exterior casts her too easily as the villain of the piece; Brigid’s costume, constantly neat and trim, never gives the sense of a working woman who must slosh around in the muck of cowsheds, nor of her nighttime instability.

But these are minor criticisms, remembering also that new plays need a first run in order to settle. Charcoal Creek is a tightly directed, thoughtfully realised production that enters the debate about prejudice from a colonial perspective through a conjuring of psychological landscapes.

Merrigong Theatre Company: Charcoal Creek, writer Marcel Dorney, director, designer, Anne-Louise Rentell, performers Olivia Beardsley, Johnny Carr, Catherine Moore, Ed Wightman, costumes Imogen Ross, lighting Verity Hampson, sound designer Daryl Wallis; Illawarra Performing Arts Centre, Illawarra, NSW, June 5–16

THE DUSK ACHES ITS WAY ACROSS THE DESERT SKY AND A CROWD GATHERS ALONGSIDE A STORMWATER DRAIN THAT SEPARATES THE ICONIC SPENCER HILL FROM THE SMALL ALICE SPRINGS SUBURB OF EASTSIDE. AS THE LIGHT SLOWLY DECLINES, HISTORIES EMERGE FROM SHADOWS AND SAND; FIGURES BLENDING WITH VOICES TO EXCAVATE THE LAYERS OF STORIES UNDER TODAY.

Under Today is the outcome of a five-year quest to uncover what director Dani Powell describes as “the things that we don’t see, as relative newcomers to a place that has been extensively mapped by those who have lived here before us.” The work’s genesis is in oral history, with Powell piecing together the final narrative over many years from interviews with past and present residents of Alice Springs.

Powell realised she was “making a documentary and the question then became how to engage a live audience with a deeply aural work.” Multimedia artist Alex Gillespie was one of her earliest collaborators on the project. Gillespie’s long-term involvement is reflected in the deep synergy between the soundscape created from the oral histories and her projections of historical and contemporary maps onto the contours of the landscape.

Intimate knowledge of the Spencer Hill site is central to the work’s breathtaking use of the landscape; durational manipulation of light and shadow throughout the performance is elegantly employed to illustrate social and historical proximity. The opening sequence of silhouetted figures emerging from and fading back into the landscape left the eye searching for stories in the last of the light; a poignant analogy for the dispersive and ephemeral nature of human experiences layered over the site.

In contrast to the effortless synergy between lighting design and soundscape, the success of the contemporary dance elements as a vehicle for image-based performance was sporadic. Aspects of the live performance provided thoughtful juxtapositions with the aural narrative; the imagery of dancers extracting clothing buried in the sand was captivating throughout, providing an evocative visual metaphor for buried histories. However, much of the choreography, such as pizza-spinning gestures accompanying histories of the Italian community, centred on literal interpretations of individual stories and displayed limited conceptual integration of core themes of the work.

Unlike another recent site-specific performance, such as Big hART’s Namatjira in Ntaria/Hermansburg, Under Today is not designed to tour. It has been produced from and for the community of Alice Springs. Despite this, its key message—the importance of understanding the far-reaching historical relationship between the earliest inhabitants and the land—is one that is relevant beyond its local audience. Powell’s depth of commitment and skill in collecting and re-presenting these stories in live performance is to be applauded. In a political climate where measures of social dysfunction are often cited as a justification for government interventions on Aboriginal land, Under Today serves as a timely reminder to the community of the complex and contested nature of land tenure and belonging in Central Australia.

Red Shoes, Under Today, director Dani Powell, lighting Kallum Wilkinson, projections Alex Gillespie, sound design Damian Mason, choreography Miriam Nicholls (Bond), producers Red Shoes and Browns Mart Productions; Spencer Hill, Alice Springs, May 25-27

EVE, A THEATRICAL MEMOIR OF AUSTRALIAN NOVELIST EVE LANGLEY, IS THE LATEST PERFORMANCE WORK DEVISED BY THE LONG-TERM COLLABORATORS IN THE NEST ENSEMBLE. INITIALLY CONCEIVED WITH BRISBANE THEATRE STALWART AND SADLY MISSED DIRECTOR DOUG LEONARD AND HIS PARTNER, DESIGNER ANNA FAIRLEY, EVE IS NOW VERY MUCH IN THE HOUSE STYLE OF THE NEST. AS WITH THEIR PREVIOUS PRODUCTION, THE KNOWING OF MARY POPPINS, BASED ON THE LIFE OF PL TRAVERS, THE AUDIENCE IS INVITED TO ‘READ’ AND ASSESS THE LIFE OF A SIGNIFICANT AND MISUNDERSTOOD FEMALE AUSTRALIAN ARTIST.

Eve Langley’s life is representative of the experience of many female Australian artists of the1940s: brave and bold, with freedom as their leitmotif. Langley’s most famous novel, The Pea-Pickers (1942), is her autobiographical account of adopting a male persona, Steve, in order to go fruit picking with her sister in the Gippsland region. Unfortunately, the price of such artistic and personal liberty was excruciating: poverty, domestic drudgery and madness. Langley’s work and her life became increasingly florid and disassociated, and by the late 1940s she had formally changed her name by deed poll to that of her hero, Oscar Wilde. Like Janet Frame, Langley spent years in an asylum, only to be rescued by her sister in 1956. She was found dead in her remote hut in Katoomba in the Blue Mountains in 1974, her face eaten by rats.

EVE opens with a few key propositions. A ghostly Eve greets the audience, demanding, “Would you consider me mad now? Who is it that can tell me who I am?” The haunting central image of the work is the prone body of Margi Brown Ash as the three-week old corpse of Eve Langley, her incandescent face tilting back slowly to reveal a “mouthful of planets.” The other figures are caught in Ash’s orbit; they are her hallucinations rather than separate entities. The male violinist Moshio accompanies the singsong poetry of the text with a score by Travis Ash. Stace Callaghan is perched directly above the life-sized bush hut that dominates the stage, as the child-muse narrating the well-known Oscar Wilde short story, The Selfish Giant.

What EVE captures exquisitely is the pain of Langley’s life, particularly the years leading up to her committal, with three young children, no money and a wayward painter for a husband. Ash’s caramel voice and whirling dervish performance energy is infused with danger and intensity in the passages of the piece that focus on these years, where Langley, like Ash herself, was trying to juggle the demands of young children and her artistic calling. This is the distinctive aesthetic of The Nest Ensemble at its best: autobiographical and literary, archetypal and sensual, like a warm bath of emotion and word. There are no sharp edges or raw blisters.

If there are any criticisms to be made of the show they exist generally around this sort of memoir theatre. Like the polite, hushed tones of a panel at a writers’ festival, there were moments where the literary overwhelmed the performative and the reverent elegy snuffed out the blowsy and exuberant wildness of Langley’s life and writing. Langley’s vocation, to write the mythic Australian landscape, was evoked by a sequence involving a chalk map on the back wall of the Sue Benner Theatre and a list of Langley’s works. Homage was paid and dutifully noted but Langley’s driving compulsion was being described rather than experienced. I should acknowledge, though, that in the performance I attended Moshio had to leave the stage with a broken string and so I saw a show with the vital performance element of the soundscape missing.

Yet the sense of literary and metaphoric remove was also reinforced by the design. The dominating bush hut, filled with the naturalistic props of Langley as an aging recluse, read as Australiana rather than interiority. Placing and containing Stace Callaghan in the balcony, unable to move, akin to the dead body of Langley, neutralised her powerful performance energy. The decision to foreground the words of Oscar Wilde felt like another literary frame. Langley had her own male alter ego, Steve, one she inhabited in life and recreated in her novels. However, EVE exploded theatrically when the autobiography of a performer’s body intersected with the literary and historical story of Langley. It felt like a missed opportunity not to experience that with Callaghan too. Perhaps the danger of consistency is that your accomplishments become the norm. Criticism aside, EVE is a deftly directed and beautifully constructed account of an important Australian artist’s life.

The Nest Ensemble, EVE, writer, co-deviser Margi Brown Ash, director, co-deviser Leah Mercer, performers Margi Brown Ash, Stace Callaghan, Moshio, co-deviser Daniel Evans, composer Travis Ash, design Backwoods Original, lighting Genevieve Trace, costumes Kate White; The Independents, Sue Benner Theatre, Metro Arts, May 9-26

YOU HAVE GOT TO LOVE A SHOW THAT OPENS WITH A CABINET OF CURIOSITIES. CURLY TAPS, AN ODD LOOKING FLAG, WONDROUS WHEELS AND EVEN A BOWL OF APPLES ARE SET ATOP A PAIR OF ORNATE DOORS THAT YOU HALF EXPECT TO BE CONCEALING A BOG-STANDARD COFFEE CART. ITS ODDITY HARBOURS SUCH GLEE THAT GUESSING AT ITS FUNCTION IS THE PERFECT WAY TO CHANNEL THE EXCITEMENT OF A MASS OF CHILDREN ALL TOO IMPATIENT FOR THE REAL PERFORMANCE TO BEGIN.

Terrapin Puppet Theatre is masterly at this kind of stuff, for all the right reasons. They know their audience intimately. They write with them, collaborate with them and tend to fashion clever narratives peppered with just enough curious angles and obtuse twists to keep families engaged. With Sleeping Horses Lie, their latest two-hander, the story is of Sally, a young girl who plays tiger with fingernails of strapped-on felt pens, bravely navigating a world of adult indifference and fear. In a kind of classic quest, two storytellers enact the journey of her unsettling dreams using all the ‘he said/she said’ literary devices of picture books and bedtime stories. The narrators jump between characters to warn us that “this is what happens when shapes change shape in the night” as Sally reluctantly ventures to the park after being chastised for using house walls as canvas to her felt pen art. Putting on her best brave, she becomes “Sally Long Claws” and encounters friends and foe along the way, including a pair of trickster horses who give the work its title. In a fun narrative twirl at the end, Sally is eaten by the imagined tiger she so anxiously fears, but her ingenuity eventually wins the day.

The performance adopts a Victorian-era storytelling aesthetic, with the wow factor being Terrapin’s now trademark form of digital puppetry. In this show, the performers’ expert use of touch screen iPod-sized devices to project parts of Sally’s journey creates a kind of magic that works well—even with an audience saturated in animation culture. Terrapin’s trick is to keep the basics of compelling puppetry at the core, for it is the sheer delight of unexpected transformations—big and small, digital and mechanical—that keeps the fascination alive in this work.

This show demands a lot of its performers, however. To capture the curiously aloof air that marks the best of the Victorian story-teller tradition is not as easy as it might seem, and sometimes the performance didn’t quite match the promise of the material. With so much going on (including the base task of getting through so much text in so little time), there was sometimes a sense of being hurtled towards show’s end. So it was no surprise to discover the performance we attended was the second of two back-to-back shows and the final of a two-week road tour. Yet, for any actor who has experienced it, there is nothing so priceless as the collective gasp or giggle of children in a theatre. To make good the contract, they deserve only the very best in exchange.

Terrapin Puppet Theatre, Sleeping Horses Lie, director Frank Newman, writer Maxine Mellor, performers Bryony Geeves, Kai Raisbeck, designer Selena de Carvalho; Earl Arts Centre, Launceston, June 16. Touring Tasmanian venues.

THERE IS A LOVELY AWKWARDNESS TO A DECIBEL PERFORMANCE, AS ITS MEMBERS YOKE TOGETHER ELECTRONIC AND INSTRUMENTAL SOUNDS TO TRY OUT COMPOSITIONS THAT TRANSPOSE THE TWO.

Decibel arrive on stage with all of the formalities of a chamber orchestra, wearing funereal suits and gazing seriously at scores unrolling on an array of networked laptops. Into this quiet, conservative atmosphere they work with the quirky edges of new music, each piece holding a surprise within it that turns the conservatism of composition on its head.

In Agostino Di Scipio’s Texture/Residue the musicians play without playing, tapping their fingers on the instruments without blowing or drawing a bow. Here lies the awkward moment that Decibel are working with, as we expect to hear the harmonies of instruments working together but are instead confronted by a tapping of fingers on cello, flute, saxophone and the like.

At some point being amused by the piece turns into a fascinating experiment in listening to what you usually deign not to hear. Instrumental sound is also the sound of the materiality of the instrument, a materiality that is here attacked vigorously by the fingers of the players, building to an anxious and beautiful texture of sound.

Liminum, by the outfit’s artistic director Cat Hope, is a brilliantly didactic example of what Decibel is interested in doing—colliding electronic and instrumental sounds, as if in a centrifuge. Here instruments imitate a distorted electronic sound, as if taken from a horror film soundtrack. There is a dark ambience at work here, as the instruments are required to remain at the pace and tone of the sound, never rising or falling to the registers they are capable of. This is Decibel at their most interesting, as electronic and instrumental sounds flesh themselves out in relation to each other, here beginning to sound positively industrial as a violin twists through the amplification of pedals.

Such experiments are symptomatic of the kind of awkward and fascinating fit that Decibel create, in compositions that sometimes generate harmony but often highlight the ways that sounds can slide and grate against each other. In Liminum, it is as if some bulbous creature is trying to order a drink in a bar but cannot make itself understood. Amid such experiments the standout instrument of the concert became the piano—ably played by Stuart James—pulling many of these sounds together just as they were moving in different directions. The piano also tied much of the concert to sounds that resembled those from a 1980s horror movie. A new work by Australian wunderkind Anthony Pateras, commissioned by Decibel, also had a haunting feeling to it, as did an atmospheric, moody composition by Perth’s Joe Stawarz.

The highlight of these horror themed pieces was JG Thirwell’s Canaries in the Mineshaft/Edison Medicine from his Manorexia project. Thirwell is better known for the brashness of Foetus, but like many rock musicians, discovered that he was also good at composing music. Innovatively combining the sound of a skipping CD, a record player and baby accordion, Thirwell’s composition offered a chance for the ensemble to show off what they are really good at, as different angles of musicality were thrown together in a series of distortions that built to sublime cacophony.

To throw the whole concert into a different register, a final, happier piece by Bohren and der Club of Gore called up images from a moody 1970s conspiracy film. Old cars in traffic and a recording of rain combined in one of those mixed up combinations that kept the concert attuned to the Decibel concept, while pushing its continuity.

Such disruptions make for a lively Decibel concert as short pieces try out different ideas, throwing sounds together and pulling them apart again. This gives their performances a freshness that can transform into a nervous disposition, as an audience waits for an irruption of new sounds. In a traditional concert setting, where everything is prim and proper, this could well be fatal to an experience of the music. Such discomfort provides however the perfect atmosphere to experience the uncertainty that comes out of collisions between one type of sound and another.

Decibel, Small Things: Decibel performers Cat Hope, Stuart James, Tristen Parr, Malcolm Riddoch, Lindsay Vickery, Aaron Wyatt, Callum Moncrieff, Perth Concert Hall, May 28

ENSEMBLE OFFSPRING’S NEW RADICALS PROGRAM PROMISES TO INTRODUCE NEW AND INSPIRING ART MUSIC TO AUSTRALIAN AUDIENCES. BEYOND THE THREAD OF LO-FI, DIY SOUND SOURCES LINKING THE WORKS, AN AIR OF RISK-TAKING PERVADED THE CONCERT. THE UNUSUAL SOUND SOURCES SUCH AS MEGAPHONES, 78RPM RECORDINGS, BUCKETS, BOTTLES AND SANDPAPER WERE BETTER APPRECIATED IN SOLOS AND DUOS WHERE THE AUDIENCE COULD CLOSELY WATCH THE PERFORMERS STRUGGLING TO CONJURE MUSICAL SOUND FROM THEIR MATERIALS.

Yannis Kyriakides’ Zeimbekiko 1918 is a palimpsest of nostalgia from its eponymous folk tune, through its composed realisation on violin and electric guitar, to the mind of the rapt reviewer sitting in the audience. Kyriakides’ patchwork of slow-attack guitar tones and pealing violin harmonics is based on an old recording of the zeimbekiko aivaliotiko he found while exploring his Cypriot roots. The tune from the town of Ayvalik in Turkey has its own history of memory and loss as Ayvalik’s primarily Greek population was displaced during the Greco-Turkish population exchange of 1923. To the musicians recording the zeimbekiko aivaliotiko in 1918 New York, however, the tune may have been a more positive organ of memory.

Kyriakides plays on this and his own history of imperfect remembering by cutting up and reordering the phrases of the tune into disjointed gestures and reeling decorative passages. The figures rise out of the hiss of the 78rpm record and repeat indeterminately or disappear never to be heard again. The bright tones of the recording jar against the violin and guitar, which are occupied with painting the past with a wash of long harmonic tones and chords. Already a dated work, the sound world of Kyriakides’ composition held its own nostalgic quality for me.

Written in 1995 and revised in 2001, Zeimbekiko 1918 bears the lo-fi aesthetic, combined classical and rock instrumentation, ponderous tonal minimalism and aching sincerity of its time. In fact the work slightly pre-dates the most successful bands making music in this vein like Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Veronique Serret on violin and Zane Banks on guitar matched the sincerity of the music without lapsing into sentimentalism, leaving the work’s emotion to the persistence of each ringing note.

The peculiar thing about Kyriakides’ aesthetic is that it not only paints a picture of nostalgia, suspending you in indefinite dreamy concern, but it is nostalgic to me insofar as I used to listen to an awful lot of this music around the time it was written. Having made this comparison, Kyriakides’ use of fluid meters demonstrates his distance from post-rock reverie and sustains an arresting peculiarity throughout the entire work.

If Kyriakides looks back to a lost time then Turkish-born and Sydney-based Ekrem Mülayim looks forward to one. Having previously invented a culture with a history, language and scripts so that he could imagine the relevant music, Mülayim here invented a new instrument, notation and choreography for percussionist Claire Edwardes. Each of the hand-crocheted gloves has three bells hanging from the tips of the fingers. Seated at a black table Edwardes endeavoured to dextrously strike and dampen each bell according to a unique form of notation combining choreography and sound. The result was beautiful in its simplicity and use of movement, with occasional silent gestures—an upheld hand or a wipe of the forehead—adding to the ceremonial focus of the performance. To watch Edwardes strain to keep the bells from inadvertently striking each other was like watching a shaman conducting a dangerous rite. The magical aura of the performance was only increased by the kick-drum hidden under the table that suddenly began to punctuate the spell.

At the other end of the New Music spectrum was the world premier of New Zealand composer Michael Norris’ Save Yourself, which the composer writes is based on sonic analogues of colour fields over-written with gestures and articulations. This description immediately brings to my mind that terrifying 80s TV show The Mulligrubs, or the seats on public transport. However, instead of Norris’ idea, I heard the timbral washes of the melodica and accordion ‘picking out’ sounds from the ensemble’s tutti chords, sustaining them for inspection like a ninja pulling out his opponent’s heart and presenting it to him as he dies. The struggle with unconventional instrumentation continued with valiant efforts to play the melodica pianissimo. As an ensemble work Save Yourself is a lesson in the economy and honesty of beauty. Nothing falls into the background and the audience follows every step of the way.

The unreliability of Mülayim’s glove-bells made me think of how safe our concert experiences are and how little we expect to go wrong. There is no sense that the virtuoso violinist is really walking a tightrope in that cadenza, or that the ensemble might miscount that 16:23 bar to disastrous effect. Bringing a bit of danger into the concert hall was Ensemble Offspring’s great triumph. Watching a performer struggle with an unusual sound source was the same as listening to a contemporary composer baring his sonic reasoning and putting it on the tightrope of the audience’s open judgement.

IN THE CROSSBOW FESTIVAL FOR SMALL ENSEMBLES THE QUEENSLAND CONSERVATORIUM CONTINUES THEIR PRACTICE OF COMBINING NATIONAL, INTERNATIONAL AND STUDENT PERFORMERS IN CONCERTS OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC.

Tonight it’s ELISION (plus four students) presenting six works, either Australian or world premieres, in the Conservatorium Theatre. It’s a traditional venue—stage up front, audience way down there. Great sound, but not as close to the performers as I’d like for what is a ‘small ensemble’ night.

The concert opens with Gyfu (gift) from Liza Lim. There are half a dozen music stands set up in a line to one side of the stage to give Peter Veale on oboe a clean look at the entire score—no turning pages. A good idea as the work is difficult, challenging, the sort of piece that gets played in competition. Veale gives his usual jaw dropping virtuosic display, technical brilliance completely subsumed to musicality. The upshot is a beautifully lyrical and sinuous performance with hints of Middle Eastern tonalities. Peter Neville’s accompanying percussion lilts, skips and dances, so that for a piece with such a modern language the effect is medieval and theatrical. Troubadours, duduks and multiphonics. Frame drums played with hairbrush and knucklebones.

Jump cut to the first Star Wars (the one that lauds people smugglers) and the introduction of the most annoying trope in sci-fi: the off-planet speakeasy with crazy plush puppets playing 30s future-retro space swing. Timothy McCormack’s One flat thing reproduced provides the rejoinder. The setup is a trio, Hot Club style. Neville sits cool and centre on drums, Veale hunches over with his oboe as though ready to pounce upon the score and Jennings stands to the side on violin. Fast and squeaky, chockablock with sex, humour, triumph and rejection, it’s the Kurt Weill bar for sleazy higher intelligences, unnatural alien superposition and quantum tunnelling between friends.

Benjamin Marks then follows solo on trombone, mute, and lots of singing into the mouthpiece for McCormack’s piece titled Here is a sequence of signs each having a sound and a meaning. The big brass can lend themselves to an element of silly, particularly when made to ‘talk,’ and Marks covers that for sure. But more than a bit of fun, or technical display, the piece develops into ranting hysterics, a frustrated diatribe against some diffuse, unknowable target. An incredible performance.

McCormack’s compositions then are full of character, yet this is in some ways surprising given the formal concerns expressed in his scores and interviews. We are used to the idea that the composer instructs the performer, via a score, to produce various pitches, notes and sounds for the listener. And traditionally the composer wants the listener to hear the sound, rather than hear the performer trying to make the sound. But McCormack has a different, maybe additional, aim—though one that reminds me of other ELISION composers such as Aaron Cassidy and Evan Johnson. McCormack deals with the physicality of production. He wants the audience to hear the underlying mechanisms, to hear the struggle between performer and instrument. His scores are filled with notations and equivocations that pull apart the different components of sound production into a number of autonomous strands of possible action. Performers are asked to make musical sense of the struggle to physically realise the conflicting and interlocking instructions in the score. The result is music that resonates with associations, a triumph of both the composer and the performers, and speaks to the deep connection this work has with the long history of music as an embodied communal experience, as a shared understanding of the effortful production of sound through the use of tools.

In yet another superb performance, Rebecca Saunders’ to and fro, for violin and oboe, gives violinist Graeme Jennings his time in the sun. Standing to the left of the stage, with Veale on oboe to the right, Jennings extracts a continual stream of flurrying harmonics that seem to exist within a thickness of sound. It is as though we can now hear the pitch of a note not as a frequency but as a domain of intricately related possibilities.

Finish the night with ELISION and student guests performing Richard Barrett’s wound i-v (strangely romantic with hints of the Scottish pastoral, rambling slide guitar like a half forgotten Pacific holiday) and codex one (the rush of swarming insects).

If anything, the now UK-based ELISION have grown since the last Queensland Labor government so stupidly cast them adrift. Virtuosic, technically and musically, individually and as an ensemble, we could once claim one of the world’s great contemporary music ensembles as our own. Now we can’t.

ELISION, oboe Peter Veale, horn Ysolt Clark, clarinets Richard Haynes, trombone Benjamin Marks, percussion Peter Neville, violin Graeme Jennings, cello Judith Hamann, electric guitar Daryl Buckley, with Queensland Conservatorium students; Crossbows: a festival for music for small ensembles; Conservatorium Theatre, Griffith University, Brisbane, May 11

PHOTOGRAPHY TODAY IMPINGES ON OUR LIVES IN ALMOST EVERY WAY—MAKING OUR MOST PRIVATE LIVES EXTREMELY PUBLIC, INTENTIONALLY OR NOT. THIS PLACES MANY OF US ON THE PUBLIC RECORD, OUR CANDID WITNESS IMAGES OFTEN INADVERTENTLY BECOMING PUBLIC PROPERTY—MORE-SO FOR AUSTRALIA’S ABORIGINAL POPULATIONS AS SEEN IN DIFFERING FORMS OF PHOTOGRAPHY ACROSS THREE CONTEMPORARY EXHIBITIONS IN SYDNEY. HOW DO WE CONTROL IMAGES OF OURSELVES—HOW DO WE SAY WHAT WE WANT TO SAY?

Manuwangku, Under the Nuclear Cloud—Muckaty Station, by Jagath Dheerasekara was part of the Head On Photo Festival at Customs House in Sydney. Uranium mining, processing and usage have long been controversial in Australia and, being mined on their land, has always been connected to Aboriginal people. Now Muckaty Station Aboriginal landowners in the Northern Territory are being pressured to have their land become a dumping site for radioactive waste from Australia and overseas.

This is the second Aboriginal human rights issues exhibition covered by Dheerasekara who previously photographed Aboriginal housing under the ‘Intervention’ in the Northern Territory in Stars, Sky, Trees, Breeze (Jagath’s Journey, 2010) at the Vanishing Point Gallery, Sydney. [Dheerasekara is currently a recipient of an Amnesty International Human Rights Innovation Fund Grant. Eds]

At the opening of Head On, a friend commented that Dheerasekara’s photographs were clumsy, showing Aboriginal people in a ‘bad’ light, as poverty stricken and in ill health. My own response was different. In his medium-large, rich colour images of people and country Dheerasekara purposefully sets out to show that this supposed empty desert, the place for a proposed radioactive waste dump, is a ‘green’ landscape full of normal people of strong character actively engaging with their environment and each other. We shouldn’t expect every Aboriginal male to look like David Gulpilil or every Indigenous woman to be a Christine Anu clone. Nor do most Aboriginal people, wherever they live, exemplify all the ‘Home Beautiful,’ trappings of the trendy western upper middle class. Nor do they expect to be treated as rubbish.

At the 2012 National Indigenous Photomedia Conference in Melbourne at the Centre for Contemporary Photography a speaker lamented current prejudices affecting artists who like to take images in the street, in public space. In PhotoGraff by Gary Trinh and Jason Wing, at Simon Chan’s Art Atrium, there is a declaration from the artists: “I am not a pedophile—I am not a terrorist.”

“The mindful do not die,
But the heedless are as if dead already!”
Dhammapada 21 [Buddhist text, third century BCE]

A binary view exists as to how to reach revelation—fasting and deprivation or indulgence by which to see the essential or discern the core from the crust. But revelation is also to be found in the everyday: the mindfulness of the ordinary. It’s definitely to be found in the absurd and mirthful, in wit and in laughter, and in the art from the street of Garry Trinh and Jason Wing. The binary of real and shadow. Their daring, sharp eyes catch every trick of perspective where cars appear to merge into the urban landscape like camouflaged animals. Eyes catch shadowy, faded, residual signage and graffiti, now with new readings: (End Restriction [Parking]).

Nicole Foreshew and Darren Bell’s show at Blacktown Art Centre in western Sydney is titled A Place of Sense. A place of sense? A place of senses? But what is sense? We construct ‘our place’ through memory experienced through the senses: sight, sound, taste, smell and touch.

An accompanying text states, “Reflecting on their continued connection with Blacktown and Western Sydney, artists Foreshew and Bell form poetic responses to place through large-scale photomedia prints, site specific installation and performative moving image. A Place of Sense explores the complexities of identity and location within contemporary urban experience” (program brochure).

A youth plays with the male-ish shovel-nose spear, but in a non-threatening way (Darren Bell, Since always, 2011 [youth with shovel-nose spear]). Serendipitously, in Arnhem Land the directional adjective-noun word Kumur Djalk—you precious thing—is a social term of endearment that has its roots in the same word for stone spearhead—normally wrapped in paperbark and traded across hundreds of miles. Nicole Foreshew’s image of a floating, wrapped spiritual object (titled Belong to All Yet to None) is an iconic image of this sense of the sacred. In traditional Aboriginal society you wrap sacred objects, ritual gifts, special foods, valuable ochre colours, bodies living and dead. You use paperbark or specially decorated fabric. And what more sacred site is there than a woman’s body? A gender binary emerges in the exhibition, whether accidental or intentional—apt, mature and without recrimination.

In a video, women (Foreshew’s close family) play and twirl, coiffured in the artist’s fabric. The women spin like Wonder Woman with her ‘lasso of truth’ capturing escaping villains, revealing her power. They spin like a centrifuge, throwing off their outer, everyday coating. The simple, graceful movements here could be said to be seductive; it is part of the performance, but also expresses a powerful and warm, purposeful yearning. A modest, coquettish vanity—a display of affection and tenderness beyond words.

Parallel with this, unconsciously, is an equally tender view of a typical Western Sydney male BBQ captured by Darren Bell. Men divest themselves of their outer garments to expose their power differently—tearing open their shirts to reveal their chests: Supermen.

These are great candid shots, only one of which gets near to a posed portrait. The strength of men, their potential for violence and their exposing of themselves also allows them to be completely vulnerable, physically and emotionally. They are real people. We feel we know them intimately. We are with them, comfortable and not challenged. They are raucous and happy, while an almost aloof second group is really reserved—silent witness rather than spy; more like a close relative, a confidant we have known all our lives. Bell has a great eye for the male psyche that his subjects reveal here.

Alcohol is said to be a depressant but also a suppressant of control. People talk of taking hallucinogenic drugs to see new or different perspectives, even visions. They forget alcohol can take you into another place of sense. It’s said that people tell the ‘real’ story, the truth when they are ‘pissed.’ I haven’t seen such an alive set of moments captured in photos in a long time. An amazing event, coupled with Foreshew’s images of almost instinctive, graceful movement.

You can bring in ‘big names’ to make a curatorial career or, as at Blacktown Arts Centre, you can work with talented locals. It’s curious that as the ‘the state’ and other vested interests clumsily strive to ‘train’ a set of young Aboriginal pet poodles or witless government stooges to be paraded nationally and internationally, it would appear the progress of Aboriginal society becomes possibly irrelevant. What is happening organically at Blacktown Arts Centre and with its local theatre productions leaves clunky, expensively funded programs for dead—the difference between 17th century chamber music and Lady Gaga.

Jagath Dheerasekara, Manuwangku, Under the Nuclear Cloud, Head On Photo Festival, Customs House, May 4-July 7; Gary Trinh, Jason Wing, PhotoGraff, Art Atrium, May 8-26; Nicole Foreshew, Daniel Bell, Place of Sense, Blacktown Arts Centre, Sydney, April 20-July 7

Under the Nuclear Cloud will be featured at this year’s Darwin Festival August 10-26 and tour to Adelaide and Canberra in 2013.

WE NEED YOU, YOU NEED US—THE TITLE IMPLIES A STICKY SITUATION OF MUTUAL DEPENDENCE. THIS CLEVER AND TOPICAL GROUP SHOW AT TIN SHEDS GALLERY CURATED BY GEORGIE MEAGHER BROUGHT TOGETHER FIVE ARTISTS TO PRESENT A PROVOCATION OF SORTS.

A challenge to consider not only the intertwined relationship between artists, galleries and audiences but also the powerful yet often neglected influence that economic relations exert on the making, exhibiting and consumption of art.

Artists working at the dematerialised end of the art-making spectrum deal increasingly in the trading and transmission of experiences and this show was particularly concerned with how such practices destabilise the notion of value in the economy of art. The 90s business pop-philosophy of the ‘Experience Economy’ was a curatorial starting point for Meagher and if the premise bordered on the prescriptive, most artists responded with a welcome light-hearted approach or applied a deft hand to the theme.

Resonating strongly with audiences was Dara Gill’s Untitled (Depositing $250 Artist Fee into Gallery Wall, 2012) which, as the title neatly describes, involved a video documentation of the performative gesture of the artist drilling a hole into the white gallery wall, carefully rolling and inserting his $250 artist fee into the hole and then filling, sanding and painting over it. It was a cynical yet engaging gesture that lampooned art as a remunerative from of labour and reminded audiences that for many artists the making of a work swallows more funds than it generates.

Sebastian Moody, meanwhile, embraced an all-encompassing form of performance art in The Sting (2012), a work that revolved around Moody’s outsourcing of the day-to-day maintenance of his identity (email, Facebook, internet banking and the like) to a young unemployed Brisbane musician named Maxwell Farrington. In a short video work the pair casually negotiated the ins and outs of their con while the viewer struggled to identify Maxwell from Sebastian, becoming implicated in a game of cat and mouse over who represented the ‘real’ impostor.

Others works tested the premise that audience participation can inject greater agency into the economy of relations between the art object and viewer, with varying results. Paul Gazzola’s Just For The Thrill Of It (2012) comprised a re-purposed Jumbo Skill Tester machine filled with hundreds of brightly coloured key tags inserted with the details of Gazzola’s “company.” By inserting a coin and manoeuvering the mechanical claw into the pile, players could retrieve a tag and earn a share in the company—here the experience of participating in the game was perhaps more novel than empowering. Lara Thoms, on the other hand, introduced an unnerving and stalkeresque edge to audience participation in CONGRATS#2 (2012). Inviting gallery visitors to inscribe their mobile numbers onto the machine’s Bingo card over the duration of the exhibition, whichever number the Bingo ball landed upon on the final day of the show Thoms pledged to call daily for an entire year, a potentially rewarding or rather awkward prize depending upon your point of view.

Agatha Gothe-Snape’s series of de-skilled artworks playfully refuted the notion that either the purity of materials or the precision of an artist’s skill can act as arbiters of an artwork’s value. A whimsical yellow rectangle Power Point slide show reworked Minimalism for the DIY digital age and a series of limited edition prints were dictated by the mileage of a single ink cartridge inserted into a bubble jet printer. Gothe-Snape’s works were typical of the wryly ironic, self-reflexive and low-fi contributions of the five artists which presented a diverse and stimulating range of interpretations on the theme, provoking responses that were albeit more cerebral than visceral.

There was a welcome contrast, then, in Nathan Babet’s unrelated installation Red Water (?ervená Voda) in the next room which presented a multimedia environment spilling over with signification and affective power as Babet, an artist working with sculpture and video, continued his investigation into the loaded terrain of the uncanny. Here, Babet inhabited the figure of the Zimmerman (carpenter) and filled the gallery with the products of his labour, from piles of chopped wood, ceiling height pine trees and a lone felled tree to an imposing Gulag watchtower. Two video loops showed the artist-carpenter taking slow and menacing trance-like swings at a tree with his axe and chopping wood in a hauntingly barren and smoky industrial landscape. The exhilarating intensity of Babet’s labour and the array of evocative and resonate objects installed in the space was a powerful reminder of the value that resides in alchemical artworks which seek to transport, affect and move the viewer.

We Need You, You Need Us, artists Paul Gazzola, Dara Gill, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Sebastian Moody, Lara Thoms; Red Water, artist Nathan Babet, Tin Sheds Gallery, Sydney, April 20–May 19

MAGNESIUM LIGHT BURNS INTENSELY BRIGHT AND WHEN EXTINGUISHED LEAVES A TRACE, A DARK AFTER-IMAGE ON THE RETINA AS A GHOSTLY SPECTRE OF THE BRIGHTNESS THAT ONCE WAS. THE WORKS OF DENNIS DEL FAVERO HAVE THIS SAME PLAY OF INTENSITY AND SHADOW THAT MIRRORS THE USE OF REAL WORLD EVENTS PORTALLED INTO PARALLEL NARRATIVES OF FANTASY, DESIRE, LOSS AND DISORIENTATION.

Del Favero’s new show, Magnesium Light, comprises two video works, You and I and Todtnauberg. Each is anchored in a poignant historical moment but moves beyond its actuality to delve into more psychologically embedded folds of imagination and meaning.

Both video works spring from encounters between individuals. You and I is a sexual encounter. A female voice-over is heard over finely edited black and white frames of a passionately engaged heterosexual couple. The words could be those genuinely whispered in a love scene between equals, but instead the encounter resides in a realm of dark delusion, brutality and injustice. The woman is clearly the person in control and the context becomes apparent as the image cuts to a body in uniform and the piece closes with the woman as a military figure of authority wielding power over her lover who is now the ubiquitous icon of the hooded man of the Abu Ghraib torture images.

A remarkable thing about the images that came out of Abu Ghraib was the fact of seeing women in roles traditionally ascribed to men; committing war crimes at the extremes of perversity and debasement. It is not that women are incapable of such acts, but they are so rarely pictured as such. Then there is the additional consideration that somewhere, somehow, in their post-Iraq lives there must be psychological repercussions to their actions; that the memories insistently reverberate as part of the post-traumatic consequences of war. You and I could represent the character of Lynndie England, for example, finding a twisted way to cope with her actions, a way to counter those repeated images of her cheesy grin and thumbs up incongruously against scenes of utter human pathos. Her memories here become transformed into sexual fantasy and the suggestion is that this functions to obfuscate the horror of such realities.

Todtnauberg takes an encounter of a different kind, between two minds rather than bodies. The piece is dominated by two men walking through a high-hedged labyrinth, occasionally intersecting one another. The characters are French poet Paul Celan and philosopher Martin Heidegger. In actuality they crossed paths a number of times between 1951-70 and each was compelled by the other’s work, although the attraction was not uncomplicated. Celan was of Jewish descent with a family lost to the Holocaust and Heidegger a Nazi sympathiser. These differences came to a head in a particular encounter in 1967 when Celan journeyed to the Black Forest to visit Heidegger, to question him about his anti-Semitic views. Heidegger failed to appease Celan and Celan could not forgive him. Following the encounter Celan penned an impenetrable poem, also titled Todtnauberg, and not long after he drowned himself in the Seine.

Todtnauberg recreates the charged encounter, washing over the viewer in melancholy tones through the combination of smooth-panning along richly dark, pine tree-lined paths that lead nowhere and a whispery voiceover full of remembering, forgetting, questions, doubts and guilt. Dripping with restraint and unresolved dialogue, it communicates the longing for healing, the pain of silence and the fickleness of memory. Occasionally scenes from the war surface—soldiers marching, fires burning. This additional visual element seems an unnecessary literalisation of the content of the piece, just as the scene with the hooded figure makes obvious the pretext of You and I. These pointers could have been omitted without the works losing their strength.

Both works are aesthetically luscious and conceptually rich. Both deal with the unanticipated consequences of our choices and actions, our inability to come to terms with the past and that past bleeding into our present in a masked and obscurantist guise. Del Favero applies his signature technique of recreating a story out of a news event; the works extract an essence from the grand-scale, external, public account and inject it into stories of unspeakable, personal and private imaginaries.

Running alongside Magnesium Light is The World is Everything that is the Case, co-curated by Paul Thomas, Vince Dziekan and Sean Cubitt and developed for ISEA2011 in Istanbul. This show hinges on the metaphor of the suitcase as a loaded symbol of mobility, migration and containment. A parallel association is formed with the realm of data and the routing of data packets through networks across the globe. Just as the contents of a suitcase are taken from our lives, fitted into a compressed space and then put back together once a destination is reached, so too are data packets in the ether disassembled and reassembled.

Several of the works use a physical suitcase and somehow combine it with a media artwork. For example, Tina Gonsalves displays the piece Chameleon on screens wedged in vertically poised cases. Faces fill the screens and are programmed to respond to user-presence. Unfortunately this piece falls prey to the sad fact of fallibility that too often haunts interactive work; the faces appear to suffer from some kind of multiple-personality disorder on a high-rotation stutter-loop. More seamless interaction is felt with the piece by Mark Cypher, Propositions 2.0. Cypher fills a prostrate case with sand and the sand-pit becomes a global playground with participant actions transferred to one projection and a knobbly spinning globe on an adjoining projection whose topology is the cumulative result of the manipulations of the sand. This work is aesthetically raw but conceptually engaging.

Arguably the most aesthetically mesmerising piece is Karen Casey’s Meditation Wall, a magnificent wash of colour and pattern. The pattern is made to resemble a Turkish mosaic combined with a desert bloom (Casey’s own paintings) with both Sufi and Aboriginal music making up the soundscape. The gridded kaleidoscopic morph is derived from data of Casey’s brainwaves in a state of meditation and it is debatable how much this impacts the resulting viewing pleasure; a pulsing mandala-like pattern is familiar to visual culture and seductive in and of itself. A background clang of breaking plates disrupts the soothing flow of Casey’s wall. The clang comes from Nigel Helyer’s sonic installation, Weeping Willow. As with the Meditation Wall this work eschews the literal inclusion of the suitcase and instead provides a layered and incisive commentary on cross-cultural dialogue and exchange between the Occident and the Orient through the symbol of the Willow Pattern dinner plate.

All in all something is amiss in the exhibition’s application of the metaphor of the old-fashioned suitcase and something is awkward about its resolution. Perhaps it is the inclusion of those antiquated suitcases at the entrance of the show, or the stretching of an entire show out of a Wittgenstenian notion that is never fully articulated in the works displayed. Or perhaps it is simply the fact that unlike a suitcase the show does not travel well and something is lost in its relocation to a global context distinct from its original formulation, for example the Turkish patterns no longer resonate with the world beyond the gallery walls. Nevertheless, as a whole, The World is Everything that is the Case is experientially diverse in its use of the icon of the suitcase and exploration of an evolving idea of virtuality in a transmigratory post-digital global phase.

Dennis del Favero, Magnesium Light; The World Is Everything That Is The Case; John Curtin Gallery, Curtin University, Perth, June 1-Aug 5

Jeff Wall, A sudden gust of wind (after Hokusai) 1993, Tate, London, purchased with the assistance from the Patrons of New Art through the Tate Gallery Foundation and from the National Art Collections Fund 1995,

A GIANT LIGHT BOX TRANSPARENCY, THE SPECTACULAR A SUDDEN GUST OF WIND (AFTER HOKUSAI) (1993) GREETS US AS WE WALK INTO JEFF WALL’S RETROSPECTIVE AT THE ART GALLERY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA. IT SHOWS A GROUP OF MEN COWERING FROM THE WIND THAT’S BLOWING SHEETS OF PAPER OVER A DESOLATE LANDSCAPE. THEY LOOK LIKE THEY ARE THERE FOR A MEETING, AS SOME WEAR SUITS AND OTHERS LOOK LIKE FARMERS, AMID A COLD RURAL SCENE.

The image captures some of Wall’s endearing concerns. He has carefully staged a chance moment, which constructs a scene that he has already imagined in his mind’s eye. While it is at first glance a naturalistic scene, a second glance tells us that it has been heavily constructed, and yet this artificial sensibility carries with it a trace of something natural, some pivotal and beautiful quality of the world that Wall has managed to distil.

The body of criticism around the work of Jeff Wall emphasises the staged performativity of the encounters he sets into large photographs and light boxes. There is a captivating uncertainty in a piece like Knife Throw (2008), whose performers act out what they might ordinarily do in their own lives, by throwing knives at a wall. Yet their performance is far from natural, and carries with it a self-consciousness or even boredom that lies ambivalently in the posture and face of one of the men.

Such strained poses bring to Wall’s work the uncertainties that confuse performance and actuality. Wall will sometimes keep people trapped in a room for weeks at a time to achieve such ambiguity, keeping his camera trained on a cleaner cleaning, or an illustrator illustrating. The effect is positively Brechtian, as performers make us aware that they are not entirely performing these roles.

In some ways Wall’s work resembles that of his equally successful contemporaries in New York, photographers like Sherri Levine, Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman, who also work with reconstructing that which is already there. However, unlike the so-called Pictures Generation, Wall does not turn to the iconography of American visual culture. Instead he turns to ordinary people as his subjects. So that these magnificent pictures are also images of Canada, of people and their lives treated with all of the intimate detail of a staged performance.

This is the reason that Wall’s work has been compared with 19th century realist painting, but the artist also claims he is carrying on the practices of early documentary photography. The image of a group of women plucking, gutting and cleaning chickens, Dressing Poultry (2007), is replete with ugly detail and yet is strikingly beautiful. The eye is unable to tear itself away from the sight of real life rendered so colourfully, so brightly, as Wall turns the little slaughterhouse into a photographic studio.

Not all of Wall’s works are so successful. Smaller light boxes framing such innocuous objects as dirty rags, drains, paint tins and tree stumps appear in a series, more like context for the bigger pictures than works of art in their own right. They hold the politics of the major works without having the punch of a human performer to convey the complexity of the politics. For all of the discourse around Wall’s emulation of the European masters, it should not be forgotten that he is also a photographer of the ordinary, documenting in his own way the passage of lived experience among the people of his country.

This show captures cleaners, homeless people, office workers and farmers in the process of going about their jobs, in a way that pauses their bodies amidst the motions of labour as they huddle against the cold or till a field. Yet these are also problematic images, for what farmer tills his field today? What cleaner stands motionless, gazing to the floor? These are the details that have made Wall one of the most respected living artists, as he brings a kind of truth to the artifice of photography.

This truth lies in even the most constructed of his images. A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai) is not just a beautiful image of paper blowing in the wind, it is also a parable of country and city; of workers of different kinds meeting in the world. Replete with details, the image conveys the complexities of a lived situation that is also constructed, turning the naturalism of photography into the realism of documentary while somehow preserving the beauty of the natural within this transformation.

Jeff Wall: Photographs, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, to Sept 10; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Nov 30, 2012-March 2013; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, April 24-July 28, 2013

THEATERTREFFEN (THEATRE MEETING) IS NO ORDINARY THEATRE FESTIVAL. EVERY YEAR, A JURY OF CRITICS SELECTS 10 BEST PRODUCTIONS IN THE GERMAN LANGUAGE (FROM AROUND 400 NEW PRODUCTIONS FROM GERMANY, AUSTRIA AND SWITZERLAND). IT IS THE OLYMPIC EVENT OF GERMAN-SPEAKING THEATRE.

Since German theatre culture is perhaps the most robust in the world, attending Theatertreffen is a special treat. However, it was an unexpectedly ambiguous experience: high in standard, but surprisingly unsurprising.

Theatertreffen showcases an engaged, innovative, provocative theatre culture’s mainstream—large city theatres with ensembles, repertoires, bureaucracies—not performance art, live art or anything truly wacky. It is director-driven, conceptually sound, courageous, but still ‘theatre theatre.’ To the outside eye, the Theatertreffen experience is perched funnily somewhere between Kunstenfestivaldesarts and whatever a festival of Australian state theatre companies would look like: simultaneously bold, lavish and predictable. After watching the 10 plays repeat each other’s affectations, the experience started to look increasingly like a long joke on director’s theatre.

The Theatertreffen blog number-crunched the tropes and found: 9/10 plays addressed the audience directly; 7/10 involved shouting where it was not logically needed; 6/10 used film, and 7/10 microphones; 5/10 featured some form of nudity; 4/10 real children; 3/10 puppets or animal costumes; 3/10 running water; 3/10 had actors attack the set with paint; 3/10 were extravagantly long (www.theatertreffen-blog.de/tt12/allgemeines/theatric-o-meter/).

A sense of a transgressive folklore transpired, one in which nudity, multimedia, breaking of the fourth wall and self-reflection have long become convention—but also one with unexpected blind spots. I did not anticipate that Theater Bonn’s Ein Volksfiend (Ibsen’s Enemy of the People) would generate so much buzz just for casting a Middle-Eastern actor in the main role. Similarly puzzling was the excitement over Münchner Kammerspiele casting a woman in the role of Macbeth. The way Volksbühne’s Die [s]panische Fliege was singled out simply for being a comedy was alarming, to say the least. Additionally, there was a tendency among both the public and the press to term many works as ‘installations,’ merely, it appeared, because of the absence of set changes. The folklore, progressive or not, seemed to be in a rut.

There was much quality, but not much surprise. Münchner Kammerspiele’s Cleansed/Crave/4.48 Psychosis was a delicate and clean work, revealing the progression of Sarah Kane’s writing from narrative excess to introspective monologue, but also her constant return to a small set of obsessions: torture, desire, love. Thalia Theatre’s Faust I+II was a self-reflexive but good-spirited, storm through every gimmick of post-dramatic theatre, complete with a theoretical lecture on the significance of it all (a woman in gala dress announced: “Good evening. My name is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. This work of mine, Faust, is a pinnacle of German literature. We know that today.”) International Institute of Political Murder re-staged an hour of Rwanda’s genocide-proselytising, shock-jock radio program in Hate Radio, an effective work in the classical tradition of political theatre.

john gabriel borkman

However, the one work that towered above the rest was the 12-hour production of Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman by Vegard Vinge, Ida Müller and Trond Reinholdtsen, a work of such admirable excess and courage that this review will now devote itself to it entirely. All of Berlin tried to get a ticket for what Twitter termed “9/11 of theatre—there is no way back.” Borkman was unlike anything I expect to see again soon, and its singularity more than made up for the homogeneity of the rest of Theatertreffen.

It was, unsurprisingly, a bloody, gory, fanciful Ibsen text reduced to a few key phrases, guilty of almost every cliché listed above. An unrushed, postmodernist improvisation around a few key themes of Ibsen’s text (sexual repression, Oedipal complex, inter-generational violence, middle-class shame). Alienation was employed to the extreme: the set, a two-storey bourgeois house, was fully furnished with two-dimensional, cardboard furniture. All sounds were pre-recorded and amplified to cartoon-like effect. Performers in full grotesque costume and masks moved like large wooden dolls, miming imprecisely to dialogue wired through the speakers (mouthed live by the director in the back of the auditorium, as it gradually became clear).

This was Ibsen as Artaud-meets-South-Park. Where Ibsen’s Gunhild and Ella Borkman have an understated verbal tussle for the affections of young Erhart Borkman, Vinge’s sisters instead engage in a prolonged, puppet-limbed physical fight, throwing cardboard armchairs and grandfather clocks at each other to exaggerated sound effects.

But infantile it ultimately wasn’t. Borkman relied on the expectation of a theatre situation, as opposed to the more flexible durational performance, to discipline audience behaviour and thus focus our attention. We sat, dear reader, in orderly theatre rows, for 12 hours, leaving only for food, water and toilet, and rushing back in to see where the performance had gone. And it went everywhere. The initial anti-realistic excess had both ample time and drive to grow whichever way it found space, with the unpredictable, fluid energy of extended improvisation.

Despite the frequent promises to the contrary, I have never seen true chaos in the theatre, not until Borkman. Twitter buzzed with accounts of what new events had happened on each night. Stage fights turned into prop fights with the audience. The fourth wall was bricked up (taking 40 minutes to complete). An interminable “casting for Münchner Kammerspiele” turned into an army of actor-zombies being led by the director to storm the auditorium. (Afterwards, while washing stage blood off ourselves in the toilets, we witnessed an annoyed critic loudly demanding to have her expensive skirt cleaned by the theatre company.) Referencing the number-counting scene from Kane’s Cleansed, Vinge counted for hours, to many thousands, with occasional interludes into decimals. The set was repeatedly damaged. Some audience members were kidnapped. The Volksbühne security was on patrol, sounding alarms more than once. Amid the chaos, however, were moments of technical and narrative beauty: Erhart playing a computer game made entirely of moving cardboard sticks; a lifesize, flying 2-D helicopter; the drawing room which came off the house and sailed away like a raft.

German audiences are customarily prepared to engage, but Borkman built an exceptionally free rapport with its audience. We threw pieces of the set back at the performers. We freely snapped photos with our smartphones. We brought in beer and energy drinks. We walked around, peering into back spaces, moved seats, organised drinks and food delivery. Dozens of people outside waited for hours for seats to be resold. Around the 11th hour, Vinge threw packets of crisps at us, which we shared in a brotherly fashion, having by now become a settled community. After so many hours together, sitting among plastic cups, in sweaty heat, this was less a theatre than a party situation. What I had until now only read about—theatre as communion—came to life, surprisingly, serendipitously, as Borkman used every technique of durational performance, but barred the audience from the usual cool, detached comforts of such performances: the right to stand, walk around, leave.

Twelve hours in, after all the technicians had gone home, and only a video screen and Vinge were left on stage (groaning: “This is not over! I will not leave!”), the bleary-eyed audience finally stood up and applauded—until the very fact of applause became the end in itself, allowing us to tear ourselves from our seats and go home. It was 4am, and we were elated, exhausted and smelly. It was like leaving a techno party: an arts event we co-made, not simply witnessed, an arts event that had physically exhausted us. It revealed that the modes of engagement of classical theatre survive nowadays perhaps more in music events than in contemporary theatre.

Borkman was certainly the most tweeted, discussed and written about of all the Theatertreffen performances. While a distinct heir to German Regietheater, its pure excess made it slip out of grasp of analysis—apart from underlining the ecstatic, collective nature of the experience, critics have all resorted to simple, albeit incredulous, summaries. Whether it represents the future of theatre is still hard to say, if only because 12 hours can only be an exceptional investment of time. But, as Declan Greene, my guest at Theatertreffen, said months later, having finished his tour of the European theatre festivals, Borkman is by far the most exciting theatre work of the year.

Theatertreffen 2012: Münchner Kammerspiele, Gesäubert/Gier/4.48 Psychose, director Johan Simons, Haus der Berliner Festspiele, May 4-5; Thalia Theater, Faust I+II, director Nicolas Stemann, Haus der Berliner Festspiele, May 12-13; International Institute of Political Murder, Hate Radio, script, direction Milo Rau, Hebbel am Ufer HAU 2, May 16-18; John Gabriel Borkman, directors Vegard Vinge, Ida Müller, Trond Reinholdtsen, Völksbühne im Prater, May 5-19; Theatertreffen, Berlin, Msy 4-21, www.berlinerfestspiele.de

Sean Penn in This Must Be the Place, DVD

“Reviews of Paolo Sorrentino’s This Must Be the Place have made much of Sean Penn’s performance as Cheyenne, in the main, due to his appearance as an aged Goth rock idol modelled on The Cure’s Robert Smith, replete with teased blue-black hair and full make-up, but also his lilting, measured, almost squeaky, intonation.” So begins Deanne Williams’ detailed account of the outsider characters played by Penn and those who figure in the films the actor has himself directed (see article). This Must Be the Place has been widely applauded as a gently funny, highly nuanced road movie with yet another distinctive performance from the versatile Penn.

Martha Ansara, The Shadowcatchers

“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” (Keith Gallasch, RT109). This photographic history of Australia’s cinematographers from the beginning of the 20th century to the present combines a delightful pictorial record with biographies and ample historical detail.

Email us at giveaways@realtimearts.net with your name, postal address and phone number. Include ‘Giveaway’ and the name of the item in the subject line.

Aggregate, Lachlan Petras, Monash University, Melbourne, winner Dr Harold Schenberg Art Prize, HATCHED National Graduate Show, 2012

Thinking of taking on a practice-led research higher degree? Our annual education feature takes a close look at creative research in performance, visual arts, music and film. Some of the challenges that faced creative degrees at their inception are still with us despite evidence of many successful outcomes. The relationship between the artwork and the exegesis seems problematic, largely to do with the kind of writing expected. Other issues include the criteria for assessment, the choice of assessors, the value and visibility of the finished work, and just what the completed degree signals—professional development or scholarly achievement, or an important nexus of both? What is singularly evident is a diversity of programs with quite different aims which doubtless make assessment and shared standards difficult to achieve—let alone choosing where to enrol. In media arts and dance, we address progress and drawbacks in the vital practical teaching of these forms. Elsewhere we focus on developments in regional arts in Launceston, Goolwa and Alice Springs. And we welcome writers new to the pages of RealTime—Astrid Francis in Perth, Kelly-Lee Hickey in Alice Springs, Catherine McKinnon in Wollongong and Kathryn Kelly in Brisbane. The photograph above is of Aggregate by Lachlan Petras, winner of the Dr Harold Schenberg Art Prize in the 2012 HATCHED National Graduate Show, an exemplar of media/sculpture hybridity.

Congratulations: New South Wales-based artist George Poonkhin Khut winner of the $75,000 National New Media Art Award 2012 at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art.

PRACTICE-LED RESEARCH IN PERFORMANCE THROWS UP SOME CONSIDERABLE CHALLENGES FOR A FORM THAT IS LARGELY COLLABORATIVE AND ESSENTIALLY EPHEMERAL. IT ALSO GENERATES ANXIETIES: SOME ARTISTS FEAR THEY’RE BEING TRANSFORMED INTO SCHOLARS AT THE EXPENSE OF THEIR ART AND ARE UNCERTAIN WHETHER THEY’RE ENDURING A MASSIVE UNDERTAKING FOR PERSONAL GROWTH, PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT OR TRANSFORMATION INTO A NEW BEING, THE ARTIST-SCHOLAR HYBRID.

Their academic mentors are reassuring. However, you really have to know what you want out of the research and just when in your career to take it on—the practice-led research programs in Australian universities diverge widely, as indicated by the few I’ve briefly surveyed.

unisa

At UniSA (University of South Australia), Corinna Di Niro is undertaking a practice-led research PhD on Commedia dell’ Arte. Dr Russell Fewster, Program Director Media Arts, writes that “Di Niro successfully mounted a Commedia-inspired production, The Marriage of Flavio and Isabella, at the 2012 Adelaide Fringe Festival…Her work is focused on developing a model for secondary school teachers to follow in teaching Commedia…Her artefact will include a DVD that is expected to provide an ongoing educational resource.”

Fewster has two honours level students developing verbatim theatre works. One of them, Nick Martin, is “capitalis(ing) on his training as an actor and employment as a shearer. His creative artefact will be a play based on his experiences and interviews with shearers in regional SA. He intends to tour this work regionally. The interviews will also serve an historical ethnographic purpose, [documenting] a fading industry: shearing in such areas as the Barossa Valley.” Fewster sees such creative output as “making a valuable contribution to the arts. Within a time of shrinking funding, the university with its resources such as a fully functioning theatre, offers a subsidised laboratory for practitioner/academics to develop work without having to initially rely on the variabilities of arts funding.”

These projects exemplify the diverse possibilities that practice-led research can offer artists, other researchers in their fields, and for teaching, history and more. However, talking with a small group of academics who guide practice-led research candidates, it quickly became clear that beyond immediately understood virtues there are considerable divergences in expectations and approaches.

qut

Associate Professor Sandra Gattenhof, Head of Discipline, Creative Industries Faculty, School of Media, Entertainment, Creative Arts, Performance Studies, QUT (Queensland University of Technology) says, “Looking at our pattern of practice-led research over the last five years, all of our cohort—honours, master and PhD students in drama—are practice-led. There are no theory-based research degrees. It’s been a significant change and makes extraordinary demands on facilities.”

Secondly, not only has there been a change in approach but also in the age group of higher research degree students: “Five to 10 years ago, the students would have been mid 30s, early 40s with a degree of professional practice behind them and possibly looking to reorient or change practice.” A notable third development has been that “When students undertake practice-led research we say, you must think beyond the scope of your degree, about making a piece of work that you could then apply in an industry context. This work is a leaping-off point into professional practice.”

Students can opt to go from undergraduate to honours where a first class degree offers automatic entree into a PhD program: “a student’s professional track record for the industry is actually being developed through the research pathway. It’s a deliberate strategy on our part,” says Gattenhof. “For example, my PhD student and arguably our most successful candidate to date, David Morton, was clearly an outstanding theatre maker. His honours work was programmed in the Metro Arts independent program. His first work in his PhD, version one of The Harbinger, was programmed in La Boite’s independents season last year. Artistic director David Berthold saw the work’s potential and programmed it for the main stage. By the end of this year he’ll be 24 with a PhD and a professional track record at a leading venue.”

I ask Gattenhof in what precise way Morton’s work is research. “Everything he does is framed through a problem based methodology. It can seem counterintuitive. We say to our students, as theatre makers you don’t start with a research question. Often your practice is already defined by a problem, perhaps form-based or process-based. Part of the challenge is for you to take that into a research paradigm, to analyse it and put the contemporary literature framework around it to inform other practitioners who might be in that same position.”

Morton’s ‘problem’ relates to a fascination with the position of puppet-based theatre: “In his honours most of the literature he could find to do with suspension of disbelief, the engagement with the imagination and the encounter with the sublime, was to do with children’s theatre. He had a hunch that adult-oriented puppet theatre would have the same effect. The only way he could prove that was to make some work and trial it. We consider this as a partnership. I’m as much involved in his research as he is. We’re finding that adults slip into an imaginary state more easily than children.”

The exegesis continues to be a much-debated component in practice-led research. Gattenhof declares that practice and research “should be so tightly intertwined that one can’t exist without the other.” Morton’s research includes “a literature review, a method statement, data analysis and findings. We use the tools of theatre, what works in the room—a personal journal, photographs—but also reception interviews, a survey and now focus groups—traditional tools not usually used in a qualitative paradigm.”

uow

Professor Sarah Miller, Associate Dean (Research, Creative & Professional Practice) at the University of Wollongong where practice-led research students include leading music theatre composer Andrée Greenwell and respected members of Sydney’s contemporary performance scene, Nigel Kellaway and Nikki Heywood.

Unlike QUT, “UOW does not rank our degree as a professional doctorate. It’s ranked as a highest level research doctorate.” As well, “you have to be an artist of some seniority. You can go into a PhD from Honours but for a creative doctorate you have to have a practice.” Miller tells me that a great deal of energy is initially invested in developing the students’ writing, editorial and research skills, “and it takes a long time to set up the research point—it’s very individual. We’re very focused on the writing because these people know how to be artists.”

I ask Miller about how artist-students feel about the exegesis. She tells me that “some fear that they will lose what it is that makes them an artist. We don’t want them to lose that at all. When they say, ‘I don’t want to write like an academic,” I say, “What, you mean badly?” [LAUGHS] Of course it’s not what’s asked for or aspired to. It’s in the framing of the exegesis. We are strict about “making examiners academically comfortable, “ says Miller, quoting one of her colleagues. “There are certain things a student needs to do—have a research topic, be able to formulate questions and articulate what their methodology is. If their methodology is more creative that’s fine, but they have to be able to articulate it.”

How much distance do students need to have from their work? “It’s in and out. There’s no restriction on using the word ‘I.’ Sometimes the work is very personal. Often, working through what your artistic lineage is and understanding that is very important. In my experience, people start from wanting to write their autobiography. We bring different views to the work, often using two supervisors, one more focused on writing, the other on the practice. The views of fellow students are also important.” Recently Miller took a group of students, including Nikki Heywood, performance maker Karen Therese and live art practitioner Sarah Rodigari to Bundanon arts centre for four days focused on discussion with each other. “Each had their own studio, we met at meal times, and they let me read their work—when they were ready. They want it to be perfect. It’s a relaxed place to work for people who can suffer freelance artist anxieties.”

What is the value or the significance of the work produced by practice-led research? Miller thinks that “it’s about the calibre of the work each institution insists on. ERA (Excellence for Research in Australia) has made all this very clear, that non-traditional research outputs will be valued highly when they are of calibre. Candidates’ research is the high calibre art works they make. If that’s to be meaningful it can’t be treated lightly. You can teach an artist to produce a lucid scholarly document. Even if it’s never published it’s still there for others to see.”

related matters

Dr Paul Monaghan, who has been Coordinator of Graduate Studies and Research at VCA (Victorian College of the Arts) and is now based in Canada, kindly sent me a document about “creative work outputs weightings.” It’s a personal statement that raises some important issues, one of which I had discussed with Sandra Gattenhof: “Performance is primarily collaborative.” David Morton’s production of his work, The Harbinger, is co-written and co-directed by Matt Ryan. As Gattenhof explains, part of the exegesis is a clear account of the nature and the range of the collaboration. Monaghan points out that for designers and actors who are being responsive to someone else’s work for their research the issue of agency can be problematic—hence the need for clarity about sole and joint authoring, alongside similar matters such as the distinction between original and interpretive works.

ephemerality

As Associate Professor John Freeman (Department of Communications and cultural Studies, Curtin University of Technology, WA) argues in “Creative angels and exegetical demons: artistic research, creative production and thesis” (Higher Education Review, Vol 44, No 1, 2011) there is a palpable tension “between the immediacy and ephemerality of performance (made real in the new and lost in the then) and the performance of written, authored work (made in the then and found in the now).” A piece of music or a visual artwork need not suffer this tension.

The ephemerality of performance could be fatal for research if the outcome is represented only by the artwork, unless it is bound to an exegesis, an ideally substantial and explanatory trace of the event. Above all, surely it’s about what the artwork and exegesis, as one, do to and for the candidate, as both scholar and artist—not just artist. Few research-led practice works will find their way onto major stages, but if they do, let’s hope they trail glorious clouds of research data and theorising with them—something more than artefact, wonderful though that may be.

Sarah Banks, Kiralee Mulley, choreographer Julia Woolbank, students in Dance Studies, UNSW School of the Arts and Media

AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITIES, TAFES AND DUAL SECTOR INSTITUTIONS SUFFER ONGOING FUNDING CUTS FROM FEDERAL AND STATE GOVERNMENTS THAT RESULT IN STAFF REDUNDANCIES, WORKLOAD INCREASES, PROGRAM RESTRUCTURES, DEGREE DEVOLUTION, RESOURCE REALLOCATION, REDUCTION OF FACE TO FACE TEACHING HOURS AND, IN SOME INSTANCES, THE CLOSURE OF CAMPUSES.

This is happening across several disciplines, but the pain is mostly felt in the humanities and creative arts. With government austerity measures clearly impacting adversely upon our education policies, we have to ask: how will our dance programs continue to survive in the tertiary context?

During the early part of the 20th century, Bertrand Russell was alert to the crisis of the university. Despite his criticisms of the class-determined nature of these learning institutions as elite-only establishments, he became more critical about the prioritising of the technical and utilitarian over the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom. This slowly became the guiding ethos of the university and heralded a new sense of the vocational: the becoming of ‘the paid professional,’ where labour-based skills trained one to be a mere cog in the wheel of industry. Vocation was no longer understood to be the creative production of self in the pursuit of a true calling.

Vocation as learning a profession for paid labour is the conception operating in universities today. Dance education can be vocational in this sense, but for the most part, a dancer chooses to perform, choreograph, develop a studio practice or research dance in the higher sense of a calling. Tertiary dance in Australia has done well to cater for both these senses of vocation, and some institutions continue to support this integrated learning, despite the swath of cuts and course restructures. In the wake of devastating changes to related creative arts disciplines—like the ANU’s Music School, whose elite performance training course has become unrecognisable, with almost half its staff losing or having to reapply for their jobs, and the closure of art-related degree courses within Victorian TAFES—leading academics are unsure about the future of dance and the shape of its programs in the tertiary sector.

In speaking about their experiences of recent funding cuts and/or degree restructures, academics mostly provide positive stories. Nannette Hassall, Senior Lecturer at Edith Cowan University’s Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) boasts of a healthy undergraduate degree model where students can undertake technique with a strong academic focus and be engaged with industry through the performance stream and international exchange program. Despite the fact that dance is considered expensive compared to other disciplines (an economically irrational view) the program at WAAPA has survived recent review. Students can be happy about the continued balance between studio practice, academic engagement and performance training.

Dr Sally Gardner, Lecturer in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University, is happy to announce the addition of a new second studio, confirming expansion rather than contraction. However, staff are exhausted from a workload model that “does not recognise hours of teaching but only numbers of students taught.” They juggle teaching, research, publishing, performance production and “ever increasing administrative duties.” When workloads become untenable because of unreasonable expectations, the joy of teaching is extinguished by modes of labour alienation. No matter how healthy a course presents itself, a crisis may only be averted by bettering the conditions of staff.

Associate Professor Jenny Kinder, Undergraduate Coordinator at VCA, has only good news following the recent development of the college’s new Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. Dancers will continue to be cultivated into the industry through “intensive studio-based practice and quality performance experience.” The new degree structure will allow students to either specialise in dance through the BFA (Bachelor of Fine Arts) or take on a range of electives from other artistic disciplines that can lead to postgraduate studies in teaching at the University of Melbourne. This model echoes dance program structures within the US where most colleges and universities offer a BFA to specialise in elite performance.

The WAAPA program has a strong performance and production stream. Staff strategically create links with industry and the wider community so that students are exposed to a diversity of practices from local, interstate and international artists. Although adding to an untenable workload, a lot of strategic producing enriches the dance program at Deakin. Gardner says that to cover the shortfall in financial support from the university, the staff has “become active in making partnerships with dance organisations such as Dancehouse, and with local government arts offices.” “In-kind payment such as use of studio space” is offered to visiting and local artists to ensure students continue to have a rich learning experience. The appointment of casual and adjunct staff is important, but when they begin to replace permanent staff, the weight of administrative duties and strategic planning lands heavily in the lap of the few—and sometimes just the one.

Sarah Banks, choreographer Julia Woolbank, students in Dance Studies, UNSW School of the Arts and Media

Dr Erin Brannigan, Lecturer in the University of NSW’s School of the Arts & Media, has preserved strong links with industry through artist residencies in the associated Io Myers Studio. The once audition-based, dance teacher training degree has undergone a radical restructure to embrace an academically oriented Dance Studies major within a BA, and is modelled on the school’s Performance Studies program. Studio practice remains a central part of the offerings, but with a focus on somatic practices (rather than traditional techniques) as modes of embodied training for contemporary performance. The new structure helps to “find ways to open up the arts” and share structurally sound interdisciplinary relationships.

Dance Studies as a discipline legitimates corporeal practices as valued epistemes in knowledge production. The role of dance and movement in the development of conceptual thinking—and our species being—broadens our ideas of dance and choreography. Taken as genuine approaches to understanding the world, and not restricted to virtuosity and technique, dance becomes accessible to those who are interested. The dance program headed by Dr Pauline Manley at Macquarie University has this in mind, and takes it further by providing technique classes for the untrained alongside the trained. This model uniquely leans towards the idea of vocation as a calling, rather than the path to paid professionalism (not to say a profession isn’t possible).

Hassall believes the recent cuts and shuffling mark a “critical moment” for tertiary dance. She has been in academia for a long time, saw where academic dance “came from” and “can see where it could rapidly be returning to”: the private institution. Brannigan suggests that this could be the alternative for those desiring technique- led courses, especially in NSW, which has (since the demise of University of Western Sydney courses ) lacked a well-rounded audition-based program like WAAPA, QUT, VCA or Deakin’s. Dancers wanting intensive technique head interstate, overseas or pay for training in private studios and colleges like the Wesley Institute and the Australian College of Physical Education. The future of contemporary dance training (mostly associated with a degree structure) could mean a return to the private studio, separating practice from critical thinking.

Professional training in a private studio or college is an expensive option; at least university permits students to defer this expense. There is a responsibility on the part of our government to subsidise the creative arts, not to reorient responsibility back to private institutions. Gardner points out that “Compared to 25 years ago when the arts warranted attention and action” there is now little “discussion of cultural policy.” In the dance sector it occurs even less. Our federal and state agencies need to begin valuing and re-evaluating the nation’s attitude towards cultural cultivation and the training of our next generation of artists, or we will end up with what Hassall projects as “the population we deserve.”

Dr Elizabeth Dempster, Senior Lecturer at Victoria University, sees universities as responsible for the crisis in the creative arts. In 2009 the once thriving undergraduate Performance Studies major with studio practice folded to one-third of its size. Dempster says now, “third year students are at the same level as they were by the end of first year under the old program.” Universities have “failed to engage and respond respectively to art forms, and have been derelict in their duties.” Programs are being strategically designed to collapse multiple art forms into single degrees, like VU’s current Bachelor of Creative Industries, and eventually suffer decimation through lack of financing and resources by the so-called visionary hands that build them.

There is good news and bad in these stories, stories that are not new, nor isolated to dance. The academic world is in crisis; it suffers along with other industries as the movement of global capital becomes far too erratic for liberal western democracies to cope with. Dance education within tertiary institutions is safe, at least for now. It survives under the tireless, creative strain of our resilient academics who—as romantic or religious as the notion may seem—continue to support dance in the sense of a true calling.

Ella Dreyfus, I forgive you every day (italics) 2008/2012, hand stitched felt fabric.Dreyfus is completing a practice-led PhD at COFA, UNSW and she will be exhibiting the final work at University Gallery, University of Newcastle, October 3-20, 2012

“A PHD IN ART IS INEVITABLE,” COMMENTS ONE US ACADEMIC ON THE DUST JACKET OF JAMES ELKINS’ ARTISTS WITH PHDS: ON THE NEW DOCTORAL DEGREE IN STUDIO ART, WHICH GAUGES THE MIX OF EXCITEMENT AND TREPIDATION UNDERPINNING THE AMERICAN NAVIGATION OF WHAT FOR THEM IS STILL RELATIVELY UNCHARTERED TERRITORY.

By contrast, the studio-based or practice-led PhD in the visual arts is of course a familiar and well-established presence in the landscape of Australian tertiary arts education. Now with over two decades of data to draw upon including many case studies and ‘lessons learnt,’ the experience of Australian art schools is increasingly featuring in international discussions over how best to implement such degrees.

In recent years, however, the local sector has arguably experienced an identity crisis of sorts as candidates, artists, academics and universities have attempted to come to grips with the PhD as HDR—a higher degree by research. At Griffith University’s Queensland College of Art, Professor Ross Woodrow has been involved with the supervision and examination of studio-based doctorates for 15 years. He observes that “over that period of time there has been major progress towards consensus on standards and expectations, although there remains considerable variation in examination protocols and indeed quality across different institutions and different submissions.” The idea of “artists with PhDs” remains a contentious one.

At a best practice level, research now appears to increasingly figure as a significant, if not primary, objective of the practice-led or studio-based doctoral degree. In line with other disciplines, creative work undertaken within this context is to be integrated with a research question or guided by a clearly defined topic that aims to generate a contribution to knowledge. For some art schools, this shift in emphasis has proved a testing one, for others less so. COFA (College of Fine Arts, UNSW) Graduate Coordinator, Bonita Ely, points out that “COFA has the advantage that as soon as we were amalgamated into the university [in 1990] we started establishing a research culture.” The school also has clear guidelines which distinguish the studio-based PhD program from the Master of Fine Arts. “A PhD absolutely must identify a gap in knowledge or a new way of doing things or an area that the artist through their practice can find a new way of looking at in order to make a contribution to the field. We’re really insistent that students have sorted through the terrain that they are going to research. That said, the proposal doesn’t have to be set in concrete, as often when you research other things arise and it’s important to remain open to the possibility of the project evolving and becoming more focused as it progresses.”

At the Victorian College of the Arts Associate Professor and Graduate Research Coordinator, Barbara Bolt, responds that “across the sector there is tension about the ability of the PhD to produce high quality artwork that is also advanced research. This concern is also evident in Europe where the creative doctorate is flourishing. It is felt that the most radical work happens outside the academy. There is general agreement at the VCA and MCM (Melbourne Conservatorium of Music) that the primary goal of the PhD is to create high quality artwork that is also advanced research but there is expressed concern that the PhD program doesn’t necessarily attract the most radical artists—they tend to leave art school straight after graduating for undergraduate or honours and go out and practice.”

The question of legitimacy also lingers. Efforts to formally recognise creative practice as research received a small boon with the introduction of the Excellence for Research in Australia (ERA) initiative in 2009, which broadened the definition of research to make provisions for artistic research, practice-led and practice-based research. However, these still remain to be incorporated into universities’ formal research recognition and funding networks. Creative work or non-traditional scholarly publications, for example, are not included in the process for collating and auditing research outputs.

For Bolt, the legitimacy of practice-led research within the wider university research culture depends not on expanding the definition such that all creative work is accepted as research but rather in learning to distinguish the artwork from the work of art and, in this way, clearly articulating an artwork’s research contribution. “In other words, it is not just what the work is, but actually what it does that constitutes research,” argues Bolt. “The performative potential of art is something we have often come to embrace, but are rarely prepared to unpack or demonstrate. Whilst often used interchangeably, the artwork is not the same thing as the work of art. The need to articulate the research contribution in art-as-research remains critical.”

Ross Woodrow is more wary of the shift toward explicating the research contribution of art making. “The primary measure of the success of any practice-based research in the creative arts must be the output or the work itself. It is the work of art, film, book, animation, photographs, paintings, installations, performance or whatever that enhances our understanding of the world in some measure or explains some part of it in aesthetic or experiential terms. The written exegesis can only be an adjunct to that end.”

In January 2011, the Examination of Doctoral Degrees in Creative Arts Project began gathering empirical data on current approaches to assessment practices, processes and standards in creative arts HDR. According to the Project’s Chief Investigator, Professor Jen Webb, Associate Dean of Research at the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra, the current endeavour builds upon previous research projects where, “What came up consistently were concerns about examination standards and a sense of disparity between universities.”

Concerns run the gamut from the need for a larger pool of experienced examiners, the delayed submission of examiner reports, the level of variance between reports and a disproportionate amount of negative comment from examiners. To address the issue of consistency, the Project had initially envisaged proposing a Creative Arts Examination Board which has since been deemed unsuitable. Webb points out that policies differ between universities and there needs to be room for variation. There is agreement, however, that “there should be a space to talk about issues and concerns.” When the project concludes in November, a confidential report will be submitted to the government and another will be publicly distributed with core recommendations for supervisors and examiners.

At COFA, Bonita Ely points out that “you have to choose your examiners carefully. It’s a specialised field and there is still some resistance in academic circles to the idea that artists do research so you have to choose examiners who ‘get it’ and understand the paradigm, and who appreciate that artists have always made artworks to communicate knowledge. The examiner also needs to understand what a PhD is, so at COFA we only approach examiners who have a PhD already or a background as an academic.”

While a common language and set of concerns is crystalising around practice-led research, not everyone is convinced that the new paradigm displays the right emphasis. Later this year, the Australasian journal TEXT will publish a special edition titled Beyond Practice-Led Research. Co-edited by the University of Canberra’s Scott Brook and Paul Magee, “This edition of the journal is aimed at shaking things up,” says Magee, who suggests there’s a real need to address the viability of the current approach. “The solution that has been adopted is that artists somehow make discoveries in their practice and that is the contribution to knowledge. I suggest that what then enters that space is a bit meaningless and hard to critique. We need to have a discussion around who is benefiting from this research being created. Is it benefiting creative communities or is it being produced to serve accounting functions?”

Yet, as Woodrow highlights, “It is very important to stress the impact that postgraduate study in Australian universities has had on the quality of contemporary art over the past decade.” For example, “almost all of Australia’s representatives at the Venice Biennale over the past decade have benefited from Masters or Doctoral studies.” The need to offer artists avenues for continuing their education and training at an advanced level such as the PhD is a real one and HDR in the creative arts promises to remain a growth area. Inclusiveness may not be a defining characteristic of the current practice-led model which favours the artist-researcher over the strictly intuitive art maker, but at the very least a consensus on what constitutes a practice-led PhD is clearing the way for important discussions about rigour, fairness and consistency, vital to a healthy maturing of the field.

BY TRANSLATING THEIR MUSICAL PRACTICE INTO LANGUAGE, MUSICIANS ARE COMING UP AGAINST A PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEM THAT HOLDS CENTRESTAGE IN THE DISMANTLING OF AUSTRALIA’S UNIVERSITY MUSIC DEPARTMENTS.

While vice-chancellors attack music for its calculable expense, supporters defend it for its alleged evasion of expression in language and number. Practice-led research in improvisation, composition, classical performance and sound design is proving both views misguided, opening the way for an articulate musical culture able to argue its worth and attract research funds.

In Australia, the uptake of practice-led research in music has been piecemeal and unregulated. Philip Samartzis of Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) was one of the first wave of performance-led researchers, studying with Philip Brophy in 1997. The process was one of trial by error, as Samartzis tells it, “none of us had experience in practice-led research.” He confesses that coming from experimental music made the process easier. “The experimental tradition already tries to articulate things differently, tests things out in performance, is reflexive, peer-reviewed […] But as a student I knew how much independence, supervision, stubbornness you needed to get over the line.”

Today, Graduate Convenor at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) Robert Vincs gets five or six inquiries about practice-led research a week. Taking a strong interest in theory and philosophy, VCA postgraduate students explicitly interrogate the line between music and language. To Vincs, an overly structural approach to the relationship between music and language is limiting our ability to conceptualise creativity. “I can think of nothing more important to humankind than creativity,” Vincs asserts. His own work on computer-simulated improvisation has helped him to understand creativity as a process of play. While it could be assumed that Vincs’ definition of creativity would deem the scientific research framework irrelevant for asking musical questions, the reality is not so dire. “The highest resistance I get is from the students themselves. They think they have science models like monkeys on their backs, but it’s not the case.” Students, Vincs says, need only describe what they are doing and why and how they are doing it. “People get stuck on the first point. People find it hard to realise what they are doing.”

Part of the third generation of Australian practice-led researchers and a former student of Samartzis, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) Post-Doctoral Fellow Cat Hope is under no illusion as to how the language of practice-led research shapes creative inquiry. To Hope, the problem is not so much framing musical processes as research, but squeezing them into the hyped-up language of grant applications. Fortunately, creative artists are uniquely placed to succeed at such writing. “Musicians are well equipped for practice-led research because a lot of us have written grant applications before we enter academia. You have had to say how innovative you are more times than you care to remember.” In arguing for innovation, interdisciplinary and technological projects are particularly easy to promote. Many projects at WAAPA are moving in this direction. A particularly successful example is Music Performing Arts doctorate student Stuart James, who is developing a system to control timbral spatialisation gesturally using touch interfaces. But Hope is careful to note that the innovation of a work does not necessarily reflect its value. “It is easier to articulate innovation than value,” Hope reflects after a gruelling research evaluation exercise, wondering whether assessment criteria adequately evaluate the creative outcomes they encourage.

Vanessa Tomlinson of the Queensland Conservatorium at Griffith University believes that articulating one’s practice improves the outcomes, so long as you distinguish between practice, practice-led research and pure research. “Not all creative work is research. It becomes research when you put forward a hypothesis and proceed with an experiment. […] When you investigate with some clarity or consciousness the process becomes fascinating in all areas, music included.”

It is interesting that in the field of improvisation the problem of combining language and music seems difficult but also leads to some of the most interesting and controversial outcomes. As a jazz musician, Queensland Conservatorium PhD candidate Toby Wren already had an interest in rhythmically complex music, but the Carnatic music of South India came as a revelation: “There I found a perfect expression of many rhythmic things I was experimenting with in jazz,” Wren recounts with obvious wonder. Unhappy writing this transformative encounter down as a garden-variety ineffable experience, Wren travelled to South India to study Carnatic tala. His studies led to another difficult-to-describe phenomenon: he noticed a stylistic bleed from Carnatic music into his jazz improvisations. “I wanted to know how it was happening and why it wasn’t happening more. They are similar styles, but have different ways of thinking.” The unexpected fusion of styles in his own playing led Wren to a contemplation of harmonic tension and release in jazz and rhythmic tension and release in Carnatic music. Wren’s own cross-cultural practice is the basis for his current PhD research exploring the shortcuts and working methods of improvisers.

But the process of Wren’s research has not always led to answers of greater linguistic definition, as might be expected from the above summary. More and more often, Wren finds himself asking linguistic questions that require musical answers, much to the chagrin of his supervisors. “I started with worded questions that had worded answers, but I am moving towards worded questions where the answers are entirely musical. What will it sound like when I combine this and this? What kind of music will I make if I get together with this person?” Wren hopes his supervisors will let him make the final chapter of his thesis a recording.

Way Out West, from left to right back Howard Cairns, Peter Knight, Rajiv Jayaweera, Ray Pereira, foreground Anh Nguyen

Queensland Conservatorium PhD alumnus Peter Knight shares Wren’s suspicion of the presentation of research results in scientific writing. In particular, he questioned the recording of the creative part of his research. If examiners were going to insist on a recording of his improvisations, Knight decided, the focus of his PhD would have to be the medium conveying his improvised message. “I decided that my process was going to use improvisation, but that I was going to focus on the process of recording that improvisation. I was editing the improvisations as well as I could and documenting the editing process. I discussed that process. I would take only three-four minutes of the improvisation because what works in a recorded setting is different from in a concert.”

Knight’s thesis also provided a partly autoethnographic listening guide to the recordings. “I was trying to create something usable, whether people wanted a richer listening experience or they were composers themselves.” Students and teachers around Australia have since consulted the thesis enthusiastically. The problem of talking about music did not go away, however, and again the conclusion of the exegesis proved the greatest challenge to the examiners. Knight’s style was literary and fragmentary, reflecting his musical processes. “I wanted to leave it a bit open-ended,” Knight reflects on his conclusion. “Maybe being unsure is where the vitality of the work resides.”

The uncertainty of Wren and Knight’s wider academic community in regards to the combination of creative and exegetical elements of their projects is indicative of the lack of standardisation of practice-led research in Australia. Polifonia, Europe’s largest music in higher education project, has been evaluating practice-led research since 2004, while the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council released its report on “Practice-Led Research in Art, Design, and Architecture” in 2007. Today, practice-led research forms the cornerstone of several schools of music in mainland Europe, notably Belgium’s Orpheus Institute. Australian institutions have each individually squeezed their programs into the rather hazy shapes of the Australian Qualifications Framework. While this has allowed each institution to capitalise on its strengths, it has possibly undermined the institutionally recognised value of creative outcomes. Future Fellow at the ANU School of Music (one of the slower institutions to take up the practice-led research challenge, much to its obvious disadvantage) Aaron Corn attests that a strong combination of performed and paper output is necessary in an academic CV and that there is not yet true parity of institutional regard for these two kinds of research outcome.

Tertiary music departments across the Western world, though not in some of the world’s poorest countries, are either adapting to government funding models that favour research over creative activities, or their intra-university support is being brutally slashed. There is no ambiguity as to where the impetus for change is coming from. With one-on-one classes being the norm, staff attracting little research funding, but cohorts providing a vital link to the wider community, conservatoriums have generally been accepted as expensive but valuable parts of universities since they were merged with academic schools of music during the Dawkins reforms. The current “crisis” of conservatorium funding is artificial.

We have known this since 1999 when the La Trobe School of Music was closed in the full blush of fiscal health. Many of the current generation of university executives mistakenly (and with humiliating consequences) see in conservatoriums a needless burden, rather than recognising them as the effective public outreach machines they really are. Practice-led postgraduate research degrees attempt to bridge the institutionalised research/creative divide and patch this invented funding gap. We are already seeing a new generation of articulate performers able to offer up dazzling research questions and advocate the place of music in society, but we may also see a drop in the standards of creative outcomes—music’s most powerful advocate—as musicians struggle to fit their practice into jewel cases, 16-bit files and the printed word.

Restless Dance Theatre and Riverland Special School, Artist in Residence project, 2010

WE ARE IN A REMARKABLE ERA OF PARTNERSHIP BETWEEN ARTS AND EDUCATION SECTORS RIGHT NOW IN AUSTRALIA. NOT THAT YOU WOULD KNOW IT. TALK TO MOST GENERALIST TEACHERS, ARTISTS OR PARENTS ABOUT THE VALUE OF THE ARTS IN SCHOOLS AND THE BENEFITS ARE KNOWN BUT NOT ENTIRELY UNDERSTOOD. DISCIPLINE-BASED ARTS EDUCATION IS EITHER SILOED OR MARGINALISED (OR BOTH) IN SCHOOLS. QUALITY ARTS-RICH LEARNING IN THE NAME OF CROSS-CURRICULA INTEGRATION IS RARE—AND VISITING ARTISTS IN SCHOOLS ARE OFTEN JUST A WELCOME NOVELTY.

The Australia Council’s Bums on Seats report indicated over 90% of Australians agreed with the statement that the arts should be an important part of the education of every Australian. But in an environment of high stakes testing and public preoccupation with schools’ rankings, there’s a mismatch of aspiration and reality. Time for the arts in pre-service education is shrinking and, as Professor Robyn Ewing has recently shown, practice rarely meets policy when it comes to the arts and Australian education (The arts and Australian education: realising potential. Australian Education Review, No. 58, 2011).

At the same time, a new national curriculum in the arts—Australia’s first—is being drafted this year and this should be cause for celebration. Arts education will soon be mandatory for pre-schoolers through to Year 10s and the important role of school partnerships with industry is likely to be recognised in that. But if the public consultation reports are anything to go by, the task of capturing all the ‘multiple legitimate purposes’ of arts education in a single document is not going to be smooth sailing. Debate has dogged the public discourse—about whether the curriculum should prioritise discipline or creativity, pre-career development or personal knowing, scope and sequencing [curriculum breadth, depth and order. Eds] or open-ended enquiry. In fact, the debate unleashes a range of issues about the value of formal schooling. But let’s not go there. Let’s go to the role of artists instead.

art improves learning

Professional artists and the ways they work have a contribution to make to improving the quality of learning in schools. That’s not just arts learning, but learning full stop. Take, for instance, professional creative practitioners working in contemporary and hybrid forms. The best of these artists understand the play of discipline and creativity, synthesis and disruption, form and enquiry necessary to produce innovative new work. This is not just a process of manipulating artistic elements to produce a result, but a process that draws on a range of disciplinary, synthesising, creating, respecting and ethical habits of mind. Explicit unpacking of this professional process of artmaking offers much in the way of education. For these habits of mind are the same ones touted by lead educationalists such as Howard Gardner as essential to the task of living in times of change and uncertainty (Five Minds for the Future, Harvard Business School Press, Cambridge MA, 2007).

artists, risks & ambiguity

Secondly, it may seem trite, but those who choose professional lives as artists in Australia deal daily with ambiguity and risk—both in terms of staying creative and staying employed. Finding out how artists work productively with risk and ambiguity again provides an important opportunity, in an educational sense, to capture insights into the workings of self-reflexivity, motivation and resilience. And, thirdly, one of the most important factors in sustaining a quality arts practice, is the capacity to remain curious. Artists at the top of their game know how to be curious, how to enquire into that curiosity and how to create conceptual and artistic spaces in which that curiosity can evolve into new meaning. It can be a messy business. But the combination of abstract and concrete thinking that is required is rich and deep, and young people can learn a lot from it. Understanding these capacities for thinking critically and creatively makes for good ‘life-long learning’—that much mal-aligned and tortured phrase of educational policy.

the artist as role model in the knowledge economy

What, then, is the aim of quality education in the 21st century if not to cultivate curiosity and support young people with the capacities to follow it? These are capacities that one would imagine are essential to surviving in the so-called ‘knowledge economy.’ Professional artists role model these processes in their everyday work, more so than many other professions. And this is where artists’ ways of knowing can provide students, teachers and educational leaders with insight in how to live and learn well in a contemporary world of fluidity and uncertainty. It isn’t about celebrating ‘creative genius’ or the so-called ‘creativity’ of low-income life, it’s about recognising systems of thinking that have relevance to how we manage day-to-day. This was made abundantly clear to me recently as I listened to a young student talking of his experience of working with artists in his school in regional Tasmania: “I thought it [creating the artwork] would have been a bit more structured, but then at the same time it’s fun because you’re thinking ‘Oh, it might be like this or at the same time it might be like that’ and it’s definitely not going to be the one thing, it could just turn in an instant. So, life isn’t just a straightforward path. It has deviations. You might do one thing which leads to another thing but then that next thing could lead you to do something completely different.”

There is much ado about a new national curriculum locking down the available benefits of arts engagement in schools. This is only a danger if teachers retreat to formulaic pedagogy that simply serves to tick the necessary boxes. A curriculum shouldn’t work like that. Education is fundamentally about relationship. And the learning relationships in classrooms are different from school to school, teacher to teacher, student to student. Work in the classroom should reveal curriculum, not the other way around. So, where do artists fit in? They can of course continue to do what they have always done: helicopter visits, guerrilla incursions, the occasional training workshop for teachers. Or some may even turn to further education to become teachers themselves. But at a systemic level, there are important alliances being made in potentially more sustaining, collaborative and supportive ways.

strategies in action

Some States and Territories have made a head start: the engaging ArtsEdge team of arts and education government officers in Western Australia have collaborated over many years to implement a range of programs and initiatives across both sectors in that state. Organisations like Windmill Theatre in South Australia ‘reach in’ rather than ‘reach out’ by inviting teachers and students into their rehearsal processes on a regular basis. And since 2008, the Federal Government has got in on the act and shown leadership in supporting high-level policy partnering of education and the arts through the Artist in Residence Program, administered by the Australia Council. Initially a four-year $5.2m initiative, AIR is now an ongoing program of government and aims to improve young people’s access to quality arts education across the country. An evaluation of the first two years has shown that the program is meeting its objectives. But data has also emerged of the program’s capacity to re-orient understanding of the artists’ role in supporting student learning across a range of areas. Far from replacing the role of specialist arts teachers, artists-in-residence are being recognised for the skill set they bring to the pedagogy of creative teaching and learning across the curriculum. A further realisation is growing that the thinking practices that underlie artists’ creative work have as much to contribute to young people’s learning, as the sharing of disciplinary skills that artists strive to perfect.

at cross purposes

But there’s a long way to go yet before a marriage can be honoured between the arts and education in this country. Feedback about the day-to-day reality of arts residencies in schools reveals that artists and teachers still speak at cross-purposes at times. In the nitty-gritty of making space and time in school life for the arts, some educational leaders continue to be wary and some non-arts teachers remain unconvinced. It’s a job not just for government programs, arts organisations or multi-skilled teaching artists to turn this around, it’s a job for all those who glimpse the educational value of artistic ‘ways of knowing.’ Just making the creative process visible can enhance our capacities for living well.

Coriolis Effect. “Goolwa has great bike tracks but very few bikes…we’re bringing the bikes to Goolwa for some freewheeling through art—and in our wake we’re leaving the bikes for others to use” (press release).

COUNTRY ARTS SA IS HOSTING THE 2012 NATIONAL REGIONAL ARTS CONFERENCE, KUMUWUKI/BIG WAVE, “ A SURVEY OF THE NATION’S LATEST REGIONAL ARTS PRACTICE AND THINKING INFORMING US OF WHERE WE ARE NOW AND INDICATING SIGNPOSTS TO THE FUTURE” (WEBSITE). THE EVENT WILL BE HELD IN THE COASTAL TOWN OF GOOLWA, NOT FAR FROM THE MOUTH OF THE RIVER MURRAY. I SPOKE WITH ARTISTIC DIRECTOR STEVE MAYHEW ABOUT THE CONFERENCE AND ITS COMPONENTS.

What’s the relationship between the conference and each town chosen to host it?

Each conference takes the shape of a town. It’s just up to the town’s capacity really as to how big the conference or festival is and whether each part of the festival program can make a big statement or whether the conference program is the one to concentrate on. In 2010 Launceston really wanted a winter festival and so they used the conference as a jumping off point with Junction Festival, which is still going (see page 13). Goolwa doesn’t have any aspirations to become a festival town but we were very lucky through some fantastic support from Arts SA to really turn this into a multi-faceted event.

You have a conference strand and presumably the artworks are seen as kind of exemplars of what’s possible?

Well, actually I did it the other way round. I started with the artworks. I came up with the artistic program alongside a meta-theme: “the art in resilience.” In 2010 I was doing a Governor’s Leadership Foundation course, visiting a lot of regional communities, and the word “resilient” came up frequently. I got really irked that it was being worn like a badge of honour—you know, that regional people are downtrodden but they’re resilient.

In my research, I found resilience means to bounce back to original form. When you relate it to living things, human beings and communities don’t bounce back to original form—there’s an inherent change. I’m interested in that and in that adaptability of humans and communities. So the notion of resilience is actually about being adaptive and creative in that change.

It came down to really looking at regional artists and what they were doing and the communities they’re working with and the type of audiences that they’re searching for. The works needed to have a touch of future-thinking about them but also an ability for communities to enter into the work, either while it’s being made or while it’s being shown. So the audience or community completes the work.

That interaction happens either prior to the work being shown to a different audience or it’s actually happening there and then in front of the audience. That’s the style of work that I’m very interested in but it’s also the work that I think regional communities could become very interested in because it’s a quick way of engagement. To present a touring work that has been made outside of a regional community that possibly has no relevance whatsoever to them is harder to sell than one that has a framework that can be adapted, made in front of that community and includes them.

You’re dealing with forms that are very current such as sound art, experimental music, digital works, live art and new developments in site-specificity.

That’s exactly right. I’ve made an absolute push to feature works that are up there with any urban centre’s exploration. I’m a firm advocate that artists from urban areas get a lot out of delving into regional centres—to learn from them. Because many of these communities are small you can have a direct relationship with audiences and know exactly where you’re going wrong and where you’re going right when you’re experimenting.

One work, titled If there was a colour darker than black I’d wear it, has been four years in development. It’s a collaboration between artists living in Mt Gambier, Port Augusta and beyond. It takes place across a whole town. You’re in a bus and the work revolves around a character you never see whose name is Ado. But you interact with him on Facebook and through his text messages. You get to know about his life in this town and you meet his friends, who are real people from the town who have submitted video memories of Ado. As the work progresses, you visit his home, his sporting club and you realise that he’s no longer in the town and the reasons for this become apparent as you travel across the town. It’s a work that can literally be lifted up and put into another town. It’s a series of frames and structures and it takes the shape of the town that it’s in.

Over the last four years it’s been developed in Mt Gambier and had quite a substantial number of young people watching works-in-progress and feeding back into certain sections of the work. When it moves to Goolwa, we’re placing an advertisement in the local paper asking people to join us in the first couple of days to contribute to the work and then log on to Facebook and become a friend of the character. They can actually end up writing some of his back-story in real time.

There’s a big exploration around live art and its intersection with regional communities and what that specific engagement is between the artist and the regional area or country town. I Met Goolwa is another work that has a framework that can be lifted up and placed in another town. It’s by Bureau of Worthiness, which includes some artists who live in regional areas. Emma Beech is the main driver of that project. The artists place themselves in a town at least a week before opening. They map out where their base is and that becomes their performative space. They draw a circle and say we can only walk from this space and then ask the question to any passerby in any public space, “What makes your day worth it?” From that question comes a series of responses and from those comes an artistic response—which is a beautiful performance by Emma Beech, illustrator James Dodd and director Tessa Leong. The work has had various incarnations. It’s currently in Geelong. It’s been in Port Adelaide and also Faaborg in Denmark.

Subsequently, Goolwa will play host to a 12-month investigation of live art and its civic engagement, The Coriolis Effect. It’s an exploration between Punctum Live Arts in Castlemaine, Victoria, and Country Arts SA. Those two organisations have taken six artists from across Australia—from Western Australia, Northern Territory, Victoria and South Australia—and are looking at artistic practice that can not only engage communities and audiences but also look at political grey areas and ask, “How can live art fundamentally shift thinking?”. We had a fascinating couple of days in Castlemaine a few weeks ago sitting around with the Mayor and talking about trouble spots in that town and ways and means that live art might help to shift thinking. Fascinating work.

Then there’s WIRED Lab with Southern Encounters and its many collaborators from across the states.
The WIRED Lab

In Launceston I heard Sarah Last, director of WIRED Lab, talk at the conference and I immediately thought I wanted to chat to her because my ears prick up when this sort of work is being made in regional Australia. It’s great to hear that there are innovators and explorers out there. Three SA sound artists have started working with Sarah and we’ve modeled this on her previous work that came out of Cootamundra.

Exactly right. And the funny thing is it’s actually the first railway in South Australia. So (we combine) notions of heritage with new work. (It’s pleasing that) this heritage line, where a steam train often puffs between Victor Harbor and Goolwa, can be re-used in such a unique and modern way.

Sometimes people think with their hands as well as their heads. We have traditional workshops in Ngarrindjeri weaving and really contemporary workshops in digital art and animation. And while we’re on the Ngarrindjeri, there’s a huge project called the Ngarrindjeri Sharing Circle. We’ve engaged the local mob and they’re showing their culture quite openly and publicly for the first time in ages.

It’s actually a Ngarrindjeri word for ‘big wave.’ I was having a meeting with the Ngarrindjeri, not only about the conference but about the Regional Centre of Culture program that Country Arts SA runs every two years, that just so happens coincidentally to be in Goolwa this year as well. The previous Regional Centre of Culture program held in Murray Bridge was titled ‘Ripples.’ A piece of paper was handed to me by one of the elders. I opened it and it read, “Kumuwuki” (Big Wave)—much better than Ripples Murray Bridge.” So we then went through a long and involved process of choosing the word and having it accepted. It’s absolutely particular to the place because Goolwa is on the sea as well as at the mouth of the Murray. The Regional Centre of Culture title in Goolwa is “Just Add Water.” So in a funny way we’re the big wave that comes after you add water.

I’m a theatre director by trade—trained at Flinders University Drama Centre, graduated in the early 90s, found myself far more interested in making work than directing existing texts. The opportunities to make work at that time were with groups of young people, youth theatres and with communities. I found myself artistic director of the Riverland Youth Theatre about five years after graduating and ever since then I’ve dipped in and out of artistic directing, managing companies such as Brink Productions and programming festivals such as the Adelaide Fringe and Adelaide Cabaret Festival. I landed at Country Arts and in the past five years it feels like it’s all come together. The past 18 years or so of working coalesces into things that you know and you understand how you can push things forward.

Regional Arts Australia National Conference, 18-21 October, Goolwa, South Australia; www.kumuwuki.org.au.

I Promise It Will Always Be This Way, John Sasaki, video still, courtesy the artist

DISTINCTIVE ARTS FESTIVALS ARE SPRINGING UP AROUND REGIONAL AUSTRALIA, BRINGING IN NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS, COMMISSIONING AND PRODUCING WORKS BY LOCAL ARTISTS AND ENTICING COMMUNITY MEMBERS TO BECOME ACTIVE COLLABORATORS AND PARTICIPANTS.

Live art’s inherent flexibility and its inclination to interactivity make it ideal for a new generation of community-oriented art-making. Add to that an older tradition of site-specific creativity and you have a potent mix, as demonstrated by the 2012 program of Launceston’s Junction Arts Festival. I spoke with the festival’s director, Natalie de Vito, about several works in the program that exemplify the festival’s goals.

Our focus is on participatory arts projects and live arts as a means for us to engage with quite a wide range of audiences. That includes the arts community in Launceston, across Tasmania and beyond. We’re slowly building up an international presence, bringing international artists here but trying to develop collaborations too. From a regional perspective, one of the things we’re trying to do is to build practice here through a residency program. One of the things that makes us unique is that we also produce almost all of those works or commission them.

We’re very much involved in the development of the site-specific nature of the works, really trying to activate the city. We bring national and international artists in for several weeks—we have an artist this year who will be in residence for five weeks. I hope for next year’s festival that will be longer.

Absolutely. It’s about the give-and-take between an artist and the community. We hire local artists to work as co-ordinators, to collaborate by directing some of the quite specific components of the performances. They’re very much involved if they’re not already producing a project of their own that we’re helping to create.

Some of the work you’re bringing in is from mainland Australia as well as overseas?

We’ve got En Route by One Step at a Time Like This, who are Melbourne-based. They’re actually in London right now—they’ve recreated the piece they did for the Melbourne Fringe for the Cultural Olympiad. It’s a 90-minute kind of psycho-geographic walking tour of the city as a solo experience. It’s a really beautiful, quite meditative piece that they recreate in every city. It’s been to Brisbane, Edinburgh Fringe, Chicago and they’re on their way to New York.

A guardian guides each participant using headphones, iPod and mobile phone, directing them through a 90-minute theatre of the city. One Step at a Time is a collective of four artists. They came to Launceston on two residencies to develop the piece here. They very much focus on embedding themselves within the city, researching its history and some of its key elements. The amazing thing about it is that everything in the city suddenly becomes a possible part of the piece. You’re in an extremely heightened state such that the person who walks in front of you could be part of the performance.

Most definitely, which is what we’re trying to do in terms of the vision of the festival. We have over 50 events including live performances and music and evening club performances. But the majority of the live arts projects that we helped produce are site-specific so that Launcestonians and visitors can think about this city in a new way. It’s very much focused on using places like alleyways where people might not normally go, or the shop that’s been empty for two years which we’ve taken over as part of a pop up event. So people stop and think for a minute about how we might re-use the city.

What about the Branch Nebula work which presumably makes a different kind of use of the skate park?

In a number of their performances Branch Nebula have brought street culture into a formal theatre space, with skateboarding and BMX bikes and parkour. Now they’ll bring that into the skate park where they’ll collaborate with the local users to devise a piece. They’re coming for a three-week residency. The performance will start in the city in a warehouse space and wind up at the skate park. On the way it will stop at places where the kids maybe go to skate at night time because one of the alleyways is lit really well or a particular set of stairs has got a really great railing. Branch Nebula are really open to collaboration and being guided by their participants. It’ll be like a tour through the city with mini-performances, finishing at the skate park but with the performers and participants blending with the other users of the park.

From a dance and theatre perspective, quite a lot of people will attend to see what Branch Nebula is doing. But this is also a really amazing opportunity for us to access a huge group of young kids and skaters who maybe would never think that they would be interested in contemporary experimental dance and choreography.

What about the John Sasaki project, I Promise It Will Always Be This Way? Who will perform the 26 mascot characters?

I Promise It Will Always Be This Way, John Sasaki, video still

They will be locals. This piece was originally created in Toronto at an all-night Nuit Blanche project. It was a 12-hour durational event from dusk till dawn. In bringing it here as a six-hour event we adapted it to make it suitable to the festival and the location and as well translate it from its very specific Canadian/North American identity. One of the things that we have been working on with John is that the first 26 mascots in the original performance were unrelated to any particular brand—there’s a tiger and a lizard and whatever else. One of the things we changed for this performance is that they’re all linked to a particular community organisation or they’re a corporate sport mascot. So we’ve got a Blood Drop (Australian Red Cross Blood Service), Healthy Harold (Life Education Australia) and a range of corporate mascots. John is interested in how this will change the performance. As well, the mascots are going to be linked with local area sports clubs and schools, with each participant having a run-through banner. The project in itself is essentially a massive spectacle about everything around sport and the enthusiasm and excitement of it—but without the sport.

It’s a very conceptually driven performance built around failure and the idea that mascots give 110% but for 30 seconds or two minutes at a time. It’s impossible to maintain that intensity of enthusiasm over six hours. So what happens to that generosity of spirit over that time and how does that play out?

It’s quite a spectacular piece. Part of the performance really is about how the performers deal with it. There are sleeping cots on the field if they want to have a nap. There’s a little lunch station. If they need to take their mascot head off, they can. The performance is about the generosity of spirit between the mascots and the relationship between them and the audience. Neither can exist without the other. The show looks at failure but at the same time there’s also something really beautiful about it.

There’s local artist Stuart Muir-Wilson’s Guerilla Gardening. Stuart’s creating vegetable gardens that will pop up around the city. For example, we have one in a car park, and audience members and passers-by will be asked to feed the meter so that the garden doesn’t get a ticket. He’s made the gardens in palettes and we’ve had really tremendous support around the project. Stuart is doing his Masters at the University of Tasmania in the Architecture department focusing on sustainability and environmental science, landscaping and urban design—how we can reconsider disused space, maximising it for community need and good. We’re also looking at how we can take Launceston City Council owned properties or disused business properties to create little moments of utopia but also something that’s quite productive that the general public can come to and use. It’s about places that can be respected, that the general public feels compelled to participate in, to weed and keep safe.

I’m Canadian. I studied art history and I ran a contemporary art gallery in Toronto so my interest in practice came from site-specific installations and performative works in public places as well as live arts and social practice. I was also the artistic producer of the theatre company Mammalian Diving Reflex. So I have a kind of cross between visual arts and theatre. I did quite a bit of theatre production and devising and, within that structure, similar participatory live art style works.

Yes, quite extensively. I travelled to Australia most, with the Haircuts by Children show and also the Children’s Choice Awards. I’d been to Launceston a few times doing three other projects with MDR. The first Junction Festival was part of the Regional Arts Conference. Ian Pidd, who’s the Artistic Director of Junction, programmed the festival to coincide with the conference. It was only meant to be a one-off event. Following the festival there was quite a bit of interest from Arts Tasmania and also Launceston City Council about the possibility and need for some kind of event like this that was focused in the north of Tasmania. So, I happened to be in Launceston a few months following and was brought into the conversation about how it could potentially work. I put together the proposal for turning it into an annual festival. That’s how I ended up getting inadvertently pulled in as Festival Director with Ian as Artistic Director. I lead the long-term vision and the direction of the festival and we both co-program the artworks. It’s very collaborative.

I like the sound of Red Brigade vs Blue Brigade—Melbourne’s 10-piece all girl brass band, The Red Brigade, competing with locals in the streets.

There’s a huge number of brass bands in Launceston and we’ve been able to collaborate with them and with local schools and music clubs. That’s another way we’ve been able to try to outreach to the larger community and try to get them involved. I think it’ll knock the people’s socks off!

MONTPELLIER DANSE 2012 PROVIDED THE USUAL BLEND OF TOP-BILLED CHOREOGRAPHERS AND EMERGING ARTISTS. THIS 32ND EDITION COMPLETED A DIPTYCH BEGUN WITH THE 2011 FESTIVAL, WHICH SOUGHT TO CELEBRATE THE MEDITERRANEAN.

This year Montpellier Danse continued its voyage around the Mediterranean basin, presenting artists from Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, Spain and Turkey. A short foray mid-festival revealed works which explored failure, exhaustion, madness, and the body possible…

william forsythe: yes we can’t

“If you try to fail, and you do…have you succeeded?” This is the question asked by William Forsythe in relation to the new version of his 2008 work Yes we can’t. This version, which bears little relation to its original incarnation, is (as its title suggests) an attempt at failure; an exploration of bad taste. The original piece, according to Forsythe “was not very good…and realising this, we decided to make it worse.”

And worse it is. The costumes are awful (with sequined leggings, ugly high-heeled shoes and terrible wigs), the music (a nauseating melange of famous works, from classical to Broadway hits) always appearing for just long enough to be recognised, but utterly misplaced or out of sync. This is dance-as-nightmare—a constant assault of dance styles, from ballet to jazz to esoteric contemporary dance, each rendered dreadful in their combination. Some of the choreography is executed with mesmerising technique and some flat-footed and clumsily. The unrelenting result of all this is mesmerising chaos, which is somehow impossible not to continue watching.

Of course this is not the first and will not be the last attempt by a choreographer to mine the 20th century dance canon for comedy and acerbic comment. Dance makes for an easy target, replete with clichés and iconic moments which can be reproduced for comedic effect. But to ‘succeed’ in the creation of bad taste is not always so easy. The choreography in Yes we can’t cleverly progresses too quickly for the viewer to digest. It oscillates too frequently between fancy-dancing and displays of sublime technique to be categorised, either within the realm of pastiche or ironic post-modernism.

Summarising the work at a pre-performance press conference, Forsythe ventured that, “It’s not sophisticated for about half an hour; then it’s sophisticated for 10 minutes (but there’s no dancing). And afterwards…it becomes even less sophisticated.” It is within those “sophisticated” 10 minutes which Forsythe alludes to that Yes we can’t shows its hand. Addressing the audience in French, one of the dancers embarks on the first of several extended apologies for the awfulness of the show. He explains in conciliatory tones that the dancers are not this bad normally, that it’s a shame that the audience couldn’t have been there for the rehearsal when they were much better…This fawning, which of course makes things worse, and goes on far too long, reveals the self-awareness of the work before continuing its descent towards a bad ending.

The placement of Yes we can’t within Montpellier Danse 2012 makes for interesting programming in a festival which never shies away from presenting the unashamedly beautiful or theatrical. Yes we can’t does not operate solely for the pursuit of laughs. It attempts to unpick the nature of dance practice and spectatorship, and the perhaps unavoidable clichés that surround them. One vignette sees a dancer in naff red and white gym leotard perform a highly skilled gymnastic solo complete with red ribbon. His skill is breathtaking, and while we laugh when he gets tangled in the ribbon or fails to catch it after a soaring leap, we become ever more aware of our enjoyment in the spectacle of his technique. This is dance spectatorship laid bare as guilty pleasure, and we cannot escape the awareness of our own implication in this relationship.

mathilde monnier, twin paradox

Another work which shone an uncomfortable spotlight on spectatorship was French choreographer Mathilde Monnier’s Twin paradox. Arising from research into American Dance Marathons of the 1920s and folk dances from around the world, Twin paradox makes for an uneasy exploration of duration, repetition, survival and exhaustion. On a harshly lit stage with gaudy orange floor, a series of couples undertake endless duets. Linked physically at all times, they entwine, become locked in clumsy embraces, before rolling and unfolding into the next entanglement. The choreography begins slowly, with an almost sculptural air, but as the piece progresses the movements become ever swifter, more repetitive and harder to watch.

By the end of the work the dancers are clearly exhausted and, in a way, so too are the spectators. As a viewer there is an odd discomfort between being bored by the relentless, almost violent motion, yet acutely aware of the effort expended by the dancers onstage. Here, once again the spectators are conscious, not only of their position in the bargain between performer and audience, but are also moved to question the nature of spectatorship in dance. The dancers continue to move, to dance (according to Monnier), “in spite of everything. To dance after everything.” And we keep watching.

The final half-hour of the work is pure pain, both to do and to watch, and perhaps that is, after all, the point of the work. Dancers fall repeatedly in swoons, caught in the nick of time by their dance partners. While admittedly Twin paradox does not make for easy viewing, it nonetheless provokes some intriguing considerations. The costumes, lighting and noisy soundscape create an altogether hostile environment in which dance becomes a last desperate struggle to assert itself above all else. This could not be achieved it would seem, with a comfortable ride provided for the dancers or spectators.

out of lebanon and morroco

In addition to world renowned choreographers such as Forsythe and Monnier, the festival’s theme of programming artists from around the Mediterranean Basin provided an eclectic mix, with some striking performances. Lebanese Danya Hammoud performed a spare, pared down solo entitled Mahalli which, whilst somewhat limited in its remit, nonetheless made for a distilled contemplation of movement, and the power of small gestures.

Morocco-born Bouchra Ouizguen’s Ha! charted a pleasing path between humour and melancholy. Opening on a scarcely lit stage, four female figures become visible in the gloom. Clad in headscarves, they rock repetitively. Thus begins a quixotic journey into the realms of female kinship, strength, humour, and madness. The figures onstage do not comply with the norm of athletically trained dancers. With the exception of one, they are rotund; barrel-shaped even. Ouizgen says that she creates dance in the context of modern-day Morocco, recruiting dancers from the street whom she chances across. Central to Ha! is the body, and the strange landscape that these women provide, through song and an interrogation of movement. At times they stamp, laugh hysterically, perform delightfully awkward leg kicks, or pile on top of one another in strange mounds.

By turns they become the archetypal crones of a market-place, with scarves tied under their chins, or warrior-like figures with feet planted squarely on the ground in a gesture of defiance. What is most delightful about this work is the fact that it surrenders neither to spoof nor to overly earnest posturing. It determines a language of its own, drawn from the body and the characters onstage, which it sticks to without exception.

The diverse arrays of work at Montpellier negate categorisation, and also render them too innumerable to mention. It was possible in many, however, to detect a continual chipping-away at the boundaries of what dance is, and can do—to create more possibilities for failure and success, and to undermine the very categories on which these terms are built.

Montpellier Danse 2012: Yes we can’t, choreography William Forsythe & the Forsythe Company Dancers, music David Morrow, costumes Dorothée Merg; Twin paradox, choreography Mathilde Monnier, music Luc Ferrari, costumes Laurence Alquier; Mahalli, choreographer, performer Danya Hammoud, sound Cristian Sotomayor, Danya Hammoud, costume Wafa Aoun; Ha!, choreography Bouchra Ouizguen, costumes Nourreddine Amir; Montpellier, France, June 22-July 7

THE SEATING CAPACITY OF THEATRE MAISONNEUVE IS 1,458. IT’S A BIG HALL THAT COMES WITH AN APPROPRIATELY VAST STAGE. SO WHEN A LIGHTING DESIGNER CHOOSES TO ILLUMINATE THAT STAGE WITH ONLY ONE SMALL FLUORESCENT LIGHT UNIT, I HAVE TO WONDER WHAT THEY’RE UP TO. THE INTENT BECOMES CLEAR AFTER A FEW MINUTES.

rosas: holy communion achieved

A lone performer, barely visible, arrives at the front of the apron and begins to vocalise. He drones, gasps, intones, and growls. I can just make out the grey outline of his flexing, heaving ribs. Soon his voice is joined by other voices issuing from the shadows. They harmonise in modalities that originate in Renaissance and Middle Ages church and folk music. While the lights give me just enough visibility to place the first performer, the new voices won’t let me fix sound to figure. I must receive with my ears only.

Cesena, by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and Bjorn Schmelzer (Belgium), was originally performed outdoors at the Palace of the Popes in Avignon, France, starting in pre-dawn half-light at 4.30 am. The indoor version parallels the transition to full morning light without attempting to mimic nature. More light will come as the show progresses.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this collaboration between choreographer and musical director is the way dancers and singers are seamlessly integrated. The greatest vocal challenges are left to the singers, and the most difficult movement solos are left to the dancers; but for the most part the bodies all sing and move—to very high standard. Walking, turning, rolling and singing with collective intent, the performers form a community of initiates with a holy mission: to awaken the sun—or its proxy, electric light. They succeed. My primal fears are allayed by the light, and my spiritual yearnings, associated with Gregorian chanting and the like, are fulfilled.

societas raffaelo: communion interrogated

On the Concept of the Face, Regarding the Son of God by Societas Raffaelo Sanzio

On the Concept of the Face, Regarding the Son of God by Societas Raffaelo Sanzio (Italy) is an exercise in testing your faith—or if you don’t have any of that, your patience. A modernist apartment done almost exclusively in white is stretched across the wide expanse of the Theatre Jean Duceppe. An old man in a white bathrobe sits on a white couch on a white vinyl floor watching TV. He shits himself repeatedly. His middle-aged son, in black suit and white shirt, repeatedly cleans him up. The son dons latex gloves, removes the old man’s diaper, sponges him down, and mops up the brown mess on the floor with white towels. He is a patient and loving son, but he sometimes becomes exasperated. The old man cries and begs forgiveness. All the while Jesus, the world’s original forgiver, watches on, his face rendered in enigmatic detail by Renaissance painter Antonello da Messina and blown up by director Romeo Castellucci to massive proportions on a panel that stands upstage centre. Jesus’ expression is hard to read. Is it one of bemusement, empathy, or judgment?

Castellucci seems to have created all this as a test. Certainly for the characters—will the two men give in to despair? But also for the audience—as we watch the dreary and sometimes comical routine we are assaulted with the acrid odour of shit. Yes, Castellucci has polluted the theatre with a sulphurous stink. Some spectators hold their nostrils shut. As usual with Castellucci, the visceral nature of the experience is also a theatre game. While “regarding the face of the son of God,” I try to discern his attitude to the two men; I check my empathy levels while having my senses assaulted; I negotiate with the representation before me—to what degree do I identify with, and care about, the real-life situation portrayed? During one of the son’s exits for towels, the father unscrews the lid of a jug and pours more brown fluid over himself and the whiteness of sheet, blanket and floor. The son returns to find the father crying and begging forgiveness again. Who is testing whom? Later in the show, about a dozen pre-teens throw metal, grenade-like missiles at the giant face of Jesus, achieving not a dent. They then sit and contemplate the image. Jesus remains impassive. Someone just passed or failed a test again, but I can’t tell who.

madlinsko theatre: out of the body & in your face

Director Oliver Frilic and Mladinsko Theatre (Slovenia) assemble an arsenal of actor-bodies shoved in numbers as far forward as the stage will allow for Damned Be the Traitor of His Homeland. They will ask some difficult questions of the audience at Theatre Rouge du Conservatoire and make some uncomfortable accusations. But first each actor creates a fictional eulogy for him or herself, and each successive account of the circumstances of their passing is more improbable than the last. In this way, authenticity of personal narrative is thrown into doubt from the outset. In one scene the company interrogates one of its members in a chummy but dangerous manner: where do his allegiances lie? Is he really Slovenian? Isn’t one of his parents a Croat? Didn’t he sing songs in the pub with Serbian soldiers? The diversity of the actor’s ancestry is such that the whole notion of ethnic identity is made to look a very dubious construct. But if so, how did we get to the atrocities of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia? Instability of ethnic identity is starkly contrasted with a sense of deep personal loss at the fracturing of Yugoslavia. Each actor recalls the moment they learned of former President Tito’s death in 1980. They strip naked before us and cry. The sense of loss—of a country, of a time without war—is affecting. Some of us in the audience are crying too.

Eventually, the actors ask the spectators, “Where were you when the slaughter in Srebrenica was taking place only 400 kilometres from here?” Of course, they don’t ask this when performing in Montreal. They find other ways to challenge the Canadian audience: for example they note that Canada’s oppressive Indian Act provided much of the basis for South Africa’s system of apartheid. With blanks fired loudly and frequently from a pistol, and with most of the show occurring almost in the lap of the audience, Damned Be the Traitor is a shock and awe performance that keeps me alert and on edge. The ‘awe’ part is largely in the handling of pace and rhythm by the director. Frilic’s sense of proportion is impeccable. He knows when to shift gears and when to surprise. As a result Damned Be the Traitor is a well-oiled, political-funhouse ride, one with amusements that turn nasty but never feel gratuitous.

motus: process makes imperfect

Too Late! (Antigone) Contest #2 by Motus (Italy) was inspired by the 2008 killing of teenager Alexandros Grigoropoulos at the hands of police in Athens, Greece. Motus partly builds its show from the script of Sophocles’ Antigone, with one actor, Vladimir Aleksic, tending to play the role of the dictator Creon and the other, Sylvia Calderoni, tending to play the defiant outcast Antigone. The work is strongest when it stays close to the original text; there’s more than enough complexity in Sophocles to allow for a nuanced examination of the abuse of state power. Early on, dialogue is juxtaposed with the two actors playing dominant and submissive dogs—a simple parallel to the power relationship in the play, but one made effective by the detailed physical work. As is typical in art-market political theatre, the company turns the lens on its own creative process and the focus of the piece becomes diluted by meandering speculations about power and identity woven with personal biography. Unlike Damned be the Traitor, which uses similar techniques but in a tightly focused manner, the inspiration for Too Late!, charged by Grigoropoulos’ death, simply dissipates. Despite the political posturing, it feels like nothing much is at stake.

FTA: Festival TransAmériques 2012, Montreal, Canada, May 29-June 4; for credits and company sites, see www.fta.qc.ca/en

Monolith, Lawrence English, Werner Dafeldecker, Scott Morrison, Liquid Architecture 13

AUSTRALIANS HAVE LONG FOUND SOMETHING ATTRACTIVE ABOUT ANTARCTICA—THE LAST FRONTIER FOR THE MANLY VIRTUES OF ENDURANCE IN ISOLATION, A CONTINENT FOR THE TAKING WITHOUT THE INCONVENIENCE OF PRETENDING SOMEONE ELSE GOT THERE FIRST. WHO KNOWS? BUT IT MAKES FOR AN INTRO TO THIS YEAR’S LIQUID ARCHITECTURE: A TIGHTLY CURATED COLLECTION OF WORKS DERIVED FROM THE ARTISTS’ PERSONAL VISITS TO ANTARCTICA.

Except for the first piece by Robin Fox which is a sonification of waverider buoy data from the Southern Ocean, rather than a traveller’s tale. Still, it’s data from about as south as you get before the ocean freezes. The piece starts with the rising and falling of wave heights quantised into discrete steps and then set to a scale. High pitched but not annoyingly so, the sound is metallic and fun. Then a slower, lower pitched version joins, followed by more waves followed by the creaking of ships’ timbers (surely it must be something else, but that’s what it sounds like). More sustained sounds whoosh in, wind and steaming water, but then it gets stupid loud and sensible types in the audience all start shoving fingers in their ears—which would make a nice photo.

Next is a playback piece from an absent Chris Watson. Low creaking rumbles remind me of ocean-going wooden ships again. Sea-beasts sing and fart and splash about then plunge back into the freezing depths. Gulls call out in their usual hysterical and angry panic. A huge something surfaces with a burst of exhalation. Ice drips, waves get trapped against ice sheets, seals surface and drip off by the edge. In some ways these first two pieces show the difficulty in structuring field recordings as composition—there is a sense of sound after sound after sound—which is not necessarily bad, but seems restricted or structurally unexplored.

We’re now sufficiently into the night for me to notice how unusual it is to listen, still, and amongst strangers. People stretch out on the floor in various stages of the sleep-wake cycle. One can almost feel the theta waves resonating out from every resting head, sense the faint click as the thalamus disconnects the body for when the dreams kick in.

The final artist for the night is Doug Quin with what have become the canonical sounds of the Antarctic—Weddell seals calling underwater. The sound is not at all what one associates with large blubbery seals coughing and barking on land. Underwater, the seals sing long gliding chirps and slow descending pitch glides, sparse blurts, grunts, growls and whistles. These are unedited recordings from multiple hydrophones recording simultaneously at depths of 10, 20 and 50 metres—a sort of vertical wall of recording that is laid flat into the room where we are listening. The result is an open, sparse, sound stage with a wide range of volumes and spatial depth to each individual sound—the acoustic in all its complexity leads us into the classic meditative experience of focused attention.

Second night. Philip Samartzis presents a study of “ice behaviour” recorded at the end of summer, when the lakes and the seas begin to freeze. Samartzis produces a wonderfully rich soundscape with superb transitions and modulation of the density and content. Waves well up into the overhangs and cavities along the ice sheet edge; we hear deep plops and resonant squelches, shallow streams and fast bubbling water. And all with a precise, up close clarity until about 20 minutes in when the sound builds to a fast storm, the sound like masses of bees swarming inside an endlessly crashing wave. Back to the (ever) present running water then fade out on reverberant plinks from within a cavern—the first time the acoustic space has obviously changed. Finish with the traditional closing of the laptop—that slightly uncomfortable indeterminate ending of file playback concerts where the dynamics within the piece may include the dynamics of the end of the piece—quiet fades, abrupt silences, who will clap first.

There’s some commonality in the sounds the artists have been using. Makes sense given the environment, but interestingly there’ve been no sounds that are obviously of the voyage or habitation—no sounds of everyone getting up in the morning or making a coffee (hot chocolate and snuggle in for a read before sleep?). Perhaps this is indicative of the overwhelming power of the environment sans human, or perhaps just the efficient call of the exotic—why go to Antarctica to record a kettle boiling?

Monolith, Lawrence English, Werner Dafeldecker (pictured), Scott Morrison, Liquid Architecture 13

Next is the trio of Dafeldeker, English and Morrison with Monolith. Video plus sound. White screen, low pulse from the audio, amazing shot of the regular geometry of a walkway, thin black lines against the snow. Sound continues as regular low frequency bursts, helicopters with high frequencies cut. More lines against the snowscape—isolated human structures looking abandoned, alien, bleached into the snow. The slowly changing imagery, now blurred and offset layers of landscape, is overwhelmingly beautiful—this really deserves large screen cinema. Zoom in to ice as a textured screen, as tessellated light in patterns and transparencies. Then signs of life as fragments of bone bleached and trapped between rocks, bright orange and fluoro yellow lichens. Animal sounds.

Wind rumbles on mics, atmospherics graze across the screen and time scales blur. Snow, smooth and rough, is broken into cliffs, laid out like pillows, coloured like pale oceans and wheat under sun. At times it is hard to tell what we are seeing, the scale and movement difficult to match against experience. Masses of cloud move across the horizon at what must be incredible speed but because of the vastness of the landscape they seem to amble along like a vast and casual herd. The wind picks up, the screen is cut into bands of grey; violent windstorms sound then stop. Floes crackle, ice drips, trickles plop and burble. Thin overlays of surface water, wind blown ripples, soft unbreaking waves. Fade out.

One of the best Liquid Architectures I’ve been to (but do I always think that?) and, with Monolith, an exceptional performance that deserves much greater exposure.

Liquid Architecture 13, Robin Fox, Chris Watson, Douglas Quin, July 4; Philip Samartzis, Monolith trio: Lawrence English, Werner Dafeldecker, Scott Morrison, Brisbane Powerhouse; July 5; www.liquidarchitecture.org.au

PRACTICE-LED POSTGRADUATE RESEARCH, WHERE A FILM OR NEW MEDIA WORK IS MADE AS THE PRINCIPAL MEANS OF ASSESSMENT, IS BECOMING MUCH MORE PREVALENT AT UNIVERSITIES THAT OFFER SCREEN PRODUCTION COURSES, ESPECIALLY NOW THAT SCREEN PRODUCTION PROGRAMS ARE FORMING A MAJOR COMPONENT OF THE TERTIARY CREATIVE ARTS SECTOR. INTERESTINGLY, IT’S NOT ONLY RECENTLY GRADUATED STUDENTS WHO RETURN FOR SUCH DEGREES, BUT OFTEN FILMMAKERS WITH SUBSTANTIAL CAREERS.

Experienced documentary maker John Hughes (After Mabo, The Archive Project), for example, is doing a PhD at RMIT. He’s making an essay film about the making of his earlier documentary Indonesia Calling: Joris Ivens in Australia, and how it relates to his own practice. It’s a more experimental film, one which will have a different life; it would be very interesting as a special feature on the DVD of Indonesia Calling, for instance. He’s also doing a written component, something that sits parallel to the film and is concerned with the historical research that went into the two films. Andrew Traucki (The Reef, Black Water) is making a found footage thriller feature film as part of his Master of Creative Arts at UTS, while writing about the comparison between the making and distribution of a privately funded and a government-funded film.

As Adrian Danks, Program Director Media, School of Media and Communication at RMIT, says, the screen project and the written work for such a degree do have to relate, and often they don’t. In that case, he says it’s easier if the problem is with the written component, since “if the problem is in the project that can be difficult to address, because the event the project covers may not be able to be revisited.”

why do practice-led research?

Why would an experienced film practitioner go back to university to do a post-graduate degree? Well, as Sarah Gibson, Senior Lecturer, Creative Practices Group at UTS, says, “Perhaps they want to make that project that they could never get funded, or perhaps they want a supportive workspace where they can bounce around ideas.” As she says, a university can provide a good model for creative collaboration, or somewhere to try a new direction, and, if that fails, to learn to make something better. (And a place where that initial failure is not exposed to public scrutiny.) A post-graduate student can come in with a question rather than a fully-formed proposal, and that question can be very broad, and lead to very creative exploration. In fact, as Adrian Danks says, “They can spend their first year working out what they want to do—and even finding out that they can’t do it.”

UTS also offers a Doctor of Creative Arts, which is a three-year course, but it can be part-time. While some students do a research degree as a pathway to an academic career, for some film practitioners it’s time to, as Sarah Gibson says, “take a deep breath, assess their position, and make that film they’ve always wanted to, perhaps a bigger project, or a more significant piece of work.” For younger practitioners it’s an opportunity for experimentation, for perhaps taking a different direction. They must make something, as well as provide a written component, but as well as long form or essay documentaries, DCA students have been working on new media forms and researching different aspects of screen production.

Gibson finds that the Master of Media Arts and Production, which covers three semesters, suits people who are interested in changing careers or specialisations, or who want to add media to their qualifications. People in science areas may want to use filmmaking as another way of publishing in their area, realising that short films can disseminate ideas better and reach a broader audience. Print-based journalists may want to explore documentary as a different, and perhaps more effective, approach to the issues that concern them. For those already working in film, a production designer may want to be a director; someone working in sound may want to work with images, or a film practitioner may want to explore new media.

At AFTRS, the new Master of Screen Arts is in its first year, in which it was only open to AFTRS graduates who had completed a graduate diploma between 2009 and 2011, but this one-year course will be developing and changing, using feedback from this year’s students. Neil Peplow, Head of Screen Content, says they will be increasing the size of the intake, taking students from more disciplines and from outside AFTRS. The course will still be aimed at helping students achieve mastery in their chosen area of specialisation, while at the same time investigating Australian screen history and the big philosophical and sociological ideas in action for context and meaning. Students will be supported to map out their own path in what is an increasingly competitive marketplace, but collaboration with fellow students will be an equally important element of the course. This year students included producers, directors, one DOP and one composer, and each had to complete either a short film or a short work that would lead to a feature; the composer, however, developed a composing app for educational use with children.

the assessment of research quality assessed

Just how do you assess the research quality of a creative work? This vexed question has been exercising the minds of many of those working in the screen production education sector, but the large-scale project headed by Dr Josko Petkovic from Murdoch University in Perth, in which a team of researchers from five institutions tested 45 short productions from 19 film schools, has now been completed, with the results confirming the hypothesis that screen production assessors are consistent and methodical. Given that students in Australian film schools have a qualitative form of assessment, the aim was to accumulate a body of evidence that demonstrated in quantitative and qualitative terms that evaluation of creative works is as consistent as evaluation conducted in traditional discipline areas. The project, based on the proposition that assessment of screen production is as complex and multi-faceted as the screen production process itself, used a multiplicity of criteria and ranks of assessors to conclude that the assessment process is valid, highly reliable and internally consistent. Collaboration amongst Australian film schools to generate shared information on standards, assessment and reporting, as well as enhanced understanding of standards, assessment and reporting practices for the screen production sector and for the Creative Arts sector as a whole, are additional expected outcomes of the successful project.

a challenge: funding research productions

A continuing problem within the sector has to do with the funding of productions. While the universities can provide equipment and facilities which greatly assist in production, there is still a substantial cost that the student filmmaker has to raise. The federal and state screen funding organisations do not endorse or encourage university-industry research linkage, with postgraduate practice-based researchers excluded from accessing production funding through government film financing. A number of academics recently raised this problem in their response to the federal government’s National Cultural Policy Discussion Paper, underlining the need for the establishment of strong research links between the creative industries and the university creative arts research sector. This linkage does exist in other areas, but not in the screen sector, perhaps because practice-based research in creative arts is a comparatively recent development and its importance is yet to be recognised by cultural organisations and policy makers. Academics are hopeful that this will be addressed in the final National Cultural Policy.

thinking bigger

Film isn’t only about working on individual projects. With post-graduate students already co-operating on each other’s work, and working in supportive, experimental environments, Josko Petkovic is excited about trying to inspire people to think collaboratively on a much larger scale. Given that there are so many visually literate post-graduate students, and that “we are now entering a world that is primarily image-anchored,” he believes that “we need to start thinking about work beyond the narrow industry base,” and foresees a time when students could contribute to “large, ongoing projects stored in a cyber-archive.” Something to think about?

REVIEWS OF PAOLO SORRENTINO’S THIS MUST BE THE PLACE HAVE MADE MUCH OF SEAN PENN’S PERFORMANCE AS CHEYENNE, IN THE MAIN, DUE TO HIS APPEARANCE AS AN AGED GOTH ROCK IDOL MODELLED ON THE CURE’S ROBERT SMITH, REPLETE WITH TEASED BLUE-BLACK HAIR AND FULL MAKE-UP, BUT ALSO HIS LILTING, MEASURED, ALMOST SQUEAKY, INTONATION.

Of course much of this is a reaction to the now familiar media characterisation of Penn as the wild Method actor on the fringes of Hollywood and by a series of hyper-masculine roles such as Jimmy Markham in Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River, Matthew Poncelet in Tim Robbins’ Dead Man Walking (1995) or Danny McGavin in Dennis Hopper’s Colors (1988). Alongside these manly portrayals we have been witness to a litany of offscreen performances outside the movies including run-ins with photographers: the much publicised divorce(s) from Robyn Wright-Penn, the visits to Iraq, meetings with American enemies President Raúl Castro of Cuba and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, legends of Penn sleeping with a pistol under his pillow in a resettlement camp in Haiti and a host of male friendships with the likes of Hopper, Harry Dean Stanton, Robert Duvall, and Jack Nicholson, Harry Crews, Charles Bukowski and Charlie Sheen.

At the same time, he has performed a range of curious roles that may undermine the construction of Penn as the masculine bad boy. Think Harvey Milk in Gus Van Sant’s Milk (2008), Samuel J Bicke in Niels Mueller’s The Assassination of Richard Nixon (2004), Jeff Spicoli in Amy Heckerling’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Emmer Ray in Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown (1999) and, most hysterically, David Kleinfeld in Brian de Palma’s Carlito’s Way (1993). In all these films Penn has acted against type, well against the type found in Mystic River and Dead Man Walking, at least.

In many instances Penn has played naive outsiders, characters caught up in their own times and locales, often unable to escape their own fates. Similarly, Cheyenne’s wisdom lurks beneath the façade of a simple, emotionally fragile Goth who is able to clearly see the truth of situations without the encumbrances of worldliness or sophistication. One of the best scenes in This Must Be the Place is when Cheyenne meets Tattoo Mike (Gordon Michaels) in a bar in Bad Ax, Michigan and these two outsiders exchange opinions about alcohol, tattooing and the joys of gratitude in a childlike reverie, the kind of languid, episodic conversation emblematic of Penn’s performance in this film. Frances McDormand as Cheyenne’s partner Jane is a confident, assertive yet loving character, absolutely at ease with the world, consistently wooping him at handball; but in essence operating to support and contrast with Cheyenne’s simplicity and innocent directness.

Similar characters populate the films Penn has directed. In The Indian Runner (1991), Viggo Mortenson plays Frank Roberts, a tearaway who returns from the war in Vietnam. Unable to find a place for himself in the world he left, Frank causes irreparable damage to his family and hometown. John Booth (David Morse) in The Crossing Guard is released from jail for killing the child of Freddy Gale (Jack Nicholson), only to provide Gale with the direction and wisdom he needs to escape his life of alcoholic rage and sadness. Nicholson plays Jerry Black in Penn’s The Pledge, another character unable to deal with the horror of a child’s murder who descends into obsession and destruction. 2007’s Into the Wild focuses on real-life character Chris McCandless (Emile Hirsch), who gave up his comfortable middle-class life for one of adventure that led to eventual starvation and death in the wilderness of Alaska.

Similarly, it is possible to see This Must Be the Place in relation to one of the major concerns of Penn’s own directorial efforts in films such as The Indian Runner and more recently, Into the Wild—the concern with place and how it shapes, contains and characterises individuals. Penn’s films can also be understood as a distinct genre that takes as its subject not only outsider figures but also the very specific locales and historical moments from which they emerge. The Indian Runner may be discussed in relation to the whole ‘badlands’ mythology that has been popularised in various renditions of the story of Charlie Starkweather and mid-west America. The Crossing Guard belongs to a tradition of imagining Los Angeles that includes Cassavetes’ work (The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Love Streams, A Woman Under the Influence). The Pledge is confined to Nevada and returns to the Native American mythologies introduced in The Indian Runner. Into the Wild, covering numerous locales, is principally concerned with Alaska and all that place signifies in the American imaginary.

This concern spills out into many of the films in which Penn acted including This Must Be the Place. Sorrentino’s film takes its title from the Talking Heads song which has as its subtitle “naive melody,” an instructive connection for the film and Penn’s performance. In a host of performances and in his own directorial works Sean Penn has oscillated between twin poles; the rendering of place and awkward, naive outsiders’ journeys to find themselves. Of course, many are taken by road.

Taking into account Penn’s directorial oeuvre we can understand many of his performances in the same way. His Academy Award-winning performance as Jimmy Markham in Clint Eastwood’s adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s novel Mystic River is of a person unable to escape not only his past, but also the intricate community of Dorchester, Boston; the locale that Lehane has written about in a series of novels. Milk relies on San Francisco for its setting. Hometown girl, B Ruby Rich, described the premiere screening in nostalgic terms, in particular Penn’s rendering of the title character:

“the film started and silence descended, as the audience began to realise what a house of mirrors we had entered. As Sean Penn brilliantly disappeared into the body, voice and mannerisms of Harvey Milk, it got harder and harder to separate the world on the screen from the one we lived in” (“Ghosts of an Ideal World,” The Guardian, Jan 16 2009).

We could also think of Penn’s David Kleinfeld, the coke-snorting, aspirational, corrupt lawyer of De Palma’s film, unable to resist the money, drugs and women in 1980s New York City, leading to his own and his client Carlito’s (Al Pacino) deaths. One of Penn’s earliest and most celebrated characters, Jeff Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High, in his own naïve (albeit stoned) disregard for school rules and teen angst experienced by the other characters in the film, is able to transcend the ethos he finds himself surrounded by and can revel in his dreams of being a pro-surfer and babe magnet.

Like these characters, This Must Be the Place’s Cheyenne is a recluse or outcast whose episodic journey across the United States to locate his father’s Holocaust tormentor is a search for not only the tormentor, Aloise Liange (Heinz Lieven), or simply himself (as many road movies prescribe) but for something immediate and important, less of a location than a time and event by which to recognise himself, as in “for me this must be the place.”

This Must Be the Place, writer, director Paolo Sorrentino, writer Umberto Contarello, music David Byrne, cinematography Luca Bigazzi, editor Christiano Travaglioli; Italian, French, Irish co-production, 2012; Australian distribution and DVD, Hopscotch.

RealTime has 6 copies of This Must Be the Place to giveaway courtesy of Hopscotch Entertainment. Email us at giveaways@realtimearts.net with your name, postal address and phone number. Include ‘Giveaway’ and the name of the item in the subject line.

Leo Clayton and Sam Doyon from their Advanced Techniques for Modern Living project, Faculty of Creative Arts, University of Wollongong

“A GENERAL ISSUE PLAGUING UNIVERSITIES TODAY, WHICH IMPACTS ON MEDIA ARTS, IS THE “COMPLIANCE CULTURE”—THANKS TO ENDLESS AND INCREASING GOVERNMENT REGULATION AND ACCOUNTABILITIES… BESIDES WASTING ACADEMICS’ TIME, IT MAKES PLANNING AND TEACHING LESS FLEXIBLE. IT ALSO APPEARS TO HAVE A STRANGE FLOW-ON EFFECT WHERE STUDENTS SEEM INCREASINGLY INFLEXIBLE IN THEIR EXPECTATIONS—AT LEAST INITIALLY. FOR MEDIA ARTS, THIS INFLEXIBILITY IS PARTICULARLY DETRIMENTAL, GIVEN THAT THE JOB SITUATION IS SO FLUID AND THE MEDIA LANDSCAPE, INCLUDING SOCIAL MEDIA, CHANGES SO QUICKLY.” NORIE NEUMARK

Last year, Lisa Gye’s article “sublimation vs subjugation” (RT104) looked at the changes brought about by the restructuring of the Australia Council Boards in 2005, which abolished the discrete funding field of New Media Arts. By interviewing academics who teach media Gye found that as an academic discipline, media art was “settling back into more established disciplines—Fine Art, Media and Communications, Design, Creative Arts and Science and Technology” and no longer considered “a monstrous hybrid struggling to find its place in the gallery or the museum.” Gye rightly concluded that “vigilance is required to ensure that the sublimation of media arts practices to the mainstream does not result in their subjugation.”

In 2012 I have extended her research with an open-ended question on the major issues facing new media arts education. Of the 16 key academics around the country who responded to my enquiries, the majority found, as Neumark succinctly describes, that wider issues are transforming teaching in this arena. Broadly speaking, the challenges in media arts education today revolve around institutional structures, discipline strictures, student expectations and the shifting role of the academic.

For Christian Haines (Elder Conservatorium of Music, University of Adelaide), “Sound media or sonic arts education seems to be in a constant tension amongst a multitude of ideological and institutional forces where modes of pedagogy can be incompatible with sonic arts practice. In particular, the language and mode of teaching the aesthetics and practice of sound is contemporary and often amorphous, while the Western music tradition and its language has largely been formalised for at least over a century.”

Another “large conundrum” for Nancy Mauro-Flude (Tasmanian School of Art, University of Tasmania) is that “computer art and culture (software, hardware, networked media, operating systems) cannot be learnt in the usual three-hour slot allocated in an undergrad environment.” Mauro-Flude finds that institutional environments can actually inhibit experimentation and creativity due to proprietary software being taught as is, and security protocols limiting students intimate engagement with their means of production. Her teaching approach is to encourage students “to tinker…to open up machines and touch their inner parts.”

Studio practice taught in two-hour tutorial blocks is also problematic for Lisa Gye and Darren Tofts (Swinburne University) who “don’t actually teach a media art program as such, but ground our media arts and contemporary critical remix subjects within the context of an arts and humanities program.” At CQUniversity Steven Pace finds the “demand for greater efficiencies within the system puts educators under constant pressure to adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to teaching, but that simply doesn’t cut it.”

Of course the problem isn’t just that existing structures don’t fit what can be termed new media/transmedia/digital media/computational media/programming/kinetic art/sonic arts/electronic media/robotics/bio art /interactive art/social media. Many faculties are rebuilding themselves around the unique challenges of these forms. Gavin Sade (Creative Industries Faculty, QUT) sees “ that while new media arts has struggled to find a natural home discipline within higher education, it is this very problem that points to its significance—and that is the way the practice of ‘new media arts’ has played a role in the development of a range of disciplinary-based practices and programs.”

With no wish to fashion a Media Arts empire, Brogan Bunt (University of Wollongong) agrees that disciplinary coherence is less interesting “than fostering points of disciplinary intersection and unsettling. The challenge is how to maintain this mode of being within a university environment that tends to prefer clearly delineated fields with straightforward (however illusionary) graduate employment pathways.”

Over the last year media arts in the school of art at RMIT where Martine Corompt and Ian Haig teach “has been combined into an area called Expanded Studio Practice, which covers areas like video art, animation, media art installation, emerging media and more traditional mediums such as painting and drawing. Being situated within a more traditional art school model has its challenges but also clearly establishes what we do within a fine art pedagogy and not a media communications, applied media or design course.”

Norie Neumark, in her role as Director of the new Centre for Creative Arts at La Trobe University has just led a year-long curriculum review resulting in “building exploration, openness and critical skills into the core of the curriculum and assessment, particularly in the early years. This way we build a Media Arts and Creative Arts culture where experimentation and flexibility are valued.”

Mauro-Flude had her best results when she ran a winter-school ‘hot house’ of a “daily 10-day unit” rather than a weekly slot. “We are witnessing FabLabs and Hackspaces popping up in most institutions and ice-cream vans (Android software development) as a ‘must have.’ The Tasmanian School of Art is undergoing a renovation at the moment which has these things implemented and is possibly in the process of opening up departments for students to migrate and explore forms, which are inherent to the subjects in question.”

At The University of Sydney, Kathy Cleland in the Digital Cultures Program “focuses more broadly on the critical analysis of the cultural and social uses of new media and digital technologies in the Arts and Humanities area.” The Digital Cultures Program will amalgamate with the Department of Media and Communication in 2013. Due to substantial growth in student interest over the past five years, Chris Chesher states they are currently renewing the curriculum in the Master of Digital Communication “to reflect the growth in social media, mobile media, controversies in regulation, new literature and changes in careers in the broad digital media industries.”

A new sonic arts program has arisen from a re-structure at The Elder Conservatorium of Music to accommodate a broader, more inclusive understanding of the field of music and sonic arts. For Haines, “pedagogy in the sonic arts is vibrant and evolving as free and readily available tools and knowledge encourage the exploration of new aesthetic and conceptual ideas by students.” Mauro-Flude insists, “These days you don’t have to be a hardcore developer or programmer to build a custom application with free software.” Meanwhile Sade is seeing some of his best students sign up to free online tertiary courses from top international universities (eg www.coursera.org ) to augment their studies at QUT.

Bunt reminds us that when integrating media arts it is vital to maintain multiple points of access to “all manner of activities that involve communication, information, system, gaps, deferrals, delays.” Mauro-Flude set up a Temporary Autonomous Zone [TAZ] in her garage in Hobart to transfer an experiential, hands-on collaborative learning approach outside the institutional framework. The main objective of this ongoing venture is “to implement the ideas of a ‘free society’ in a daily practice of cultural and artistic production dealing with a holistic approach to technology and to develop a network of trust when learning new skills.”

Breath, Jessica Green, South Australian School of Art, UniSA. “This projection work focuses on the simplicity of breath an act that is so implicitly important and present in life. There is rhythm to this motion. Like the ocean tide”

For Mark Kimber (South Australian School of Art, UniSA) “the adage of ‘build it and they will come’ does not necessarily apply in education “considering the trepidation of all involved and the current fiscal tightness.” UniSA has media arts workshops within first year foundation courses to introduce new students to the possibilities of a range of mediums that they had previously not considered. “In our experience most of our students come to art school with a definite medium in mind but many do change their preference upon discovering other disciplines…which has pleasingly resulted in a marked increase in enrolments in our New Media courses.”

Corompt and Haig agree, “One of the biggest issues we have faced recently is in the awareness of a media arts practice to incoming students. Many secondary students have folios in painting and drawing, less so in media arts-based work it seems. It appears secondary school students if interested in media art and emerging media are often inclined to apply to a media and communications course and not a fine art course.” Haines concurs with “the need to develop secondary school level subjects to facilitate and nurture skill sets in the sonic arts/sound media arts and to do so in a manner that is able to readily adapt to a rapidly changing field.”

Pace acknowledges, “We’ve made a lot of progress in responding to the challenge of student diversity over the past 20 years, but there is still plenty of room for improvement.” This is particularly difficult at CQUniversity when working with distance education students who have no standard communication technologies or access to resources in their homes. Lucas Ihlein (UOW) finds a strong practice of blogging by students effective. Students update and upload on the progress of their own projects on a self-managed independently set-up domain on the university server, which “accelerates their critical-reflection cycle, and also helps cultivate a strong classroom culture.”

The way academics think about and engage with their students must change. Alan Dorin (Monash University) cautions, “As academics we need to resist the temptation to mould new electronic media artists to our own approaches with respect to the technology they employ, the way they employ it and the issues they address.” Dorin respects that the majority of incoming students “have spent their entire lives gaining familiarity with digital technology and its potential. The online environment is a part-and-parcel of growing up, so too are international networks of teenagers exchanging music, images, videos, software and techniques for working creatively.”

Gye and Tofts also see a shifting academic role. “Students also need to be sufficiently motivated outside of formal class time to pursue their own practice; so we need to also be adaptive to work they are also doing in their own disciplines.” Dorin continues, “We can show students the history of their media; assist them to place their own work in this wide context; encourage students to reflect on and critique their work, and that of their peers” and promote “active engagement with issues outside of the art world.” Haines, while ideologically differing from Dorin, supports the need for “pedagogical methodologies that permit rigour with respect to the theory and can counter some of the undesirable by-products of internet culture, such as the ‘mile-wide, inch-deep’ approach.”

Russell Fewster (UniSA) considers an “ensemble approach”—courses which focus on individual skill development within a group setting—as “essential for preparing new media artists for the future industry.” UniSA’s Media Arts Program promotes cross-program projects, cross-disciplinary production and performance techniques, with students also learning experientially by participating in professional industry projects driven by staff outside the university. This learning/research strategy works both ways as staff, although putting in time outside the curriculum and normal teaching hours, achieve a measured research outcome.

For institutions and program leaders around the country the main challenge, as articulated by Ihlein is that most of today’s students “will not be practicing as ‘artists’ in the sense we currently understand that term, so it can be difficult to know how to guide them into industries that are only just emerging.”

Media Arts is the tip of a global revolution that has changed modes of learning, communication, communities and expectations. Online learning is common, and in a networked education environment, the local university may not be perceived as the pinnacle of knowledge and research it once was.

To navigate these significant hurdles requires strong vision and a persuasive manner, coupled with a ready flexibility and passion for engagement with students.

Considerable thanks go to my correspondents for their generosity and insight in the composition of this article. I wish them well as they usher Media Arts education into the near future.

“DIGITISE THE WORLD. (A NEW LIFE AWAITS YOU.)”—SO BEGINS TROY INNOCENT AND DALE NASON’S CYBERDADA MANIFESTO, WRITTEN AROUND 1990 AND REVIVED FOR A RETROSPECTIVE AT MELBOURNE’S NEW LOW GALLERY, CO-CURATED BY ACADEMIC AND CULTURAL CRITIC DARREN TOFTS.

“Live in CYBERSPACE where all feelings and physical realities can be psycho-chemically simulated. DON’T BE AFRAID: EXPOSE YOUR CIRCUITRY.” A couple of decades on, CyberDada seems both ‘old-school’ and prescient in its fierce embrace and ironic critique of the now-ubiquitous ‘digital age.’

I hear it before I see it—the collective din of analogue synth sounds, a TR808 drum machine and several TV monitors pumping out copious white noise. Entering the basement space of New Low I’m confronted by accompanying visual noise—fast-cut videos projected onto walls, ‘sculptures’ made of techno-junk and a floor thick with label-less soup cans and scattered paper. CyberDada manifestos printed onto Lotto slips. Stencil cutouts, photocopied collages, and “FUCK” printed in pixellated type on old phone-book pages. A monitor lies on its side, camera taped to the front so that I see myself looking back at me.

Luckily there’s one explanatory panel amid the chaos: between 1989 and 1994, Innocent and Nason, then Swinburne Uni design students, took on the nascent digital media and cyber cultures in the heroic spirit of early-20th century forebears the Futurists and Dadaists. The result was their internationally-disseminated manifesto and a cache of events, films, performances and tactical actions that—along with the work of artists such as post-humanist Stelarc and cyber-feminists VNS Matrix–defined Australia’s emerging cyber-art scene.

This show is heavily ‘immersive’ without either video goggles or an Inter-Arts grant anywhere in sight. Its brash physicality and analogue aesthetic is completely overwhelming: works like the original CyberDada Manifesto video (1990) both jar and mesmerise with grainy graphics and endless rapid edits—half-pixel-based, half-hand-drawn images of what seem to be biological forms one second, circuit boards, newsreel fragments or broken test grids the next. Burgeoning patterns are abstracted by prototypical video effects, morphing into kaleidoscopic mandalas. An artificial iris becomes the only eye, an aperture through which a fractured, digitised reality is all that can be seen. Colour, endless editing and no time for interpretation, only visitation—a soup of images.

According to Troy Innocent, the historical moment of CyberDada’s birth held several contradictions. On the one hand, computers were seen purely as ‘tools’ in the design world; and on the other, incredible claims were being made elsewhere about the potential of new technologies to change the world. The concept of virtual reality was generating considerable hype; techno music inspired investigations into beat-induced trance states. But the creative capacities of computers remained relatively unexplored, mostly dormant since the ‘cybernetic art’ experiments of previous decades.

CyberDada, in part, took the piss—though, says Innocent, some people missed its satirical flavour. He recalls responses along the lines of, “YES, this IS the revolution, let’s replace the meat of our bodies and digitise everything!” Innocent and Nason made videos, playing with whatever effects and equipment they could get their hands on, commandeered dot matrix printers, devised performances and built installations out of already-obsolete techno-junk—creating a noisy, multi-form aesthetic that Innocent says was also influenced by the dystopian sci-fi aesthetics of Blade Runner and cyberpunk.

At the New Low show, embedded in and around the flashing images, fuzzed-out monitors and bits of motherboard is the other crucial element: language. The words of the CyberDada Manifesto are, like those of the Futurists and the Dadaists, bombastic, clever, premonitory, heroic, tongue-in-cheek, and ultimately seductive. “Hot wet nodes” meet “a perfect techno world.” “Pure brain to brain communication” is tempered by “virtual/smart drugs,” “muscles” and “mutation.”

As if the seizure-inducing videos around the walls aren’t enough, moving installation pieces cast sporadic shadows across the space, visually echoing the continuing single-beat rhythm of the TR808 and a near-toneless bass pulse. These taped-together assemblages of sundry manufactured parts, along with several of what Nason and Innocent describe as “Cybaroque totems” in the centre of the space have been newly created from materials kept in storage since the early 90s. Old projectors and laptops, polystyrene packaging, broken robot toys, multi-pin connectors, plastic tubing, circuitry, fake hair, string, wires, blinking LEDs, film canisters and pill bottles, glued and taped together, seemingly at random. “FUCK” appears here too, projected onto the ceiling.

Co-curator Darren Tofts describes Innocent and Nason as “fastidious archivists of CyberDada ephemera.” Mounting a CyberDada retrospective now is timely, he says, with the so-called ‘new aesthetic’ being touted as the intervention of the digital into the built environment. “CyberDada, as Lisa Gye has observed, were doing this more than 20 years ago,” he says.

“[Nason and Innocent] gave us the audiovisual style of the digital age before we even knew it was an age; and…much of what is described as the new aesthetic is CyberDada by another name. When posterity looks back on the digital age in a hundred years’ time, CyberDada will be remembered as its herald,” Tofts says.

The retrospective’s barrage of sound and image is unrelenting—a disorienting meditation that separates your senses from your brain. If originally CyberDada critiqued the hyped-up claims for a digitised future, its relevance is redoubled in the face of exponentially expanding consumer culture, with its endless media offensive and mounting detritus. In CyberDada excess is turned back on itself: it feels like walking into an aesthetic assault—it’s noisy, it’s ugly, it’s messy and you can’t even read a label on the wall to make sense of it. But at the same time it’s liberating—a weirdly entrancing brand of ‘fun.’ Where VNS Matrix devised a more streamlined, ideological ‘cyberart’ to ‘infiltrate the system,’ CyberDada aims instead for randomness; its very ‘unresolvedness’ ironically garnering its integrity. In this sense it seems less a precursor of the ‘new aesthetic’ than of contemporary live art—as a space where creative intervention is the generator of excitement and energy, a strategic rather than organised aesthetic.

CyberDada Retrospective, Troy Innocent, Dale Nason, New Low Gallery, Carlton, Melbourne, June 5-8

THE 59TH SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL SAW THE FORMER HEAD OF PROGRAMMING AT THE DURBAN FILM FESTIVAL, NASHEN MOODLEY, INDUCTED AS FESTIVAL DIRECTOR. THOUGH MARRED BY SOME STRANGE INCLUSIONS IN THE OFFICIAL COMPETITION (SUCH AS WALTER SALLES’ MEDIOCRE ADAPTATION OF ON THE ROAD), MOODLEY’S FIRST FESTIVAL PROVIDED A PLATFORM FOR SOME SUPERB CINEMA, INCLUDING SOME VERY STRONG AUSTRALIAN FEATURES.

not suitable for children

“Infinite Stories” was the tagline chosen by this year’s festival marketing department, however opening night saw the reiteration of one much closer to home, with Peter Templeman’s debut feature Not Suitable For Children. With his 20s passing in a blur of parties and casual sex, Jonah (Ryan Kwanten) is sublimely unprepared to discover that he not only has testicular cancer, but also only a month of fertility remaining. Antics ensue as Jonah, suddenly desperate to father a child, attempts to cajole, beg or bribe any and all women in the vicinity to help him out.

Filmed amid the terraces and cafes of Sydney’s inner west, the film is a smoothly shot, mildly off-beat and unrelentingly facile romantic comedy, crafted with commercial considerations apparently overriding all others. While there’s nothing wrong with this per se—dependent both on one’s sense of humour and relative enjoyment at the sight of Kwanten’s sweaty torso—the film’s inclusion on opening night at the country’s most eminent film festival is questionable. The urge to broaden the festival’s appeal by supporting that rarest of species, an Australian film that celebrates urban life, is understandable, as is the reaction against the wilfully obscure Sleeping Beauty, which filled the slot last year. To give such a prestigious platform to a film that so determinedly mistakes the myopic for the local and the formulaic for accessibility seems to simply highlight how few quality Australian film comedies there have been in recent years, particularly considering the strength of the comedy scene in general.

lore

Cate Shortland’s second feature since 2004’s Somersault, and the first Australian entry in the official competition, was a quietly absorbing drama, Lore. Adapted from Rachel Seiffert’s novel The Dark Room, it delves into the barely contained anarchy of Germany immediately post-WWII through the eyes of 16-year-old Lore (Saskia Rosendahl), abandoned by her SS Officer father and neurotic mother and left to guide her four younger siblings halfway across the country to their grandmother’s house. The situation is dire, Lore trading her mother’s earrings for breast milk to feed her baby brother and ratting the corpses of the occasional suicide victim while navigating her way through a population either contemptuous and apathetic towards her situation or disturbingly gripped by denial at Hitler’s defeat. Haunted by the photographs of concentration camp victims posted throughout the countryside by the Allies, Lore is forced to face her own unthinking complicity in the Nazi project in the person of a young Jewish escapee, Thomas (Kai-Peter Malina).

Shortland’s characteristic handheld style is extremely effective here, conjuring an almost documentary sense of historical reality. Symbolically laden imagery proliferates, lingering close-ups of a face, arm, nose, mouth, seem to suggest cultural displacement and fragmentation; shots of black, dripping water or eels writhing at the bottom of a bucket suggest darker motifs. Rosendahl is excellent, quietly sympathetic as the young protagonist, making her occasional anti-semitic outbursts the more confronting. A measured study of the consequences of fascist ideology on the psychology of children, Shortland’s film seems to suggest that political and social change is only made possible through the transformation and expansion of individual consciousness.

dr sarmast’s music school

Nowhere was this more apparent than in Polly Watkin and Beth Frey’s excellent entry for the Australian Documentary Prize (won by Paul Gallasch’s Killing Anna). After the invasion of Afghanistan, Melbourne-based musicologist Dr Ahmad Sarmast decided to return to Kabul with the plan of opening the country’s first national institute of music (ANIM) and the dream of growing an Afghani national orchestra from scratch. Tracing the development of the school over a period of four years, Watkin’s documentary vividly captures the apparently insurmountable problems—bombed-out and decaying infrastructure, incompetent building contractors, international indifference, lack of instruments, widespread sexism (including amongst the teaching staff), residual religious discrimination against the “loose practice” of music as well as the constant threat of violence—arrayed against the cheerfully unflappable Sarmast, who remains driven by the unshakeable belief that “music is nutrition for the soul.”

The documentary’s brilliance lies in its depiction of how this belief unfolds amongst the orphans and street kids whom Sarmast makes a point of teaching. Children such as Waheed—whose days are spent selling plastic bags on the street being relieved by evenings at his brother’s miniature Casio—is transformed by the end of the film into a quietly assured young pianist. Or there’s Sonam—prevailing attitudes towards girls and music not preventing her from gradually blossoming into a smiling young violinist. Though at times confusing to follow (perhaps reflecting real conditions in post-war Kabul), Dr. Sarmast’s Music School aptly illustrates the potential of music as a vehicle of self-expression—also demonstrated in the ongoing project of Skateistan—and the utility of that old adage, make music not war.

dead europe

The second Australian film in the official competition also provided a response to the effects of war and genocide on succeeding generations. Adapted from Christos Tsiolkas’ novel by Louise Fox, Tony Krawitz’ version of Dead Europe is a darkly compelling meditation on anti-semitism, inter-generational responsibility and the economic and social state of modern Europe. Keen to escape the casual intolerance of his family after his father’s death (“It’s only Jews and Muslims that go to hell,” his mother tells a young relative), Melbourne photographer Isaac (Ewan Leslie) travels to his parent’s homeland of Greece to scatter his father’s ashes. Disturbed by stories about his father’s activities during WWII and haunted by visions of Joseph (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a young refugee he encounters in Athens, his journey takes him to the slums of Paris before finally leading him to Budapest and his estranged brother Nico.

Shot on location with a skeleton crew, Krawitz’ decisions to liaise with refugee groups for featured extras, as well as incorporate footage of recent demonstrations against government austerity measures, provides a bedrock of reality on which the genuinely unsettling supernatural elements of the story unfold. Although Fox’s script truncates Tsiolkas’ novel at the halfway mark, it nonetheless follows the disturbing logic of the story through to its conclusion. Europe is depicted as a spiritual venus flytrap, linking the historical injustice of the Holocaust, resurgent anti-semitism sapping various characters’ moral authority, a supernatural curse that demands blood for blood, and the similarly vampiric economic forces that are suggested as lying at the heart of the modern EU. Though the film could benefit from further polishing, particularly in its third act (the screened cut was only completed 10 days prior to its premiere at the festival), Dead Europe is nonetheless a gripping and original take on the horror genre.

2012 Sydney Film Festival: Not Suitable For Children, director Peter Templeman, screenwriter Michael Lucas, producer Jodi Matterson, Icon Film Distribution; Lore, director Cate Shortland, screenwriters Robin Mukherjee, Cate Shortland, Rachel Seiffert; distributor Transmission Films; Dr. Sarmast’s Music School, director Polly Watkins, producer Beth Frey, Circe Films; (screened on Artscapes, ABC1, July 10 & 17); Dead Europe, director Tony Krawitz, screenwriter Louise Fox, producers Iain Canning, Liz Watts, Emile Sherman, distributor Transmission Films; Sydney Film Festival, June 6-17

FOR HER NEXT TWO WORKS—CONVERSATION PIECE, COMMISSIONED BY BELVOIR, AND WEATHER IN THE 2012 MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL PROGRAM—CHOREOGRAPHER LUCY GUERIN HAS CHOSEN SUBJECTS THAT SHARE CERTAIN DYNAMIC SIMILARITIES.

Chaos Theory informs us that a small variation in weather conditions can have enormous consequences elsewhere. In everyday conversation, a significant variable—a modest change in tone of voice, volume or topic—can result in a stormy exchange. Guerin’s new works are also connected by our common inclination to talk about the weather.

However, there will be no talk in Weather, and Conversation Piece appears to be about talk that goes awry. I recently spoke with Guerin and asked her about the origins and evolution of Conversation Piece and Weather.

conversation piece

I was invited to do a development period with Belvoir on a work that involved dancers and actors. I was really interested in how I could work with these two different disciplines, to make something that really needed both of those elements. And I walked into the rehearsal room with no ideas—deliberately—I wanted the material to emerge in the process of working with these people. What came out was the idea that three people would just be having a conversation—like a foyer conversation—and that the whole show could emerge from that. Somehow that sort of triviality is an end point but a beginning too, to everything that we engage in—these fairly inane interactions. I don’t mean that in a negative way.

I don’t see it as improvisation. There’s nothing to improvise on. It really is whatever pops into the performers’ heads. I suppose it requires a certain amount of practice to be able to let yourself articulate this kind of idle chitchat in front of an audience. It’s actually the dancers who have the conversation at the top of the show. I made that decision just because they’re less experienced in a way. They talk over the top of each other. Sometimes you can’t hear everything they say—you mostly can—but there’s a naturalness about that, which I’m sure the actors could do as well but they have a more innate sense of how to speak and how to make themselves understood.

That’s right. The actors’ skill comes in interpreting and extrapolating on this initial conversation which is recorded on iPhones by the dancers as it’s happening. The actors aren’t present then. The first thing they do is a sort of part verbatim rendition of what’s just happened. You can see they don’t have any of the natural gestures of the original and they’re sort of straining to hear, to pick up the words and speak at the same time. It’s kind of wooden and it’s quite interesting to see it repeated almost like a text.

Then it starts to break down. Each performer has their counterpart—so the actor Matthew Whittet is repeating dancer Alastair McIndoe’s part of the conversation while Alastair is trying to talk to him. It becomes quite dislocated. Then it moves into how you might feel about losing track of a conversation and your mind going into other places—the way you can have a dual consciousness.

The dancing is mostly quite choreographed. It seems that those sorts of flights of fancy or the shift to another thought process are really well interpreted by the dance section.

Sometimes, but at others it just happens. It can erupt out of a conversation and obliterate it. I know it’s a bit of a cliché but the dancing represents those aspects of us that are really not about language and words and logic and being able to string sensible sentences together.

For quite a long time I’ve been quite interested in this idea of what it is that dance actually says to us. It’s obviously something but I don’t think I’ve ever been able to say what exactly that is. Nor have I heard anyone articulate that in a way that’s been really satisfying. It’s something I like to keep exploring. But at the same time, I think we can articulate our relationship to dance.

Then you’ve added the iPhone element, which is interesting in an age when people are umbilically attached to these things.

It’s been a fascinating thing to work with. People behave completely differently from the way they did a decade ago. These phones are our connectivity nowadays, a huge part of the way we communicate. We’re also using quite a few iPhone apps in Conversation Piece. Some of the music is being generated by iPhone apps and the phones are plugged into the sound system. Everything in life exists within this little rectangle of plastic. It’s an amazing thing but it’s also disturbing even seeing people on stage trying to get their conversation set up; it’s very clear how isolating that is. Not that I’m against iPhones at all.

weather

I’m a bit of a warm weather person, which has always been difficult living in Melbourne. I love Melbourne but there is that weather aspect that you might wish was different.

No, I don’t suffer what’s called Seasonal Affective Disorder—no more than anybody else on a grey day. I spent a couple of years growing up on a farm when I was a young child and there was this strong connection to climate and especially rainfall. It was in a dry part of South Australia so there was this idea of really being affected by natural, uncontrollable forces in terms of when the rain fell, whether it ruined the crops or whatever. If there hadn’t been any rain, your bath would only be a couple of inches deep. The weather had a real impact on our lives. But I think even living in cities it’s amazing how dependent and attached and in tune we are with the weather. It’s probably the main thing about the natural world that we really are connected to.

It’s pretty simple. I just thought it would be a really great topic to explore choreographically. Probably the thing that’s been interesting for me this year with two quite large works on the go is that I’ve been able to split my interests a bit. I am quite interested in text—more of a choreography of words I guess. It doesn’t really come from a theatre-making place; it definitely comes from my background as a choreographer. It includes words, emotions and almost creating characters—so that the choreographic pool of language becomes much larger in Conversation Piece. But I also have a real love for pure choreography and dance. So in Weather I have a subject that allows me to really explore movement, direction, force and emotion—to a certain degree. Plus it’s just becoming so important now. Our awareness of the weather has really changed, the way we think about it. It’s not just this thing from out there that we can’t control; we are actually beginning to change the weather system. And the conversation about the weather is changing.

I read that you don’t see Weather as episodic, but as evolving, perhaps like the initial chat in Conversation Piece. Why is that important to you?

It’s also been something I’ve questioned in my work, or in choreographic work in general. You often go into the studio and you make sections, you make one part and then another part and then you put them together. It’s unavoidable to a degree—you can’t work on everything at once. I’ve attempted to make the shifts between things less abrupt and with more of a bleed into each other, similar to the way that weather changes—although weather does sometimes change quite suddenly. One of the things that’s really become quite prominent in the work is a more abstract idea of weather as represented in maps and diagrams where you see the isobars shifting or the highs and lows and weather fronts moving. I’ve gone into more representational movement than I normally might. I’m more often attracted to quite abstract movement, but there’s something about the simplicity of moving like the wind or like water. It’s almost a child-like relationship to dance and movement.

The sound is not what you’d expect. I’m working with the composer Oren Ambarchi. It starts with a pulse, which you might not associate with the weather which is so fluid and changeable. But it almost sounds like a motor that starts up and then the pulse pretty much goes all the way through the work. There’s a section in the middle where it drops out and moves into speakers called Leslie Cabinets in which fans shift the sound, like a Doppler Effect, and then it returns to its rhythm. It creates a sense of time or of the world turning, building in a way that you have an expectation that something is about to happen, and it gets greater and greater.

What do you anticipate the audience might feel about the weather you create?

I don’t know what they’ll feel but I would like them to have more of a visceral response to the work. It’s visually intricate and the choreography is very involved. I would hope they’d become absorbed and drawn into it in a kind of unquestioning way.

Lucy Guerin Inc is celebrating its 10th birthday this year. The company was started up by Lucy Guerin and Angharad Wynne-Jones in a small office above the Malthouse carpark. The company has gone from strength to strength under the partnership of Guerin and executive producer Michaela Coventry, who joined the company in 2006. Coming performances include Untrained at BAM in Brooklyn, November 27-December 1 and at the Mondavi Center in Davis, California. Yorgos Loukos, Artistic Director of the Lyon Opera Ballet, has commissioned Guerin to create a work as part a triple bill, to be premiered in May 2013, with William Forysthe and one of Australia’s most promising young choreographers, Lee Serle. Emma Gladstone from Sadler’s Wells has commissioned a co-production with Lucy Guerin Inc which brings together English theatre director Carrie Cracknell, currently based at the Young Vic, and Lucy Guerin. There have been two creative developments of the work which will premiere in early 2014.

Belvoir: Lucy Guerin, Conversation Piece, Aug 25-Sept 16, www.belvoir.com.au; Melbourne International Arts Festival: Lucy Guerin Inc, Weather, Melbourne, www.melbournefestival.com.au

intermission

Compared with Thousands and Cannibal, the other parts of his Trilogy, Matthew Day’s Intermission unfolds as if from the dark night of a dancer’s soul, one whose body is trapped in the waves of stress from an ever mounting Sisyphean labour. If you hadn’t seen the first two works with their droll ruptures in otherwise exacting flows of magical transformations, you might well have wondered what you’d walked into.

Intermission is black—gloves, clothing, floor, enveloping curtains and mood. The sound score is an oscillating, increasingly multi-layered and intensifying hum. Day’s initial moves seem, as ever, to emerge from a tense stasis. A shoulder moves back. A heel lifts. What appears to be a kind of walking on the spot takes shape with a slight sway; but Day is actually on the move, circling in a wide arc to the curtains behind, almost merging with the blackness on our right. Turning back to us, he executes an extremely slow right leg lunge, right arm leading. He gradually extends his arms and raises his hands in an ambiguous, weighty supplication to be repeated over and over. The overarching pattern, more elaborate in detail than I have words for, moves to our left, the sound slipping away and then resurgent with attendant bright light until Day, with that abstractly imploring gesture, stops.

Intermission feels personal and purgatorial, although Day’s interests as expressed in interviews and his program notes indicate no such inclination towards self-exploration. Even so, the work is a dark pleasure, its grim beauty born of its curious suggestiveness and a relentless wave structure. When I interviewed Day for RealTime he explained, “while I was performing (Cannibal) 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” (RT109).

Ideally, intermission needs to be seen in close proximity with Thousands and Cannibal in order to fully absorb the binding power of stillness, vibration and wave movement that make Matthew Day’s Trilogy a very strange and fascinating creation.

be your self

Garry Stewart’s Be Your Self for ADT is, for all its raw humour and reverie, an essentially dark or perhaps simply realistic account of the disconnect between ourselves and our bodies and the likely inevitably of our species simply slipping back into the great ecological soup. Physical movement in this work is initially described in a slather of neurobiological terminology up against the exquisitely slow moving body whose functions it is describing. Such control is short-lived. We witness an onslaught of involuntary behaviour consume the dancers who twitch, gurgle and dry retch, tussle and battle in perfect sync with a dynamic sound score that accentuates the sheer viscerality of performance. Bodies impose on other bodies; a dummy is the recipient of various projections until it threatens to strangle its manipulator; moments of hard-won intimacy evaporate; and, unusually for contemporary dance, changes of mood are facially, if fleetingly, expressed. A brutally convulsive, enacted heart attack brings home the life and death core of Be Your Self. To realise this involuntarism requires inventive choreography and skilled dancers who are equally able to perform passages of play, display and posturing—elements of our voluntary selves perhaps, or genetically driven?

Be Your Self then glides into another world altogether as a ramped stage slides forward, onto which are projected images that suggest nature with abstracted curling tendrils while dancers limbs slip up from beneath like new growth. Clusters of arms and legs form crab shapes—new creatures. Bodies mutate—the distance between a head and legs eerily elongates. Finally, a lone figure slides head first down into nature; human mutability is at an end. Atypically for Stewart, this part of the work is contemplative. Save for a moment when a heart pulses aggressively, the end comes gently and existentially. While not altogether convinced by some of the spoken text and the limited integration of the actor who delivers it, and uncertain about the duration of the latter section, I thought Be Your Self richly rewarding, at once funny and serious, visceral and intelligent—a major work.

This rare appearance by ADT in Sydney was welcomed with critical acclaim. Apparently, we’ll see G in 2013, but when will we get to enjoy the company’s latest, much praised work, Proximity, which tours Europe in the same year? Too much waiting.

PACT: Intermission, concept, choreography, performance Matthew Day, dramaturgy Martin del Amo, sound design James Brown, lighting Travis Hodgson, PACT Theatre, Sydney, June 19-30; ADT: Be Your Self, choreography Garry Stewart & the ADT dancers, assistant choreographer Larissa McGowan, design Diller, Scorfidio + Renfro, sound design Brendan Woithe, lighting Damien Cooper, video design Brenton Kempster, costumes Gaelle Mellis, dramaturg Julie Holledge; Sydney Theatre, May 31-June 3

FICTION OFTEN COMES WITH A POTENCY THAT MAKES IT MORE PERSUASIVE THAN NON-FICTION. THE ABSENCE OF BLACK AND WHITE FACTS ALLOWS US TO LEAP INTO GREY AREAS WHERE WE CAN WRESTLE WITH ETHICS AND MORALITY.

Tidefolk Fictions is an ambitious project by emerging choreographer James Welsby, a recipient of the City of Melbourne Young Artist’s Grant. Against the backdrop of the ‘fish bowl’ room at Melbourne Aquarium, the performance was a family-friendly foray that engaged the viewer gently and, occasionally, humorously.

Tidefolk Fictions acknowledges that the life aquatic ignites the imagination because so little is actually known about it. It urges us to enter a fictional realm where we can start to view the sea as more than just vast and blue. It is a timely performance. There are growing concerns about the acidification of our oceans, the effect of climate change on sea levels and of the coal industry’s effect on the Great Barrier Reef. While lacking a cohesive, single narrative, the performance consisted of eight short segments bound together by a singular theme: the sea and the fears (ecological or monstrous) and fantasies that come with it.

Story-telling and fish tales go together. Welsby’s starting point was the novel Gould’s Book of Fish by Australian writer and environmentalist Richard Flanagan. In his fictionalised account, Tasmanian convict William Buelow Gould, also an artist, obsessively paints fish before ultimately transforming into one. Vocal recordings played during the performance offered snippets of fiction—a woman with a growing predilection for bathing morphs into a scaled and gilled creature.

Opening with a melodramatic score that evokes Forty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Welsby unveils a Gould-like canvas with a finned monster after enacting a sit-in portrait session. Aiken, the subject of the painting, displays open-mouthed horror. Fair and statuesque, she couldn’t be further from the image but we enter the realm of make-believe through the picture. The dancers are now fish caught in a net; they flap about on the ground, screeching for oxygen with loud, infrequent gasps.

The unison of the four young dancers was noteworthy. In the blue-tinged environs of the Aquarium, in their matching costumes, they had the silent comradeship of synchronised swimmers. The crowd seemed to relish the demanding acrobatic aspects with one performer swung by her hands and feet for quite some time. Welsby’s choreography delves into the perpetual state of motion of the sea. The ebb and flow of tides was explored, the movement becoming unbroken and circular around the dance floor. The four performers were able to enact the intuitive dance that a school of fish engages in as it binds then separates when in danger. The dancers run in unison then change direction and cut through each other. Patterns gave way quite beautifully to improvisation.

Moving on into playfully camp territory, the performers called out the names of various fish species to be enacted (the chapters of Flanagan’s book are named after species). From the standard fish and chip shop species, Welsby shouts ‘disco-shoes-with-goldfish-in-them-fish!’ There is a particular strangeness to the marriage of dance and fish. I am thinking of The Chemical Brothers’ “Salmon Dance” or even the animated A Shark’s Tale (where Christina Aguilera and Missy Elliot do a cover of the 1976 hit song “Car Wash”).

Holding a performance in a busy space was never going to be an easy feat. The aquarium remained open to a curious public who tended to shuffle into the ‘fish bowl’ and move on in confusion. Performers Sarah Aiken, Chafia Brooks, Jessica Wong and James Welsby managed to remain focused amid the distractions, holding the floor for 40 minutes for the three-dozen or so committed viewers. Competing for attention with the silently graceful Mako and Grey Nurse sharks, the dancing was at its best when quietest, echoing the streamlined, harmonious movements of the fish. In exploring anthropomorphism, the dancers seemed to commiserate with the wild creatures trapped in glass around them. The location, which seemed to detract from the performance, was, in hindsight, one of its most important elements.

As a child I thought that the Sydney Aquarium was a glass tube jutting out into the harbour. The fish on display were in their natural surrounds while human spectators were the fish out of water, so to speak, in that fragile bubble. Watching Tidefolk Fictions made me recall this childish confusion; here are dancers who blur the line between human and fish, and between art and attraction in the Aquarium.

Tidefolk Fictions, producer, director James Welsby, choreography James Welsby in collaboration with performers Sarah Aiken, Chafia Brooks, James Welsby, Jessica Wong, sound design Josh Hogan, costumes Doyle Barrow, lighting Gavin Ruben—The Rubix Cube, Melbourne Aquarium, May 9-12

IT’S NOT THAT IT HASN’T BEEN DONE BEFORE. FEMINISTS HAVE CRITICISED THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF FEMININITY SINCE THE LATE 1960s. BUT EACH GENERATION DOES IT IN ITS OWN WAY. IN ANY CASE, THINGS HAVE HAPPENED SINCE THEN.

Atlanta Eke was born decades after the advent of second wave feminism. She doesn’t need to make space to be heard. She can invent. This Monster Body is an attempt to create something and in so doing to destroy something else, to rattle the bars of the cage so as to break with convention.

Eke begins as a performing Guerilla Girl, naked but for a Buffy-style demon mask. She is on a pedestal, twirling a hula hoop over and over again. We file in, listening to the swish of air, a grinding reality that refuses to seduce despite the obvious virtues of Eke’s body.

This Monster Body sits somewhere between the real and the imaginary. It spits in the face of culture as it is, inevitably, swallowed by it. After all, how can a beautiful, young woman contest the beauty myth that permeates our perceptions of the female body? Through her own agency for a start. 1960s feminists were concerned to reject the objectification of the female body by the viewer (aka ‘the male gaze’). Eke bypasses the question through exerting her own thought in action leaving it up to us, the audience, to negotiate. She tries to help by transforming her own body.

Eke wants to become monstrous but this is not so easy. Somehow she has to fiddle with our imaginations, to twist the actual into something else in a field which is not under her control. For example, having chugged a vat of vitamised something, she stands in the middle of the room and urinates, then rolls in the vast puddle. The shock (and joy) of the transgression mutates into the glistening beauty of female curves. She stuffs her tight body suit with balls, suggesting a deformation of body shape. The resultant body image flips between malformation and insistent beauty. Similarly, towards the end of her piece, she paints her face out with pink makeup. For an instant she is disfigured, but as the painting covers her entire face, she re-emerges as a complete (and attractive) image.

This Monster Body is a series of assays, experiments that gesture towards the otherwise, while falling back into reality. Eke has an army of masked Guerrilla Girls who dance naked. It is nice to experience the strident energy of these women, to watch a man wander the stage with mop and bucket. Maybe things have changed.

One Show Only is a different kettle of fish, though it also has an air of collaboration, between Byron Perry, the choreographer, and Singapore’s Frontier Danceland. This is a dance between the one and the many. Perry draws upon the many to create something singular, for example, a cosmos composed of hands. A sign of human dexterity, the hands work at a very fine level, towards pattern formation. Little torches create a starry firmament. Atmospheres mutate into a series of moments.

While we are wrapped in a blanket of darkness, there is a sense of distance between the audience and the action that I want to disappear. Would the power of One Show Only be amplified if we could be installed inside this pattern? I think this would have worked for the first part of the piece, which is essentially nonhuman. There is a shift in gears however towards phrase material, into the rhythmicity of ‘contemporary dance’ which has a human face. The pleasure of expressing technical facility shows in the bodies of these very focused dancers, morphing into a series of smiling faces. I’m not sure why they were smiling. The shift between the nonhuman atmosphere of the first half and the recognisably human tenor of the dancing in the second was a bit of a jump for me. Once I see dancers doing their thing, I start to watch what they are doing, and they were doing pretty well. One Show Only was composed of parts, initially forming a whole, less so as time went on. If the intention was for these serial gestures to make a whole, then the question arises as to how the parts relate, how the movement from one section to another can recombine in some way to enhance the power of the work as it shifts through time.

This Monster Body, choreographer, performer Atlanta Eke, performers Amanda Betlehem, Tim Birni, Tessa Broadby, Ashlea English, Sarah Ling, lighting Marita Petherbridge; Dancehouse, Next Wave Festival, May 21-27; One Show Only, choreographer Byron Perry, performers Christina Chan Jia Ai, Foo Yun Ying, Bernice Lee Yixun, Rachel Lum Ruixia, Seow Yi Qing, Keryn Ng, Zhang Xuesong, sound design Luke Smiles, lighting Benjamin Cisterne, Arts House, Melbourne, May 9-13

THE BEST DOCUMENTARIES, LIKE THE BEST FICTIONS, ALLOW US TO REASSESS THE EVERYDAY BY MAKING IT STRANGE OR, EQUALLY, TRANSPORT US INTO UNFAMILIAR WORLDS, WHETHER ACROSS AN OCEAN, INTO THE OUTBACK OR THE LIFE OF SOMEONE LIVING QUITE NEAR TO US, IN INNER SYDNEY, AS IN NAMATHRA THOMAS' THE HIDDEN GEM.

Thomas' subject is Jemma, a Kings Cross sex worker in her early 40s with a drug problem and an impending court case for allegedly abusing two young men. But the eccentric, volatile Jemma is also Steven Gray, a one-time dancer with the AIDT touring dance theatre group from NAISDA (National Aboriginal and Islander Skills Development Association) Dance College. Raw archival video footage reveals an elegant, sensual performer.

Thomas and her small crew follow Jemma at close quarters with hand-held camera, tracking a sporadic soliloquy of doubt and near despair leavened by a droll sense of humour. Establishing shots are more formally filmed, giving The Hidden Gem a strong sense of place—best of all on Jemma's transformative journey home to her Queensland family in an apparently idyllic coastal setting. Here, she sheds drugs, exotic clothing, wig and makeup to reveal a soft featured, gently spoken Steven in awkward conversation with his slightly disapproving mother. However, soon mum is laughing and dancing with her much-loved son. Such spontaneity comes as a great relief.

But for all that home offers, Steven is restless for city life. Given the affection his family has for him and the natural comforts of home, we struggle to comprehend the attraction. The dynamic tensions between the seemingly discrete personalities embodied in this transgendered person, between a loveless city and a caring family and between formal and informal filming (finely edited), propel this bracing film. For all the film reveals about its subject, ultimately his-her motivation remains unclear. What more can we expect but to be grateful to Jemma-Steven for allowing a life to be scrutinised. This is intelligent, sensitive filmmaking.

The Hidden Gem has been programmed for the 2012 Antenna International Documentary Film Festival in Sydney (Oct 1-14). In the school's festival awards for documentary, Hidden Gem won Best Direction, Editing, Cinematography and Sound Design as well as a Courage Curiosity Compassion Award and an Audience Award.

Another engaging documentary, True Cult (director Sara Pinto) takes us into the world of Sydney's Jaimie and Aspasia Leonarder and their homely Mu-Meson film archive and screening room (see “Archivists on the edge” in RT79). The Vimeo trailer offers a glimpse of True Cult's intimate, immersive filming, dextrous editing and the amusing selection of images from vintage lo-fi films. It's good to have a film tribute to the amiable, knowledgeable and quietly passionate Leonarders. In another documentary award section in the festival, True Cult won Best Direction, Editing and Cinematography.

In a large field of films I was also taken by Brendan Sweeney's unnerving short, 91-104, constructed from a brisk montage of brief close-ups of humble 1940s and 50s technical equipment and power facilities. The focus on innocent looking buttons, wiring and gauges gradually evokes a sinister scenario—of the Dr Strangelove variety—as the music and editing pulse insistently and the incursion of a bloodied hand suggests someone will push the button that will unleash nuclear war. 91-104 won the award for Best Sound Design in Drama.

Although inventiveness was variable and booming scores too often overwhelmed quieter visual material, production values were consistently high in all of the films screened.

Sydney Film School is a private film school with students from 42 countries attending the school since 2004. Every year some 120 documentaries, dramas and individual thesis films are produced. To date 87 films have screened in 127 film festivals locally and abroad, winning 38 first prizes.

The Hidden Gem, director Namratha Thomas, director of photography Jean Tertrain, editor Miguel Muzaly, composer Ross Symington, producers Bingyin Guo, Amanda King; True Cult, director Sara Pinto, DOP Alexandre Guterres, editors Carolina Izquierdo Duarte, Alexandre Guterres, Sara Pinto; 91-104, director Brendan Sweeney, DOP Timothy Endmeades, production design Catherine Rynne, composer Luke Warren; 16th Sydney Film School Festival, Awards Night, Chauvel Cinema, Sydney, July 12; www.sydneyfilmschool.com