In his seminal text, The Fashion System (1967), Roland Barthes breaks fashion into two forms—image-clothing and written clothing. In the 21st century might we not extend this to clothing performed, musical and virtual?
For Profiler 5 we’ve asked some impeccably attired artists how they view fashion; how fashion influences their work; and their thoughts on the slippage of fashion into art and art into fashion. Gail Priest, Online Producer
When overseas, one of the main activities I do is shopping. And by that I mean I like to walk through high-end malls and flagship stores. I get a lot of inspiration from them. It doesn’t mean I buy anything, although on occasions of course I will. One of the attractions is the holistic world of branding. A concentrated world. A considered, complete world. I enjoy the finishing of a shop fit out: the colouring, carpets, discrete lighting, packaging, scents, music, security guards, hangers, glass and brass cabinets. Mirrors and reflections.
My recent photograph, Dreams End With You, displays a man perhaps looking up to the stars from within a Chanel store I made from plywood, laser cut MDF and spray painted carpet from Bunnings. The work originated from my own life very specifically. I was in Hong Kong, it was dusk and I was in a Chanel store that overlooked the city. With all that brand behind me, air-conditioned air around me and thick carpet beneath, I stood looking out into the night sky. I was daydreaming. The words ‘Dreams End With You’ went through my mind and I made a note of them on my phone.
Chanel Spring Runway Show set, 2009
Soon after I saw the Chanel Spring Runway Show from 2009; the set was a re-construction of Coco Chanel’s apartment in Paris, which in turn has become the template for all new Chanel stores. I remade that moment of me standing in the window, however this time I modelled the store on the reconstructed runway show. It is a copy of a copy. A dream from a dream. http://sullivanstrumpf.com/artists/sylvester-darren/
Love refractually
Urszula Dawkins: Project 12: This Is Not A Love Song
RealTime issue #108 April-May 2012 pg. 44
Elizabeth Ryan, I Was Made for Loving You, dress by Romance was Born
photo Heidrun Löhr
Elizabeth Ryan, I Was Made for Loving You, dress by Romance was Born
Elizabeth Ryan, dancer
The big question (for some of us) of what to wear in a piece is a consideration that comes pretty early on in my creative process. I love exploring the potential a costume has to be a significant contributor. This theme is very evident in my work with The Fondue Set and has continued in the development of my solo practice.
When I was given the opportunity to collaborate with the design team Romance Was Born, as part of an interdisciplinary residency at the Campbelltown Arts Centre in 2012, I was very excited but also somewhat intimidated. Much as I love a good costume, I hadn’t necessarily connected that with fashion. My perception of fashion was that it was from a particular ‘cool’ world of design, form, desirability and status. Combining this with what I knew of the work of Romance Was Born, I anticipated I would be met by a creation that would be highly desirable, evocative and a powerful presence in a theatrical setting. What a gift! However I found myself questioning how my body, my movement and my performance could meet all that.
In the resulting performance, I Was Made for Loving You, I chose to play with removing myself from the costume by wearing a highly undesirable beige bra and undies. Putting my unfashionable and exposed self in relationship to this item of immense beauty and intrigue created a palpable tension which led to the work feeling more like a duet than a solo. I pursued the power play for dominance, attention and status in the space between my performing body and ‘the dress’ as it became known, at times performing as if wearing the dress or ‘performing the dress’ and at other times making a contrasting state of exposure and vulnerability more visible.
Oh how they danced!
Virginia Baxter: Oh I Wanna Dance With Somebody
RealTime issue #112 Dec-Jan 2012 p2-3
Nothing to lose
Keith Gallasch: The Fondue Set’s No Success Like Failure
RealTime issue #86 Aug-Sept 2008 p36
Glamorous calamities
David Williams: The Fondue Set, The Set (Up)
RealTime issue #64 Dec-Jan 2004 p35
Lian Loke, Fox, Underbelly 2007
photo Samantha Hanna
Lian Loke, Fox, Underbelly 2007
Lian Loke, performer, designer and researcher
The theatricality of fashion seduced me as a teenager and continues to provide a platform for creating characters and worlds accessed by the mere donning of a garment. I understand fashion not so much as the latest style of clothing, but as an opportunity to re-fashion or re-invent oneself. The relationship between the garment and the body fascinates me and has led to an exploration of performative clothing, beyond everyday fashion. The reshaping of silhouette, posture, comportment and sensibility through what is worn on the body can break down the conventions of dress and behaviour, opening the body up to creative exploration.
In my performance practice, costume plays an important role and I often begin with a strong vision of a costumed body. The costume becomes a prop or environment, activating the space between and creating spatial, sensory and movement vocabulary. The costume operates as a portal to other worlds. It enables an exploration of body and becoming, of the transformative potential of the imagination.
Lian Loke, Hyperfeminoid
photo Ian Tatton
Lian Loke, Hyperfeminoid
These ideas are present in my performative costumes Hyperfeminoid and Fox. Both of these works explore constructions of femininity and our ability to transgress the border between human and animal. I also draw on Shamanic, Daoist and Butoh movement and energy practices to inform the physical language for performance. These practices can help to access altered states of consciousness where the body moves in unfamiliar and usually inaccessible ways. The Fox is in a state of gradual evolution, each performance adding to its self-fashioning. The next project will start with a prosthetic approach to its feet, replacing the fetish of a high-heeled shoe with a delicate faux pas. http://www.lianloke.com/
Selected articles
Interactive feedback
Lizzie Muller on how to prototype an artwork
RealTime issue #76 Dec-Jan 2006 p24
The body as lived
Mike Leggett: Thinking Through the Body
RealTime issue #93 Oct-Nov 2009 p31
A once and future building
Jodie McNeilly witnesses The Stirring at Carriageworks
RealTime issue #82 Dec-Jan 2007 p29
Laura Jane Lowther, KUČKA
When it comes to high fashion, I’m particularly drawn to the more avant-garde designers. I love dressing up and getting to be another character for a little while so it makes sense to me that the clothing should be unusual or different somehow to what you would expect to see in everyday life. One of my favourite eccentric designers, Walter Van Beirendonck (who is best known as part of the Antwerp Six) was a major influence in the look of our first music video “Rewind.”
Van Beirendonck designs are always bold, colourful and reminiscent of childhood imagery and we thought that the arpeggiated synths and percussion tones in the track were shapely and ‘colourful’ and quite similar to his style. We worked with Perth designer Zoe Trotman to make the dress. She had previously designed the donut dress, as part of her Lonely 8 bit Heroes collection, but we decided to add the dome shaped skirt on the bottom, to create a more striking shape, which a friend laser cut out of plastic for us. The main thing that drew us to Zoe’s design was the playful way she had stitched assorted plastic objects (including candy and donuts) onto the dress. We were playing with the idea of the over sexualised anime character and the cutesy candy theme really worked.
KUCKA, Rewind (video stills)
courtesy the artist
KUCKA, Rewind (video stills)
I always collaborate with my good friend Jessica Small who is a hairdresser but also an artist and watching her work has made me really appreciate how creative styling can be. She has worked on all of the KUČKA video clips and photo shoots and is often the one who refines the stylistic vision of the shoot. Jess decided to go all out with the styling for Rewind, painting Jake’s face and making my hairstyles as big as we could get, even fixing a photo frame into my hair for one of the scenes! http://kucka.net
Ivan Cheng, performer/artist
Now, like all foreseeable time, is a ripe moment to be an advocate for feminist politics.
Connie has a pseudonym, and in conversation she expresses no desire to live abroad; after all, Kawakubo and Margiela detach from home. I’ve been abroad since May—a residency at the Watermill Center (NY) with director Tilman Hecker, a clarinet gig in London, a residency and exhibition in Saint-Chinian, France (open through 2015), and then playing clarinet in Martin del Amo’s Anatomy of an Afternoon at Southbank in London. Now I’m back at the Watermill Center for a third summer, and, as well as questioning my taste for fizzy water over flat, I am thinking about camouflage.
When in conversation about work, the issues of transference to image or text are alarming. There is always so much labour visible in documentation and reproduction; it fails to be invisible. In disguise of my work, I’m not sure what is lost. I studied the clarinet but spend time in other pursuits.
1) Ivan cheng in video still from gargoyles – deinstalled video from three gorges 2) Installation view of three gorges
courtesy the artist
1) Ivan cheng in video still from gargoyles – deinstalled video from three gorges 2) Installation view of three gorges
My work has been interested in the act of reading for a while now and a constant is how a ‘score’ is damaged upon transference into plane. As part of Little Operations, Chamber Made Opera will present a remount of a work of mine titled kelley-gander-floyer at Deakin Edge in Melbourne. A score for 100 performers in my likeness aggregating over 65,000 words of text into an hour-long space, it contains and begins to represent the music of James Brown, Austin Buckett, Lachlan Hughes and Marcus Whale, This score formed the first stage development of epoche-lacan-orbits, commissioned over three years by Carriageworks. In Melbourne, the work will be performed by a small group of children. http://ivancheng.com
In Dance Massive 2013, one of the most curious and absorbing works was Physical Fractals by emerging choreographer and dancer Natalie Abbott. As a sound artist I found the completely integrated soundscape generated from the dancers’ movement in the space particularly appealing, but I was equally taken by the very strict form of the choreography—a relentless unison of simple, abstract movements drilled and repeated to create an uncompromising exploration of pattern and form. Coupled with the often harsh but organic sound score the movement was absolutely mesmerising. It seemed self-sufficient—form equalled content equalled form—with no need for imposed thematics or metaphors.
I was not alone in finding the work intriguing. Along with a strong critical response (see RT Dance Massive coverage by Varia Karipoff and Jana Perkovic) artistic director of Paris dance presenter micadanses, Chrisophe Martin, was also impressed and via a partnership with Dancehouse, Abbott’s subsequent work, Maximum, has just been presented in the OFF section of the Avignon Festival (along with Matthew Day’s Intermission, see realtime tv Keir Choreographic Award interview).
Maximum minimalism
Maximum premiered as part of Next Wave 2014 (see review RT121) and will soon hit Sydney as part of Performance Space’s upcoming SCORE festival. It sees Abbott teaming with a body builder, Donny Henderson-Smith. The original premise for the show was that Henderson-Smith would hold Abbott off the ground for 45-minutes, however as they started working Abbott saw there was much more to explore, or as she puts it, she became more interested in “asking questions of our bodies together.”
Ironically Maximum could be viewed as quite minimal. The piece begins with an almost 20-minute running sequence, in circles and then a series of floor patterns. This is followed by excruciating looking fitness drills and then a 10-minute lift sequence, Henderson-Smith holding Abbott aloft, in an heroic posture, swivelling through a full 360 degrees. The piece concludes with the duo resuming their running sequence.
Natalie Abbott, Donny Henderson-Smith, Maxiumum
photo Gregory Lorenzutti
Natalie Abbott, Donny Henderson-Smith, Maxiumum
Tough love
Abbott is aware that this is tough to watch: “I know that I’m asking a lot of my audience. That made me really nervous because generally people want to be entertained and if you’re classing your show as dance then maybe there are some particular things you need to put in there. But for me it’s really about a physical exploration and not just about entertaining. It’s about asking an audience to come up to that same level of intensity as the performers, asking [them] to persist with us and engage in a different way than in a more obviously spectacular dance show…There were definitely mixed responses to the performances in Next Wave and for me that’s good. I get information from that to take into the next season. I don’t necessarily want to please everybody, so I like getting mixed reviews.”
Presenting the work in Avignon to a different audience in a different space, (this one much smaller) has also made Abbott realise that her works are in a state of constant evolution. “Having a second season of the show has really made me think that when I put work out to the public it’s not necessarily finished. It’s an ongoing process… there are lots of things I’d still like to explore within the work, so I think for the next season we’re going to make some changes and keep experimenting with how we can push our bodies.”
Natalie Abbott, Donny Henderson-Smith, Maximum
photo Gregory Lorenzutti
Natalie Abbott, Donny Henderson-Smith, Maximum
Together apart
As in Physical Fractals, Abbott is working with a live sound score, created once again by Daniel Arnott. She says she wants it to “reflect the idea of Greek gods or some kind of ethereal creature.” There’s a microphone picking up sounds from the space that are augmented by shouts and yelps evocative of sport and military drills. These are then layered into ominous, propulsive rumbles. For Maximum Abbott has also given Arnott more agency in terms of timing and structure. “Sometimes it can be Dan leading, sometimes it can be us, other times it’s a bit blurry. I really like the idea of this external force, this outside voice influencing what happens in the performance space.”
Also like Physical Fractals the work relies heavily on synchronous movements. I ask Abbott what it is about unison that is so appealing to her and she replies, “I guess I never saw it enough or did it enough at university…I’m not interested in two people looking exactly the same. I’m interested in seeing similarities and disparities in the two people and what that brings up for you as an audience. I could watch two people attempt unison all day. I think it’s not possible and there’s a challenge in that.”
Before Abbot presents Maximum at Performance Space in late August, she will be attending the Impulstanz dance festival in Vienna, courtesy of a DanceWeb scholarship. She’s also undertaking a Jump Mentorship with Martin del Amo (no stranger to the walk or run as choreography). By the end of the year she’s hoping to get back into the studio to make her next work. I for one, will be looking forward to whatever Natalie Abbott comes up with next.
Maximum, Natalie Abbott with Donny Henderson-Smith, 27-30 Aug, Performance Space, Sydney. Presented as part of SCORE which also includes works by Jon Rose with Ensemble Offspring and Speak Perscussion, Antony Hamilton/Chunky Move, Pia van Gelder, Narelle Benjamin, Jane McKernan & Gail Priest, Kris Verdonck (Belgium); http://performancespace.com.au/events/score/; http://www.natalieabbott.net
Lawrence English is perhaps Australia’s most prolific producer of exploratory electronic music. His untiring work across his suite of labels—Room40 for electronic music, Someone Good for edgy pop and A Guide To Saints for old-fashioned cassettes—has significantly contributed to creating a context, locally and internationally, for experimental and alternative music. His personal discography alone lists 21 major releases over the last 13-years, the majority of which have been on overseas imprints. However his most recent album, Wilderness of Mirrors, brings things back home to his own label Room40—fitting, as the new release has a particularly local and personal agenda.
Political music
The press release for Wilderness of Mirrors declares the album a political statement. The title is drawn from Gerontion, a TS Eliot poem from 1920 which is clearly inflected with the emotional aftermath of the Great War. The press release explains how the phrase “wilderness of mirrors” was subsequently used in the Cold War to reference miscommunication between international agencies. In an email interview I asked English to extrapolate a little on the motivation behind the album and its themes.
“This past couple of years I have been utterly frustrated and angered by what I see as a completely underwhelming, if not toxic, political environment. We’re a young country, we have an incredibly high standard of living and have been very successful over recent times and yet we fail so many of the crucial tests when it comes to creating a humane and progressive society…This makes me angry and some of that aggression has been funneled into this record.”
Jaques Attali told us that noise was political, but in the 21st century is electronica? I ask English if he believes sound can communicate politically. “When you look back to the protest songs of the late 60s for example, sure there was a dialogue between politics and music, the songs were addressing these grand narratives that were clearly defined and understood in a kind of holistic way. I’d argue today we are faced with the antithesis of this, countless, evolving and shifting political battles on all fronts—humanitarian, ecological, ethical and such. It’s impossible to address the grand narratives in a meaningful way anymore. The complexity is too great, issue to issue, blow to blow, we are up against this torrent of hollow ideology and, at least here, clichéd patriarchy.
“How I think this recording interacts with politics is first and foremost personal. Much of the frustrations I have felt fuelled this record and gave it the intensities it has. This was the first time in my life I’ve found myself so incensed that the only fulfilling way I could address it was through making a work like this.
“More generally, I think what sound can do is offer us imagination and opportunity to contemplate that which lies around us, specifically music that is not rooted in language. Without words, music can suggest all manner of possibilities to all manner of ears. If people read these kinds of conversations, then perhaps my angst over the state of things might resonate with them through the music, but if they hear it cold, it might simply fill them with an energy that only sustained full frequency sound can. I’m not interested in being didactic with the art I make, I appreciate everyone brings themselves to the work and that’s the beauty of it.”
Wilderness of Mirrors
Composition of erasure
This passion has paid off, Wilderness of Mirrors is arguably English’s most arresting output to date. It’s almost a signature of English’s sound that it is slippery and amorphous, but in Wilderness of Mirrors the music grabs you by the ears and the throat from the first second of the opening track, evocatively titled “The Liquid Casket.” It feels like you’ve come in on the middle of an argument and you have to remain absolutely present so as to not lose your place and be subsumed. All the tracks have a hard edge that grows, like an increasing pressure wave—a thick rumbling chord, with pulses, textures and tones emerging and submerging without losing intensity. The tracks segue into one another and while there are dynamic changes you are never left to relax. However some of the English-style elusiveness remains in the sound palette—you can never be quite sure as to what you think you are hearing. This is not uncommon in electronic music, but here it makes you restless; you really seem to need an answer. Is that a voice? Is that piano melody I can just make out? What crazed orchestra is this playing at the bottom of an ocean?
English explains the process he employed to make these ghostly sounds. “Wilderness Of Mirrors has come from a long process of elemental shift and erasure. At the heart of each of the pieces is some single-celled sound organism that has evolved through the duration of the album into the final living, breathing music you hear. Those initial elements are almost entirely gone in the finished works, but some are still buried close enough to the surface that they have a presence. Essentially what happened across quite a few of the pieces was a process of introducing an element, recording against it and removing that element, it was at times a glacial process and often those initial elements were merely points of agitation for me to work against, a kind of creative friction point that I could use to incinerate the sounds that followed.
“It may sound naïve, but I don’t think of myself as making experimental music. There’s really not that much experimenting here beyond what all musicians and composers might partake in. Sure, it’s lacking some of the aspects that make music instantly familiar, like drums in every song, but beyond that it’s not so unfamiliar. To me, Wilderness Of Mirrors shares more with the outer orbit of SWANS’ saturated walls of sonics or the final 20 minutes of every My Bloody Valentine show. These were the groups that in some way influenced the album’s colour and tone. What you hear is a bunch of instruments all gasping for air as they are systematically plunged and held in caustic bath of electronics.”
Musical politics
Of course, in order to be prolific you need longevity and the reality is that English has persisted and flourished when many other artists have fallen by the wayside. I asked him what has kept him going as both an artist and producer and how he sees the music ecosystem in Australia.
“If we examine music we have two very discrete ecologies—that of heritage music, which largely exists and persists thanks to the bilateral funding arrangements between the state and federal governments, and then there’s the rest of the music sector which must make other arrangements for its survival. Looking at many of the state orchestras and opera companies, it would appear that having all that support hasn’t necessarily brought about progressive commissioning of new Australian work or any kind of inspired repertoire, which is a shame as this results in fewer flow-on effects to the rest of the sector.
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with supporting these behemoths—groups like the SSO and ACO are utterly world class—but I do think it raises an important question around equity in the arts. Why some companies have guaranteed survival almost no matter what they program or how they perform and all others are put under stringent analysis against criteria of excellence and the like. Even from a neo-liberal perspective, it makes little sense to approach these institutions as we do. We have a live music sector worth something in the range of $2.55 billion according to Live Performance Australia and of that, classical music represents just $135 million. Contemporary music towers over this figure, but if you look at how funding is distributed it does not reflect this fact. Rather the opposite. I think there’s room for all kinds of music out there, but we should aspire to equity in the arts.”
Lawrence English, through his efforts as an artist and label manager, as well as a gig and festival curator, certainly offers an excellent example of Australian contemporary music’s vibrancy, vigour and relevancy.
I have worked in professional theatre as a performer, writer, teacher and director since 1980 and am currently Artistic Director of Darwin-based company Business Unusual (BUU). Formed in 1997, BUU has been creating original work which explores the combination of physical theatre, mask, puppetry and text. BUU past productions include The Pearler, Tracy and Contagion’s Kiss all of which used Top End stories as the inspirational springboard.
I work regularly with Horse and Bamboo Theatre, one of the UK’s leading visual companies and was co-founder of Skin and Blisters (London 1987-1991), a circus theatre company that toured major festivals in Europe and the UK. I was also a co-founding member of Amsterdam-based multi media group Too Much Art (1984-7). Other companies I’ve worked with include UK Company Trestle Theatre (1991-2002), Darwin Theatre Company, Knock-em-Downs, VCA, Tracks, The Sydney Theatre Company and Melbourne Theatre Company.
Exposé
I started writing when I had mumps at age seven—The Adventures of Mumpy Doll, not yet published but I have not given up hope (if only I could find the manuscript or to be more exact, the torn out, crumpled, medicine-stained pages of my then diary).
I love language but write shows without words. Actually I do use minimal text so it has to be distilled—a bit like whiskey and poetry. I am inspired by words: the oral histories of ordinary people talking about their lives which immediately become extraordinary in the telling and a starting point for a show.
In reviewing for Real Time I have enjoyed my foray into the world of words again. Painting the picture of the production in the quiet of my home after the event allows me time to reflect on the work and appreciate how it has affected me. I believe the reviewer has a responsibility to add to the richness of the arts by critiquing work in a way which allows the maker to carry on making—supporting and valuing the work while giving clear responses to it.
Darwin is a fertile place for making art, a hugely culturally diverse community living in extreme weather in a part of Australia that feels like a different country from the south. There has been a resurgence in local theatre in the past few years and the link with our national peers is both feeding the artists and showing what the north is made of. I shall enjoy continuing to write about the new productions while starting to research my own next word-less concept.
P.S anyone interested in The Adventures of Mumpy Doll?
Recent articles
Bastardy and identity
Nicola Fearn: Stephen Carleton, Bastard Territory
RealTime issue #121 June-July 2014 pg. 36
The past lives in us
Nicola Fearn: Forced Legacy—The Story of Alyngdabu
RealTime issue #118 Dec-Jan 2013 pg. 36
Not so strange strangers
Nicola Fearn: Polytoxic, Trade Winds
NT Writers’ Centre’s RealTime Workshop Darwin Festival online feature
A Winning punch
Nicola Fearn: Roslyn Oades, I’m Your Man
NT Writers’ Centre’s RealTime Workshop Darwin Festival online feature
Shaken out of the everyday
Nicola Fearn: Yumi Umiumare with Theatre Gumbo, DasSHOKU SHAKE!
NT Writers’ Centre’s RealTime Workshop Darwin Festival online feature
Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, The Snail Race, Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milan, 06 March 2008
Campbelltown Arts Centre’s forthcoming exhibition The List, is possibly their most ambitious project to date with 13 artists working with local community groups involving over 500 young people in total. Outcomes will take the form of video projects comprising an 80s TV musical based of Dante’s Purgatorio created by Pilar Mata Dupont in collaboration with McCarthur Diversity Services (see our realtime tv interview); a work exploring feminist theories of objectivity by Kate Blackmore working with a group of young girls at Mission Australia Claymore; and new visions of utopia created by Zanny Begg and boys from the Reiby Juvenile Justice Centre in Airds. Adding an international edge to the exhibition is UK artist Marvin Gaye Chetwynd who is working with Campbelltown Performing Arts High School students to create both a live performance and a video piece.
Let’s get the obvious question out of the way. Marvin Gaye is not her real name. She changed it in 2013. Prior to this she called herself Spartacus. In a BBC4 interview she says that the name changing is mainly a way to keep herself interested and amused. As Spartacus Chetwynd she made ripples in the visual artwork with her wild, anarchic performances and video manipulations of same and was nominated for the 2012 Turner Prize. The overall flavour of Chetwynd’s work is carnivalesque with a heavy dash of popular culture and the occasional “libertine” or “racy” (her terms) top notes. While her name may change, the aesthetic of her work appears consistent and footage of her recent solo show at Nottingham Contemporary shows a joyously chaotic exhibition combining installation, video, performance with live green screen technology, a recreation of the Star Wars holiday special complete with ink Wookiees and Chetwynd’s hand-made replica of the brain bug from Starship Troopers.
The work she is making for The List draws on a more “erudite” source, the Cretan fable of King Minos and the Minotaur. Working with high school students who are trained in acrobatics and aerial work, she will devise a performance based on the ancient ritual of bull leaping. At the time of this interview Chetwynd had just come from her first meeting with the students. She explains, “It’s quite fun for me because I’ve never really worked with people who are trained in movement before… So rather than me having to accommodate my art practice to meet the needs of community in some way—to be helpful or inspiring to a group that doesn’t necessarily have lots of access to the arts—it feels like I’m quite a spoilt bunny. I’m being welcomed to work with high school students and they’re all totally busting to go and really happy to perform.”
The performance will stand on its own and a video also exhibited. Elements of the recorded work will also be integrated into Chetwynd’s larger project, Hermitos Children 2 which will premier in London in October and includes a giant puppet bull. This relationship between live performance and documentation is integral to Chetwynd’s practice. “I prioritise the live moment. I’m spontaneous and I want to have a natural high. I work very hard to make something happen where people really enjoy themselves and I don’t really care if anyone has a document of it. But what’s happened over 15 years of higher education and being analysed and being encouraged to do things that are for more high profile platforms is that I’ve learnt to protect myself and enable something that’s intimate and totally surprising to continue to happen and to communicate on a more robust level. So what I’ve gone and done is to use techniques like Pasolini and other filmmakers. They use real live moments, something that really happened in history. Whether that’s a gig of a famous band or a funeral of a famous political leader, it’s a real documentation. So in my case it’s the performances that I’m really doing and prioritising and loving doing and then I put a layer of narrative over the top of it with some amateur actors or some continuous story line so that what I’m hopefully doing is making a product that’s enjoyable in its own right as a work—it becomes a film…I can hand copies of these films to institutions who need something to be shown 9-5 [and] at the same time I’m allowing myself to continue as someone who wants to work for the live moment.”
So if liveness is the priority why does Chetwynd operate in a visual arts rather than theatre world? She says “those are the opportunities that have been offered to me. I still do live performances in a domestic interior, or on a street, or on a walk, like the Walk to Dover project. My inclination is to do things anywhere and I still do that. But the [performances] that are given the most attention and the ones that people know about are those that happen in galleries…The thing I know clearly is that I don’t really like the proscenium arch and the set up of the platform being raised and the expectation of a professional, well rehearsed traditional play. I don’t find that pressure welcome. I much prefer political street theatre or carnival—anything on street level. And I actually enjoy the awkwardness of an area to perform where people would be walking past rather than being invited and ticketed, and that doesn’t lend itself to theatre.”
Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, The Cat Bus, A Tax Haven Run by Women, Frieze Art Fair, London 2010
Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, The Cat Bus, A Tax Haven Run by Women, Frieze Art Fair, London 2010
Chetwynd is possibly the ultimate postmodernist, seeing her high literature and popular culture references as equal. I ask her what is it about the references she chooses that she finds significant. “Usually there’s some really profound truth or interesting intellectual concept that you can tell is really within the popular cultural presentation. It really is there; I’m not making it up or putting it on it. I recognise it and the I just want to celebrate it.”
Celebratory really is the best way to describe Chetwynd’s work. Even via the mediation of YouTube this is glaringly apparent. Also apparent is Chetwynd’s beguiling mixture of earthy groundedness and naughty trickster. In her closing comments Chetwynd suggests why her work has such boldness and buoyancy. “People find it strange that I don’t seem to have any problem with crashing and burning or things going wrong. I just don’t seem to suffer in the same way other people do. Experimenting in public—I really don’t mind. I think of it as something totally worthwhile doing and totally fine, so that seems to be part of why I do this.”
Chetwynd’s work alone is reason enough to look forward to The List, but add the collaborative projects by 12 other leading artists and it’s looking likely to be an extraordinary art experience.
Campbelltown Arts Centre: The List, artists Abdul Abdullah & Abdul Rahman Abdullah, Zanny Begg, Kate Blackmore, Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Shaun Gladwell, Michaela Gleave, Uji Handoko Eko Saputro (aka Hahan), Robin Hungerford, Pilar Mata Dupont, Daniel McKewen, Tom Polo and George Tillianakis, 9 Aug-12 Oct, opening party with performances Friday 8 Aug, 6pm; http://www.campbelltown.nsw.gov.au/UpcomingExhibitions
One of the consequences of being in large part a refugee nation is that extraordinary stories of survival and terror can be found behind most ordinary Australian suburban front doors. Sophia Turkiewicz’s deeply personal and affecting new documentary Once My Mother traces one such tale—her mother’s path to Australia, via Eastern Europe and Russia during the darkest days of the Second World War. Yet, Once My Mother is not a work of mourning; rather it’s a celebration of survival and a tender portrait of a fraught mother-daughter relationship haunted by a traumatic past.
When asked what inspired her debut documentary, Turkiewicz jokes, “Well, I keep making the same story.” An early graduate from the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, Turkiewicz initially attempted to tell her mother’s tale through an unfinished student documentary in 1976. Her first major work, the 30-minute Letters From Poland (1978) was a drama loosely based on her mother’s experiences as a refugee in post-war Australia. Most famously, she made another Polish refugee story in 1984, with the award-winning feature Silver City.
“In a way I see this film as a companion piece to Silver City,” Turkiewicz explains. “But I think the impulse behind making Once My Mother as a documentary was finally getting the story right. While I was lucky to have the opportunity to make Silver City, it’s a pretty glossy account of the real story. I was always aware of that and felt it wasn’t quite the authentic truth of my mother’s real experience.”
Once My Mother, Helen with newborn Sophia in Lusaka refugee camp
courtesy the artist
Once My Mother, Helen with newborn Sophia in Lusaka refugee camp
The sheer scale and horror of that experience perhaps explains the reticence Turkiewicz showed as a young filmmaker. Her mother Helen was one of millions deported east and fed into Stalin’s vast network of gulags when the Soviets and Nazi Germany dismembered Poland between them in 1939. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the desperate need for troops earned the Poles an ‘amnesty’ so they could form an army. Many of these soldiers eventually fled to Persia via Uzbekistan, bringing thousands of displaced civilians in their wake. Having made it to Persia, after the war Helen ended up in a British-run refugee camp in Rhodesia, southern Africa. Six years later, cradling the baby who became a filmmaker, she was taken into Australia as part of the post-war migration program.
Once My Mother traces this story through interviews with Helen shot for the unfinished student film in 1976, along with more contemporary interactions filmed as Helen’s memories were slowly being eroded by Alzheimer’s before her death in 2010. A wealth of archival material from Polish, Russian and British sources fills out the historical backdrop.
This is anything but dry history however. Nor is it a straightforward recounting of Helen’s life. “It was only through the process of making the film that I started to realise that it was as much about me and my relationship with my mother as it was about her,” Turkiewicz says of her decision to return to her mother’s experiences. “What I understood, ultimately, was that my impulse behind returning to this story was to try and nut out my complicated relationship with my mother. So I had to be a character in the film as well.”
Once My Mother, Helen and Sophia Turkiewicz
courtesy the artist
Once My Mother, Helen and Sophia Turkiewicz
Turkiewicz’s bond with her mother was long tinged with resentment over her placement in an Adelaide orphanage shortly after they arrived in Australia. Their difficult relationship and the echoes of Helen’s past in Turkiewicz’s childhood are effectively conveyed through a parallel structure that places the director’s life journey alongside her mother’s earlier travails. In her 20s, for example, we see Turkiewicz’s world open up as she gains a degree, moves to Sydney and joins the burgeoning Australian film industry. Around the same age, Helen was enduring a 4,000 kilometre trek across the Soviet Union with countless displaced Poles dropping dead around her, before finally escaping into an uncertain future as a post-war refugee. These parallel lives not only put the director’s more mundane struggles into perspective but highlight how incomprehensible her mother’s past must have been to Turkiewicz as a young girl coming of age in 1960s Adelaide. We see this story through both Helen’s and the filmmaker’s eyes, in a structure that conveys the epic sweep of the Polish deportee experience while maintaining an almost home movie intimacy with its subjects.
Although the film’s limited means contributed to its pleasingly intimate feel, Turkiewicz would have liked greater resources with which to realise her directorial vision. “I only ever had one day with a professional cinematographer,” Turkiewicz comments ruefully. “If we’d actually got the money and then made this doco, it would have had a completely different look and that’s really one of my slight disappointments—that the production values are not what I would have wanted for this story. It just grew through grabbing any opportunities we could along the way and cobbling it all together.”
As associate producer Bob Connolly explained in a speech before a private screening of the film last year, Once My Mother was rejected by both SBS and the ABC when the filmmakers sought a pre-sale (see On the Dox, RT118). This rendered the makers ineligible for backing from most government bodies. They were also rejected by Screen Australia’s Signature Fund, the only funding program that does not require a pre-sale. Her mother’s rapidly failing health forced Turkiewicz to push ahead and piece the film together over five years with virtually no budget. With the film almost completed, Screen Australia finally came on board and the ABC followed suit with some funds to make a 50-minute television version.
Turkiewicz concurs with Connolly’s criticism of structures which effectively prevent any documentary not tailored to broadcast schedules from receiving funds. But she also sees a deeper problem related to distribution. “There are fantastic feature-length documentaries being made all around the world and they’re not reaching our television screens or cinemas. I don’t think it’s just Australia—it’s a worldwide problem.”
Once My Mother is a perfect illustration of Turkiewicz’s and Connolly’s points—a beautifully moving, essayist documentary that cannot be neatly placed in a television slot and consequently nearly didn’t get made. But as well as being emotionally affecting, this is also a film that speaks to contemporary events here in Australia. “When you look at that whole phenomenon of post-war migration to Australia, it came from government policy, leadership and education. In the course of less than a decade Australia was absolutely transformed—and what a gift those people have made to the dynamic, multicultural and sophisticated society we now have. I want my film to be part of this conversation. I’m driven to despair seeing what is happening to refugees now,” Turkiewicz says forcefully.
As well as her mother’s contribution to Australia, Turkiewicz herself is part of the ongoing refugee story, even if our broadcasters showed little interest in what she had to offer. As always, it seems, the best in our culture has to develop regardless of those in positions of power.
Once My Mother, director Sophia Turkiewicz, producer Rod Freeman, Australia, 2013, www.oncemymother.com
Once My Mother is screening nationally in cinemas.
Next month No Strings Attached Theatre of Disability’s Sons & Mothers will embark on a national tour that will commence at the Darwin Festival and culminate in October in the company’s home state of South Australia with performances in the regional centres of Renmark and Port Pirie. The show (which I reviewed in RT118) premiered in 2012 at the Adelaide Fringe and last year enjoyed a season at Adelaide’s Space Theatre alongside the premiere of a documentary feature film by POP Pictures as part of the Adelaide Film Festival. Evolving out of writer/director Alirio Zavarce’s struggle to come to terms with his mother’s illness, Sons & Mothers coalesced around the No Strings Attached Men’s Ensemble, a group of 12 performers with disabilities.
Birthing
Artistic Director PJ Rose tells me that Zavarce was forced to take time out from the company when his mother fell ill and he was deeply moved by the reaction of the Men’s Ensemble on his return: “They were all so sympathetic, so genuinely sad at the thought of what they would do without their own mothers. That’s where the idea started. So it lived in Alirio’s mind until 2009 when they did one big workshop which POP Pictures filmed. In fact, some of the things that ended up in the production happened on that one day. Kym Mackenzie’s birthing of himself under the skirt came out of that workshop and it was such gold that it stayed.”
Funding from the Richard Llewellyn Arts and Disability Fund allowed NSA to undertake the show’s first full creative development, a period characterised by Rose as “a lot of sitting and writing, the guys writing stories of their mothers, collecting photographs, family things. We had seven people in the beginning. There are still seven performers, but Alirio is now one of them because, as you know from the film, we lost one [Abner Bradley, multi-instrumentalist and core Men’s Ensemble member had to withdraw]. He hadn’t recovered in time for the first season so the decision for Alirio to join the cast was made about a month before we opened. The Men’s Ensemble is the longest-surviving workshop group we have. Sons & Mothers is the culmination of their work so far but I expect they’ll do more.”
PJ Rose
courtesy the artist
PJ Rose
Home
One of NSA’s most recent ventures is Tracking Culture, an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (ATSI) performance workshop launched in 2005 as a partnership between the company and Kura Yerlo, a services provider to Adelaide’s western metropolitan Aboriginal community. Kura Yerlo facilitates a visual arts and crafts program called Karrarendi (translation: To be proud and rise above) for 30 ATSI participants with disabilities and it is from this group that Tracking Culture has emerged. I suggest to Rose that the workshop must present NSA with a unique set of challenges, bringing together as it does participants whose disadvantage in many cases straddle physical and mental impairment in addition to the socio-economic inequalities particular to indigeneity in Australia. “Certainly,” she says, “we get to the most disadvantaged people in the culture. Most of them can’t speak. Many can’t move. So finding the way in with any particular show is an amazing challenge.”
Tracking Culture’s latest project is Echoes… of Knowing Home, a new, multidisciplinary play by playwright Alexis West who is of Birra Gubba, Waka Waka, Kanak and Anglo-Australian descent. Now in its third phase of creative development, a series of six work-in-progress showings took place in late June and early July. Like previous Tracking Culture productions, the work is steeped in Indigenous myth and ritual, uniting a ‘fish out of water’ parable about a dolphin born in the desert with the use of animal puppets created by the ensemble in conjunction with contemporary fibre artist Sandy Elverd. The elusive ‘way in’ revealed itself gradually, through a process by which the over-protectiveness of the ensemble members’ support workers was redressed by an increasing, shared acknowledgment of the performers’ agency. “Agency,” according to Rose, “is crucial—and being able to demonstrate that agency. So it’s about ways of finding situations in which these performers can be the active ones. And the trick is in finding directors who delight in improvising, playing and creating from what is possible in the moment. That’s what we get from working with Alirio, with Paulo Castro and others—artists who appreciate how they can find and bring forward other artistic experiences.”
John Mack protects his dolphin child from an attack, Echoes … of Knowing Home, by Alexis West
photo Jonny Ratke
John Mack protects his dolphin child from an attack, Echoes … of Knowing Home, by Alexis West
Leaving home
Although not members of the Stolen Generations, all 13 of the performers in Echoes… were removed from their homes and either institutionalised or placed in shared care facilities. Aboriginality was sometimes given as the reason for removal, in other cases disability, limited regional support services or some admixture of all three. Rose says, “Mary, the woman who is introduced as the songstress of the group, was removed from her country at three months. She often warbles exactly as if she is in the middle of a corroboree. How would she know that? She’s never been back home. So this work came out of that, talking about where people are from. These folks have never before had an opportunity to grieve for that loss of home, for that loss of identity.
“I don’t know what the next piece will be yet,” continues Rose. She mentions an embryonic project—a piece about sexuality and disability that will see Melbourne playwright Patricia Cornelius and actor and burlesque performer Maude Davey collaborate—but nothing beyond the current Sons & Mothers tour is fixed. “I’ve been doing this for quite a while now so it’s not necessarily my intention to see myself into the grave here. I hope that eventually a person with a disability leads the company, someone who has a passion for this kind of work and whose artistry I admire. It’s grown much more than I planned for. I just keep programming as these things bubble up.”
No Strings Attached Theatre of Disability, Sons & Mothers, devisor, writer, director Alirio Zavarce, performers No Strings Attached Men’s Ensemble, Brown’s Mart Theatre, Darwin, 14-15 Aug and touring nationally until Oct 22; Echoes… of Knowing Home, writer Alexis West, co-directors PJ Rose, Alexis West, performers Tracking Culture workshop participants, Tandanya, Adelaide, 24 June-4 July, 2014. http://www.nostringsattached.org.au
Atlanta Eke (Keir Choreographic Award Winner 0:07), Jane McKernan (People’s Choice Award 5:28), Matthew Day (10:11) & Sarah Aiken (14:32) discuss their works and the experience of being a part of this inaugural award.
The Keir Choreographic Award was presented by Carriageworks, Dancehouse and The Keir Foundation
Creative Director of the Melbourne Festival talks with Keith Gallasch about highlights in her 2014 program. Includes: Heiner Goebbels’ When the mountain changed its clothing (0:30); Trisha Brown Dance Company’s From All Angles (3:20); Falk Richter & Anouk van Dijk’s Complexity of Belonging (6:29); Nanjing Project & focus on circus (9:14); Roslyn Oades’ Hello, Goodbye & Happy Birthday (12:36); and KAGE’s Team of Life (14:19).
Includes images and footage courtesy of the Melbourne Festival.
I’ve attended a couple of Darwin Festivals over the years, including 2013 when Virginia Baxter and I conducted a review-writing workshop for the NT Writers’ Centre with five participants, several of whom now regularly write for RealTime. The festival is welcoming, lively and intimate, making great use of the town’s parks in the temperate evenings for all kinds of performances plus live music and food.
Director Edwina Lunn’s third and final program offers a blend of local creations that connect the Northern Territory with South-Eastern Asia and fine productions from across Australia that might not otherwise reach Darwin. Reciprocally a Darwin Festival commission, Wulamanyuwi and the Seven Pamanui, premiered at Adelaide’s Come Out 2011 and has toured widely (see Cath McKinnon’s review). I spoke by phone with Lunn after her intriguing 2014 program had been launched.
Although not a local, after five years in Darwin Lunn says she has become a Territorian, “We opened our RealTime [RT121] and said, ‘Look how much Territory there is. Fantastic!’ It was a proud moment. We’re quite proud, we Territorians.”
Calling the festival “100% Darwin” makes sense then.
It was an easy connection to make. We commit to this festival being a celebration of our time and our place in this city. Darwin as a city and certainly the Northern Territory are evolving so much. The people and the population change each year with natural attrition, a new population arriving and our growing Indigenous population, which is nearly 30% and our Asian connections. The white Australian population turns over every four years. The festival re-invents itself every year to respond to what’s happening in our city. So it’s pretty easy to say, let’s call the festival “100% Darwin.” And we’re doing a show called 100% Darwin.
It features 100 Darwinians on stage. What will they be doing?
It’s a very challenging form of theatre making by Rimini Protokoll from Germany (see RT96 for an account of 100% Vancouver and RealTimeTalk for an overview of the company’s work). They’ve done this show in many places—in Norfolk and Vienna and Athens and [in 2012] Melbourne. I knew that Rimini Protokoll staging the show in Darwin would be different from anywhere else in the world because Darwin’s population is unique.
The show is based on Australian Bureau of Statistics data. The idea is that every single person on stage of those 100 people represents 1% of the population, based on a set of selection criteria, which all come from the ABS. We had to work with the Rimini’s to decide what criteria would be prioritised. Not just asking “Were you born in Australia?” we wanted to delve a little deeper and also to find the compositions of families. The show itself then will ask these 100 people on stage to tell us about their lifestyles, how and why they live in Darwin and what their opinions are on the big issues in Darwin, the Territory, the region and nationally. We imagine that Territorians will have a very different response to many of those questions from other Australians. Even the answer to a simple question such as “Do you consider yourself to be a Territorian?” will be really interesting since most people on stage will probably have lived here for less than five years.
But it doesn’t take much to decide that you are a Territorian. I reckon after I was here for two years people started to call me a local. I think it’s hard not to be. When you live in a place that is a capital city but is extraordinarily remote, you have to engage with what is happening here in terms of culture and lifestyle and that means you can’t not be part of the beating heart of what’s happening.”
Including adapting to the climate.
Exactly. Climate and lifestyle means you must live very differently up here and get used to some very odd things—bugs and mould and different kinds of bacteria and diseases. I know many, many people who have Ross River [virus] simply because they’ve lived in Darwin. That’s a life-long legacy. You know you’ve lived in Darwin if you end up carrying that around with you for the rest of your life. I don’t have it fortunately but there’s still a few months left for the mosquitoes to get me!
One of the exciting aspects of the festival is the Asian connection, for which you’ve achieved some additional funding. Not only that, some of the works are the result of collaborations between Australian and Asian artists.
It wouldn’t be a Darwin Festival if we didn’t have a connection with our Asian neighbours. Our international program has always featured Asian work, with a particular focus on Indonesia because it’s very close to us and we’ve developed many ongoing relationships with Indonesian companies. There are many Indonesian people and groups in Darwin, including the Indonesian Consulate, which is the only consulate we have. So already we have strong links with Indonesia and we just wanted to do more.
[The funding was the result] of one of those amazingly fortuitous meetings you might have with a new Chief Minister who points to a map behind his head and says, “If we were to give you some more money, would you be able to do more work within this region?” And the answer to that is always, “Yes!” It’s been quite thrilling to be able to work with local partners—not just government, but corporate partners—on a collective vision. This is what the Territory really needs, to work more and connect more with Asia because we’re so close. And because of our tropical lifestyle in many ways Darwin feels more like an Asian than an Australian city.
The Lepidopters
photo courtesy Darwin Festival
The Lepidopters
What about the nature of the works you’re featuring? Tell me about The Lepidopters.
That’s going to be a challenging work for our audiences, but in typical Darwin audience style they’re lapping it up, buying the tickets even though we’ve been quite open in our marketing to let people know that this is a form of science fiction rock opera with an outer space aspect. It involves a fabulous collaboration with local choirs as well as Indonesia’s Punkasila collaborating with Slave Pianos and pianist Michael Kieran-Harvey (see RT119 for a review of an earlier version of the work at MONA FOMA). Since we booked them they want to work with the Darwin Chorale and some Indigenous composers as well. So I’m pretty confident when I say we don’t know what the show’s going to be but I also have confidence that it’s led by a good, strong team of great collaborative artists and they’re going to make a show that Darwin will probably never forget.
And what about Temporary Territory, by the Indonesian artist collective Ruangrupa?
We’re risk-takers and we really like working with artists on collaborations that respond to our environment. I met with Ruangrupa on a trip to Indonesia and really liked some of the work they were doing. They’d already done a project they’d called “a disruption.” They put installations into Djakartan bus stops.
The Djakarta traffic is hideous. For people who have to rely on public transport it’s an even more hideous experience because the buses are so incredibly over-crowded and so they spend a lot of time at bus stops. Ruangrupa activated the bus stops. I asked them to consider coming to Darwin to do a similar project. I had a wonderful Skype conversation with them before they visited Darwin, trying to get them to understand that we didn’t really have a traffic problem and we didn’t really even have a peak hour.
They’ve had couple of site visits here and we’ve sent some local Darwin visual artists to Djakarta so it’s a truly collaborative project. I was Skyping them saying, “I need to give you some perspective on how few people there are in Darwin.” There are only 120,000 people here compared to the 10 million people who just commute in and out of Djakarta every day. I said, “I’m looking out the window from our office and I can’t see one single person. If I look out of the window on the other side, I still can’t see a single person.” We have so much space. They thought that was bizarre.
They came over and became quite fascinated with our bus stops and how we use them—almost the history and the ecology of Darwin’s bus stops. They’ve worked with two great local visual artists, Sarah Pirrie and Simon Cooper. They’re installing art pieces into at least 30 bus stops. We’re trying to install them all overnight—almost like art by stealth—so when people leave home on the first day of the festival they will be confronted with what is still their bus stop but it could also be something else. The installation and the decoration respond to the location of each bus stop. I suspect that one is going to be installed as if it were a gallery with white walls, complete with a gallery opening with wine and cheese and people standing around talking about art. This is one of the reasons I like working with Indonesian artists. Not only do they have a strong sense of where they fit politically and having a political voice, but they’ve got a fantastic sense of humour and they’re good at taking the piss out of themselves and us. One bus stop might be a tribute to the absence of cats in Darwin, unlike in Djakarta. This as one of those festival events that takes over the whole city and reminds people that this is a month where we should be looking at and using our city in different ways.
Another collaborative work is The Book of Shadows with Tim Parrish and Connor Fox who have worked with puppeteers in Ubud in Bali combining traditional puppetry and multimedia elements.
They bring the show back here after a rehearsal showing in Ubud and they’ll do a sneak preview presentation of the work at Brown’s Mart before the full season in November. There are many people visiting the festival in August who can’t see the rest of the theatre that’s made here throughout the year.
You’ve also got Vietnamese Water Puppets and Cambodian Aerobics— what is that?
LAUGHS I must say The Cambodian Aerobics could be seen as a bit of personal indulgence. I’ve always wanted to do something in the festival that celebrated the dawn. Darwin people get up very early because it’s soon very hot. You see many people out exercising before it gets light, but it’s the usual forms of exercising—walking or running along the foreshore and along our bike tracks. In some ways this mirrors what happens in many Asian cultures. People get up early to exercise in a group style almost like some form of Soviet military style exercise or Tai Chi or an aerobics workout. It isn’t like contemporary aerobics in a gym with lots of lycra; it’s quite literally people who’ve just come out of their houses, many of them in pyjamas and slippers.
Most of the people I’ve observed engaging in this kind of physical activity in Asian capital cities are quite mature but they also include people who are grabbing this moment before a long day of often quite hard physical labour, and they do it with great humour. I suspect that the reason why many great Asian cities are thriving and people are working so hard is because they have a collective culture of ‘let’s get up together in the morning and do this physical activity.’ As a tourist, if you participate it sets you up for the rest of the day—and it just makes you smile.
Arisa Yura, images Yasukichi Murakami, Through a Distant Lens
photo Miho Watanabe
Arisa Yura, images Yasukichi Murakami, Through a Distant Lens
That’s fabulous. A work with an historical perspective is Through a Distant Lens featuring the images of Yasukichi Murakami a Japanese photographer working in Darwin in the 1930s. How did that come into your program?
Mayu Kanamori is a documentary maker and theatre maker who has made works for the Darwin Festival before. She has a family connection to Darwin and she’s a descendent of Murakami. She came to me a couple of years ago when she was in Darwin researching this show. She doesn’t live in Darwin any more but still has a connection to the place. It’s taken at least two years to research it, put it together and to grow it into the theatrical show that it is [directed by former Darwin Festival director Malcolm Blaylock]. It’s also touring to OzAsia in Adelaide shortly after. The idea is to eventually take it back to Japan.
The show is also an acknowledgement of the contribution that Japanese people made to Darwin before the bombing of Darwin in World War II. Just as happened to many Japanese people living in Australia, Murakami was expelled from Darwin and had to leave behind his legacy—all of the things that he did that showed his marvellous contribution to this city. Darwin really celebrates its Chinese heritage. There are loads of streets named after the Chin family and a number of other families who helped to build Darwin and rebuild it after the bombing and after Cyclone Tracy but there’s very little acknowledgement of the Japanese influence in Darwin. If you go to Broome in Western Australia there’s a huge acknowledgement of the Japanese influence there.
So Through a Distant Lens is a little nod to something that we may further uncover as the whole country celebrates our Anzac centenary and we start to look in more depth at our history. We’re really proud to have this show in the festival. And I don’t think it’s controversial because Darwin was bombed. I think it’s actually a much more insightful look at Japanese relations at that time.
You have No Strings Attached’s Sons and Mothers from Adelaide [see our interview with company direct PJ Rose], Ursula Yovich in The Magic Hour, which was created in Perth, Michael Kantor and Tom E Lewis’ The Shadow King from Melbourne [see RT119] and major Australian festivals and Dalisa Pigrum’s Gudirr Gudirr made in Broome [see Dance Massive 2013] and performed around Australia and in Europe. Darwinians are certainly not left off the cultural map.
They are really wonderful shows we’re really proud to have. Not only do our audiences respond well to seeing really high quality national theatre but it’s also really important to bring these works to influence and stimulate our local arts industry. Ursula Yovich and others are also offering workshops and master classes and Ursula is MC-ing our opening night concert. Our local theatre makers will benefit from seeing how artists making works that are of high quality and tourable.
The Choir of Man
photo courtesy Darwin Festival
The Choir of Man
I’d like to mention a show that has a particular NT flair to it and that I think the rest of the country and the world might see soon. It’s The Choir of Man, which is a musical theatre work developed by David Garnham, a fantastic local country music singer who won the Tamworth song competition a couple of years ago and tours with his band, The Reasons to Live. A couple of years ago he said to me, ‘I want to put a choir together and they’ll all be men and we’ll just rehearse over a barbecue and a few beers ‘cause I want to be accompanied by a choir just for a few songs within my show.’ It’s turned into a massive phenomenon with many men in our community trying to get into the choir. Now it’s almost 20-strong and has attracted the attention of Andrew Kay—one of the original producers of Tap Dogs and Soweto Gospel Choir—from AKA Management who was entranced by the NT flavour of it—all these men on stage, in flannies, some not wearing shoes, but really together, having decided to be in this gutsy choir. Producer Wayne Harrison has been to Darwin for the audition process and they’re now about to go into rehearsals, turning what was a rough and tumble music show into a full-length musical theatre piece with the vision of it going on to Adelaide Fringe and then Edinburgh Fringe and the West End. If it gets the same reception that Tap Dogs did it may very well do something for NT masculinity.
I’m really proud in the last few years to have developed this work and am hoping it has a life beyond the Darwin Festival.
2014 Darwin Festival, Darwin, Northern Territory, 7-24 Aug
Mickrophonie I, Transducer, Speak Percussion, THNMF2013
photo Brad Serls
Mickrophonie I, Transducer, Speak Percussion, THNMF2013
Audiences for New Music cannot be taken for granted in Australia; you have to make them. The success of Speak Percussion can perhaps be explained by their ability to connect with their music, audiences, collaborators and with composers of different generations. Combining physical spectacle with challenging music, they have proven that, if presented with conviction, new audiences can be drawn to the thorniest of concert programs.
The ensemble has appeared in RealTime magazine for some 12 years, often in innovative collaborations with other musicians, visual artists and scientists. As founding member and artistic director Eugene Ughetti explains to Gail Priest in a video interview for RealTime that the group functions today as a collective, facilitating percussion events rather than a band of regular members (though there is evidently a core group of performers including Ughetti, Matthias Schack-Arnott and Leah Scholes). A 2008 collaboration with sound designer Myles Mumford and installation artist Elaine Miles saw the ensemble crawling among 1400 handmade glass objects in the atrium of the National Gallery of Victoria (RT83). In 2011 Speak collaborated with engineers to develop a program addressing the difficulties cochlear implant wearers experience in distinguishing different pitches and timbres (RT102).
From Keith Gallasch’s first review of “four about-to-graduate VCA musicians” in 2002 (RT49) to City Jungle (a recent collaboration with Terminal Sound System now firmly in Speak’s touring repertoire, see Partial Durations), artistic director Eugene Ughetti has often sought to bring the club to the concert hall. While Ughetti made a virtue of his years dancing to drum ’n’ bass and jungle, other current contemporary composers such as Anthony Pateras, Robin Fox and Cat Hope introduced an aesthetic derived from noise music into their works. In terms of physical movement, a greater opposition could not be imagined. Whereas drum ‘n’ bass inspires the most frenetic movement imaginable, noise music is known for the minimal physicality of its motionless laptop artists and shoe-gazing guitarists.
The combination of Speak’s physical intensity with these other composers’ captivatingly dark aesthetic has proven a winning combination in works such as Transducer (see Totally Huge New Music Festival 2013 online), a collaboration with Fox based on the physical manipulation of dozens of microphones and Anthony Pateras’ large ensemble work Flesh and Ghost at MONA FOMA in 2011 (RT102, also THNMF2011). Speak’s MONA FOMA gig was a case in point for Speak Percussion’s propensity for audience engagement. The immense program featured some four hours of large-scale works requiring multiple batteries spread around the warehouse at Prince’s Wharf. Amid the incredible din, the audience ate tempura with wasabi aioli while lounging on beanbags.
As well as championing the works of their contemporaries, Speak are constantly commissioning new works by younger composers, including James Rushford’s Whorl Would Equal Reaches, which recently had its premiere at the Tectonics contemporary music festival in Adelaide (RT120), and Macrograph, a solo percussion work by Alexander Garsden (RT119).
Speak are also dedicated to playing some of the most challenging works of, broadly speaking, complexist composers including Chris Dench, Richard Barrett and, to an extent, Liza Lim. Since the flight of the ELISION Ensemble to the greener pastures of Europe in 2009, there has been a dearth, despite the efforts of some younger ensembles, of performances of this music. Speak’s upcoming performance with Richard Barrett is therefore a welcome contribution to Australian musical life. At RMIT’s SIAL sound studios Speak Percussion will be joined by Barrett himself on electronics to present a concert entirely dedicated to the composer’s works. Matthew Lorenzon
For some reason I find the bio a faintly embarrassing genre, but mine goes something like this: born in New Zealand, raised in Samoa and Canada, arrived in Australia just in time for high school. More specifically, I left the snowy Rocky Mountains and arrived in sunny Newcastle, which was a minor culture shock. I am no beach babe so I started plotting my escape soon afterwards, moving first to Canberra and then to Sydney where I have been for over a decade. Wherever we lived, I enrolled in a drama class of some description, initially because my mother thought it might cure my shyness (it did not) and then because I loved it and it felt like home when nothing else around me did. In retrospect, it is no surprise that I wrote my doctoral thesis on performance and migration.
Currently, I am employed as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of New South Wales. Conventional academic wisdom has it that during a fellowship you need to finish something, start something else and start thinking about a third thing, so I have been finishing my manuscript on performance and forced migration, starting a project on performance and listening (so many headphones in live art), and starting to think about performance and accidents (in the wake of so-called ‘liveness’ debates, the accident seems to be invoked ever more often in discussions about the ontology of performance).
Exposé
I don’t remember life without writing but, as friends and colleagues have pointed out, I rarely call it that; instead I refer to it as “typing.” I didn’t realise I did this but I suppose ‘writing’ sounds intellectual and intimidating whereas ‘typing’ sounds mechanical and therefore more manageable. Not that it is.
I started typing for RealTime in 2007, having previously worked as a proofreader for the publication. I sent a report from the Explosive Youth Theatre Festival in Bremen where I was performing in PACT Theatre’s The Speech Givers. Since then I have written about asylum seekers in theatre, film and visual art, various types of “theatre of the real,” about emerging artists in Sydney and—inevitably—Newcastle. Occasionally I also write an overview of a festival, like Liveworks, Imperial Panda, Festival a/d Werf and the recent Performance Space 30th birthday celebrations.
Some of my early reviews are clearer of eye but harder of heart. For better or worse, I am more forgiving now, all too aware of the courage it takes to create and the conditions under which most artists labour. During my doctoral research, I also became aware that RealTime is sometimes the only record of a particular performance. This has changed somewhat with the rise of blogs, but in the absence of a dedicated theatre journal (eg American Theatre) and without a dedicated theatre archive or museum (eg New York’s Public Library for the Performing Arts, London’s V&A Theatre Collection), RealTime’s role in preserving Australia’s performance history remains crucial.
When reading old issues—I have an almost complete set of the hard copies!—I find that the reviewer’s opinion is of some interest, but often not as much as his or her “thick description” of the work at hand. I try to keep this in mind now, especially if I have wandered off track. Failing that, I conjure Keith’s voice: “Caroline, this is interesting, but what actually happened on stage?” In short, typing for RealTime is the best of both worlds: as in academic discourse, one can assume that the audience is intelligent and informed, but as in mainstream criticism, one is free of the footnote. Unlike the bio then, the RealTime review is a most agreeable genre!
Recent articles
Meta-theatrical Magic
Caroline Wake, Back to Back Theatre’s Ganesh versus the Third Reich
RealTime issue #120 April-May 2014 pg. 43
Immaculate Conception
Caroline Wake, Mark Wilson’s Unsex Me
RealTime issue #120 April-May 2014 pg.25
History Never Repeats
Caroline Wake with Virginia Baxter and Keith Gallasch, Performance Space Turns 30
RealTime issue #119 Feb-March 2014 pg. 4-10
Machine/performer/spectator
Caroline Wake: Festival A/D Werf, Utrecht, The Netherlands
RealTime issue #104 Aug-Sept 2011 pg. 22
Live work, women’s work
Caroline Wake: Liveworks, Performance Space
RealTime issue #101 Feb-March 2011 pg. 18
There are remarkable things to see in Art+Soul 2: the intriguing creations of fascinating artists, venerable exponents of ancient practices and a younger generation of contemporary artists working in video, film, performance and installation, melding with the traditional forms and concepts of their inheritance.
The second of curator and writer Hetti Perkins’ much-anticipated Art+Soul series is about to be launched on ABC TV. Perkins travels Australia meeting artists in their homes, studios and beloved country, often with their families and communities. The sense of art as integral to life is woven through the series, profoundly entwining the everyday, the spiritual, the land and collective and personal Indigenous histories. Alongside traditional artists in remote art centres (Yolgnu man Wanyubi Marika; the people of Tjala Arts, SA) and shell artists Lola Greeno and Esme Timbery, Perkins interviews contemporary artists Jonathan Jones, Warwick Thornton, Daniel Boyd, Nicole Foreshew, Vernon Ah Kee, Christian Thompson, Brian Robinson and Julie Gough.
Perkins pulls together threads from across the continent—with its extremes of landscape and climate and sharply contrasting craft and art practices—to reveal lineages of unexpected continuity of influence (sacred tree art in a Jonathan Jones’ fluorescent light sculpture; Albert Namatajira in the works of Warwick Thornton and Daniel Boyd; traditional dyeing in the swirling cloth of Nicole Foreshew’s performative video creations). All the artists in this series make works that speak for themselves, but in conversation each is also eloquent about their feelings of connectedness with a sustaining ancient culture and the deeply disturbing history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history over the last two centuries. Perkins informally and unhurriedly draws them out, in the same way she draws us in, her voice warm, deep, intimate, her manner easy. They in turn are frank, witty and observant.
Hetti Perkins, Vernon Ah Kee, Art+Soul 2
image courtesy Hibiscus Films
Hetti Perkins, Vernon Ah Kee, Art+Soul 2
Perkins herself is more than a guide, more than a delineator of art history, she is a story-teller—the art she reveals to us is part of her own story, not as an artist but as curator, an intimate of the artists and, above all, as someone whose own life parallels theirs in shared culture and history. Episodes are framed with reference to the inspiration from her grandmother, her father—the activist Charles Perkins—and his clan country near Alice Springs, land which Perkins says sustains her.
The series is superbly made with Perkins as writer, director Steven McGregor, cinematographer Eric Murray Lui and sound recordist David Tranter. These are Indigenous filmmakers with extensive experience and considerable achievements, documented over the years in RealTime (see Indigenous Film Archive Highlight) and in Dreaming in Motion, Celebrating Indigenous Filmmakers, AFC-RealTime 2007). With a score largely made up of affecting contemporary Indigenous songs, Art+Soul 2 is engrossing viewing, another fine record of Indigenous Australian art from Perkins and an exhortation, firmly if gently stated by the activist-presenter-writer to understand art as Culture.
What did it feel like to make this series, to be nomadic and travel far and wide?
It’s a thrilling opportunity to travel around and renew old acquaintances and see friends. One of the pleasures of being a contemporary nomad of sorts is that I really love driving out bush, around places like Uluru, Arnhem Land, Aurukun is just amazing—beautiful. And those long drives are something I find quite therapeutic. But doing it in the company of someone like Mrs Porter—we see her in the series [at Warakurna Artists, WA] giving the children their paints and canvases and a little painting lesson—when you travel with someone like her, of course, the country, even though it’s beautiful and enriching, you start to understand why all these places you’re passing by, whether it’s a tree or a rock-hole or hill, have significance. I think that sense of the country being sentient and alive is very important. While obviously we can’t cover every minute of what we do in the series, I hope the sense of that comes through strongly in each episode.
It’s a fascinating range of artists—most relatively young artists but also older people with a very strong sense of craft whose creations we might be surprised to see juxtaposed with contemporary practice. But they all make sense. How did you come up with this amazing ‘cast’?
One of the things we try to do is to say that contemporary Indigenous art practice has myriad forms of expression. So Lola Greeno’s beautiful shell necklaces can be as political as a Daniel Boyd Treasure Island painting [a map of Australia detailing hundreds of original Indigenous language groupings over which the label ‘Treasure Island’ is imposed by wealth-seeking colonialism]. So I think that’s one of the probably not-so-subtle messages we’re trying to get across, that in being connected to country and being an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person, you’re inherently political or politicised and this can be expressed in ways that can often be quite subtle or more suggestive than strident.
Hetti Perkins, Warwick Thornton, Art+Soul 2
image courtesy Hibiscus Films
Hetti Perkins, Warwick Thornton, Art+Soul 2
But with a darker, underlying sense; as Warwick Thornton says, that even to breathe is a political act.
Yes, that’s right. I shouldn’t even be alive. He makes that point very clearly. And as he says, I’m an Aboriginal artist because if I’d been a plumber, I’d be an Aboriginal plumber. Having a film director now as an artist is also kind of fun.
There’s a diversity of voices in each artist. Daniel Boyd can make quite overtly political works and others like his mysterious Dark Matter images. Vernon Ah Kee makes the Tall Man video work but on the other hand those rather scary charcoal drawings, Unwritten [both works triggered by the Palm Island Riot of 2004 and its causes].
They’re quite haunting, aren’t they?
There’s a connection between Boyd’s dots against dark space and Vernon Ah Kee’s ‘faceless’ visages [in each case suggesting faces or bodies not seen by white culture].
What strikes me too as you look at the works of those artists and you see the different presence that they have—some quite subtle, others more overtly political—is the softly spoken artists themselves. I think it’s wonderful to be able to introduce them to people. There’s a lot of compassion and conviction and they’re steadfast in what they say, but I think people will be surprised at how almost self-effacing or even humble they are.
They’ll let their art speak for them and for their people but they can make strong statements.
Yes, they’re quietly persuasive and I think that’s something I’ve always admired about these artists and one of the reasons for doing this series. [It’s] not only their work but because they have the courage to make the work, to put it out there.
There’s also quite a strong emphasis on families—family photographs and archival material, including your own. You make that connection regularly so that each artist reveals a sense of lineage and place.
Yes, I think one of the reasons for doing that was to be open. It’s meant to be intimate, to get to know these people and their country and their homes. I don’t think you can do that if you’re some sort of narrator up on high. You have to meet the generosity of spirit that the artists are offering. It was felt appropriate for me to have the same sort of approach with myself as I asked of the artists.
You pack a lot into each 60-minute program, but there’s still a feeling of reflection and enquiry. You must have spent quite a bit of time making this.
Yes, quite a few weeks on the road and the inevitable post-production. You have to allow for pauses. There’s a term in poetry—I forget what it is. Caesura? I’ve always been struck by that idea. In my experience, a lot of the time, listening is as important as asking. Often if you just wait, when one of the artists stops that pause means something amazing is about to come out of their mouth. But I also think a lot of that was due to Steven McGregor, the way he directs is so inclusive and intuitive. He often will say in the edit, “We just want to give people a chance to breathe; let the art, the landscape, let it breathe.” A lot of that [sense] you’re identifying in it is very much to do with Steven’s editing.
He’s a very fine film director. He’s made his own films and for other people. Working with him must be a great advantage. Also Eric Murray Lui who’s a great cinematographer.
And David Tranter on sound—three super-experienced, super-talented and, I have to say, super-fun people to work with. And that’s really great because, like Art+Soul 1, you can just go into a community and you know you don’t have to have the cultural planning workshop sort of thing before you go in. Nobody’s going to shove a camera in anyone’s face without [permission].
When you’re talking to the women in the Yarrenyty Arltere art centre in the Larapinta Valley near Alice Springs who make soft sculptures, we see a very good stop-animation segment featuring toy figures in a story that combines traditional lore and good advice. Who made it?
That was a couple of people at the art centre. These wonderful people, the nannas and kids and cousins and dogs all get to play a role in these animations about all the stuff that happens out in the town camps—and pretty much anywhere. One of my favourite moments—we used it at the end of one of the episodes—is the little nanna and pop figures in bed. One rolls over and puts their arm over the other one. It’s such a nice touch.
It’s interesting that in your selection of artists for Art+Soul 2 you see younger artists like Warwick Thornton, Daniel Boyd, Christian Thompson and Nicole Foreshew who engage with new technologies, video, installation and performance as clearly sustaining tradition, if in different ways. Are you attracted in particular to these artists?
I’m lucky, because I’m old enough so I’ve been able to work with a lot of these artists in one form or another over the years, which makes it even harder to narrow down who will participate in the series. Often it’s a matter of availability and who’s around that comes into it. But the artists you mentioned, they’re reasonably young and I love the way they’re picking up that mantle, whether it’s Rover Thomas, Emily Kngwarreye…the pioneers. Daniel Boyd talks about Albert Namatjira. They feel they’re very much part of that artistic tradition. They maintain their heritage but [have] their own individual form of contemporary expression…that’s really what Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture is about. It’s about this endlessly adapting, evolving, changing cultural sphere. That’s one of the most exciting things about it.
The series says that art is very important. You say it’s a beacon and that it promotes understanding. Warwick Thornton says it’s very ‘healing.’ You say at one point it’s about finding a way home. For Aboriginal people seeing this art and this series must be a much more profound experience than for the non-indigenous viewer.
We all have common experiences—home and family, place and a sense of belonging are things we all share. My people are no different. We feel the same way. It’s about trying to find touchstones, those things we all identify with, we all crave and need. Indigenous people have been denied those basic human rights. For them and for people like myself who aren’t artists, I similarly can take comfort or guidance or inspiration from the work of our artists. That’s why I pay so much respect to them, because they do have this incredible responsibility that they happily take on their shoulders. They choose to make these works that are inspirational. It’s very important work and it’s no easy task.
Art+Soul 2, writer, presenter Hetti Perkins, director Steven McGregor, cinematographer Eric Murray Lui, producers Bridget Ikin, Jo-anne McGowan, Hibiscus Films; screening July 8, 15, 22, ABC 1
Interview with visual artist Pilar Mata Dupont about her video work Purgatorio, commissioned by Campbelltown Arts Centre for The List exhibition 9 August – 12 October.
“Journeys to relive your past?” was the Khan’s question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated: “Journeys to recover your future?” Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
It can sometimes seem that Australian artists are obsessed with travel, their sense of achievement and status intimately linked with international residencies and presentation opportunities. It’s hardly surprising given the general ambivalence towards the arts here, resulting in a small critical mass even when all the art scenes are added together.
But beyond the motives of CV building and presenting your work in an environment where art is respected, travel is vital for an artist (and everyone), as the immersion in difference encourages altered ways of seeing, hearing and experiencing. All that stimulation can’t help but get the creative juices flowing.
For Profiler 4, we’ve asked a selection of artists to tell us about a city that gets their creative curiosity piquing and how that place has influenced their practice or a particular project. Enjoy this vicarious vacation. Gail Priest, Online Producer
Kyoto is one Japanese city I have had little connection to, in terms of embedded time, but somehow its echo resonates. The first few times I visited were during tours in the early noughties. These visits were fleeting and the memories seemed mostly to be confused—a jumble of train stations, giant robotic crabs, transcendental food, record stores, galleries and friends not seen often enough. It was as though my mind was just engaged, I was present as someone focused on a kind of delivery into that space, more than a consumer of it. Time as it were, worked against me.
Recently though I have found myself in Kyoto twice as, well, a tourist. The timeframes were not so generous, but on both occasions I had no agenda except ‘being.’ It’s a luxury that doesn’t present itself very often. It has been in this more free flowing mode and with a casualness of time that I have managed to find what it is that makes this place so reverberant beyond the moment on contact. For me Kyoto epitomises an expression of time and this is probably one of the central themes in my work. In its Zen gardens, time is gradated; rock, water, moss, trees and their inhabitants marking out layers of time, as T?ru Takemitsu put it. Each element exuding a sense of (de)composition over timelines, these timelines weaving into increasingly complex patterns that eventually overcome and subdue the mind.
This affect is in many respects what I hope my music does. I want to trick the mind and create a rupture in time within which the listener becomes disconnected from a notion of linear or narrative time. I want the sonic elements, like those in the gardens to erode and emerge at different rates, creating a wholly consuming experience that hopefully lingers well beyond the moment in which it is first experienced. http://lawrenceenglish.com
English’s latest release, Wilderness of Mirrors, will be released July 21, http://room40.org
1) Cameron Platter, Better Together, Cape Town (graffiti also by the artist) photo Paul Gazzola; 2) Francois Knoetze, artist in OPENLab, courtesy the artist; 3) Sethembile Msezane, artist in OPENLab, courtesy the artist
Cape Town—a city on the edge of a continent where incredible beauty is juxtaposed with the harsh realities of a huge racial divide. Cape Town—home to 3.7 million where only 15% of this number is white. Recently named the best place in the world to visit by the New York Times as well as becoming the 2014 World Design Capital. Cape Town—sun, sea, nature, drugs, crime, disease. Cape Town—yeah baby!
Seventeen years have passed since I was last here as part of an artist exchange. This time was highly formative in my explorations around themes of people, place, history and site and my developing interest in the creation of works with diverse communities and cultures. Seventeen years ago I also learnt I was but a young white boy in a very black world.
So 17 years later I am again in the city and this time in preparation for OPENLab 2014. The politics of democracy and the individual, longstanding quests in this country are still high on the agenda as the transition to a more equal South Africa still seems a long way off. But these unifying themes give weight to many of the artists’ works I have seen and provides a nurturing and provocative guide to my own thoughts as I explore the social realities of an arts and curatorial practice that strives to be inclusive and relevant. www.paulgazzola.org
OPENLab, 8-27 July 2014, University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, Cape Town, alongside the Vryfees festival; www.openlab-southafrica.co.za
Live art from demolition
Keith Gallasch: Michael Dagostino, Paul Gazzola, Temporary Democracies
RealTime issue #116 Aug-Sept 2013 p32
Oh how they danced!
Virginia Baxter: Oh I Wanna Dance With Somebody
RealTime issue #112 Dec-Jan 2012 p2-3
Janie Gibson, Lenox, Massachusetts, USA
Janie Gibson (second from left), Shakespeare and Company Conservatory, Lennox, Massachusetts
Lenox is a small town in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts. I was drawn there to study the theatre practices of Shakespeare and Company who made their home in the area in 1978. I spent 6 months there last year, immersed in the company’s work through the Conservatory training program for actors and as a teacher trainee in the Month-Long intensive Workshop. I was there during the ‘Fall’ and Winter months and loved watching the leaves change colour, eating apple-cider donuts, using Laundromats and getting used to the filtered coffee.
I am an actor, education artist and theatre maker. My work is rooted in Polish ensemble theatre, Shakespearean performance and devising original pieces. Lenox is a place in which I have transformed and discovered new things about myself, my voice, my work and how I want to live in the world.
‘Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say’ is one of the closing lines of King Lear and a principle underpinning the practice of Shakespeare and Company. Through this training I found my voice as an artist and human being. I learned how to investigate and perform Shakespeare and in doing so discovered the power, joy and importance of telling these stories. I experienced the strength I have as a woman and my capacity to effect other people through my words, actions and voice.
Shakespeare and Company was founded on three pillars of training, education and performance. The company runs world-renowned actor training programs, a popular summer season of performances and an extensive program of transformative education work. I am hoping to return to Lenox in September this year to work as a director in the annual Fall Festival of Shakespeare. http://www.shakespeare.org/
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Cat Jones, New York (between Billyburg and Beaverkill)
1) Cat Jones, Transcontinental Garden Exchange 2) From the other side, New York; 3) Ladybake 3000, Catskills; 4) Entrance to the Fragrance Garden, Brooklyn Botanic Gardens Library; 5) Intelligent Slime Mould, Genspace, New York
photos Cat Jones
1) Cat Jones, Transcontinental Garden Exchange 2) From the other side, New York; 3) Ladybake 3000, Catskills; 4) Entrance to the Fragrance Garden, Brooklyn Botanic Gardens Library; 5) Intelligent Slime Mould, Genspace, New York
In New York I can start a conversation mid-sentence addressed to no-one in particular and be sure that whoever is nearby will pick it up and carry on. I can walk the street, give directions to a stranger and end up at dinner with same, a dogma changing neuroscientist.
For me, New York is a place I can turn up in and feel like I’m home. A similar summer 11 years ago seasoned me with lifelong friend collaborators and artistic turning points. I was enamoured to see if we still feel the same way about each other. We do.
2013 was a year of cumulative cities for me, rolling in from a retro media art and feminism party reunion, Berlin; a winter retreat with plants and edible olfactions, Brussels; pounding through ideas, SXSW, Austin, Texas; spilling sensory performance and brittle papers, London; and balancing unbalance in Noosa. When I arrived in New York I carried the politics of touch from Performance Studies International 19, Stanford, packing stinging debates on methodology and mind blowing science from the Plant Signalling Conference, Vancouver along with a personal preview of Michael Marder’s Plant Thinking. Within four days of arriving I had an unexpected exhibition of my work in progress for Transcontinental Garden Exchange at point b. Simmer on high in the midsummer heat of New York for seven weeks. Season to taste.
Cat Jones will be presenting Anatomy’s Confection, On the Clitoris, Proximity Festival 2014, 22 Oct-1 Nov, Fremantle Arts Centre; http://proximityfestival.com/
Intimate transformations
Astrid Francis: Proximity Festival 2013
RealTime issue #118 Dec-Jan 2013 pg41
Teik-Kim Pok, Singapore
Teik-Kim Pok, Karaoke Massage, ArtBar, MCA
courtesy the artist
Teik-Kim Pok, Karaoke Massage, ArtBar, MCA
My foundational perspectives on identity were defined by a period of living in two cities within close chronological proximity—first London as a pre-schooler in the 1980s and then ex-colonial metropolitan outpost, Singapore, all the way through to the end of high school years in the 1990s.
Having lived in a fairly multicultural part of east London, I fitted in nicely and any attempts to make me feel like an outsider washed off like water on a duck’s back. When I got to Singapore, my early struggle to understand any Mandarin in the government-mandated ‘mother tongue’ classes for kids of Chinese heritage led to being labeled a ‘banana.’ Even though Mandarin was only one subject alongside every other subject that was delivered in English, I sought further refuge in the English-language theatre scene, aided by a prestigious boys school education. Only after leaving did I have an appreciation for the bilingual and unique bicultural perspective I’d gained, perhaps at the cost of stunted socio-political awareness.
Most of my work treads this overlapping territory in ways that cite and satirise recognisable Western pop cultural influences through a postcolonial Southeast Asian lens. The most enduring example of this is Karaoke Massage, which deals with conflating expectations of both cultures. Dressed in a lab coat, as I sing English evergreens and top 40 hits over the top of a tissue-busting backrub, I actively resist a few narratives at once—of a corporatised Asian by co-opting stereotypical health service tropes but also using hegemonic Western pop against itself.
Later this year at PACT’s Tiny Stadiums, together with Kevin Ng at the Mook Gwa Institute, I will be shedding light on the rise of the diasporic Chinese middle class property obsession over Sydney’s urban landscape.
Selected articles
Boy on the edge of obliteration
Teik Kim Pok: True West Theatre, The Violent Outburst That Drew Me To You
RealTime issue #119 Feb-March 2014 pg. 38
Ljubljana: 1) Luka Princic & Jodi Rose, Bizovik Bridge, 2007, photo by Cym; 2) Luka Princic, mixing live sound under Bizovik Bridge, 2007, photo Jodi Rose;
3) Luka Princic & Luka Dekleva listening to the Bizovik Bridge, photo Jodi Rose; 4) Jodi Rose, T.R.A.C.E.S, Ljubljana 2010, courtesy the artist
Ljubljana: 1) Luka Princic & Jodi Rose, Bizovik Bridge, 2007, photo by Cym; 2) Luka Princic, mixing live sound under Bizovik Bridge, 2007, photo Jodi Rose;
Ljubljana was high on my list when I dreamed of Europe, after seeing the documentary Predictions of Fire, about the infamous NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) art collective.
My first visit is to perform at Break 2.3 Festival “New Species,” where I collaborate with video artist Luka Dekleva. Luka arranges a rehearsal at his apartment and we spend an afternoon playing bridge sounds and video with increasingly psychedelic effects, helped by the judicious ingestion of Medica, the local honey liqueur. Creative friendships and the evolution of projects through ongoing personal connections are the reasons that Ljubljana will always hold a place in my heart. That and the Medica.
My second visit is three years later and Luka has arranged a short residency through his music and festival production company CodeEP, with technical support from Kapelica Gallery and finance from the Ministry of Culture, Slovenia. We spend Christmas Day under the Bizovik Bridge, a cable-stayed structure in a bleak wasteland on the outskirts of town. Luka D, Luka Prinčič and I amplify the bridge and hold an impromptu performance for people out walking their dogs in the snow. The bridge is on the ‘POT’ Path of Remembrance and Comradeship around the outer edges of Ljubljana, commemorating the resistance and underground Liberation Front.
Our recorded material is processed and re-invented in a live ‘expanded’ cinema performance at plush refurbished cinema, KinoDvor. In celebration, the boys take me to Metelkova, the internationally renowned “autonomous cultural zone” created on the site of the former military barracks, now home to artist studios, galleries, bars and clubs. I am initiated into the secret “dark room” bar, Jalla Jalla and introduced to Slovenian Bear’s Blood. The homemade schnapps almost kills me, yet I make it back into town for a club night at K4.
I am thrilled to meet the boys again in Linz, where they are part of the featured Slovenian Art Scene at Ars Electronic and I am cruising the Danube with the European Sound Delta. We play an impromptu gig on the ESD boat and I am tickled to find that my name is listed on the wall of the international arts scene in Slovenia. (Here the performance on SoundCloud.)
Ljubljana’s beautiful setting, nestled between a fairytale castle and the Ljubljanica river, gives the city a great deal of charm. In winter there is a magnificent display of galaxies and comets through the winding cobbled streets, the alternative to Christmas lighting designed by one of the country’s most famous painters. The romantic story of Francè Preseren, Slovenia’s national poet, is commemorated with his statue gazing across Preseren Square. I suggest a stroll along the river to find antique bookstores, experimental fashion and fabulous cake at Kavarna Zvezda,14 Wolfova ulica.
On my third, and most recent trip I am there as co-initiator and facilitator of TRACES, a cultural exchange project funded by the European Commission with partners in Belgium, Lithuania, Germany, Finland, Hungary and Slovenia. We are part of EarZoom, Sonic Arts Festival organised by IRZU Institute for Sonic Research. Opening night of the festival ends on a high note with cocktails atop the Neboti?nik Skyscraper Bar, the first ‘skyscraper’ in Ljubljana. The mix of high culture, serious philosophy and friendly conviviality makes every visit a lasting pleasure. http://jodirose.tumblr.com/http://singingbridges.net
Berlin Wall and Jon Rose, stills from a film by Konstanze Binder 1990, Rosenberg Museum Archive
courtesy the artists
Berlin Wall and Jon Rose, stills from a film by Konstanze Binder 1990, Rosenberg Museum Archive
All you need to know about how bad the former DDR (East Germany) was can be gleaned from the official records of the victors of the Cold War and writers, such as Anna Funder, who have jumped on the band wagon and weren’t even there.
I lived in West Berlin from 1985, but spent much time in East Berlin—indeed I played a number of tours in East Germany. Yes, state sponsored concerts of free improvised music in concert halls, galleries, cinemas and clubs to full houses. My final tour before the place collapsed and the population committed political suicide, consisted of 13 concerts in 12 days, two matinees, and one day off—all paid generously in advance. Of course, if I had been strumming three chords on a guitar and singing about the limitations of the East German government, I would never have gotten the gig. But as it was, “free” improvised and experimental music was considered art by the authorities and thus acknowledged an important part of state culture and community. East German musicians could travel abroad as cultural ambassadors.
My escapades back and forth over the border between West and East, clothed me in the garb of a bit character in a John Le Carré novel—alternative realities, loaded double meanings, Cartesian sign posts, the yellow haze of the smog blowing over the wall from the East and a strange twilight world of opportunities, surreal misunderstandings and dangers too, occasionally. I was once arrested for crossing the border with my 19-string cello. As the guard at Check Point Charlie pointed out to me, “That’s not a cello, a cello has only 4 strings! Do you think we are all stupid over here?”
My experiences and stories from this time could fill a book, but we live our music and culture so much in the past these days, I’ll stop right there. http://www.jonroseweb.com
Rebecca Lane (flute), Aviva Endean (clarinet), Jonathon Heilbron (bass) and Matthias Schack-Arnott (percussion), Quiver, performing David Young’s ‘Not Even Music’ in Berlin-Weissensee, 28 June 2014
courtesy the artist
Rebecca Lane (flute), Aviva Endean (clarinet), Jonathon Heilbron (bass) and Matthias Schack-Arnott (percussion), Quiver, performing David Young’s ‘Not Even Music’ in Berlin-Weissensee, 28 June 2014
Saturday 28 June 2014
7:00am Up early to go for a run, followed by morning skinny dip in the lake (Weissensee literally means ‘white lake’) that gives this district of Berlin its name.
8:07am Breakfast Skype with a Melbourne friend to debrief about shows I’ve seen this week which included a chamber opera by Sciarrino, a radical reimagining of Purcell’s The Faery Queen by Helmut Oehring and then a reconstruction of Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus invention, The Triadic Ballet. Haven’t even scratched the surface of what Berlin offers up every week.
11:12am Wander around my local village, the ‘Componisten Kiez,’ where all the streets are named after composers (Bizetstrasse, Smetanastrasse, Schoenberg Platz). Wind up in Weissensee Jewish Cemetery, ancient, ivy-covered and (according to the caretaker) bigger than the Vatican City.
2:00pm (Australian) Quiver Ensemble arrive at my apartment to rehearse “Not Even Music” a new piece I’ve just composed employing watercolour as graphic music notation. Rebecca Lane (flute), Aviva Endean (clarinet), Jonathon Heilbron (bass) and Matthias Schack-Arnott (percussion) tackle it with their usual passion, openness and virtuosity.
5:47pm People begin to arrive for the house concert. Ute, a photographer, has brought her own thermos of tea. Enrico, a dance therapist, has brought brochures for his Samba workshops. Meggie, a curator, has brought wine and a bunch of exotic weeds. Soon the kitchen is packed, the living room is rearranged, windows are flung open, cushions and rugs repurposed.
6:29pm The world premiere of “Not Even Music” lasts 42 minutes and coincides exactly with the Chile-Brazil World Cup match, so the neighbours don’t even notice the thunderous crescendi. Post-performance exuberance ensues.
9.04pm Find myself in a bar in Neuköln, half of which is in police lockdown due to a standoff between the city council and refugee squatters. Machine guns everywhere.
Twin Cinema: Four Devils and a Woman in Red, 1) Bridget Crone, Lily Hibberd 2-4) Yallourn Theatre demolished, memory screen; Commissioned by NETS Victoria for The Cinemas Project curated by Bridget Crone
photo Din Heagney
Twin Cinema: Four Devils and a Woman in Red, 1) Bridget Crone, Lily Hibberd 2-4) Yallourn Theatre demolished, memory screen; Commissioned by NETS Victoria for The Cinemas Project curated by Bridget Crone
Over more than a decade, artist Lily Hibberd has developed an impressively polymorphous practice, ranging from painting to installation to playwriting, filmmaking, live performance and bookmaking; and from gallery-based, individual endeavour to collaborative, community-centred projects. A prolific creator, she also founded independent contemporary arts publication un Magazine (http://unprojects.org.au). Her interest in cinema traces back to her 2003 work, Blinded by the Light, included in the CCP’s Art + Film exhibition (see RT57).
For curator Bridget Crone, Hibberd was an apt choice for The Cinemas Project, in which five artists worked in regional Victorian sites and former sites of cinemas. Crone paired Hibberd with the Regent Theatre in the isolated Latrobe Valley town of Yarram, one of few locations where the original cinema still stands. The project resulted in Twin Cinema: Four Devils and a Woman in Red, an exhibition of objects and memories at Latrobe Regional Gallery, 4 Devils, Hell and High Water, a play in six acts and an enigmatic silent film, both performed by local residents.
Hibberd was keen on Crone’s suggestion of Latrobe Regional Gallery. It’s a former cinema site and you can still see the proscenium if you know where to look, Hibberd says. “Both of us thought of it as an echo…I’m very interested in memories that have been apparently fragmented or dispersed over time; so attention to something lost brings a kind of productive memory to bear on the community.”
Hibberd has been concurrently working on an IASKA Spaced 2 project with the communities of Punmu, Kunawarritji and Parnngurr in the Western Desert and the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct Memory Project, with formerly incarcerated women (see RT121). “I’ve become more interested in being, not necessarily the author of all the work…[but] producing, I guess, provocations through the work. So that people will be able to be involved and engaged and actually be creators too.”
In the Latrobe Valley, Hibberd found that the process of ‘mining memories’ over 18 months or so brought up more than coal. “There were deeper waters there,” she says—mythologies that seemed to arise not just from shifting industrial histories, or the valley’s frequent, intense fires, but also, in Yarram itself, from regular flooding. “The history of water in the region is played out through the theatre. The building itself has pressed metal panels around the balcony of Neptune [the Roman god of water]. It’s like you walk in there and that’s the first thing you see—and I thought, water, right!”
4 Devils, Hell and High Water, a play in six acts, commissioned by NETS Victoria for The Cinemas Project curated by Bridget Crone
courtesy the artist
4 Devils, Hell and High Water, a play in six acts, commissioned by NETS Victoria for The Cinemas Project curated by Bridget Crone
The Regent began to gather a wider story than the cinematic memories which range across half a century from its first commercial screening of FW Murnau’s 4 Devils in 1930 to its last, The Woman in Red, in the 1980s. “The theatre was built by this amazing woman, Margaret Thompson…Her first theatre was called the Strand [now demolished], and, on the first occasion when I had a gathering, people came and were sitting in the Regent, and I was saying, ‘Tell me what you remember’—and people were like, ‘Oh we thought we’d come to talk about the Strand.’ Every time I tried to do this, people talked about the thing that had disappeared or been lost or taken away: it was where they wanted to deposit, in a way, their story.
“You’ve got this doubling of the thing that is apparent, and the ghost or the lost thing. We’re talking about a lost industry, a lost history, lost towns—Yallourn [home of the Strand] was completely razed when they realised there was coal underneath. So that process when people started to talk about the Strand, which was no longer there, instead of the Regent [which is], well this is a very powerful mnemonic force.”
Twin Cinema: Four Devils and a Woman in Red, Lily Hibberd installation shots, commissioned by NETS Victoria for The Cinemas Project curated by Bridget Crone
courtesy the artist
Twin Cinema: Four Devils and a Woman in Red, Lily Hibberd installation shots, commissioned by NETS Victoria for The Cinemas Project curated by Bridget Crone
The cinema, says Hibberd, has historically been a crucial social space in regional towns, “the connective tissue” that binds people together. Moving beyond the ‘individual vision’ of art-making teases out not only community memories but deeper themes and tropes—such as that of displacement—aided by the “estrangement” that such a project facilitates, prising things out of their context and viewing them from a distance.
“So the Latrobe Valley is actually a huge development of economic madness. Like ‘dig it up and move it.’ And thus people’s way of dealing with that was really interesting. I wanted to put the people I was meeting in touch with themselves, to actually say well it’s not just about art, it’s about recognising what this social activity—cultural production—is that we’re all involved in.”
Lily Hibberd, Twin Cinema: Four Devils and a Woman in Red, Latrobe Regional Gallery, Morwell, Victoria, 12 April-8 June; 4 Devils, Hell and High Water, a play in six acts, The Regent Theatre and Gippsland Regional Arts, writer Lily Hibberd, director Darren McCubbin, The Regent Theatre, Yarram, 24 April; commissioned by NETS Victoria for The Cinemas Project curated by Bridget Crone; http://www.lilyhibberd.com
The Cinemas Project also features Brook Andrew (Bendigo Art Gallery, 12 April-1 June 2014), Mikala Dwyer (Mildura Arts Centre, 8 June-24 August), Bianca Hester (Coles Carpark, Warrnambool, 4-5 July), Tom Nicholson (Sorrento, Indented Head, Geelong and at Geelong Gallery, 6-9 July); http://www.thecinemasproject.com.au/
See RT122 for an interview with Bridget Crone for more about the Cinema’s Project
Ever-adventurous Sydney Chamber Opera is about to premiere Sydney-based composer Michael Smetanin’s Mayakovsky to a libretto by poet, novelist and critic Alison Croggon. Their subject offers these artists rich material—a life complex and confounding, revolutionary but, even in the revolution’s terms, rebellious.
Pre-revolutionary and Revolutionary Russia were culturally fecund times, abounding in new ideas, movements and artistic invention. Radical experimentation in all artforms gave revolution succour and inspiration amid horrendous power play and bloodletting until by at least the late 20s when it was absorbed into the State’s mainstream or more often banished—bodily to Siberia or bureaucratically to the outlawed, coverall category of Formalism. Some artists faded into alcoholic despair, some played by the rules or appeared to (as is alleged in the case of Shostakovitch), some were imprisoned or murdered, others suicided.
The poet, playwright and poster artist Vladimir Mayakovsky, who shot himself in 1930, was one of many artistic leading lights in the 1910s and 20s and one of the most famous. His commitment to the spoken word in his public recitations with his deep baritone voice, bardic rhythms and the vividness of his writing—prodding, assertive, tortured, rich in imagery cosmic and streetwise—made his art accessible and bracing. This, we must remember, was a time when in Russia and across the Western world, artists were self-declared prophets, socialist or fascist, waving the wands of new technologies, conjuring new futures, leading the charge as an avant garde, but ever espousing the fundamental power of the Word—spoken, sung, propagandised—and Word as Image—typographically radicalised and collaged in his collaborations with Rodchenko and Lissitsky. This was Mayakovsky’s art.
Agitator and martyr
Mayakovsky’s friends described him as gigantic, anarchic, volatile. Maxim Gorky recalled meeting the young poet: “I liked his verses and he read very well: he even broke into sobs, like a woman, and this alarmed and disturbed me. He complained that a human being is ‘divided horizontally at the level of the diaphragm.’…He behaved very nervously and was clearly deeply disturbed. He seemed to speak with two voices, in one voice he was a pure lyricist, in the other sharply satirical. It was clear that he was especially sensitive, very talented, and—unhappy.”
He also saw himself as a martyr. Marjorie Perloff describes Mayakovsky as a “poet-saviour” in his poem “Cloud in Pants” (1915): “I’ll drag out /my soul for you /stomp it flat /so that it’s giant /and, blood-soaked, bestow it—a banner.”
His most famous poem Listen! is finally reassuring (“Listen, /if stars are lit, /it means—there is someone who needs it.”) but only after first conveying the abject horror of a cosmos without stars: “in the swirls of afternoon dust, he bursts in on God, /afraid he might be already late. /In tears, /he kisses God’s sinewy hand /and begs him to guarantee /that there will definitely be a star. /He swears /he won’t be able to stand /that starless ordeal.” Smetanin’s librettist Alison Croggon (this is her fourth work in collaboration with the composer) says that she “picked up the poem Listen, and extended it as a metaphor through the libretto” (Limelight Magazine, 13 August, 2013). As you’ll read in the following interview, Michael Smetanin has made use of Mayakvosky’s actual voice.
Mayakvosky’s fragility is everywhere evident in his poetry (and the upheavals of his life—centred on the torturously prolonged emotional ties to “the muse of the Russian avant garde” Lili Brik, who rejected him after 1923) alongside self-aggrandisement, self-deprecation and abjection.
The poet’s voice
Appropriately for an opera about Mayakovsky, this emotional tension is felt strongly in respect of his voice. His pride in it is evident in lines from a variety of poems: “the velvet of my voice,” “then shall I speak out /pushing apart with my bass voice the wind’s howl,” “I shake the world with the might of my voice,” “I /the most golden-mouthed /whose every word /gives a new birthday to the soul,” and “If /to its full power /I used my vast voice /the comets would wring their burning hands /and plunge headlong in anguish.”
However, in “Violin and a little nervous,” the deep baritone, “cried out, “Oh, God!” Threw myself at her wooden neck, “Violin, you know? We are so alike: I do also Shout— But still can not prove anything either!”…“You know what, Violin? Why don’t we—Move in together! Ha?” Often in Mayakovsky we sense the uneasy co-existence of two voices, two personalities, and no less in his political life.
In “At the Top of My Voice,” he expresses his pain at having to submit himself to the dictates of the Revolution, “…I subdued /myself, /setting my heel /on the throat /of my own song.” Nevertheless, as he did until his death, he commits himself to Communism, even imagining himself raising high his Bolshevik Party Card—one he never had. As Gorky observed, Mayavosky was a man two voices; they gave his poetry power and personality and reflected the painful dialectic of his life and politics.
I met Michael Smetanin at the Sydney Conservatorium where he teaches composition and music technology. The composer’s career includes two operas with Alison Croggan, The Burrow (1994) and Gauguin (2000), his superb music for the wonderful 2000 Adelaide Festival production of UK playwright Howard Barker’s eight-hour The Ecstatic Bible (directed by Barker and Tim Maddock) and a host of idiosyncratic orchestral and chamber works of great power.
Vladimir Mayakovsky
The interview
What attracted you to write an opera about Mayakovsky?
Mayakovsky is close to my heart in terms of my family background, which is Russian. It goes back a good way to when I discovered books on Mayakovsky at the Soviet Bookshop down the Haymarket end of Pitt Street back in the mid to late 80s.
I didn’t really know about Mayakovsky. He’s well known by schoolkids in Russia. Stalin said that Mayakovsky was his favourite poet but didn’t understand his poetry and really despised him. I think the fundamentalist regime and the fundamentalist apparatchiks didn’t like Mayakovsky and tried very much to keep his lifestyle under wraps because he was not a good example for the worker. Pre-Revolution Mayakovsky and other artists were under the impression that the Revolution would bring them a new freedom for intellectual exploits. But in actual fact, we know it was the opposite. It was not so bad under Lenin but when Stalin took over it was. Stalin was already looking over Mayakovsky’s shoulder before Lenin was gone. He was already a marked man.
If Mayakvosky hadn’t suicided, perhaps he wouldn’t have lasted anyway.
Well, it depends which Russian you speak to whether they think it was suicide or the NKVD, the precursor to the KGB, got him. It might have been a hit or it might have been suicide. Mayakovsky certainly did attempt suicide earlier in his life, even in his teens. So he was a big sack of contradictions, which is interesting.
Are those contradictions just one thing or everything that grabs you about him?
A lot of people say to me, well you’re a big sack of contradictions yourself. That’s me. I think that I kind of—I know I’d never met him and all that and he was dead before I was even born—but I had an almost spiritual connection with the man. And then seeing some of his films…He was a strong, robust type, a handsome guy, smoked like a chimney, drank copious amounts of whatever he could get his hands on, womanised a lot. Although an important feature in the opera is the ménage a trois he had with Lili and Osip Brik, I don’t think it was ever three-in-a-bed stuff. And once again, it depends on which Russian you speak to as to whether you believe or not that Mayakovsky might have been a convenience for Lili to make her own existence more tolerable. Being so close to him she did get visas to travel abroad. Just her connection with someone so famous was obviously going to get her some favours.
How have you focused this interest in the contradictions in the opera? Obviously they offer a lot of opportunities.
It’s very rich ground. The first photograph of him I saw was one in which he had a shaven head. So he looked like a 1920s Punk to me. All this strength and virility makes for a fairly strong score. There are tender moments—a love scene. There’s a lot of electronics in the score. All of my operas have them to some degree but this has much more. There are some eclectic moments, the little quotation, for example, of a Russian tune about a Christmas tree in Scene 3, which is a Futurist Christmas party where the apparatchik Svedova is being taunted by the other guests. It’s an electronic scene.
There are various versions of the attitude towards Futurist sound in the 20s and what it was: what actually is the sound of the future? In Mayakovksy’s play The Bedbug (1929) there’s a Phosphorescent Woman character who says we’re going to travel to the future 100 years from now, which could have been 100 years from the date that Mayakovsky recorded his poem Listen!, which is this year. So [in the score] it’s a combination of these things—almost like Futurist noise music with metal sheets and electronic music’s pure sine and sawtooth waves.
Vladimir Mayakovsky
photo Alexander Rodchenko
Vladimir Mayakovsky
This was the era of the theremin, wasn’t it?
Yes. At the beginning of the work are sounds using those pure waves, which conjure up the notions of futuristic electronic music, but of the 1920s and 30s, very, very early stuff.
What about the fragility of Mayakovsky’s character? He was incredibly self-aggrandising and could be very abject on the other hand.
Yes, there’s a lot of that in the libretto. Mayakovsky’s alter ego is a character in the work, called The Author, no name, nothing. The Author is a tenor and Mayakovsky has to be a baritone. So there’s a kind of duality there but they’re one and the same. That’s addressed in the text and the interaction between the two characters is musically underpinned where it’s necessary in the dramatic flow of the work.
I read you did spectral analysis of a recording of Mayakvosky’s voice.
[Another aspect of] technological newness, if you like, was to include in the score Listen! (or Poslushayte!), a famous poem by Mayakvosky. Every Russian knows it. He did a recording of it in 1914. It’s 52 seconds long and unfortunately the first couple of words are missing from the recording. The first word is Poslushayte! and it is used again at the end of the poem so I’ve just assumed he said it the same way. The spectral analysis of that poem I’ve stretched out for the length of the opera. So the spectral analysis of Mayakovsky reading his own poem provides the harmonic pathway for the entire opera.
It’s not intelligible then as spoken text, but as sound?
You can take the spectral analysis and have a piano score printed out from it. And the piano score also has a rhythm. So when that rhythm is stretched out those time proportions are apportioned to and through the libretto and to carry it. And the actual pictures of the spectral analysis are used to inform the harmonic pathway.
Did this pose a challenge for your librettist, Alison Croggon, to write to it?
The challenge was for me to…
… create the spaces?
Yes. There were at least 11 drafts of the libretto before the final draft which was edited together after I’d completed the score—a few words changed here and there, that kind of thing. So the harmonic direction is imbued by Mayakovsky’s own voice. This is actually explained at the beginning of the opera. There are projections of some texts by Mayakovsky read by the actor Alex Menglet and the actress Natalia Novakova reads the part of the Phosphorescent Woman. Then a little while later there is an explanation read by Natalia as well—of the fact that a spectral analysis made of the 1914 reading shows that C Sharp is the fundamental of Mayakovsky’s voice. Using a different application to do the analysis, it could have given me a C Natural, perhaps—who knows? But that C Sharp appears a lot. It opens the opera.
Are there other characters?
There are six singers. Mayakovsky, Lili, The Author, a high baritone who sings Lenin and Stalin and a few chorus moments, and another singer who plays Lili’s sister Elsa who sings chorus. And then there is the Svedova, an apparatchik.
What about the instrumental ensemble?
It’s relatively small. There are two saxophones, horn, trumpet, trombone and one percussionist. There’s amplified piano and one player doubling on electric guitar and bass guitar. And there’s the fixed media, the electronics.
Is there a political dimension to your approach to Mayakovsky? He did write a lot of propaganda and he was quite a determined Bolshevik in some respects but on the other hand he was the total opposite.
Well, he was never a member of the Party. He was known as the poet of the Revolution. He did poster art for them. The Party itself he despised.
But he went with it.
It’s like the Nuremberg Trials; just trying to survive.
Like Shostakovich?
They don’t issue too many pencils and pieces of paper in Siberia. You know how many people perished there? Both sides of my family had to deal with all that stuff, with Stalin and his enforced famine. It was dreadful.
There was an attempt to make a film about Mayakvosky’s life in 1973 in Russia but because it used footage from films [Fettered by Film, 1918, in which he co-stared with Lili, and The Lady and the Hooligan, in which he acted with her again and co-directed, 1918] showing him as a hooligan and a lovelorn loon it was refused funding. This was at the same time the State was building a museum to an idealised Mayakovsky, opposite the KGB building.
Yes, that’s what he played in his films. He was a big Charlie Chaplin fan.
So what does Mayakovsky represent? Is he like all of us, trapped in the very same contradictions, if less violently?
He symbolises everybody’s struggle with politics. We have our own troubles here. And the average person has more trouble than the rich. After the Revolution, the rich were very quickly supplanted by new people in power who got plenty of whatever they wanted. For artists, for intellectuals, people with their own minds, Mayakovsky’s a great symbol. Unfortunately he gave up early. It was 1930 and he was about 36. He could easily have lived on into the 1980s.
And maybe would have been a living inspiration to Yevtushenko and other Russian poets in the 60s who revived his spirit and the power of a dissenting public voice.
You just wonder what might have happened.
Sydney Chamber Opera & Carriageworks, Mayakovsky, composer Michael Smetanin, librettist Alison Croggon, conductor Jack Symonds, director Kat Henry, designer Hanna Sandgren, lighting Guy Harding, AV design Davros; Carriageworks, Sydney, 28, 30 July, 1 Aug 8pm, 2 Aug 2pm
At the back of a gravel car park in suburban Adelaide, sandwiched between a church and high-density housing, sits an unremarkable outbuilding in which one of the city’s most distinctive arts organisations, Kneehigh Puppets, has taken root. Known for its giant puppets and large-scale, spectacle-based public engagement, the nearly 20-year-old company has carved out a colourful niche in multidisciplinary Community Cultural Development practice through successive local, regional, national and international commissions.
Now rebranded as Open Space, the company has a new artistic director and CEO, Dario Vacirca, who was appointed the successor to long-serving AD Tony Hannan in 2012. Conceptually, the transition has been evolutionary rather than revolutionary, broadening the company’s practice—the only curatorial criterion is that the work must be outdoor-based and engage open space—and deepening both its relationship with innovative practitioners and anti-privatisation politics as emblematised by the Occupy movement.
Quadrupedism Saves!, Open Space, director Dario Vacirca*
Chloe Billebault
Quadrupedism Saves!, Open Space, director Dario Vacirca*
Art is political
Politics are on everybody’s mind when I meet Vacirca for coffee. Tony Abbott’s first budget has just come down, slashing $60 million from arts and cultural development funding, another $68 million from Screen Australia and the Australia Council. “In the short term,” says Vacirca, “we’ll cope. In the long term, I get extremely concerned about what our government and neoliberal governments around the world are trying to do to more socially responsible and compassionate human activities of which the arts is at the fore. I worry about what those polices are really going to do to our practice and hence our human relationships in the long-term.”
It is, I put it to Vacirca, a vexed time for practitioners whose work is predicated not just on government funding but also on access to public space. Ours is an era marked by the retreat of the public sphere and the ascendancy of state and corporate interests in shaping the aesthetics and power dynamics of our common spaces. The draconian policing of these spaces to protect private interests is a global and intensifying phenomenon, exemplified in this country by the anti-protest laws which came into effect in Victoria earlier this year. As I write this, legislation is being debated in the Tasmanian parliament that could result in non-violent protestors facing mandatory imprisonment. Says Vacirca, “Our public spaces and our public sector supports are both disappearing. They are being supplanted by big secret activity and pop up spaces. All this language is around how real estate is being managed by corporates and by government. There is always a monetary transaction. It’s about deals between institutions and corporations.”
I wonder aloud if Open Space’s artists could thrive without government funding, outside of this increasingly closed system. “No fucking way!” is his emphatic reply. “One of the main things I’ve been talking about a lot in terms of the transition from Kneehigh to Open Space is that Open Space is not a market-driven organisation. It’s artist- and collaborator-driven. In order for us to be non-reliant on government support we would need to slowly develop back towards a more market-driven enterprise. But I don’t think that markets alone are strong enough to evolve the economy, let alone artistic engagement.”
Terror of N, Belle Bassin, Open Space associate artist, (pictured Dario Varirca)
courtesy the artist
Terror of N, Belle Bassin, Open Space associate artist, (pictured Dario Varirca)
New programming paradigms
Open Space’s model consists of two discrete but interconnected “realms”: the core artistic program, under the moniker Shifting/Renaming, and the artistic associate (AA) program. The former, closer in spirit to the company’s roots, encompasses work that is both large-scale and long-term, building on extant relationships with artists, communities and organisations in Australia and overseas. At the moment, however, the company’s focus is on the AAs, the group of interdependent artists—Belle Bassin, Emma Beech, Nadia Cusimano, Paul Gazzola, Sarah Neville, Fee Plumley and Lukus Robbins—whose small-scale CCD projects will define Open Space’s first phase.
Says Vacirca, “It’s really up to the AAs to decide how they want to use the program—what they want to give to it, how much they want back. It’s an energy exchange.” The group will engage through quarterly meetings, skill-sharing workshops and a continuing physical and online interchange of skills, resources and ideas. “It’s an open space for critical dialogue. It’s about making the artist feel supported and secure but it’s also about challenging them. If somebody comes to me and they have a dance work that they want to do I will try and work with them to turn it into not just a dance work but also a video work and maybe a participatory ping-pong show—if it works conceptually!”
The most high profile of the core artistic program’s current projects is Fee Plumley’s opensourcehome, an iteration of her reallybigroadtrip project, a government- and crowd-funded experiment in “nomadic creative digital culture” which takes place on a roving big red bus and across a multiplicity of online platforms. For the duration of opensourcehome, the bus, called homeJames, will be moored at various shared space locations around Adelaide, subject to the application of move-on powers. Other projects, still gestational, include Gina, a large-scale puppet work that will see the Australian mining magnate’s infamous poem “Our Future” transformed into a libretto, and an arts lab and series of supported residencies on a sheep station in the remote Flinders Rangers.
From Winter To Window, Open Space & USD (Korea), director Dario Vacirca*
photo Dario Vacirca
From Winter To Window, Open Space & USD (Korea), director Dario Vacirca*
Uncategorical
Vacirca has been making collaborative, community-focused, cross-disciplinary work of this kind for years, but a sense of what has been lost clearly haunts him—the relatively high levels of state-based funding which existed 20 years ago and the ability and willingness of arts bodies to talk directly to artists and to develop a language around the arts that is responsive to continuously evolving and emerging forms. “What I’m trying to do with Open Space,” he tells me, “is make it a little bit fairer for some of the artists who fall into the gaps between those traditional categories—literature, theatre, dance etc. In the next couple of years we’ll see more artists coming in who won’t even be able to say what art form they are and my aim is to accommodate those artists and those kinds of conversations. As soon as it is named or understood by the economic powers, whoever they are, it is gone.”
Open Space, Marden, Adelaide, Fee Plumley’s opensourcehome will take place in front of the Queens Theatre, 22-24 July including the Open Space Launch Party; http://open-space.org.au
Image background
*2. A quick response public intervention artwork as part of What Does the World Need to Hear by Alex Desebrock in Brunswick, Melb. Vacirca performed via proxy from Adelaide and used a remix of Brother Theodore’s rant on the arrogance of bipedalism in a protest against all levels of institutionalism dictating the framework around our search for truth. (the other side of the sign said – Science is not science)
*4. From Winter to Window is a performance for public private spaces using new and old technologies to create an uncanny experience for multiple individuals simultaneously. Exploring intergenerational trauma through war time slavery. Created for the Asian and Australian touring circuit, this is a collaboration of Open Space with USD and Ludi (Korea), and Well (Vic). Open Space hosted USD for one month where we underwent first stage development. The work is now poised for further development in October 2014, seeking full presentation between Aust and Korea in 2015.
A few years ago a stranger was moved to write to me in praise of a review in which I’d described a work by BalletLab’s Phillip Adams as fuelled by “obsessive self-indulgences.” My correspondent went further, labelling the same piece “the most self indulgent load of tosh that I’ve ever had to endure! So much so that I will never again go along to see anything that involves him.” I replied explaining that my words had been intended as objective description, not negative criticism, and that those same self-indulgences had also produced some of the most unexpected and daring experiences of my theatregoing career. The writer took this into consideration, and decided to give Adams another chance.
He might want to start with BalletLab’s latest, LIVE WITH IT (we all have HIV). The work is an extraordinary collaboration with more than 50 community participants who have been “infected or affected” by the virus and has been co-created with visual artist Andrew Hazewinkel. Where Adams’ previous work has always been, by his own admission, relentlessly “Phillip-centric,” LIVE WITH IT has seen him consciously forgo his customary position as master and commander in favour of something new. “Not allowing me to be a director feels like it’s the next step,” he says, and suggests that what he is instead doing is closer to “curation, in some ways.”
LIVE WITH IT began with a series of workshops last year followed by one-on-one developments with participants and the July showing will see a series of five or six 10-minute auto-portraits by participants offered each night, drawn from an overall pool of 20 such works. The forms of these portraits range from movement to spoken word, video and pre-recorded audio.
“It’s not Phillip’s vision and it’s not my vision,” says Hazewinkel. “It’s somehow a shared vision which is distributed between all of the participants and ourselves in this kind of strangely morphological way. It’s the experiences that we’ve had the whole way that have revealed what each of these co-authored self-portraits are. They’re not our portraits of these people.” That challenge to Adams’ own method is itself paradoxically typical of his practice, he says: “It wouldn’t be a BalletLab work if I wasn’t challenged and educated in the process. Otherwise I’m just regurgitating the same postmodern canon of shit.”
Adams’ work has always been grounded in real research while drawing inspiration from topics far from the mainstream—the cult dynamics of Miracle (RT93) and Tomorrow (RT114), Aviary’s bird-watching and millinery, Axeman Lullaby’s woodchopping (RT87) and the furry fetishisations of Brindabella (RT83). All have been Adams’ attempts at speaking to personal moments of obsession, and LIVE WITH IT is also informed by his own experiences. Adams lived in New York from 1988 to 1998, during which period his partner of the time contracted HIV/AIDS and died. “I have the passport and the license to talk to the epidemic in the way that I experienced it.”
LIVE WITH IT : We all have HIV, project rehearsal
courtesy the artists
LIVE WITH IT : We all have HIV, project rehearsal
At the same time, the very form of the work is an attempt to transcend atomistic thinking about HIV. As the provocative subtitle We all have HIV suggests, the work is not simply concerned with relaying the experiences of individuals so much as drawing attention to HIV as something shared across time and space. Hazewinkel is uncomfortable with terms such as “community art” and instead likens LIVE WITH IT to the Beuysian notion of the “social sculpture” in which the art, artist and audience are all part of the same organism.
Importantly, the development of the work involved time spent in regional Victoria. The discourse around HIV is often inflected with an implicit sense that it is an urban disease. But, says Adams, “In the country I felt that the people who talked [about] this are less anxious to talk. I don’t know what that’s about. There’s a real sense of Australian country town community.”
Conversely, the devastating effects of HIV AIDS in Africa is frequently divorced from local experiences of the same disease, something connoted by the work. “Without going into a 90s ‘We are the World’ way of thinking, there’s a sense of a unified, global humanity where we all have it,” says Hazewinkel, “whether we’re a rich western country with the latest treatments available or if we’re a much poorer African country where even if you’re lucky enough to get hold of treatments it’s stuff that people here moved away from nine years ago.”
The globalised context of the work is juxtaposed with a focus on “the Australianness of it,” says Hazewinkel. “One of the things we’re trying to do is present really intimate, microscopic, poignant Australian experiences of HIV within a broader aggregate of Australian culture. So we look at the Australian relationship (to HIV) over the last 30 years. It’s contextualised with data that comes from high and low culture, politics, sport, that somehow frame the intimate experiences.”
Those personal experiences, however intimate, do speak powerfully of the ways in which more than 30 years of HIV have seen us all “infected or affected” and have resulted in “scars, enlightened moments, stigmas,” says Adams. One such story from a LIVE WITH IT participant offers a moving illustration. On the eve of the new millennium, a Melbourne woman decided to go to a New Years Eve party in the Docklands. “She rocked up with her friend and they thought they’d go out and have a whizzbang time. She was on the dance floor and having a good time and all of a sudden there was a dude in a Grim Reaper suit.” In 1988 the then 24-year-old had returned from Europe having contracted Hepatitis B and HIV. “She was told she had four years to live,” says Adams. “Imagine being a young woman given this news in 1988.” Twelve years later she was confronted with one of the most impactful icons associated with the AIDS epidemic, right there on the dance floor.
The result? “She danced with him all night,” says Adams. “That is facing 12 years of the infection to the point where she can talk to it literally on a disco floor. And she loved it.”
Phillip Adams BalletLab, LIVE WITH IT (we all have HIV), concept, co-direction, choreography Phillip Adams, concept, co-direction, design Andrew Hazewinkel, with community participants from Melbourne and regional Victoria, Arts House, Meat Market, 17-27 July; http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/ARTSHOUSE/PROGRAM/Pages/LiveWithIt.aspx
Zaimon and Lizzie Vilmanis, White Porcelain Doll, Prying Eye
FenLan Photography
Zaimon and Lizzie Vilmanis, White Porcelain Doll, Prying Eye
Prying Eye was founded by Zaimon and Lizzie Vilimanis in 2010 to develop “live contemporary performance” with sumptuous visuals that promise to generate “goose-bumps” (www.pryingeye.org). The company’s monochrome aesthetic, filled with deconstructed silent film tropes, creates an eerie, post-gothic world that incorporates character and psychology and shuttles between performance-making, movement and dance theatre forms. They are currently working on their debut full-length work, White Porcelain Doll, which will make its much-anticipated premiere at the Judith Wright Centre for Contemporary Arts in late July.
The inseparable pair are partners in art and love since their days as ensemble members in Expressions Dance Theatre in the noughties. When I met them in the leafy courtyard of a local cafe to talk about White Porcelain Doll I resisted asking them any ‘prying’ questions about what it must be like to make an intimate two-hander exploring the darkest and most terrifying emotional context—that of a captive/kidnapped woman and her predator—with your own partner. However with typical élan the pair raised the issue themselves, talking candidly about how the project didn’t start with this brutal scenario, but actually began in 2010 as an experiment in collaborative process. Lizzie and Zaimon wanted to explore how they might work with each other as co-directors and co-choreographers rather than as fellow dancers in an ensemble, also trying not to fall into a traditional dancer/choreographer relationship. The project, A Likely Distrust, was born with a Fresh Ground Residency at the Judith Wright Centre in 2010, collaborating with video artist Ryadan Jeavons and laying the foundation for much of the visual palette of their work.
While there were a number of subsequent residencies, it was only a return to Fresh Ground in 2013 with most of their existing creative team in place that, as they put it, “the work revealed itself.” In the mysterious alchemy of these creative epiphanies the gestural language and the compelling guttural vocal score that had emerged found a place within a specific narrative: the enclosed and isolated world of captor and captive.
Zaimon and Lizzie Vilmanis, White Porcelain Doll, Prying Eye
FenLan Photography
Zaimon and Lizzie Vilmanis, White Porcelain Doll, Prying Eye
Despite the violent and voyeuristic nature of the material they have consciously decided to focus on the feminine arc of survival in the piece, searching for images that explore not simply the isolation and domination of captivity, but also the resilience and imaginative capacity required to negotiate that environment by the female victim. Neither wanted to give the game away about the work’s conclusion but they did say that the intention is to provide some sense of hope.
Their term to describe the form of White Porcelain Doll is “Silent Theatre.” As they describe it, the piece is a series of intensive image-based vignettes, like the flickering chapters of early silent films. The guttural language they have developed filters into the piece only through voice-over, supported by a haunting piano composition. The elegant and technically assured dance practice of Lizzie Vilimanis is complemented by Zaimon’s brooding stage presence and their ability—rare in contemporary dance performers—to move comfortably into the realms of character-based movement with depth and integrity.
The model of Bruce McKinven’s set design is spine-chilling in its simplicity: a platform, echoing the shape of a grand piano that reads like a sound-proof box, floating in space. It’s surrounded by suffocating, blanketed material, hung in corrugations, able to be projected upon, but with a distorted, scratchy render that evokes the spooky aesthetic so redolent of Prying Eye’s visual iconography.
Zaimon and Lizzie Vilmanis, White Porcelain Doll, Prying Eye
FenLan Photography
Zaimon and Lizzie Vilmanis, White Porcelain Doll, Prying Eye
Making new work is a risky business, but there is a bit of buzz around Brisbane about this show. The long incubation period and the solidity of the creative team bodes well for a ripe work. Having said that, the first debut full-length work for a new company is always tricky and even the most careful processes can go awry.
Ultimately, what is distinctive about Prying Eye is the power of an artistic partnership that is so intensely personal. I think it is best summed up in an image of Lizzie and Zaiman I saw on the Leigh Warren Dance website (http://www.lwd.com.au/work.htm), uncredited but presumably from Lizzie’s time there as company member (2009-2013). They are locked in a fierce embrace, with Lizzie falling away but held safe within the concentrated grasp of Zaimon. Their glowing intensity is made playful by Zaimon’s foot, which sits incongruously in the foreground, emphasising the visual trick of the whole image: two bodies falling together as one.
Prying Eye, White Porcelain Doll, co-directors, choreographers Zaimon and Lizzie Vilmanis, composer, director of photography Ryadan Jeavons, design Bruce McKinven, lighting Dan Black, systems designer Tessa Smallhorn, dramaturg Veronica Neave, choreoturg Clare Dyson; Judith Wright Centre for Contemporary Arts, 26 July-2 Aug; http://www.pryingeye.org; http://judithwrightcentre.com
In First Grade my mother was called to the school to see a report I had written on Aborigines and the so-called White Settlement. The expected three lines had expanded into three foolscap pages—a lengthy amount for a six year old who barely spoke and now, on this topic, seemed to have a lot to say.
Since…Writing…thinking, making words, forming ideas, learning rules, then breaking them…still writing with a lot to say.
There were years and years of dancing and performing in a variety of collaborations across Sydney, while simultaneously completing a degree in Philosophy at Sydney University and making two pretty fantastic children. This led to a PhD in Performance Studies at Sydney; the teaching of dance and choreography at various universities; followed by a two year stint in the US where I returned to studies in phenomenology. I now research at the Centre for Philosophy and Phenomenology of Religion working on Husserl and the structure of belief, and continue to choreograph with a strong interest in dance dramaturgy.
Exposé
I’m no fiction writer or storyteller. Sometimes characters emerge, but I’m more likely to dress in drag or choreograph a dance than write a novel. Ideas and propositions outflank the fictional—it’s a result of the philosophy training. And yet I’m prone to poetics over clear language, taking any chance to burst forth from the pith to paint the page with images and rhythms. Review writing allows me to play with language in this way. Dance and movement are rich fodder for description. When watching we usually register what we see more than what we feel. Writing is the great emancipator of the felt.
Two current projects involve dance and writing. One is a remote choreographic process between two artists living in different cities sharing the beat of their lives in poetic correspondence for live performance. The second is with a photographer/animator moving along a line between Coast and Outback NSW, stitching word and image as cultural mapping. Writing has taken over. The chest concaves in a tucked computer asana slowly waving the studio floor goodbye…
Heidegger says that man poetically dwells. Dwelling here means no small deal for him. I like this idea (if not so turned on by others) and always find myself at home in language: I write and it’s me. Not because it mirrors who I am, rather it lets me turn towards the world with acute attention. Writing is an act of alterity that evokes understanding, so I practice daily.
Reading is part of this practice; it’s humbling. Sipping the music of language, moved by new rhythms, awash in images and provoked by ideas when reading. This is writing.
Selected articles
Dancing out of trauma
Jodie McNeilly: Samantha Chester, Safety in Numbers
RealTime issue #121 June-July 2014 32
