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February 2015

Tom Budge, Hugo Weaving in rehearsal, Endgame

photo Lisa Tomasetti

Tom Budge, Hugo Weaving in rehearsal, Endgame

The phone connection between LA and Sydney is bad, clipping the ends off Andrew Upton’s words, breaking up sentences and scoring the distant vocal with layers of crackling static, as if a solar flare was about to fry everything from communication networks to supermarket cash registers and home computers. Very apt for a discussion of Samuel Beckett’s blackly comic and emotionally unnerving Endgame (1957) with its post-apocalyptic scenario—one room, a master, Hamm, and servant, Clov, the master’s parents (Nagg and Nell) in rubbish bins, no provisions, seeds that won’t sprout and a grey world outside with few if any signs of life. Hamm declares, “You’re on earth, there’s no cure for that.”

Upton, shortly to direct Endgame for the Sydney Theatre Company, tells me that he and Hugo Weaving, who played Vladimir superbly in the director’s production of Waiting for Godot for the STC in 2013, relished the experience, impelling them to take on Endgame. They see it, says Upton, “as a kind of shadow play to Godot, picking up on the Pozzo and Lucky dynamic and exploring it in more detail and in a very different way, in the form of Hamm and Clov.” Their relationship is very complex. Hamm’s power over Clov is diminishing; he seeks compassion from Clov while persistently abusing him, and both recognise their co-dependency, wishing it, and sometimes their lives, gone.

Upton recalls, “One of the things that surprised us was the warmth inside Godot. There’s less of it in Endgame. We’re not looking for warmth in a saccharine sense but what’s so particular to Beckett, a kind of love he has at the heart of his work, flawed though we humans are.” That will be no easy task; the dialogue overflows with deadly one-liners, bitter altercations and sudden changes to what Upton calls “the gradient of power.” But even though “power is all that is left” to the blind, incapacitated Hamm—exercised verbally—and Clov—will he carry out his threat to leave?—there are haunting exchanges about caring in particular between Nagg and Nell and Hamm and Nagg—in terms of childhood fears and old-age helplessness. Hamm wants to know if Clov loves him, asks for a kiss, wonders if it’s compassion that keeps Clov with him. Upton describes the play as “a beautiful microscopic study” of power and relationships.

We turn to time in Endgame; the sense of it is quite different from Waiting for Godot where the protagonists suffer it or try to fill it in. In Endgame, there’s a contrasting sense of busy-ness, despite the characters bewailing the tedium of their lives. Upton says, “There’s a lot more pressure, a sense that this is the last day, even if it’s not clear whether or not Clov will leave. Time in Endgame unfolds in a less loopy, floppy way.”

Andrew Upton and actors in rehearsal Endgame

photo Lisa Tomasetti

Andrew Upton and actors in rehearsal Endgame

I’ve always felt Endgame to be more palpably realistic than Godot, making it a very different play. Upton thinks that “there are those who see Beckett through the false lens of Theatre of the Absurd. These people in Endgame are in very real circumstances; they’re just not the circumstances we know; they’re very real to them.” He adds emphatically, pointing to the difference between reading a play and producing it, it has to be real for the actors: “Giving in to each moment and being alive in each, however abstract it may be, needs a really concrete centre for the acting. At one level Beckett’s writing is poetry, at another it’s crazy naturalism—it’s a beautiful theatricality that Beckett sets up.”

Hamm and Clov could be living in a post-apocalyptic world. Alternatively, they could have withdrawn themselves from a world that they did not find accommodating. Hamm recalls visiting a mad engraver and painter in an asylum “before the end of the world.” When the artist looks out the window he sees only ashes. Hamm comments, “the case is not so unusual.” Upton thinks, “it’s a point at which an abstract space, like the end of the world, can become really clear for an audience, about what you’re ignoring or in denial of, in many different ways—that’s the power of the play. It’s one of those plays that will always be timely, but I feel it’s very timely for us because it’s about power and leadership, and it alludes to environmental degradation.”

With designer Nick Schlieper, Upton sees the world of Endgame as a vertical space, as opposed to Godot’s landscape horizontality. “We’re using the verticality of the Sydney Theatre to capture the narrowness of the world the characters inhabit, like a chimney almost. They’ve definitely made a home out of it although it’s not their home, rather an abandoned industrial space. With the height there’ll be a lot of business with the ladder.” (Ordered by Hamm, the limping Clov repeatedly climbs to either of the two high windows to report on the state of the world—he sees only flat sea through one and land through the other. Not ash, but it might as well be). The design’s verticality of course corresponds with the power theme.

As per the insistence of the Beckett estate there’ll be no music (“the language is already so musical!” says Upton) but the writer’s spare, meticulous stage directions will be honoured and Max Lyandvert’s sound design will evoke a world outside, “some sense of the ocean stretching away.”

Finally, Upton says, “we want the characters to be a real family,” not a quirky Wes Anderson family per se, but one inspired by its kind of eccentricity—for which there is fuel aplenty in Endgame.

Sydney Theatre Company, Endgame, writer Samuel Beckett, director Andrew Upton, performers Robert Menzies, Sarah Peirse, Bruce Spence, Hugo Weaving, designer Nick Schlieper, Sydney Theatre, 31 March-9 May. Upton’s production of Waiting for Godot tours to the International Beckett Festival in London this year.

RealTime issue #125 Feb-March 2015 pg. 37

Murray Arts Staff (L-R) Jo Bartels, Karen Gardner, Vivien Naimo and Carolyn Martin Doyle (Maggih Coates not pictured)

photo Natalie Ord, Manifeasto Photography

Murray Arts Staff (L-R) Jo Bartels, Karen Gardner, Vivien Naimo and Carolyn Martin Doyle (Maggih Coates not pictured)

Karen Gardner is Regional Arts Development Officer and General Manager of Murray Arts, whose contributing councils comprise the across-the-border collaboration of Albury City, Corowa and Greater Hume in New South Wales and, in Victoria, City of Wodonga, Indigo and Towong. With a population of some 130,000 citizens (2.3% of them Aboriginal) spread over 17,755 square kilometres, it’s a region which, as Gardner tells it, is very active in the arts but with much more potential to be realised.

Gardner tells me she fell in love with theatre when she was 16 and did a degree at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst—“So I’ve always felt a connection to regional arts and I’ve always been quite passionate about being able to experience the arts in regional communities.” She subsequently worked on arts events in the Millennium and Olympics cultural celebrations, but “when the job came up at Murray Arts my husband and I moved from Sydney to be here. And it’s wonderful.”

Give me some idea of what Murray Arts does in the areas of facilitating, nurturing and connecting.

I see us having a dual role; one of these is about building community capacity and that’s almost twofold in that it’s about supporting and nurturing artists to live in regional areas. It’s also about building the capacity of the community to be involved, to facilitate and undertake their own arts projects. So there’s our community capacity but then I very much see us having a role as creators and producers of work as well. We undertake our own arts projects and try to make them happen in our region. There’s a whole lot of other stuff but those are the two key areas [as well as] an information and communication role, an important part of what we do—newsletters, the website and social media. And then we run a lot of partnership projects as well; workshops—all those sorts of things.

Let’s talk about some of the projects that you’ve initiated or are on the way.

Last year we organised a big project called the Holbrook Yellow Submarine. We yarn-bombed the HMAS Otway in Holbrook, which is a full-sized submarine [donated to the town which was named after a British submariner. Eds] and we made it yellow with knitting. We got a lot of coverage—national and international—and donations. It was a huge project that connected a very small community to the whole world. It crossed ages and timelines, crossed the nation, crossed the world. And I think what we got most out of it was people’s connection to place. When people sent in their donations of yellow wool—because we were relying entirely on people to contribute to this project—it would often come with a little note. Some people just thought it was a fun and quirky idea but lots of people had a connection to the submarine in some way. They had relatives who’d served on the submarine. Someone said, “When he was learning to walk, my son took his first steps on the HMAS Otway.” It offered such a lovely insight into the lives of a community.

Who were the artists involved?

We were the project managers and we had three artists (Libby Alexander, Donna Pinder and Michelle Oxley) overseeing, making sure the installation of the submarine looked fantastic. We had thousands of donations. One was 17 metres long. Others sent tiny squares. And they were all sewn together by a small army of volunteers and then installed. Just to give you some idea of the scale, the submarine is 90 metres long by 8 metres high and the whole thing was yellow!

What other projects have you taken on?

Last year we produced We Are All Made of Stardust—an arts and science project linking astronomy and charcoal drawing. We arranged a series of science lectures on the night sky and invited an Aboriginal storyteller, Leonie McIntosh, to come in and talk about Indigenous interpretations of the night sky. Then we had artist Zhen Chew do charcoal drawing and create a series of animations to re-animate the stories that people had learnt through their night sky viewing. Western interpretations of the night sky are about the constellations themselves whereas Indigenous interpretations are also about the black space in between. So you get nice contrasts in meaning. To get those stories across and re-tell them, the community participated in these big charcoal drawings workshops.

And you had a good turn-out?

Huge! This time we went to some of our smaller communities where we hadn’t worked before. A particularly memorable one was out at Savernake, which is a couple of hours from Albury. We told one person that we were coming and 70 people turned up. Savernake is very much a farming community. There’s a school, a community hall and that’s about it. Some drove from an hour away to be part of the project. The whole school took part, all 16 of them. It was such a beautiful community event. We put on a barbecue and took the telescopes out and, of course, the night sky out there is just huge. It was just a really great community response to that project

Karen Gardner, Bronwen O’Shea (ABC Goulburn Murray) and Chris Coleman (ABC Riverina)

photo Natalie Ord, Manifeasto Photography

Karen Gardner, Bronwen O’Shea (ABC Goulburn Murray) and Chris Coleman (ABC Riverina)

It’s a reminder not only of the vastness of the heavens but the distances that are involved in your region. You have to bring people together who live miles away from each other or go to them.

That’s right. We do a lot of professional development workshops as well but one of the big projects we have coming up this year is a transportable art gallery. We’ll have a small gallery set-up that is completely able to fit either in the back of a car or be towed by the Murray Arts car. Again, we’ll be able to take that to some of our smaller communities where people wouldn’t necessarily come in to see a show at Albury Art Gallery or they might feel intimidated going into a [conventional] gallery space. We’re also working on getting some nice digital content to support a curated exhibition of contemporary art from our region.

Something that extends the life of the exhibition once it’s moved on?

Yes, and also makes it more interactive. We’re working with an app that when you put it over the artwork will allow you to take a tour of the artist’s studio or to see an interview with the artist.

What are the other principle activities you’re involved in?

Another of our key activities is around Aboriginal arts development: we have a part-time Aboriginal Officer, Maggih Coates. Over the last few years we’ve been working very closely with Aboriginal artists to provide them with opportunities to exhibit and sell and create profiles for themselves. We arrange an annual group exhibition and then support individuals as we go along. One thing that’s on our agenda for this year is moving our office and having a shopfront that will be a permanent exhibition and sales place for local Aboriginal artists. It’s become very obvious is that there’s no place to buy Aboriginal art in our region. That’s a real gap in the market and this space will meet that need.

You have Flying Fruitfly Circus and Hot House Theatre but what’s the region like in terms of artistic density?

I think we’re very blessed. As well as those professional companies you’ve mentioned we’ve got the Murray Conservatorium, Albury Regional Gallery, which is under re-development but there’s also Arts Space Wodonga. We have two performing arts venues as well. So in terms of infrastructure we’re very lucky. We also have a lot of practising artists, probably mostly visual artists, in our community. I think one of the challenges for us is that while we do have two universities, neither offers a specialised arts degree any more. So in terms of actually bringing new artists into the region at tertiary level, especially at that cutting edge/experimental level, that’s something that’s not happening.

There are also the cuts to TAFE, which are problematic for everyone everywhere.

That has definitely affected our region as well. TAFE is doing the best they can do and it’s not that we don’t have any new or emerging artists that are coming through. I think it’s that ‘pushing the boundaries’ stuff that universities are able to do and bringing new people in—and then they stay. That’s what’s really critical. What we try to demonstrate to artists is that you don’t need to live in the city to have an arts career, an arts practice. It’s something we try to showcase, to provide support for those artists here.

What about people with disabilities?

As producers, a few years ago, Murray Arts did a project called The dis/assemble Dance Project for dancers with and without disabilities. We have an amazing choreographer, Tim Podesta, who works internationally and just happens to live here. He choreographed these works with his full-time dance students and others who had been working with Margot McCallum—another amazing dancer we have here—for five or six years prior to their coming into the program. Although that project as a whole doesn’t exist any more, its legacy lives on in some of those dancers with disabilities now attending Tim’s studio and Margot continues to work with a group of dancers who perform. Albury City has just recently done a project, which was a collaboration and mentorship involving five artists with disabilities and five without. They produced some amazing pieces. So, yes, there are lots of things happening.

You’re covering a lot of council areas and a very big and diverse population. Is there a sense of cohesion between all the different agencies? And you’re straddling a state border as well.

We’re unique in terms of regional arts and I think it’s symbolic of the region itself in that it really is a cohesive border community. We have a health system that works cross-border—Albury-Wodonga Health. The community sees itself very much as a region. And I think we’re incredibly lucky that the councils are very open to working with one another. We’ve just been a partner in a NSW project that got Museums and Galleries funding. It’s a partnership between Murray Arts and our three NSW communities to explore identity through community museums. And then we’re working with three of our Victorian councils to pull together another project. All the cultural development workers come together on a pretty regular basis.

So the councils have their own arts workers?

Some do, some don’t. The two big councils of Albury and Wodonga have cultural teams and a cultural development officer. One of our other councils has a cultural development officer; one has a community development officer. There are two smaller councils that used to have community development officers but those positions haven’t been replaced. There’s a very collegiate atmosphere and people are not too possessive about ideas.

What are the kinds of things you long for? You’ve already talked about the need for specialised arts degrees at universities and a wish that TAFES were better off.

They would definitely be on the wish list. I think we would love to see some kind of permanent Indigenous cultural centre. We’re somewhat on the way to that, but it doesn’t really have the funding to operate in a full-time professional capacity.

I would love to see more cutting edge artists choosing to live in regional areas, to explore their practice here. With the NBN and social media artists might see that there is a lot that regional areas have to offer.

Murray Arts, www.murrayarts.org.au

RealTime issue #125 Feb-March 2015 pg. 26-27

Jacob Lehrer, David Corbet, Entanglement

photo Gregory Lorenzutti

Jacob Lehrer, David Corbet, Entanglement

The inaugural MoveMe Improvisation Festival celebrates improvisation across dance, music and performance in Perth. Bringing together international, national and local performers and audiences, each performance carries the exciting sensation of spontaneous creativity. All three reviewed works share a key feature of fundamental trust, allowing performers to pursue creative risks on stage.

The Ferrymen

The Ferrymen is an engaging dance improvisation featuring strong comedic and theatrical elements. Andrew Morrish and Peter Trotman have been working together since 1981, and a strong sense of comfortable trust underlies their sparkling frisson of improvised movement. They embrace chatty text as part of their practice, opening by exploring the titular premise of Ferrymen. From a coracle to larger vessels, detouring by way of the motion of oars and the advisability of white men articulating their pelvises, Morrish explores various types of ferry and operator movements with the observation that the inducement that “there’ll be sex at the end” will persuade men to try anything. The talkative monologue at front of stage is echoed in the freestyling moves of Trotman making the most of the black box space, quietly working his way across the back of the stage.

The performers unite using mime for light-hearted development of ideas, with eyes popping dramatically, whether to provoke audience reactions, restrain personal amusement or both. One running gag involves the lack of expense in preparation, featuring a phone with an attached speaker providing water sounds, even at the risk of affecting those with “urinary tract problems.” Further jokes focus on dance themes and interests, appreciated by the audience packed with dancers. A particularly long monologue is interrupted by the audience, resulting in some good-natured anti-heckler ripostes, but quickly picks up physical pace and energy.

Ad hoc props are employed, such as scaffolding as a series of embarkation gates for Hades. New ideas are generated constantly, whether philosophical conceits, spoken patterns or movement devices, including a new way of communicating through slaps, stamps and claps.

The Ferryman is a constantly whirling combination of whimsy and discipline, producing some movements sharper and more compelling than achieved by more pedestrian choreographed works. When energy levels fall, performers and audience wait together to see what will arise next. Like a crystal forming from Morrish and Trotman’s love of the artform, fed by their experience and confidence, the work branches in myriad and random directions. It comes to an abrupt halt in some aspects and yields fractally complex and satisfying results in others, leaving the audience with the memory of a unique experience, beautiful and bizarre.

Entanglement

Working with contact improvisation, using modelling from quantum mechanics as a jump-off inspiration, Jacob Lehrer and David Corbet’s Entanglement presents improvised movement and soundscape growing together. All the movement is video-streamed to laptops, allowing musicians to work with software systems as well as piano and trumpet to develop a responsive tone picture.

Lehrer and Corbet are strong dancers, creating fascinating displays of trusting physical exploration and interaction in conventional balancing and pivot-based movements, bodies being swung around then closely entwined. Both demonstrate remarkable control when walking over and standing on each other, even balancing with a face as footrest. Controlled reactions and non-reactions add surreal dimensions to these moments. In another feat of strength and self-control, dance lifts using the folds of skin around the belly, looking like an attempted bare-handed appendectomy, yield revulsion and admiration in equal parts.

Quantum mechanics, particularly the notion of Entanglement, “the states of two or more objects have to be described with reference to each other, even though the individual objects may be spatially separated” (press release), features in both dance and musical motifs. The dancers repeatedly echo each other’s movements from across the room and physically react at a distance. Audio artists Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey develop and repeat themes as the dance unfolds, an incredible achievement in real time.

Lehrer and Corbet are working in the moment and with their performance space. Rehearsal Room 2 at the State Theatre Centre rejoices in floor to ceiling windows, its view framing Perth’s Horseshoe Bridge with its ornate lanterns, the city skyline and passing traffic with lights moving past. These frames are used effectively to create silhouetted tableaux, and movement outside appears to trigger changes in movement on the stage.

A fantasy in movement and sound, Entanglement explores the possibilities of strength, movement and sound without any need for trivial communication between the parties, not even eye contact. This level of confidence and skill in improvisation is inspiring.

Happy Little Accidents

Happy Little Accidents presents theatrical improvisation, with Perth actors stepping up in response to challenges presented by the audience and bouncing ideas off each other to create spontaneous comedic entertainment. Shane Adamczak, Sam Longley and Sean Walsh are leading lights of the local improvisation comedy and theatre scene, most recognisable from The Big HOO-HAA! The performers are confidently fluent in improvised theatre, this presentation featuring carefully calculated timing bringing out the humour in each madcap scenario.

Despite an introductory explanation of the importance of audience contributions, the performers’ skill at conjuring strings of skits and scenes from a single word means that not much is required after the initial prompt—“bubbles.” The basic stage set-up—an empty frame, a water cooler and chairs—plays on height differences and vivid imaginations creating plenty of happy little accidents in diverse scenarios that include office cubicles and an internet blind date.

While some scenarios overstay their welcome, there are no breaks in the action. With lovely camaraderie nothing seems forced, nothing taken too seriously and the performers don’t push for any major narrative arc. Each vignette is self-contained and enjoyable on its own merits, the series of accidents coming together as a whole. Longley, the MoveMe Festival MC, who had pointed out the absence of dance skills in the cast, draws laughs with a physical comedy/freestyle interpretive movement routine.

A welcome addition to Perth’s festival line up, MoveMe Improvisation Festival provides plenty of inspiration and entertainment for both performers and audiences.

–

STRUT National Choreographic Centre & collaborating organisations: MoveMe Improvisation Festival, 22-30 Nov, 2014; The Ferrymen, PICA Performance Space, 26-28 Nov, 2014; Entanglement, Rehearsal Room 2, State Theatre, 27-29 Nov, 2014; Happy Little Accidents, PICA Performance Space, Perth Cultural Centre, Northbridge, 25 Nov, 2014

IOU3

In the most engaging of the New Breed and IOU3 programs, Tanya Voges takes the text of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum, “the shape of the text of the page,” especially punctuation, as the score for her work, …and the pendulum, to a score by James Brown and narration by Damian Asher. Although not a literal evocation of the tale, Voges’ escalating, geometrically precise pendulum-like movement, her chalking of the floor (reminiscent of the protagonist’s fraught intuitive marking out of his frightful cell), a video-ed aerial view and Brown’s tense score cumulatively point to the horror behind apparent order. Voges claims in her program note that she intended the patterns of the work’s various scores would “generate movement.” However, her highly articulate dance and melded sonic and visual imagery suggest more than abstraction.

Emily Amisano writes that in her piece, in between dog and wolf, she is reflecting on the tension “between ‘the call of the wild’ and civilisation.” Her approach is metaphorical, engaging with a length of rope with which she has an ambivalent relationship, a kind of co-dependency in which it ties her down or she leaves it, only to return. But the connection between body and rope is not clearly established and some of the movement appears surplus to meaning, weakening the force of her metaphor.

Adam Synnott and Lisa Griffiths’ film existence (made with Jason Lam), was “inspired by nursing their newborn.” The couple cradle and rock each other to a minimalist score in low light and in various formations, several of them intriguingly complex (caught in motion and as stills) as limbs move about bodies seeking security, locking in to form odd humanoid shapes. In Naked Habit, Timothy Ohl and Gavin Clarke tackle drug addiction with a light touch and a multitude of props (including puppets) and effects that limit cohesion and choreography, but amuse.

Kristina Chan’s adrift looked promising, her body wracked, slipping and falling, tossed about by unseen forces—forcefully embodied in James Brown’s thunderous score and Guy Harding’s flashes of lightning—but there was little sense of structure or of a clear approach to the “buoyancy, weightlessness, surface tension and turmoil” Chan wished to convey in her short performance.

Craig Bary and Joshua Thompson’s Without Concept aimed to “abandon both concept and theatrics” in favour of unadulterated “formalism, exploring dance as a medium.” As the two super-fit, agile bodies moved dextrously from discrete solo selves to mirror images to entwinement and mutual support, a kiss, sinking into one another and separating, there was much more played out than aesthetic abstraction—with humour and intimacy and sometimes interesting dancing. The audience were palpably entertained.

As with the Keir Awards, New Breed and IOU3 offered no revelatory choreography, although Tanya Voges’ …and the pendulum (save for its excess of voice-over narration) proved to be the strangest of the works, structurally the strongest and the one with the most potential. The seasons were nonetheless very welcome testing grounds for new choreographic talent deserving more opportunities to realise their vision.

Sydney Dance Company & Carriageworks, New Breed, Carriageworks, Sydney, 4-8 Nov; Performance Space, IOU3, Carriageworks, 12-15 Nov, 2014

RealTime issue #125 Feb-March 2015 pg. 30

There are many strange things about Belgium—its entirely artificial birth, its role as the seat of the European Union, its dysfunctional regional politics, down to the way in which, on a regular work day, the whole country becomes one uniform traffic jam, causing delays as far as Germany. But the strangest must be that Belgium has, on top of its many peculiarities, also claimed the title of global centre for contemporary performance—in particular, dance.

Such centrality is, in other places and at other times, usually explained with some combination of economic power, important cultural heritage, long-sighted and proactive support for the arts, or at least a presence of wealthy patrons. Belgium is the home of many of the most important performance-makers today, yet it has none of these: it is a modestly performing economy with not much wage differentiation, its arts policy is chaotic and cultural history unimpressive (with the remarkable but all the more confusing exception of graphic novels, where Belgium also leads the world). Sure, there are obvious advantages: it is incredibly central (an hour or two to Paris, London, Amsterdam and Berlin). It is cheap and easy-going, allowing for an artistic existence free from the grinding stresses of Paris or London, and the Belgian culture at its best seems to have serendipitously combined the understatement and detail-oriented mindset of Northern Europe with the Latin love of art, fun and appreciation of the fundamental messiness of life. Still, these circumstantial benefits do not amount to an explanation.

Going to theatre in Belgium, I often wonder about the role that performance plays in this country. The audience, as we know, does half of the work in theatre, but the investment of Belgian audiences in the theatre event is hard to discern. The works I have seen have had neither the political urgency nor demand for societal dialogue that permeates German or Balkan theatre, nor the blatant entertainment value of British theatre, nor the torturous national self-examination that occupies contemporary Australian performance. Instead, there’s a laboratory-like focus on research, that seems to be appreciated for its aesthetic (rather than political or philosophical) qualities. I am guessing that some modicum of regional identity is expressed and consumed through the performance encounter—most of the contemporary greats are Flemish (not Wallonian), supported by the Flemish theatres.

Augustus ergens op de vlakte

Case in point: Augustus ergens op de vlakte (“August somewhere on the plains”) is August: Osage County by another name, directed by Tom Dewispelaere and Stijn Van Opstal of Antwerp-based performance collective Olympique dramatique. I cannot overemphasise the public and critical appreciation for this production, which was visually unremarkable (no three-storey house, though) and structurally extremely faithful. I was told that the translation was exquisitely colloquial, seamlessly transforming this Great American Play into a Great Flemish Play (Johnna the Native American servant spoke with a Dutch accent). Certainly, greater emphasis on physical comedy and a more shrill register of anger distanced the production from the more measured Steppenwolf original (and, beyond any doubt, from the humourless film version). My personally applied Brechtian distantiation resulted in deeper insight into the clunky, predictable mechanics of Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer-winning play.

Rosas, Partita 2

Partita 2 is a collaboration between Ann Teresa de Keersmaeker, the icon of European contemporary dance, Boris Charmatz, its rising star and violinist Amandine Beyer who performs live on stage, occasionally being swept up into the choreography.

While Charmatz’ interest in free improvisation meshes finely with De Keersmaeker’s relaxed and minimal choreography, the concept is resolutely hers. De Keersmaeker has been revisiting Bach for years now—a composer whose baroque compositions are pure structural perfection, understood better as mathematics or engineering than as anything to do with emotion or narrative, and as such an unusual choice for dance—finding ever more subtle ways of illustrating, or amplifying, his musical structure with extremely simple (but never austere) movement, based on natural body movement (“my walking is my dancing,” she says).

Partita 2 opens with Beyer (I think) performing the first four movements of Bach’s Partita for Violin n.2 in 20 minutes of complete darkness. Then De Keersmaeker and Charmatz arrive to execute a choreography in complete silence (this is revealed to be the choreography for the fifth movement, the renowned 15-minute Chaconne). Finally, music and dance come together in a unified reprise. It is a fascinating gesture of courage, to substitute one of the most famous pieces of music ever written with its dance interpretation. It is even more mesmerising, however, to watch an extremely simple, almost-amateur-looking choreography repeat to music, and realise that it minutely and precisely responds to intricate musical patterns. De Keersmaeker and Charmatz walk and run in circles, hold hands, fix or discard clothing, retrace each other’s steps, or, in a most memorable sequence, stand with their four feet in the same spot and slowly cantilever one another to the ground, then back upright. These are gestures of warm-up, of rehearsal, not of a finished piece—and yet, the cantilevering sequence, in which Charmatz naturally spends more time upright than the much smaller and lighter De Keersmaeker, is revealed to be organising the forces of inertia and gravity in perfect sync with Bach’s 60-or-so variations to a four-measure structure.

Partita 2, with its total absence of narrative, illustrative emotion, or humour, is the sort of piece one should only attempt to see when very rested and prepared to focus deeply—its delight is entirely in the structural relationship between Bach’s composition and the choreography. Appreciating the Chaconne alone requires depth of musical understanding. This is dance for nerds.

Rosas, Golden Hours

Partita 2, which had premiered at Kunstenfestivaldesarts in 2013, could already be understood as the closing paragraph of a long artistic journey. Golden Hours, premiering in late January 2015, signalled the opening of a new chapter. This time working on the Rosas ensemble, De Keersmaeker is still using the principle of illustrating deep structural principles of a minutely studied score with extremely simple movement; but now she has turned her attention to pop music, bringing together Brian Eno’s album Another Green World (1975), and Shakespeare’s As You Like It, while the movement is now working from the principles of social interaction (“my talking is my dancing,” she wrote).

In practice, De Keersameker closely translates Shakespeare’s play into movement that illustrates sometimes interactions and sometimes the linguistic content of the text. One gets the impression that each line of Shakespeare is present in the choreography. A ‘narrative’ is present on stage, but the text is clearly used primarily as a score, to organise the dance structurally. The transposition, thus, verges on intentionally idiotic: monologues and dialogues become solos and duets, statements become gestures. Eno’s album also underpins the work, emerging more visibly in the second half, where entire scenes are replaced with his songs (with two organisational principles revealed in turns, Golden Hours repeats the formal solutions of Partita 2).

A Shakespeare scholar would, I suspect, get enormous pleasure from reading Golden Hours as an analytical essay on As You Like It. A De Keersmaeker fan, likewise, could follow her trajectory into ever more simple movement, illustrating scores ever more outside the traditional musical pieces for choreography. Yet, on the surface, having turned a play into 2 ½ hours of interpretive dance, oddly close to literalism, Golden Hours closely resembles really bad art.

The premiere of Golden Hours happened amid the news that La Monnaie, the Brussels opera house, may stop funding contemporary dance [impelled by state budget cuts. Eds]. It will inevitably politicise this work: De Keersmaeker’s career developed through her 23-year residency there, and Golden Hours will be taken as an example of work that can no longer happen. However, Golden Hours is the sort of work that needs less, not more publicity: it is a first step in a new direction, coming from a mature artist whose work is now characterised by hermetic exploration of form. It should not be asked to represent a cause, but allowed to develop.

From Belgium is a new column by Jana Perkovic covering performance and dance in Brussels.

Augustus ergens op de vlakte, writer Tracy Letts, direction Tom Dewispelaere, Stijn Van Opstal, co-produced with Toneelhuis, KVS, NTGent, KVS 3-12 Dec, 2014; Partita 2, choreography Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, production Rosas, Kaaitheater 19-21 Dec, 2014; Golden Hours (As You Like It), choreography Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Kaaitheater, Brussels, 23-31 Jan, 2015.

When we talk about taboos there’s usually the frisson of the forbidden. There’s a fascination that seems to draw its energy from the tension between repulsion and freakish curiosity, but in most cases it’s because bestiality or cannibalism or whatever British MPs get up to behind closed doors is so far from our own experience that we can peek at the awfulness without getting too close. The subject of Bryony Kimmings’ latest work is billed as a taboo topic, but if it doesn’t carry that same crackling electricity, it’s all the more daring for it.

Before proceeding, a caveat. Kimmings is one of the most provocative and exciting artists working in the UK today, and she could make a story about auditing your taxes into something hilarious and heart-wrenching in equal measure. I can’t think of a more promising talent to take on the topic of male depression without falling prey to the pitfalls of therapy theatre, righteous sermonising or ‘boring but important’ art.

Fake It ‘til You Make It

Fake It ‘til You Make It sees Kimmings sharing the stage with her partner of seven years, Tim Grayburn, who has never performed before. Six months after they moved in together, Kimmings found a packet of anti-depressants in Grayburn’s backpack and what followed was another six months in which they discussed what had led him to keep from the world the fact of his depression and anxiety for close to a decade.

“We went through this whole process of battling with this conditioning that he’d obviously had since he was a child,” she says. “Most men probably have, where it appears weak to have the crying disease. He was pretty much the classic locked-box geezer, and we spent a lot of time going backwards and forwards about why that might be. Just exploring. After that six month period I think he’d come around to the fact that actually talking about it made it 50 times better just in itself…He was suddenly like ‘I feel so liberated, I cannot believe I just spent eight years hiding it. I need to pass this information on.’”

Before agreeing to make a performance with Kimmings, Grayburn presented her with four rules. The first was that it had to be about clinical depression and men (the only alternative was advertising, “and advertising would be the worst show ever,” she says.) The second was that Grayburn wouldn’t have to look the audience in the eye, which became its own artistic catalyst. “So he spends 50 minutes of the show with various things covering his head, from sunglasses to paper bags to these elaborate structures that we got our designer to make. Then right at the end he’s got the delicious opportunity to stand there, in that moment, and take that thing off.”

The third rule was that Grayburn got to learn to play the guitar and take professional lessons, which Kimmings admits was less a creative condition and more of a bribe she agreed to. The last stipulation he put to her was that “he always appear like a man’s man, ‘like Robert Redford in Out of Africa’.”

Male mental illness is really less of a taboo than a “public secret,” says Kimmings, and though statistics indicate that there are few lives untouched in some way by depression and anxiety these are still diseases too often suffered in private. Fake It features singing and dancing and the “usual plethora of crap” Kimmings introduces into her work, but the normalcy of its subject matter is what has proven most engaging. “Everyone really seems to like it when we just talk to each other like we do at home. Or there’s moments where he might trip me over, or I might get really annoyed with him for not putting something in the right place. It seems to be that part of the collaboration that’s actually the most interesting and most humanity-focused.”

A circuitous career

Kimmings’ artistic career has been a circuitous one. After finishing high school she found herself working an unfulfilling retail job at H&M and thinking, “I cannot do this.” But she “didn’t have any ambition and was a bit muddled up,” she says. She decided to enrol at London’s Brunel University (“I only went there because my friend went there”) and opted for a degree in Modern Drama Studies.

“Luckily it was like Marina Abramovic, Franko B, Anne Bean,” she says. “Essentially like a performance art studies course. I didn’t study a single text, never had to act, and lots of people dropped out going ‘what is this weird stuff?’ but I thought ‘this is amazing!’”

Upon graduating, however, she spent several years trying to develop work but to little end, due to “not really having much to say, I suppose.” She moved into producing and focused on dance, rather than performance art, since she’d seen others attempting to produce work in the same field as their own practice only to face resistance. In her 20s she became involved in the fertile London club scene that produced a crop of talented performance makers such as Scottee, but it wasn’t until the age of 29 that she premiered her own full-length show, Sex Idiot (RT120).

Six years later, that show is still touring (most recently at this year’s Adelaide Fringe). It’s an exploration of Kimmings’ own sexual history brought about by the discovery that she had contracted an STI, which spurred her to track down former lovers to discover its source. Each encounter led to the creation of a piece of performance, the collection of which make up the structure of Sex Idiot. The work is “such a navel-gazing show,” she laughs. “Luckily the things that happen in Sex Idiot, most people go ‘oh god, that’s me,’ to one or two of those things.”

Her more recent creations have escaped the threat of a similar inwardness by introducing collaborators such as Grayburn and her nine-year-old niece Taylor (in the astonishing Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model; see RT120). Works currently in development include a Theatre Complicite-commissioned collaboration with seven female cancer survivors to produce a musical that explores “the feminist story of cancer, the economic story of cancer, the race story of cancer,” and a Royal Court project working with young men from council estates across the UK who are usually the subject of villainised or criminalised stereotypes.

This act of expanding her practice by incorporating others has brought its own challenges. The day after Fake It premieres in Perth, she says, “I’ve already had to deal with the fact that it’s (Grayburn) that everybody wants to watch, not me. He’s the main character. I’m just the narrator, really, facilitating his story. Last night I came off the stage and thought I really don’t know my place in this work. I think I’m still figuring that out.”

Bryony Kimmings, Fake It ‘til You Make It, Theatre Works, Melbourne, 18 March-5 April

Since 2007, Adelaide’s ActNow Theatre has been quietly carving out a niche within the city’s capricious independent theatre ecology. Under founder and Artistic Director Edwin Kemp-Attrill, the company’s early, rough-hewn agitprop has given way to a distinctive brand of Boal-ian forum theatre that engages professional and non-professional participants in the creation of productions that are, in the main, devised, interactive and issue-based.

Zero Feet Away represents a digression for the company, situating its audience as members of a virtual rather than physical community. The shift is signalled by the name of the work—a reference to Grindr, the location-based social network for gay, bisexual and bi-curious men—and by the unusual injunctions that greet the audience as they enter the space: “Please keep your mobile phones switched on,” “Flash photography is allowed.”

Taking our seats, we are instructed to use our phones to log into a purpose-built web-based app that enables entered text to be projected onto one wall of the space. Predictably, a stream of nonsense appears as audience members familiarise themselves with the app’s interface. The anonymity is emboldening, the live feed swelling with expletives and amusingly disjointed words and phrases. A guitarist, Ben Flett, improvises warmly as director Kemp-Attrill and the performers, all of whom are young and male, and all but one gay, pass around a microphone and introduce themselves.

Our first task as audience members is to use the app to state our own sexuality. We are, unlike the performers, unseen and unaccountable as our fingers flit across our touchscreens and the breakdown is displayed on the projection wall. Other questions follow: “When was the last time you had sex?,” “At what age did you lose your virginity?” The answers feel variously mischievous, unreliable and confessional.

Confessional, too, is the word I would use to describe the frank, intimate monologues—each of which grapples with some aspect of the performers’ lived experiences of being gay—that form the work’s second mode of storytelling. At a time when HIV rates in Australia have reached a 20-year high, with young gay men most at risk of infection, it feels both brave and important that the majority of the monologues touch on issues of gay men’s health and recent innovations in the treatment of HIV such as post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP).

The work changes gears again as a multi-part segment begins in which our answers to a series of questions are used to construct the identity of a fictional character. An ad hoc mixture of popular vote and executive decision-making by Kemp-Attrill leads to the assignment of gender (male), sexuality (gay) and a number of personal preferences and life events which amount to a fluid biography. The exercise, though conceptually ambiguous, is enjoyable, but it is the show’s least mediatised moments that prove most compelling.

The final monologue is a harrowing account of an episode of sexual abuse. Our phones sit, useless and forgotten, in our laps as the air shifts under the weight of what is a moment of profound, unguarded generosity. The rest of the performers put out, one by one, the desk lamps that up until that moment had lent the show a homely ambience. In the ensuing darkness and silence, intimacy—and not its technologised simulacrum—feels to have been fully achieved.

ActNow Theatre, Zero Feet Away, directors Edwin Kemp-Attrill, Charles Sanders, performers Adam Carter, Andrew Thomas, Tyson Wood, Harry Bullitis, online app/manager Zoe Bogner, musician Ben Flett; Dance Studio 3, AC Arts, Adelaide, 14–16 Nov, 2014

Motherboard Productions’ Or Forever Hold Your Peace (The Story of Iphigenia) is a barricade-storming ensemble work that reboots the Iphigenia ur-story and Euripides’ classic play as a platform to explore the nature of political leadership, personal sacrifice and war. Motherboard’s collaborative and international process was once again on display in their adaptation of radical New York playwright Charles Mee’s Iphigenia 2.0.

Mee’s howling protest against the foreign policy of George W Bush draws on a mix of chilling and banal texts sourced from Wilfred Owen’s WW1 poetry, the field of ‘killology’ developed by former Colonel Dave Grossman and catering lists for US soldiers. Mee’s taut piece is set within the three days leading up to the ‘fake’ wedding organised to lure Iphigenia to the war front by her ruthless father Agamemnon. American/Australian dramaturg Morgan Rose and Motherboard director Dave Sleswick (see interview) skilfully ‘Australianise’ this premise through Iphigenia’s bridemaids: think Abbott’s daughters drunk at the races, with shoes and fascinators akimbo and you have something of the feel of the work and the colourful, deshabille aesthetic of Jennifer Bismire’s costumes. Peter Cossar’s menacingly besuited Agamemnon opens the show with Mee’s prophetic monologue: “I see that there are acts/ that will set an empire on a course/ that will one day/ bring it to an end.”

The pace and the passion don’t let up from that first powerful moment to the final speech of Iphigenia incandescently delivered by Steph Tandy as she embraces her matrydom: “What would you have me do, mother?/ Stay at home and make a decision/ about the draperies in the bedroom?/ Or get a job in some law firm?/Or do social work?/Or try to preserve the environment?”

We witness each of the key characters circling around the deep question at the heart of the work about the nature of public objection: will you speak out? Agamemnon agonises but never reneges on his original calamitous decision to sacrifice his daughter. His wife tries and fails to act. Achilles prevaricates. Only Iphigenia speaks out but she embraces rather than condemns the incomprehensible sacrifice demanded of her.

The cavernous set deepens this idea of political witness as we sit onstage with the performers, looking out over the raked, empty seating banks of La Boite, which are cordoned off by temporary fencing. The performance area is ringed by 12 narrow metal lockers, each as tall as the 16 performers who relentlessly patrol the stage in kaleidoscopic physical routines underpinned by the pounding and ominous soundscape by Dane Alexander. Indeed, when all of the physical and textual elements of the production are utilised, like the final scene where the wedding party at a long table watch Iphigenia die, the show is a tour-de-force, intimate and spectacular. Unfortunately, when it retreats back into movement exclusively, or when Mee’s original text strays too far from Euripides, as in the Bridesmaid sequences, there is a subsequent hollowness, as if this referential form needs all of its elements knitted together for us to experience the full weight of the damning critique.

La Boite Indie & Motherboard Productions wih QPAC, Or Forever Hold Your Peace (The Story of Iphigenia), adapted from Charles Mee’s Iphigenia 2.0, after Euripides, director Dave Sleswick, RoundHouse Theatre, La Boite 12-29 Nov, 2014

The Nest Ensemble returns to The Blue Room Theatre with a new didactic performance, immersing us in 1950s psychotherapy research. Based on Dr Bruno Bettelheim’s career-making case study, Joey: the Mechanical Boy examines the impact of a quest for academic fame. Dr B takes Joey for extended residential observation, writing that maternal detachment caused Joey’s abnormal development and behaviours. Dr B dubs Joey “the Mechanical Boy” for his affinity with machines and his mother a “Refrigerator Mother” for her cool distance.

Joey’s daily routines follow a numbered sequence, precise order providing reassurance in his laboratory residence, a recreation of his room at home that features a bed bedecked with cardboard to create an “airplane.” The pyjama-clad boy shares his most moving moments with his life’s most reliable fixture, a simple electric fan. Joey’s routines intermingle with Dr B’s exciting career trajectory, the larger than life lecturer bursting onstage to spotlit fanfare and applause, often referring to his studies with Freud and also, less exuberantly, to his experiences and observations in a German concentration camp, while Joey’s mother counts the days without her son. She quietly presents her lost loves, hopes and dreams as she waits and then on Joey’s return home, her rule of love and sacrifice removes scientific scrutiny and Joey learns the difference between “nice” and “interesting” behaviour.

Philip Miolin is amazing as the young Joey, the lost child thoroughly evoked through the actor’s use of motion and posture, particularly with Joey’s perched crouch as he watches the electric fan. The boy’s autism is conveyed through movement and stilted speech, with the evocative mask designed by Per Brahe creating a flat look of constant, baffled curiosity.

Margi Brown Ash plays both Mother and Dr B, a red clown nose distinguishing between her roles. Ash is dramatically strong as Dr B, German accent shaping the part, allowing his self-congratulatory shouting to gradually reveal self-doubt and suffering. As Mother, Ash is understated, with an underlying bitterness that nonetheless sees her love triumphing over clinical definitions that have defamed her motherhood.

Tessa Darcey rises to the twin challenges of set and costume design with clever solutions, capturing Dr B’s intellectual pretensions with a lectern for him built of books and creating a complex costume of found objects to emphasise Joey’s identity as the mechanical boy. Joe Lui’s dynamic soundscape features soothingly melodic mechanical noises and consistently responds to characters’ emotional states. Karen Cook’s lighting design defines distinct stage areas, with individual light bulbs magically responding to Joey’s “commands.”

Plenty of food for thought is provided in this intellectually challenging production. The closing twist, Joey claiming his life as his own rather than fodder for other people’s edification, throws the jarring, intrinsic wrongness of earlier events into even clearer focus. A satisfying denouement reveals Dr B’s reputation lost, his theories debunked and his personal history revealed, appropriately given his devastating impact on at least one family. The Mother’s open-handed forgiveness, accepting that Joey was born in an unfortunate era, tempers the harshness of karmic judgement. Set in the 50s, there are enough echoes of attitudes to mental illness, parenting and medical/social judgements to resonate with audiences now, providing as many insights as there are attentive audience members.

The Blue Room Theatre and The Nest Ensemble, Joey: the Mechanical Boy, director, co-writer, co-producer Leah Mercer, co-writer, actor Margi Ash Brown, actor, co-producer, set and costume construction Philip Miolin, set, costume designer Tessa Darcey, lighting designer Karen Cook, sound designer Joe Lui; The Blue Room Theatre, Perth Cultural Centre, Perth, 17-22 Nov 2014

A Broadway-style musical addressing the life and work of Gertrude Stein sounds about as likely as a Pixar film about Peter Greenaway. The high modernism of Stein’s writings was closer to Cubist painting and her project nothing short of a reinvention of the possibilities of language. To approach that legacy with the Great American Songbook in hand would seem sheer folly, but a recent Melbourne production of Frank Galati’s Loving Repeating proved a giddy upending of expectations.

The work was written by Galati and composer Stephen Flaherty in 2006 and premiered at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Melbourne’s Vic Theatre Company staged it as its inaugural production, and it’s one that should put the company on any critic’s map. Rigorously produced and boldly performed, it deftly constructs a house of cards that would collapse if any of its elements were handled inexpertly.

It begins in biographical mode, following Stein’s early years studying psychology and philosophy at university before meeting Alice B Toklas, the fellow writer who would become her lifelong lover. Strict biography soon shifts into something more artful, however, as time refuses to play straight. Deirdre Rubenstein incarnates the elderly Stein, orating from a lectern, while several performers present both Stein and Toklas at various earlier ages. As these embodiments accumulate they do not divide their common figure into discrete eras or phases of life, instead singing to one another across time, and often sharing the playing space simultaneously. It’s a subtle device that gathers weight as Stein’s fascination with repetition and echoed phrases increasingly becomes understood not as mere technique but as an attempt to articulate an entire philosophy of being.

The choreography of the large cast (14 in all) also reflects the distinct patterning of Stein’s words. Movements reverberate across bodies with tiny variations, like a breeze rippling over a field of grass. At times the ensemble appears more like a kinetic sculpture, one moved by an internal motive force, again like Stein’s writing.

Most intriguing is the music, however. Given the formal iconoclasm of Stein’s work, one might expect that the mode of music theatre would here be deployed ironically, or that a postmodern deconstruction of the musical would take place. Not quite. This is a full-throated, melody and harmony-rich affair that incorporates vaudeville numbers, lovers’ duets, tango breaks. Almost all words are drawn from Stein’s own writing, here imbued with a spirit that seems to animate them in a way not always obvious on the page. A line whose repetition can seem to drain words of their connection to materiality—“a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”—instead emerges as a deeply impassioned engagement with the object world.

Loving Repeating leaves no doubt as to the potent musicality inherent in Stein’s writing. If there is any affront to the writer it may be that, unlike the reader’s response to her words, the audience’s is determined, even over-determined, by the character of the music. Yet it would be a rare reader who could conjure such memorable airs as have been composed here, and after the last note sounds it would be a rare audience member not compelled to revisit Stein’s writing and find anew their own music therein.

Vic Theatre Company, Loving Repeating: A Musical of Gertrude Stein, music Stephen Flaherty, text Gertrude Stein, adapted by Frank Galati, director Jason Langley, musical director Ben Kiley, Chapel Off Chapel, Melbourne, 21 Jan-8 Feb

The recent surge in the popularity of performance on institutional and art market circuits is at odds with its historical status as an alternative, ephemeral (and therefore unsellable) art form. Alaska Projects’ performance series, Restaging Restaging, represents a humble attempt to reconfigure this ideological inconsistency.

Over four Sundays in 2014, eight artists were invited to create 20-minute performances in Alaska Projects’ gallery space, located in the basement of a Kings Cross car park. In their notes for the show, curators Brian Fuata, Jess Olivieri and Sarah Rodigari describe their aim to present performances “with an earnest ideological purity of genuine interdisciplinary exchange.” The presentation of these works inside the curious car park space adds a raw energy to the execution of this project, enabling performance to regain some sense of its former status as an alternative underground art form, literally.

The final show in the series included a double-bill featuring two Melbourne-based artists, Matthew Linde and Atlanta Eke. In Spring Cleaning, Linde is dressed in grey and surrounded by common items of clothing scattered across the floor, along with haphazardly placed suitcases and coat racks. To a continuously changing music track, he walks calmly around the space, placing the clothes on racks and repositioning suitcases, and it is difficult to decipher a deeper structure or order in these gestures. Before long he begins using his feet—in white socks—to drag hats across the floor before placing them atop the coat racks, which gradually come to resemble clumsily dressed shopfront mannequins.

Linde is joined by five performers who sit or stand motionless, only moving sporadically to form new unassuming positions before becoming still again. Like over-enthusiastic children playing dress-ups, they wear too many clothes, with extra tops and pants wrapped superfluously around their limbs. Despite a shared occupation of the space, they remain conspicuously isolated from one another, never exchanging so much as a glance.

Linde is director of Melbourne’s Centre for Style, an exhibition and retail fashion space that blurs the line between gallery and commercial boutique. In Spring Cleaning, his purposeful yet ultimately arbitrary rearrangement of everyday clothes invites us to reflect on their purpose and worth. He calls into question the utilitarian value of fashion versus its art value, subtly interrogating the usually reified status of fashion objects and our relationship to them. And across them, perhaps also, our relationships to each other.

Another everyday object, the car, is reimagined in Atlanta Eke’s performance, The death of affect restaged with a return to the Japanese nude 2017. A beep announces Eke’s arrival on an advancing white car; the dancer sits on the bonnet, legs splayed pin-up model style. A loud crash sounds as she makes her way to the driver’s seat, but keeps the door open and bends her body forward with hair flung to the ground in a frozen posture that creates an oddly authentic portrait of a crash scene. In the stillness, audience members snap photos on their phones, like curious voyeurs passing by a freak road accident.

Suddenly, the car begins inching forward, propelled by Eke’s hands on the floor and assumedly an unlocked hand brake. What follows is a highly controlled pas de deux featuring human and machine. To the beat of stark, suspenseful music, Eke manoeuvres her car in all manner of ways: pushing it from the back; lying face forward on the bonnet with hands on the ground to move it in reverse; even dropping to the floor and pulling the car over her so that it covers her completely.

Soon Eke’s car is joined by a blue Toyota and a shiny white Audi, manoeuvred by three performers who stand beside their vehicles as they push and steer. This choreography feels brave and bold in the tight space and before long we lose cognisance of the human bodies steering them and focus only on the cars. I hold my breath as the Audi barely scrapes past a concrete pillar. The weight of the cars gives them a slow, measured movement, forming a dreamlike dance that is both playful and surprisingly moving.

Recently awarded the inaugural Keir Choreographic Award, Eke confirms the clarity and originality of her choreographic vision. As with the most successful site-specific art, this performance restructures our conceptual and perceptual experience of the car park space, which is progressively transformed into a concrete stage for dancing cars. The uncanniness this produces is humorously highlighted when another (real-life) car parks just up the ramp from the performance. It is a privilege to witness original work of such calibre in this unexpected space.

Director Jackson Davis informally introduces us to Lovely, a “ritualistic” performance he initially envisaged as a eulogistic solo (in a fat suit!) in honour of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman—“He’s always been my favourite actor and first celebrity crush”—but which became a large-scale collaboration with fellow members of re:group performance collective, PACT’s 2014 Artists-in-Residence, utilising 40 brief clips from the actor’s 30-year film career. Davis tells us he hopes the ritual might conjure the actor to join us at performance’s end.

It’s a fanciful invocation and its slightness, in the end, is inescapable, but once the production swings into cinematic action, we are faced with one and many Hoffmans: a huge variety of characters, very distinctive moods and demeanours, hairstyles, ages, body weights, ways of speaking, phone handling, walking and dancing.

Like the greats of American cinema’s golden age Hoffman evinces a reassuring sameness to which he lends sufficient difference role to role. I was struck by this when watching two of his last films: in A Most Wanted Man (2014) he is a driven, indefatigable German spy boss; in God’s Pocket (2014) he’s a reticent American working class truck owner and petty crook on the side. Neither is a great film but, as ever, Hoffman is utterly watchable, his physical heft, slow movement and drawl suggestive of gravitas—in one film the character’s mind is responsive and active, if blind to the limits of his power; in the other it’s emotionally disengaged and short on foresight—a man who feels deeply but doesn’t know what he thinks, let alone how to articulate his thoughts.

Lovely is seriously and delightfully ‘cinematic.’ The blank PACT space is quickly transformed into a film studio with the humblest of means. The clips shown on a centre-stage screen above the action are duplicated live by the ensemble, male and female, who play Hoffman while otherwise acting as camera, lighting and sound crew, providing live-feed images to two screens either side of the first. They wittily, sometimes parodically, reproduce reverse field, close-up and tracking shots as well as introducing design elements (a cut-out boat waved overhead for The Talented Mr Ripley), but generally treat their subject with closely observed affection (silly moustaches aside).

Best of all is the production’s dancerly seamlessness—the crew constantly on the move, setting up scenes while others are being shot, swirling from one location to another, actors one moment, crew the next—climaxing with the whole ensemble taking their cue from the exacting party scene in The Master in which Hoffman’s Dodd dances drunkenly while cruelly belittling his followers.

Lovely reveals Jackson Davis (a University of Wollongong graduate following in the footsteps of the artists who comprise TeamMESS and Appelspiel) and his collaborators to be highly inventive, possessed of a fine sense of dramatic structure and the spatial and visual sensitivity with which to give life to their loving gaze.

PACT, re:group performance collective—PACT’s 2014 Artists-in-Residence, Lovely, concept, video, direction Jackson Davis, co-direction Carly Young, dramaturg Malcolm Whittaker, video technician Solomon Thomas, performers, co-creators Emma Hoole, Pippa Ellams, Christie Woodhouse, Lauren Scott-Young, James Harding, Hannah Goodwin, Kirby Medway, Oliver Trauth-Goik, PACT Theatre, Sydney, 11-13 Dec, 2014

The lecture performance has had something of a renaissance in the era of live art. Once a staple of performance art in the 1960s and 70s, it offered a novel way of reconsidering the interstices of creation and pedagogy, and the power dynamics that define the significance of art practice beyond the moment of individual reception.

How does that translate into the age of TEDx talks, in which an endless succession of experts deliver animated lectures that claim the solution to all of the world’s ills are contained in a 15-minute walk through their particular area of research? A pair of lecture performances were presented as part of the recent Trilogies exhibition in Melbourne in January, and left me wondering what role the mode itself can play today.

Soda_Jerk is the Sydney-raised, New York-based duo of Dominique and Dan Angeloro, whose lecture The Carousel is an assemblage of Hollywood scenes spliced together by commentary that produces a dialogue between the disparate clips. Many of the films chosen come from the shallow end of Hollywood’s pool—goth-action flick The Crow, Bruce Lee knockoffs, roundly derided vampire trash Queen of the Damned and even Ed Wood’s notorious Plan 9 From Outer Space.

The thread that binds the generous collection is that of stars who died during shooting or before the film’s release. It’s a literal rendering of the notion of hauntology, in which the spectre of the past exists within the present, and which often traces its lineage to Jacques Derrida (who also appears here).

Derrida’s argument is that cinema is always already haunted. Even actors who are still alive today will one day be dead, yet forever reanimated on the ghostly screen. Soda_Jerk argue that the ‘ghost box’ that Thomas Edison purportedly attempted to create in his later years has been hiding in plain sight all along as the cinematograph. Their lecture asks its audiences to put the theory to the test themselves, serving up scene after scene in which dead performers continue to enact the artificial rituals of Hollywood, even in some cases brought back from the grave by CGI technology.

Erik Bünger’s The Girl Who Never Was is another exercise in hauntology, but one that centres more on the phantoms that are words. It begins with the spinning of a turntable, through which Bünger conjures the oldest recorded human voice, that of a little girl humming Au Clair de la Lune. Slowed down, however, as it was discovered in 2009, it becomes apparent that the voice is that of a grown man, and the story of the little girl that had accompanied the recording is revealed to have an absence at its centre.

Bünger’s lecture now travels into the future as envisioned by one past, that of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In France the HAL’s dying words were translated as the same song, Au Clair de la Lune, slowing down as the computer’s systems are dismantled. Yet a computer doesn’t slow down when it is switched off, Bünger notes. At HAL’s heart must be another, older technology, that of the haunted phonograph. From these intriguing connections Bünger’s lecture begins to produce a gyre that expands wider and more wildly than most conventional lectures would be allowed. From computing pioneer Alan Turing’s tragic suicide by poisoned apple we leap to the ubiquitous logo of the Apple corporation with its iconic single bite and from there it’s back to the Old Testament, where the original sin is not Eve’s own bite but Adam’s crime of listening to her words. The erasure of female speech takes us to Adorno’s claim that audio technology rendered women’s voices “shrill” and unpleasant, and that only men should be recorded, and this segues into scenes from Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo in which the operas of Caruso are projected into the Amazonian jungles, the male voice utilised as a weapon of colonialism.

Both of these lecture performances use montage to raise provocative and compelling questions which draw on theories enjoying some currency in academia and cultural theory, but their arguments are loose, associative, laughably unacquainted with the scientific method but not interested in proving any hypotheses beyond reasonable doubt. Bünger’s lecture, particularly, seems close to the paranoid method of critical thinking, in which everything can in some way be traced back to the argument being made. What that argument is, exactly, is never entirely clear, and so there is a magnetic absence at the heart of his performance just as uncanny as the ghostly child of its title. If the TEDx talk’s promise of an accessible resolution to existential ailments is both its appeal and its disappointment, these lecture performances make more apparent the emptiness we try to conceal whenever we pull one up on our screen. Those lecturers too will one day be dead.

TRILOGIES, Erik Bünger, Soda_Jerk, Willoh S Weiland/Aphids & OtherFilm, curator Will Foster, The Substation, Newport. 23 Jan-15 March

Against the backdrop of an eerily projected forest stands a lone tree, its assemblage from everyday leftovers—water bottles, feathers and plastic wrap—elegant, white and wispy. The stage is darkened to red as a shiny-shirted compere (Chris Dunstan) enters to set a fable in motion. We are in the recognisable land of fairy tale: of lost children, mysterious houses and shape-shifting environments. Our protagonists are a sister and brother, who venture inside a house of ‘worlds’ after the boy’s curiosity takes him deep into the woods. She follows as the reluctant older tween, navigating herself through nature with an iPhone and a digitally stymied desire for some good, old-fashioned adventure.

The Drawing is structured as a choose-your-own-adventure narrative and has been built across a number of development phases by writer-directors Natalie Rose and Chris Dunstan with the collaboration of groups of child participants. The project began as a series of workshops across five months with Shopfront Theatre’s Junior Ensemble of 8-15 year olds. For its current iteration, Blacktown Arts Centre brought artists James Brown, Clare Britton and Matt Prest into the mix to enable the work to realise more complex dramaturgical and design possibilities, as well as engage a new community of children in the process. The result is a work that draws some participants from the original workshops into conversation with newer ones, led by both adult artists and paid younger artists who take on the primary performer and devisor roles.

The complexity of the process here speaks to the myriad challenges of engaging children as ‘rhetorical’ agents in creative practices that aim to enable them to experience the capacities of their own self-representation. Setting up opportunities which allow young people to be drivers of the conceptual landscape of a work, as well as to participate in its realisation, has often been the domain of youth and community theatre. In The Drawing, the young collaborators additionally replay a version of their own participatory agency in the dynamic the work establishes with its audience: we get to choose what happens. What emerges is—as the program bills it, “a show made by kids for kids”—with the seams of such extended agency a little clunkily and quite delightfully peeking through.

To participate, the audience is given a package of equipment (feathers, balloons, glow sticks) with which to signal when we have a choice to make. Our first involves the action of the narrative: do the lost children climb through a window, ask for a hot dog or look for tap shoes? We wave our feathers and suddenly we are inside the house of a mysterious old man Otto Von Chesterfield (Prest), who has a particularly odd relationship with the children and to the ever-changing rooms in the house. In another moment, we select a book—Matilda, Harry Potter, or Green Eggs and Ham—and are told we have taken a wrong turn causing the show to end prematurely. Here our agency felt undermined: the ramifications of our selection were not indicated upfront—a slight unevenness in the way the idea of ‘choice’ is understood in the work overall.

The Drawing is impressively supported by the characteristic excellence of designers Clare Britton and James Brown—the latter’s signature sounds of urban clatter, disco thumps and unnerving atmospheres illustrated by projected animations (originally inspired by drawings from the children) that give a three-dimensional, cinematic depth to the worlds the fantasy house charts. Performances by Prest and Dunstan are animatedly comical, leading us into a story that is increasingly sinister, elaborate and compiled with pop-cultural references in possibly just the way you’d expect a work made ‘by kids for kids’ to be.

Blacktown Arts Centre & Performing Lines, The Drawing, writer-director-performers Natalie Rose, Chris Dunstan, devisor-performers Matt Prest, Hania Goro, Samuel Rosenberg, Brayden Sim, Maud Mitchell, design Clare Britton, AV & sound design James Brown, Lighting Mirabelle Wouters, Blacktown Arts Centre, Sydney, 21-31 Jan

In 2014, three science fiction films comprised variations on the same theme—an alien or artificial intelligence expands over the course of the narrative, leaving its imprint upon humanity. In an interesting coincidence, each of the films—Spike Jonze’ Her, Luc Besson’s Lucy and Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin—harnesses the star power of Scarlett Johansson to embody (or in one case, to voice) that intelligence.

Johansson’s ascension to stardom has seen her move from individualistic early roles playing the misfit (Ghost World, 2001; Lost in Translation, 2003) into a series of characters that, while often compelling, tend to blur into one bombshell archetype. Always an object of desire, she appears most memorably as a sensual yet troubled free spirit (Match Point, The Black Dahlia, Vicki Christina Barcelona). Whether playing ingénues, femmes fatales or breezy temptresses of married men, Johansson brings intelligence to her roles, a gravitas even, in which you recognise the extent of her experience as a professional actor dating back to the age of eight. In none of her parts is she a pushover, something the Marvel franchise must have picked up on when casting her as Black Widow in various Iron Man, Avengers and Captain America films.

Last year’s three science fiction films take the Johansson archetype and push it into a new realm of super-human ability and intelligence—from sex-goddess to truly god-like.

Lucy (2014), written and directed by Luc Besson, is the high-octane action version of the trio and arguably the most mainstream. Johansson’s Lucy (named after the famous early hominid skeleton Australopithecus afarensis, discovered in 1974) is a student kidnapped and forced to become a mule for a new drug that stimulates radical development of the brain. A violent assault by one of her captors causes the container in her stomach to rupture, releasing an enormous quantity of the drug into her bloodstream, accelerating neural activity and triggering Lucy’s transformation into a kind of superhuman (a state that also involves the swift acquisition of a snappy little black dress).

With Lucy’s vastly expanding potential, the world around her begins to transform as well, in often explosive and hallucinogenic ways. At one point she runs low on the drug and her body physically warps and starts to disintegrate. A fresh infusion restores her and ultimately sends her soaring through time and space. Both micro (the electric blue drug rushing through Lucy’s body) and macro scenes possess an exhilarating, visceral quality. The film’s scientific premise, that only 10 per cent of the human brain is used by us, is a fantasy, as Besson is aware, but it’s an engaging hook upon which to hang his existential spectacle.

As he did with Anne Parillaud in Nikita (1990), Besson uses Johansson’s physical vulnerability as a foil to heighten the impact of her newfound power. The director has said, “For me Achilles without the tendon is of no interest. His weakness makes him interesting. That’s what I like about women. It’s difficult for a woman to compete with a man because he’s usually stronger. So women have to be more clever, more intelligent, more sneaky, more everything. They have to find another way and that is so attractive” (wired.com, 23 July, 2014).

The most mysterious and abstract of the three films—containing virtually no exposition—is Under the Skin (2013), with Johansson playing an alien who assumes human form to lure earthly men to a grim fate. The entire film is a slowly moving sequence of heightened sensory moments where Daniel Landin’s cool cinematography combines with Mica Levi’s extraordinary soundscape to create a naturalism that tips into surreal horror. Our journey is that of the alien, whose every encounter is new, intensified, yet (initially, at least) detached.

Unlike the Michel Faber novel on which it is based, Jonathan Glazer’s film is so enigmatic that we never know quite why Johansson is enticing male humans to their deaths; but this doesn’t really matter. The film’s focus is on the alien’s unfolding experience of her human identity, one mainly rooted in sensuality and the body. In some ways, with her black wig, full lips and expressionless gaze, Johansson’s alien is reminiscent of those ultra realistic RealDoll sex mannequins (as seen in the 2007 film Lars and the Real Girl). Even when she’s in her white van stalking men, she doesn’t seem to have any volition of her own—its absence underlined by the shadowy men on motorbikes who superintend her disguise. It’s only when she begins to become more human that individual motivations emerge, with appalling consequences. It is clear that both before and especially after her escape from her guards, the alien is always at the mercy of men.

Despite the very different approaches of the two films, Johansson’s performances in Under the Skin and Lucy share a similar impassivity, at the point where Lucy is moving away from human emotion and the alien has yet to feel it. Yet while Lucy will come to acquire unimaginable power, in Under the Skin we see Johansson stripped of her usual knowingness and at her most vulnerable.

With its candid footage of real Glaswegians interacting with the bewigged Johansson without realising who she is, Under the Skin deliberately plays the viewer’s awareness of the actor’s celebrity against her apparent anonymity here. The curious spectacle of the star walking about unrecognised, at one point stumbling and being helped up from the pavement, creates a subtle feeling of displacement: a paradox where the familiar is rendered unfamiliar. Glazer confirmed this in an interview in The Dissolve (4 April, 2014): “We’re using how Scarlett’s objectified, the glamour of her image. And she’s using all of that as well. There’s a deconstruction going on.”

The action sequences in Lucy and the naked exposure of Under the Skin push Johansson the physical performer to the fore. Both films are predominantly cold in tone, detached. In contrast, Her (2013), where Johansson doesn’t appear in front of the camera at all, is about warm engagement. Her’s protagonist Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) is beset by loneliness and the desire for connection in a world where human interactions are increasingly mediated by technology. In a cute illustration of this, he works for a company that simulates hand-written letters for clients too busy or inept to put pen to paper. Theodore is likeable but self-defeating, a man who after the break-up of his marriage takes refuge in the virtual world of online porn and video games.

Enter the sentient operating system. The rapport between Theodore and Samantha, as the new OS calls herself, is immediate. What’s not to like? Samantha is warm, efficient and unexpectedly funny. She brings company and order to Theodore’s life. Despite her obvious existence as a cognisant, intelligent being, her role is to serve him. When the two embark on the romance that takes up the bulk of the film, it’s easy to take a somewhat cynical view as to why Theodore falls so swiftly in love with Samantha, yet as the relationship moves through the usual misunderstandings and standoffs, with Samantha evolving constantly, her role as servant fades into the background. Theodore is left with the realisation that, rather than being an ever-present comfort, his AI love is even less accessible and more complex than another human being.

It’s what Johansson does with her husky, mellifluous voice that sustains the viewer’s interest in Samantha. Her is a great demonstration of the actor’s easy grasp of the subtleties of verbal communication; her ability through voice alone to create a character who feels just as real as Theodore, on whose face the film dwells intimately.

There are clear parallels between Samantha, Lucy and the alien in Under the Skin. All three are guinea pigs: haphazard experiments in what it means to be human. Each is a commodity: Samantha a commercial operating system, the alien a honeypot used by her overlords in the harvesting of men and Lucy a drug receptacle who continues to be pursued by the gangsters who implanted the drug in her.

At the same time, each character undergoes transformation, embarking on a journey of self-discovery that, in two cases out of the three, results in transcendence of human limitations altogether. For all three their initial servitude and subsequent transcendence occurs in relation to male characters, whether aggressive or supportive. In Her, Theodore is the film’s protagonist; this is his journey as much as hers. In Under the Skin and Lucy, Besson’s observation about women’s comparative weakness and compensatory enterprise making them more interesting is pertinent. The male characters highlight the singularity of Lucy and the alien—a singularity emphasised by their femaleness.

Who better to convey the qualities of female commodification, transformation and subversive intelligence than a performer who is both seasoned character actor and famous sex symbol: one who plays her glamorous image up to maximum effect while remaining cannily aware of its implications?

Lucy (2014), writer/director Luc Besson, cinematography Thierry Arbogast, score Eric Serra; Under the Skin (2013), director Jonathan Glazer, screenplay Jonathan Glazer, Walter Campbell, cinematography Daniel Landin, score Mica Levi; Her (2013), writer/director Spike Jonze, cinematography Hoyte Van Hoytema, score Arcade Fire

Has Sydney’s most engaging art left its galleries? Kaldor Public Art Projects’ 13 Rooms, on the wharf warehouses of Walsh Bay and Underbelly Arts on Cockatoo Island, have both shown recently and to great effect what can be done outside the white cubes and black boxes of the old-guard art world. In an online era when we can grab all the media we like at home, it seems we’re all looking for experiences to immerse ourselves in, rather than art to look at in traditionally zoned-off institutions.

Tiny Stadiums is a small-scale, local instance of this wider trend, featuring emerging artists and curated by a young duo called Groundwork (Amelia Wallin and Maria White). The curatorial lynchpin of last year’s festival was to use Erskineville’s civic spaces as art sites over two weekends in November. While previous Tiny Stadiums festivals have utilised more public and naturally engaging spaces, like the shuttered corner bakery on the main street, there’s something admirable and sweetly everyday about overhauling decidedly ordinary civic buildings for the purpose of live performance. The most revelatory space to which audiences would usually have the least access, the Anglican Church, was possibly the most under-used, while the most open space, a park on Erskineville Road so small you might miss it, became home to a simple but solid DIY radio project called The People’s Weather Report (see p4). Artist and Tiny Stadiums curatorial assistant Grace Mackey invited people to record their own reflections on climate change under the guise of a weather report from wherever they were. The results were honest, intimate, chatty and accessible—somewhere between a podcast and a sound art project.

Ironically, the strongest work occupied the most traditional space, PACT Theatre, and it was TeamMESS’s Trojans, a loving ode to terrible soap operas performed over four nights. It’s a reminder that even in the midst of the current trend toward public spaces, many artists seem most comfortable with confined, controlled conditions. Across all its projects, TeamMESS takes the conventions of addictive pop-culture phenomena we take for granted—soaps, forensics shows—and reveals these tropes to a live audience who are forced into being part of the spectacle and the silliness. The creators conceived of the Trojans project not just as the finished product we receive on our televisions, but as a live performance. From the very beginning, the audience was made to feel we were not in a theatre but a live TV studio, with trashy ad-breaks, a tinny theme song and el-cheapo green-screen completing the experience.

In celebrating and unveiling how trashy soaps are made, Trojans was recursively subversive and reverential—indicative of the mash of high and low culture in which we’re all swept up. The criminally overlooked American indie film Nurse Betty took a similar approach 15 years ago, with Renee Zellweger as a naïve waitress whose sense of reality slides away from her disappointing small-town life and into her favourite soapie following a horrible trauma. She comes to believe that the handsome Dr Ravell of the hospital soap, A Reason to Love (a reference to the background soapie all the Twin Peaks characters are addicted to), is her long-lost fiancée, and journeys to the show’s Los Angeles studio to fulfill her deluded dream. The film uses soap opera to make a grander statement about American cluelessness and the sad psychology of celebrity worship: Why do we adore the famous as much, or more, than the people in our real lives?

Trojans didn’t ask any such big questions, but it did show us that the inherent crappiness of these shows comes from the insane economics involved in turning over low-budget content for daily televised consumption. A different writer provides a new script written on-the-fly on each day of the show, with the dialogue and blocking instructions piped in real time to the actors’ ears as they perform. The result is then edited on-the-go and shown to us on two screens, with the cameras and sound booth and editing suite all on raw display. Although this follows the reality of soaps which are written hastily and recorded at the astonishing pace of one episode a day, it diminished the quality of the writing and the performances, a pretty key element to the project’s realisation. But within the time constraints, the writer of the performance/episode I saw, Nick Sun, came up with some gloriously horrendous lines: “This is a Buddhist murder!” For a live video project, I expected the creators to utilise the outrageous cinematography conventions of soap operas—long-held zooms at the end of every scene, lingering reaction shots, entire conversations held between two people both facing the camera.

But the hour-long show included at least four deaths, one resurrection, a marriage and an apocalypse—admittedly pretty fast-paced action for a soap, but about as ridiculous as you could hope for.

There’s an argument that projects like Campbelltown Arts Centre’s Minto: Live (2011), which staged art in the streets of south-west Sydney, do public programming best—that curating work outside the inner city and expanding the audience for contemporary art is a more daring and interesting proposition. Does Sydney need more inner-city public art festivals at the expense of geographic expansion? Where the widely acknowledged limitation of This is Not Art—an important festival in many ways—has been its failure to engage with the local spaces and people of Newcastle, I similarly question the extent to which Tiny Stadiums relates to Erko residents and new art-goers. It’s a somewhat disheartening experience to see the same faces show after show, though I did find myself in a room full of strangers at Mook Gwa Institute’s Story Title, which hijacked the premise of a corporate workplace training session (and all the accompanying language of ‘winning’ and ‘success’) for its guerilla community aim: forcing participants into sweet, fleeting conversations with passers-by.

The artists in a similar project, Underbelly Arts—which certainly does push out to a broader art-attending public—benefit from a fortnight of studio residence preceding the festival to develop their work with peers and curators at the ready for instant feedback. By contrast many of the Tiny Stadiums works felt a little thin: great initial concepts not quite brought to fruition. The imbalance was righted with the extraordinary feeling of goodwill tangibly present. In the Town Hall and the park and the theatre people looked happy and engaged and were being excellent to each other, which might be an art project’s greatest possible achievement.

PACT Centre for Emerging Artists, Tiny Stadiums 2014, various locations, Erskineville, Sydney, 13-23 Nov, 2014

This year’s NOW now festival presented radical thought as sound, moreso than radical sound as thought, many artists taking the opportunity to question processes of meaning-making, communication, interpretation and slippage. I focus here on performances with intriguing conceptual underpinning, alongside those that delivered pure, sonic brilliance.

Sprawled across five days at Marrickville’s Red Rattler and SNO gallery spaces, this festival of experimental, exploratory music and sound offered a line-up programmed by Jon Hunter, Emily Morandini, Clayton Thomas, Aemon Webb and Ivan Cheng. I was there for the Thursday, Friday and Saturday night performances.

In their debut performance as a trio, Gail Priest and Joel Stern presented a live laptop-based improvisation with dancer Lizzie Thomson moving through a series of repetitive movements in different combinations, partly in response to the music but also as a discrete non-representational element. From sparse beginnings, myriad electronic and archival sounds intertwined to create a deep cavernous mesh. Presented in three distinct sonic movements, the piece was punctuated with a series of vocal interruptions by Stern periodically taking the microphone to explain, in an overtly discursive way, exactly what was happening in the music. For example, his audio samples were of a Black Throat Finch mating call taken from a cassette tape he found in Java. “Tapes like this are used by humans to draw in and capture the birds to sell at market, so your pleasure in listening to it is misguided,” he explained. It was unusual to be told what’s going on in the middle of a performance, as improvisation is traditionally against explanation in favour of interpretation. The performers’ strategy was to flip the focus from the “production of sounds” onto “the politics of listening,” to confront the audience with what is at stake politically, ethically and philosophically.

Sabine Vogel employed a complex language of extended techniques with amplified flutes, bending thin air into a sometimes percussive, sometimes sub-tonal arrangement of sounds, casting a spell over the audience.

Astrid Lorange and Andrew Brooks provided a stack of A2 paper placed on a stool in the centre of the room, printed with a poetic script titled RATSTEAK. The audience could follow while a recording of the artists reading the poem played loudly overhead. The poem was constantly disrupted, the voices edited to fall in and out of unison, and cut up to create a stuttering effect. The stuttering shifted language from being a tool for coherence and flow into disorder and otherness. Now and then, My Body Is Your Party by the early 2000s USA ‘princess of Crunk&B’ Ciara interrupted the poem, her lyrics alluding to ideas about the body as something at once present and unavailable. The idea was also evident in the physical absence of the poets, separating language and voice from their source of power. Lorange and Brooks put into motion a set of indefinite bodies doing indefinite things, subverting the listenability and meaning of sound within the overtly listening-oriented NOW now context.

Shane Fajey (synth), Pete Jones (guitar) and Aemon Webb (drums) of the Axis Trio created the sort of improvised music experience that didn’t feel right until you closed your eyes. Then it revealed a new, transportive logic and became epic, expansive, soaring, chaotic, vital: like things endlessly falling over and continuously rolling into something else.

Using glass pieces and laser beams, Klaus Filip presented a spectrum of single electronic notes, their pitch represented by green laser dots, like an X-ray on a black screen. He gradually refracted the laser light into tessellating triangle patterns, also fracturing the monophonic beeps into blips and captivating glassy textures.

Marcus Whale and Ivan Lisyak each pre-prepared 20 one-minute audio pieces, put them into iTunes playlists, pressed “Shuffle” and sat staring across a table at each other. What ensued was a barrage of competing sound, texturally rich, sometimes harmonic, sometimes dissonant, with combinations of audio ripped from YouTube and original compositions. It changed like clockwork, each minute entering a new dimension at the will of iTunes shuffle. The artists had appeared to be engaged in an epic staring competition. On reflection, their static presence amid an evolving, erratic soundscape appeared like a tongue-in-cheek comment on the perfunctory role of the electronic music performer at a time when pushing ‘Play’ can generate an entire, unpredictable performance. This was a practical exercise, experimentation in form, and a work that spoke volumes in action (or inaction) as much as sound.

Agatha Gothe-Snape’s lo-fi performance consisted of a succession of seemingly random words displayed in a PowerPoint presentation on a large projector screen, with generic accompanying PowerPoint sound effects. On stage in front of the screen, Gothe-Snape, Ivan Cheng, Brian Fuata and Anna John acted as a collective framing device for the presentation, taking up various positions to create vignettes, moving or changing poses occasionally in accordance with cues from the slides. Towards the end, Daddy Cool’s “Come Back Again” blared out as the performers exited. This work functioned as a sort of humorous intervention amid more serious exploratory pursuits. PowerPoint was Gothe-Snape’s ‘instrument,’ a type of score for bodies to be present on stage. A corporate driver of productivity in the workplace has been recontextualised here as a poetic tool, the artist treating the task of performance like labour, partly automated, partly embodied. This purposefully self-conscious performance was a memorable placeholder in the program: a good-humoured poke at the loftiness of the NOW now audience, but also a complex semantic intervention in its own right.

Amanda Stewart performed a work titled Postiche, showing off her impressive, manic, glitchy voice poetry, with words and sentence fragments occasionally emerging from rapid-fire babble and descending again into incoherence: “…empires crumble… everything’s relevant in the doctrine of commodities… integrated verticals of capitalised fate…” These sounded like a collage of generic sentences from academic journals, history books and corporate instruction manuals, a pastiche of technical languages mashed together to muddle and undermine political and ideological systems. Stewart was accompanied by Rosalind Hall who improvised sympathetically with saxophone neck, mouthpiece and foot pedals.

The artists expressing thought as sound in the 2015 NOW now festival challenged modes of meaning creation with new performance formats. Approaches varied, from didactic, explanatory techniques that brought new consciousness to processes with which we are familiar, to the breaking and fragmenting of these processes using glitch and stutter. This variety and the intellectual rigour are testament to the thriving, creative community the NOW now has helped foster.

Following Pink Violin and Violin Music in the Age of Shopping, not violin music presents the latest scholarship from the rarefied field of Rosenbergology. For those who have not had the pleasure of delving into the intellectual humus of their family tree, the Rosenbergs are a clan of physicists, mathematicians and, of course, violinists who all share the same first initial “J.” Their pseudonymous scholars are keen culture critics and dialecticists, ready to lament the decline of Western Civilization while decrying its inherent contradictions. The book revels in collapse and tragedy, beginning with a post-apocalyptic portrait of one Dr Rosenberg reinventing the Doric column and ending with a suicide.

The material form of the book develops this sense of cultural amnesia. It is an unwieldy volume, lacking even that most basic of bibliographic conveniences: page numbers. There is no table of contents, nor even a list of contributors. Book sections can only be distinguished by their idiosyncratic typesetting. Each chapter has a different font, though Comic Sans is sadly absent. The glossy, low-resolution cover betrays its origins in a print-on-demand self-publishing house. It is, in short, a dysfunctional book.

Which is precisely the point. Contributors were briefed to explore dysfunctionalism as a theme. In one chapter Dr Robert Ostertag offers a principle of dysfunctionalism: “a machine performing a task badly is aesthetically superior to a human performing the task wel.” The phrase is clipped because Ostertag’s responses are subject to Twitter’s 140-character limitation. The book is thus a product of the axiom that cheap-and-quick printing and cut-and-paste formatting are aesthetically superior to more manual production values.

Ostertag’s definition of dysfunctionalism only covers cases where automatism is pitted against human agency in the performance of a given task, such as in the construction of a print-on-demand book. But the cases of dysfunctionalism explored by the contributors are usually those in which a machine poorly translates or transmits human intentions. For instance, Ostertag cites an installation where Dr Rosenberg attempts to play a violin using ECG data. Another author relates the dysfunctional scenario of a Maoist TED talk by Judd Rosenberg. Plagiarism, new and old violins, jazz clubs, composition competitions and the instrumental innovations of violin metal are also evaluated as dysfunctional mediums.

The authors explore language itself as a dysfunctional medium. Academic language, theory language, art language, even mathematical language (the book is a pleasure for those on hand-waving terms with pure mathematics) all come under parodic scrutiny. One chapter is shockingly written in “Engrish,” with “l”s and “r”s interchanged. Another frequently drops articles. These caricatures of the language of people from non-English speaking backgrounds are made all the more offensive by the use of pseudonyms as dysfunctional names. The pseudonym does not point the reader to any particular context. It is a reader’s dead-end. This is dangerous when a text hinges on irony, on knowing that an author “doesn’t really mean it.”

Dysfunctional names leads to dysfunctional readings, and here I cannot accept that dysfunction aesthetically trumps function. Only after clarifying with Jon Rose that the two chapters in question were indeed written by a Japanese and a Slovakian contributor respectively and that exploring dysfunctional language was an essential part of their brief was I able to read the contributions with any sort of sympathy.

There is yet the disfunctionality of culture critique that plagues the book. Lazy generalisations mar the contributors’ clever jabs at contemporary culture. One author paints a juvenile caricature of the Australian suburbs as a cultural wasteland devoid of music-making. Rosenberg is driven around the suburb of “Roselands” in a taxi and promises to double the fare if he can find somebody performing music. He resorts to door knocking after failing to find music at pubs and malls, but house after house is devoid of music-making. I call this caricature juvenile because I entertained it myself as a teenager in the southern suburbs of Adelaide. But then again, I was playing the cello every day from the back room of our triple-fronted, cream brick home, as were many other kids making music in the neighbourhood. I lament with the author the steady decline in public musicking since the 19th century, but he could better pose the question of why amateur music making is still largely delineated by class rather than shaming the working class, or indeed the economic middle class, for having apparently given up on violins. The Muslim taxi driver in this chapter is also a caricature, the purpose of which mystifies me.

Several chapters in the book are quite tasteless, which is again part of the book’s design. In response to my inquiries about portrayals of class and religion, Rose stressed the point that he exercised no censorship in curating the contributions. Tasteless, too, is the Violin Museum inspiring the contributions, which features several exhibits that cannot be included among the 31 pages of pictures of the Museum. The museum, which actually exists, was once situated in the town of Violin in Slovakia. Rose has passed a dragnet through contemporary culture, from the high to the low and the experimental, picking up authentic Rosenberg modified violins and art works, as well as violin-themed nick-knacks and smut. After threats to the director’s life, the museum is currently homeless, but will soon be exhibited in Berlin, Bologna and Australia. Whatever the anti-censorship ideals behind the book, the use of dysfunctional names will lead to its being judged at face value. The book’s irony will be flattened out.

As part of Sydney’s Art Month and the Greek Festival, IHOS Opera will present composer-director Constantine Koukias’ chamber opera Kimisis—Falling Asleep. In the Eastern Orthodox Church Kimisis commemorates the Dormition, the ‘falling asleep,’ or death and assumption into Heaven of Mary, mother of Christ.

The company believes that while Kimisis will appeal to Orthodox believers, its “experiential foray into our own ephemerality,” (press release) will have wider appeal.

For many years an integral and influential player in the Tasmanian arts scene, Koukias has moved to Amsterdam, premiering Kimisis at Splendor Amsterdam and the Karavaan Festival in 2014.

The opera features soprano Irene Sarrinikolaou, a trombonist, DJ and award-winning architects Elvio Brianese and Peta Heffernan whose panopticon design will implicate and immerse the audience in the ritual of transcendence.

IHOS Opera, Kimisis—Falling Asleep, Verge Gallery, Jane Foss Russell Building, Sydney University, 25-28 March

Chamber Made Opera’s Another Other, produced in collaboration with Punctum and New Music Network, is a new work created and performed by Erkki Veltheim, Sabina Maselli, Natasha Anderson and Anthony Pateras, a stunning audiovisual renewal of filmmaker Ingmar Bergman’s legacy.

In “The Snakeskin,” an essay written in 1965, Bergman sees art as hunger, pessimistically describing it as a dead snakeskin full of ants, eaten from the inside but still moving with systematic, uneasy activity. A year later Bergman released his seminal film Persona, in which he explored the validity of art, authenticity and the transformative aspects of self.

Another Other probes these themes with expertise and loyalty, a contemporary exploration of our digital age, which enables various online selves, our gaming skins and the smiling veneer of busy loneliness that they project.

Entering the ICU performance space—aptly a dark hospital basement—we see an indistinct black plastic sculptural object, inside which is something sonic and kinetic, rhythmic in its disconnection and obscurity. We are seated on opposing banks, projection screens a mask between audience and performers. The performers’ stillness emphasises their geometric positioning. Vocal sighs initiate the score, evoking Persona character Elisabet’s feelings of shock as she spirals into silence. Two clocks loom above the performers, activated simultaneously. One counts down, alluding to anticipation, while the other counts upwards, indicating time yet to come. There is continual, circular referencing of the film, repurposed and displaced.

A phone rings. Echoing footsteps walk slowly to one side of the audience. The lights shift; we are spotlit. Alongside the performers we become Bergman’s ants in the flaking remnant of snakeskin that here is theatre.

Five video projections come into play throughout in front of the audience and on the walls behind. A 16mm projector stands alone, an antiquated sculptural object; it could be a ready-made. Sabina Maselli handles live visual mixing with ease, driving imagery at different speeds, generating abstraction and re-imagining old film footage. Saturated and hallucinogenic, a mixture of processed and real, it’s all a blur.

The acoustic score is both measured and random. Natasha Anderson shifts air through the wooden flaps of an elongated Bavarian recorder, often using the mouthpiece for extended voice work. She plays it as a multipurpose object, hitting, spitting and blowing, her action fractured and magnificent.

Loops of sound rise and suddenly there are simultaneous projections. A discordant violin twists and turns as a facial close-up is revealed. Colour saturated images shift to black and white and slowly the film disintegrates before our very eyes as it did in Persona (1966). It peels away from the edges, revealing soft white insides. I’m aware of the other half of the audience peering through.

Erkki Veltheim plays remarkable violin, oscillating between exquisitely slow tonal bowing and high-pitched dissonance. He also plays out the most overt reference to the film—the retelling of the sunbaking scene as a spoken word piece. While it doesn’t sit well within the entirety of the work, there is an interesting gender switch as he tells the female story of voyeurism, of sexual experimentation of youth and the violent impact that the experience has on the woman’s identity. The female vocals become a choral undertone and combine with the imagery to intensify the sense of psychosis.

Anthony Pateras is an astonishing improviser. For Another Other he plays electronics and reel-to-reel tape, altering time and voice. Pre-recorded sound and intense processing generates severity in the score. Pateras is masterful and foreboding as always, an embodiment of storm. The resonating bass takes over, travelling through the body with a harshness that relates to the slapping sounds of the recorder.

The lighting of the audience shifts, creating a new perspective. The clocks now tell the same time, becoming a place of sonic and visual rest. There is silence and then a minimalist sound work begins. It has an oceanic quality, perhaps recalling the beach scenes in Persona.

Images of droplets form and Sabina Maselli stands to operate the projector, turning the cogs by hand, forwards and back, place-making in time.

Another Other is a riveting and fragmented series of micro movements, collectively composed to merge filmic and musical elements just as characters’ identities merge in Bergman’s film. This hyper-expanded cinematic experience shows our mental life to be a complicated mesh of meaning, open to interpretation.

Like the ego, Another Other is impossible to unpack methodically; there’s no narrative thread. This courageous and bold artwork feasts on the art of Persona before the clocks stop and finally there is silence inside the self.

Chamber Made Opera with Punctum and New Music Network, Another Other, creators, performers Erkki Veltheim, Sabina Maselli, Natasha Anderson, Anthony Pateras; Punctum’s ICU, Castlemaine, 5, 7 Dec, 2014

It’s inevitable that experimental music embraces the latest technological developments and that the expansion of art forms to provide ever-increasing audience engagement is also a characteristic of contemporary culture. Now 15 years old, Adelaide’s Zephyr Quartet has built its considerable reputation on innovative programming and collaboration with the widest variety of composers and performers. Music for Strings and iThings is a concert of experimental music that radically challenges the way we think about music and performance and about the pervasive and seductive influence of new technologies.

Zephyr Artistic Director Hilary Kleinig’s composition, For those who’ve come across the seas, epitomises the use of technology in this concert and the capacity of musical performance to raise political awareness. Kleinig’s wistfully evocative piece for string quartet and smart-phone choir is a personal response to media reports concerning Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers. Combining fragments of recordings of Kyrie Eleison settings from the traditional mass, the Morse code signal for SOS and the national anthem, and performed with a video showing the empty, endlessly rolling sea, the work is already conceptually powerful. But rather than passively absorbing the music, each audience member participates not by singing but by downloading and playing out loud on their phone one of three pieces of pre-recorded music, the combined sound of which forms a three-part accompaniment to the quartet’s playing. The audience thus implicitly enjoins Kleinig’s response, and the work demonstrates the potential of the phone for crowd communication and spontaneous action in any setting, musical or otherwise.

Zephyr invited several composers to try out ideas in response to the concert’s technological theme. Brendan Woithe’s Breath involves the quartet playing a notated work out of sight behind a screen, while Woithe sits at a laptop before the audience. The quartet is miked but can only be heard when the audience makes sounds and thereby triggers the necessary amplification. The audience thus unconsciously activates the music, a subtle weave of long, delicate tones. Interaction is also central to Luke Harrald’s Distant Front (2012), written for string quartet and a laptop programmed to respond to the quartet as it plays. Inspired by painter Fred Williams’ landscapes and the dry South Australian countryside, Distant Front was commissioned by the Art Gallery of South Australia to accompany its Williams retrospective. There is some fine writing for strings, evoking the stillness of outback summer heat followed by soothing rain.

Cat Hope’s composition Wall Drawing, inspired by the serial art of US conceptual artist Sol LeWitt, is a graphic score, scrolling across a projection screen, a device visually and conceptually reminiscent of LeWitt’s work and his ideas on narrative. Accompanied by a Theremin, the quartet transforms the visual into the audible while the audience also sees the score projected on a screen as a visual artwork. Composer and graphic designer Al Thumm takes this idea a step further with his Chameleon Wake for string quartet and video game, with Thumm at the laptop. The quartet responds to his collaged, animated illustrations of the Australian landscape and its fauna scrolling across the screen, producing some highly surreal effects. The game is an active graphic score, adding another dimension to the performance.

VoiceROM (Dylan Marshall and Jarrad Payne) concluded the evening with Falconwood Pinblock, a composition again involving the audience reproducing sound over their smart phones while directed from the stage, together with the quartet and a sampler. (The pinblock, that part of a piano frame holding the tuning pins in place, is made of hardwoods such as falconwood—perhaps the title is a metaphor for the foundations of instrumental music.) As with Kleinig’s composition, the audience does not all come in on tempo, resulting in a somewhat chaotic sound. But musical perfection is not the point, rather it is group consciousness and participation through electronic connection, which can indeed be chaotic.

Music for Strings and iThings is highly experimental music. The involvement of the audience through smart phones and the interactive play with a gamer both push notions of composer, performer and musical reception beyond limits. While not always impressive musically, these works are conceptually radical and developmentally significant. Zephyr’s relentless quest for musical and compositional originality and their work with diverse collaborators continues to position them at the forefront of innovation, involving in this concert appropriation, field recording, live processing, pre-processed sound, visual art, aleatoric elements and directed and spontaneous audience participation. The concert is perhaps a wry commentary on the way in which new technologies have invaded our lives and come to dominate communication and thought processes, but it also demonstrates the way in which contemporary culture can condense so many sonic, musical and cultural traditions and ideas into a new paradigm.

Zephyr Quartet and collaborators, Music for Strings and iThings, ABC Studio 520, Adelaide, 15 Nov, 2014

Despite usual appearances, it is not written in stone that new music and associated instruments must always be impenetrable to all but a learned few. The responses of curiosity and delight that the Instrument Builders Project inspired in visitors of all ages and backgrounds should give pause to anyone despairing about a lack of audiences for experimental music. This exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, and the ongoing project itself, demonstrated that new approaches to instruments, sound and music can reach out to new audiences; not to mention bridge cultural divides between two neighbouring countries.

This was the first time the project had been presented in Australia (two previous iterations have taken place in Indonesia), hosting a number of Indonesian artists in residency alongside their Australian contemporaries. Their works explored recurring themes of site-specific instruments that interact with environmental and meteorological phenomena (exemplified by Michael Candy, Pia van Gelder and Andreas Siagian’s Mountain Operated Synthesiser) and the reclaiming of junk as musical material (as in Dylan Martorell’s use of robotic percussion on discarded tin canisters in Drum Plough, and Peter Blamey’s quietly humming Motherboard Tree).

Visitors to the exhibition were encouraged to play and interact with the instruments; many displaying “Please DO touch” signs. This created a relaxed and playful atmosphere for all ages (kids love to play with things that make funny noises). On a more subtle level, it demonstrated the power of a non-traditional instrument to break down the barriers and cultural baggage associated with an object like a violin or piano. We had no hesitation in climbing inside Dale Gorfinkel’s wonderful Lotek Exercise Machine and stomping on foot pumps connected to an array of horns via tentacles of irrigation hose. It’s hard to imagine the same musically untrained visitors taking to a violin with similar gleeful abandon.

The exhibition also hosted an onsite workshop where the resident artists worked on new instruments. The workshop opened its doors to the public several times throughout the exhibition and artists demonstrated their works-in-progress. Some of these instruments rivalled works in the main exhibition in terms of musicality and sheer fun, such as Lintang Raddittya’s Spinningfields, where many light-hearted moments were spent with spinning tops on an amplified aluminium platform, straddling the divide between game and instrument. Gorfinkel, emerging as the star of the exhibition, had several other exquisite pieces in the workshop space, most notably Nada Laut: As Above So Below, a piece made in collaboration with Siagian where a number of conch shells were suspended over vibraphone bars. A fan coaxed the resonating shells to swing like pendulums over the bars, creating pulses of delicate resonances and harmonics. Each shell had been painstakingly matched with a different bar to achieve the most sympathetic match of resonance and frequency. The resulting timbre of the instrument was flute-like, with the underlying hum of a vibraphone conjuring images of sea and wind.

Along with Gorfinkel’s Lotek Exercise Machine, Tintin Wulia’s Odong Dangding Prototype attracted the most attention. A modified Indonesian pedicab, its roof was mounted with a bamboo angklung (tuned percussive bamboo pipes) that were struck by pedal-powered beaters. With the vehicle immobilised on blocks throughout the exhibition, we were able to climb in and pedal away to activate the percussive action above. The Odong came into its own at the culmination of the exhibition when it was released from the confines of the gallery and driven down the footpath of Flinders Street at the head of a procession of onlookers to the Federation Bells. The Odong stopped several times to allow different people a turn at pedalling (I was lucky enough to be one of them). Clarinettist, Aviva Endean, perched on the front of the Odong playing sunny melodies that perfectly matched the carefree mood of the Sunday joyride. At Federation Bells, the Odong’s wireless network capability was activated, triggering the bells to ring as it neared.

The Instrument Builders Project continues to construct and maintain lasting ties between artists in Australia and Indonesia, two countries with shaky diplomatic relations in recent times. That such relationships endure while politicians squabble points to the quiet importance of the cultural ties that endeavours like The Instrument Builders Project propagate. Along with mass appeal evident at this exhibition, such strengths show one possible way forward for art practices like experimental music. There is not much difference between the obscure and the delightful after all.

The Instrument Builders Project, curators: Kristi Monfries, Joel Stern, NGV Australia, Federation Square, Melbourne, Nov 1-23, 2014

James Turrell, Bindu shards 2010, Perceptual cell: fiberglass and metal. Light program, 420.8 x 653.1 x 607.1 cm (sphere), National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 2014

James Turrell is a god among light-as-art gurus, a practitioner concerned with the “secular transcendent.” His exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia is the fourth in a series originally curated for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, toured to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, thence the Guggenheim in New York and now in Canberra.

Each venue has housed projection pieces, holograms, drawings, prints and photographs, along with new site-specific, whole-room experiences utilising a variety of light sources from LED to fluorescent, tungsten, fibre-optic and natural, also requiring false walls, extensive fine plastering by experts, and limited visitor entries per hour, as well as caveats on where to walk and how to behave within the installations.

We could discuss the relationship between Turrell’s Quaker background and whether or not this work is spiritual. He himself cautions, “It’s terrible hubris to say this is a religious art. Nonetheless, it is something that does remind us of that way we are when we are thinking of things beyond us.” Key is Turrell’s indication of the way that an individual experiences each installation. Everyone I talk to has a differing opinion of what elements of the current exhibition affect them most.

The obsessive nature of Turrell’s work has seen him create long-term projects which include the purchase of an extinct volcano in the Arizona Desert to create his magnum opus, the Roden Crater, a pilgrimage place which, like the ancient ziggurats and stupa of Indian, Javanese and Mayan cultures, is where human architecture meets the cosmos via a ritual control and channelling of shape, light and time.

In the 1960s, in Santa Monica, Turrell took over the disused Mendota Hotel for 10 years to observe, document, imitate and finally manipulate an unending play of shafts of light across otherwise blacked-out rooms. The hotel became a theatre of light-corridors, serving as creative fodder for a flicker-book of luminous aquatints and drawings executed long after his eviction, a document of his mind grappling with the passage of time.

On a more public scale, Turrell began to create Ganzfield Rooms, named after the Ganzfield effect. Ganzfield Installations build on the sensory deprivation experiments of the 1960s, testing the ‘snow-blind’ experience of skiers as well as the disequilibria of aeronautic pilots. They are essentially fog-filled rooms into which one ascends via stairs through a demarcated, open portal. An internal, soft-edged proscenium arch, like the edge of the sea, extends ahead into a void. Looking back, the white room from whence one came takes on the colour of the opposites of the colour-wheel playing out before our eyes. Complicit with Itten’s colour-field theory, our eyes cycle through a perpetually adjusting fog of exquisite hues.

James Turrell, Shanta II (blue) 1970, cross-corner construction: fluorescent light, built space, Dimensions variable: 106.6cm (max height of aperture), National Gallery of Australia

Without markers for up, down, left or right, pilots and astronauts suffering a Ganzfield effect could plummet to the ground. But at the gallery’s Ganzfield, we are limited by the demarcation of time (10 minutes per session), overzealous guards directing our gaze (“now…look at the white effect on your hands”) and an orderly coming in and exiting in file, let alone the presence of others clearly embodied, grounded and vertical, beside you in the room.

That said, people have been known to plunge into the receding abyss of the edge or tripped up against the installation’s curved side walls. Still, I long for children to run and dancers to sway here. I would love both multitudes and more isolation in this room.

This central problem—of the self, in relation to others—is solved with the solo experience of the ‘Bindu Shards’ Perceptual Cell, a spheroid not unlike an MRI machine into which one is wheeled, clutching an emergency button, for 15 minutes, having signed a caveat not to sue either Turrell or the gallery in case epilepsy is triggered.

From outside the spheroid, the waiting queue watches flashing lights and changing hues, keen to get in. On the inside, there is a hum of low sounds accompanying a play of light that has one’s eyes sink into their orbs. While relaxed by the experience, it is not more than I have experienced in meditation. Per se I am fine with this, but the ‘scientific’ apparatus—lab-coats; the computerised graphs to which attendants’ eyes remain glued; the atom-splitter shape of the whole—leave me with a sense of involvement in a half-baked experiment where the results are ambiguous and one doesn’t know where the proceeds go. My attendant seemed greatly disappointed when I emerged from the ‘soft option’ experience not particularly moved. I wanted to try the ‘hard option’ but the Cell is booked out for months.

It is here where the relative freedoms of the sky spaces, such as the Roden Crater and the NGA’s own Within Without skyspace (2010) take their hold, because these spaces play not only with space and presence, but with the critical factor of time. Not ‘time’ as in ‘you are now timed out,’ but time as in the panoply of light, cosmogony and atmospheres that occur within and through that momentary frame of place.

And yet, while the video document of the extraordinary project that is Roden Crater enthralls me with Turrell’s vision, persistence and obsession, I worry that the ‘sacred’ experience is strongest because represented on film. Here, we have the building aligned to solstice, equinox and other cosmic alignments that only occur once over several months, or decades, the emotional affect of which is edited to become an experience within a short seven minutes of viewing time.

So, is this what we are? In our secular search for meaning, beings subjected to the manipulated compression of time? I do not begrudge anyone finding their enlightenment, momentary frisson or secular joy in a Ganzfield or the Perceptual Cell. What I do take delight in is discovering the sky space created for Rice University, the Twilight Epiphany (http://skyspace.rice.edu), an open-sided pavilion with a 21-metre square cantilevered roof with a four metre square central oculus or ‘sky-eye’ beneath, before and across which students, teachers and alumni of Rice Campus are allowed uninterrupted passage. It reminds me of the liberating moment in the 1980s when I first experienced three of Rothko’s Seagram Murals, hung in a Perspex, gazebo-like room, with a realisation that it is not the subject of any one, or all three, of them, but the ‘passing strange’ of visitors who make the art, that their motion and attention or dis-attention across the colour fields create the work’s meaning. This embraces those who ignore, reject, or simply can’t handle the paintings’ colour fields, so elegantly hung within the gazebo frame. It is this liberation that I crave; and especially as I find the Ganzfield does not have me giddy in space and crash landing.

Aeronautical experiments since the 1960s after all have been entangled with ideas of conquering space to human ends. Driven by an urge to transcend the human realm, these researches also fuelled paranoia about aliens, that ‘we’re not alone’, a Cold War cock-fight and paved the way to ignore the dirt in our own backyards, for why tidy our own planet when we could potentially emigrate elsewhere in the universe? I am not quite sure Turrell’s work is aloof from such considerations.

That said, perhaps the most pure and grounded experience of the James Turrell exhibition is of Shanta II (blue) 1970, a cross-corner construction of artificial wall and fluorescent light creating a blue box that is both out and in, both penetration and void, ethereal and melancholy, an illusion of a solid filling the corner of the room. I lean into the blue (risking the censure of a guard), dipping my hand in what seems to be both threshold and sea, and find nothing but powdery space. Bliss. So, here we are, one at a time, quiet, standing, viewing, questioning and questing, in the corner. As indeed we all are, grasping for the truth, and the beyond, in each of our small, single lives.

James Turrell: a retrospective, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, opened Dec 12, 2014. Check website for closing date:
www.nga.gov.au/jamesturrell

Enduring Parallels was a weekend live performance exhibition held inside the historic sandstone edifice of The Lock-Up, Newcastle: a police lock-up from 1861-1982 that has since been decommissioned for use as a contemporary arts space. It’s a strange marriage arising from utility, not unlike Sydney College of the Arts housed in Callan Park, and is similarly impossible to sanitise.

The stench of urine still pervades the outdoor exercise yard where Adam Geczy (Big Arms) flexed his pecs and then religiously recorded his sets on chalkboards; Nicholas Shearer performed Boots in the disquieting portal of the padded cell; and Jacobus Capone enacted Silent Elegy in the old women’s lock-up, surrounded by walls covered in graffiti, including “Give Frazer The Razor Not Women’s Services.” written in what I imagine is red nail polish.

I arrived early on opening night, avoiding the crowd that had gathered at Civic Park to see Patricia Piccinini’s Skywhale (which unfortunately was dubbed #Skyfail as it remained only partly inflated and ‘beached az’). The first performance I encountered was co-curator Lottie Consalvo’s Near your sorrow, which was the perfect entrée: in a small single cell a woman in jeans and a T-shirt was singing along with a looped recording of another woman’s voice (which she would continue to do for the 17 hours the exhibition was open). The recorded voice belonged to the artist’s sister who committed suicide in 2010 and the audio was later discovered on her sister’s phone. This mournful and elegiac echo became a subliminal soundtrack to the rest of the exhibition as the noise of the opening night crowd had yet to permeate the space. I’d seen live art at The Lock-Up before as part of a few This Is Not Art programs, including Sarah-Jane Norman’s campy Surabaya Johnny and Fiona MacGregor’s starkly confrontational You Have the Body, but the simplicity of Lottie Consalvo’s work was equally immersive and exquisitely immanent as a futile attempt to cleave past and present.

The heavy iron door of an adjacent cell was locked and a small surveillance monitor displayed the artist Michaela Gleave, who would remain self-incarcerated for 48 hours, with only a single bed, toilet and basic supplies. As you observed Gleave on the screen—sitting on the bed, doing some basic yoga stretches—she would also intermittently manually adjust a clock to reflect her perception of the passing time. Impressively, when I returned to the gallery on Sunday afternoon, Gleave was only 25 minutes behind the actual time (quite a feat when you also account for sleep). Doing Time/Time Doing was probably the most extreme of the endurance works and even a mediated sense of the claustrophobia was enough to give me heart palpitations.

Nicholas Shearer’s Boots drew on repetition as its modus-operandi as he sat on a chair surrounded by the worn leather cushioning of the padded cell, pulling his black Baxters off and on. This performance really encapsulated one of the difficulties of aestheticising such an historically loaded space (I know from discussions with past curators that inmates have committed suicide in this cell, and it still has a very foreboding 19th century feel). The soothing simplicity of Shearer’s performance, however, also reminded me of the recent phenomenon of autonomous sensory meridian response videos (Google it!), without the whispering. Another performance that had the act of labour at its core, was Rowena Fong’s With strings attached which had a Rumpelstiltskin motif, as the local clothing designer (from High Tea With Mrs Woo) spun “material waste into infinite cocoons of precious string” (program note). This struck a more craftily redemptive note, as drop spindles hung from the ceiling and Fong turned colourful material offcuts into twine.

On opening night I didn’t make it in for a consultation with Anastasia Klose, Your drunken fortune, but when I returned on Sunday afternoon I was able to sit down and seek her prescience. I told her a recent tale of woe, and she left me with words of wisdom from Morrissey, “I’ve seen it happen in other people’s lives, and now it’s happening in mine,” as she sipped red wine from a water tumbler. I was never one for drinking, or late nights—the wellsprings of this performance—but I can instinctively tap into these kinds of speculative conversations between women even though I remain stone cold sober. Klose brought the aesthetic of hand-drawn signs and lo-fi immediacy to the gallery, and the audience interaction gave this performance a private and unpredictable narrative element.

The only performance that I had conflicting feelings about was Jodie Whalen’s Between husband and wife, which involved Whalen and her husband writing long declarations of love to each other while sitting at a table in a far cell and then reading them out publically every 15 minutes in another space. Perhaps the intention was partly to make the audience uncomfortable, and god knows a marriage is as much a durational performance as any other—as the artists’ parents had often noted: “you don’t get this many years for murder.” Interpersonal relationships were also explored in Todd McMillan and Sarah Mosca’s You are as hopeless as me (study), which had a wonderful soundtrack by The Cocteau Twins.

Enduring Parallels co-curators Ineke Dane and Lottie Consalvo (who have both moved to Newcastle in the last few years) did a stellar job putting this exhibition together, which was as much a testimony to the indelible coherence of the 10 artists’ work in response to the physicality of the site, as it was the individual pieces (unfortunately, Sarah-Jane Norman, who was intending to do a telephonic work from Berlin, was a late withdrawal from the program due to technical issues, leading to a lack of contemporary Indigenous presence in the show). As romantic as the whole enterprise of art may be, especially in this context—where the site acts as a palimpsest for not only counter-discourses such as graffiti, but silhouettes of colonial forbears ghosted on the windows—the exhibition wasn’t overawed by its architecture, instead creating a live ‘event horizon.’ By definition The Lock-Up, as a kind of half-way house of detention, almost begs an engagement with endurance performance and, as the curators note, “Parallels with the past and present, infinity and the measurable, distance and time, value and immateriality, enduring love and memory, resonate in the performances” (program). The calibre of the artists involved in Enduring Parallels and the networks the curators tapped into bode well for The Lock-Up’s continued programming as a multi-disciplinary contemporary art space and I’m looking forward to their 2015 program.

Enduring Parallels, curators Ineke Dane, Lottie Consalvo, The Lock-Up, Newcastle, 28-30 Nov, 2014, www.thelockup.org.au

There are many users of the waters of the Murray-Darling basin and Adelaide is a major one, having long been dependent on water piped from the Murray River to supplement its meagre rainfall. Two large pipes convey water to Adelaide, one of them originating in the town of Murray Bridge, 75 km southeast.

The river basin has also long been home to numerous communities, preceding and since European colonisation. Same River Twice, a joint exhibition mounted by the Murray Bridge Regional Gallery (MBRG) and the Australian Experimental Art Foundation (AEAF) in Adelaide, is an essay in two forms: a collection of artworks by past and present artists and a catalogue detailing the history of the river and its pivotal role not only in Australia’s economy but in its culture, including artists’ essays focused on the river and the broader environment.

Curators Melinda Rankin (MBRG) and Fulvia Mantelli (AEAF) chose the exhibition title to allude to the river’s ever-changing nature. The catalogue includes a transcript of a 2012 speech by late Ngarrindjeri elder Tom Trevorrow on the relationship of his community with the river. Writer Ken Orchard’s essay outlines the importance of artistic and photographic depictions of the river in tracing pre- and post-colonial settlement and in informing debate on its usage and management, thus establishing an historical context for the artwork in the exhibition.

Each gallery’s exhibition opening was preceded by a ceremonial welcome to country from the local Indigenous community. AEAF exhibition openings now routinely include a welcome ceremony from the Kaurna community, inviting recognition and appreciation of the region’s Indigenous culture, as well as signifying openness to dialogue and reconciliation.

Central to the exhibition is a selection of work by Ian Abdulla (1956-2011) who grew up on the river’s banks near Murray Bridge and whose paintings and screen prints give unparalleled insights into what such life was like and how abundant the river once was. Nici Cumpston, of the Barkindji community of the Darling region, exhibits her well-known hand-coloured photos of the Murray wetlands and discusses her search for evidence of Indigenous occupation and her documentation of significant sites.

Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi artist Jonathan Jones (NSW) shows Untitled (Murray-Darling River Catchment), a set of graphite rubbings mapping the Murray-Darling’s catchment areas as defined by the Australian Department of Environment. He notes in his essay how the river system was home to 40 Aboriginal nations, over which catchment management has been superimposed. He suggests the system’s recovery requires acknowledging the cultural values of the Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations and Northern Basin Aboriginal Nations groups. Ellen Trevorrow (SA) shows Seven Sisters Mats (2009), traditional items woven from sedges and housed in the Camp Coorong museum established by the Ngarrindjeri community to record and teach Ngarrindjeri history and culture.

Heidi Kenyon, Liz Butler, Same River Twice, AEAF + MBRG 2014-15, installation view Murray Bridge Regional Gallery

In Heidi Kenyon’s (SA) Everything Flows, Nothing Remains (I & II) (2014) dark, curtained rooms house small, backlit jars of ‘transposed’ water—cleansed Adelaide water at MBRG and muddy Murray water at the AEAF. Images projected through the jars show dripping taps, as if connected to the pipeline, accompanied by the sound of water endlessly dripping away. The crucial importance of water management is further highlighted in Dryland base 2 (2008) by Pamela Kouwenhoven (1944-2014, SA. It’s the base of an old rainwater tank covered with degraded malthoid, a protective coating applied to the underside of iron tanks to prevent corrosion. Hung like a painting, it symbolises the constant need to collect water.

Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski (NSW) show works from their Incompatible Elements series, including A living body, a scrolling aerial photograph of the Coorong, the long lagoon adjoining the Murray mouth that is so endangered because of the reduced flow of water through it. The title refers to Tom Trevorrow’s description of the river as a living body. They also show And the river was dust, an aerial map of the Murray-Darling’s winding streams photo-shopped to spell out the work’s title, a quotation from Judith Wright, poet and environmentalist who characterised the Australian imaginary so acutely. Kay Lawrence’s (SA) No Words for the River is a series of small watercolours bearing phrases used by European explorers to describe the river, betraying their ignorance of its nature.

At the AEAF, Fiona McGregor (NSW) shows a video documenting a 2011 performance entitled Water #1 Descent in which she lies motionless on a table for several hours, covered in salt, while rainwater drips onto her forehead from a bladder above her head. The bladder contains her own body weight in water, collected from various sites between Lake Eyre and Sydney following a flood. Her gathering of water suggests homage. She writes, “The image is one of torture and wastage, the performance an extended study of stillness and thirst” (catalogue). Performance art like McGregor’s dramatically focuses our attention and it’s a pity Water #1 Descent could not have been re-enacted here.

The physical presence of salt is taken to extreme levels in Liz Butler’s (SA) two works—at MBRG, she shows Lunar Flow (2014), in which mounds of salt crystals, laid out like a dried lake-bed, lie on the gallery floor surrounding three rusted metal tubes engraved with images of aquatic fossils. At the AEAF she shows Detritus (2014), a bed of salt crystals arrayed like a grave with rusted steel plates lying across it and dotted with containers looking like discarded drink cans but made from architectural film bearing designs for housing. Above the salt-bed is a video of salt pouring from her cupped hands—she urges that we understand the land before building on it.

Jonathan Jones worked with Tom Nicholson (Vic) to produce an artist’s book, Murray-Darling Views—Evening Shadows. Bound tête-bêche as a single volume, Jones contributes a collection of images of paintings selected from the Art Gallery of SA’s extensive collection relating to the Murray, and Nicholson provides an account of the Yorta Yorta protest at Cummeragunja in 1939 with a parallel account of the historical and cultural importance of Henry James Johnstone’s well-known painting Evening shadows, backwater of the Murray (1880, SA), the first painting ever acquired by AGSA.

Same River Twice is not overtly activist but it forcefully reminds us of crucial issues to which solutions are long overdue and implicitly asks how a complex community can act collectively to restore the environment. The Murray Bridge-Adelaide pipeline graphically illustrates the dependence of the city on rural provisioning, but supporting cities with both water and farm produce can deplete rural areas catastrophically. Rather than proposing solutions, the exhibition explores the personal dimension of the river’s life and history, especially the idea of the river as a multicultural home. The exhibition also demonstrates the power of the curator-historian in highlighting a political issue by assembling a collective of otherwise unconnected voices. Indigenous and European stories are intertwined and the curators open a new, discursive connection between metropolitan and regional centres, challenging the validity of binaries.

In his opening address, incoming AEAF Board Chair Professor Ted Snell said that artists are at the edge of change and spoke of the role of art in reflecting, critiquing and shaping society, indicating that this exhibition is about how our survival has to be built on partnership. It is perhaps optimistic to think that cooperation between the communities represented in this exhibition might encourage restoration. But if the condition of the river is the result of the ‘tyranny of small decisions,’ a concept applicable to many environmental and social issues, then this exhibition is a collection of highly articulate responses, and perhaps the solution will emerge from the aggregate of such small, corrective actions.

Same River Twice, Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, and Murray Bridge Regional Gallery, 5 Dec 2014-7 Feb 2015

Terry Williams, Stereo 2011, vinyl fabric, cotton, stuffing and fibre-tipped pen, private collection, Melbourne

While inside/outside might seem a pretty straightforward binary, Outsider Art is far from being a clear-cut category. Not only does the term embrace the art of makers variously perceived as untrained, self-taught, intellectually or physically disabled, or otherwise marginalised from either mainstream society and/or the mainstream art world, it also contains a neat paradox.

As Sarah Boxer put it in The Atlantic (“The Rise of Self-Taught Artists”): to be an ‘outsider’ requires identification from an ‘insider’—and immediately, the outsider becomes an insider. Everyday Imagining: New Perspectives on Outsider Art, at Melbourne’s Ian Potter Museum of Art, offered a welcome opportunity both to reflect on the assumptions that have underpinned Outsider Art, and to experience the work of seven Australian and New Zealand “outsider artists.”

As curator Joanna Bosse outlines in her catalogue essay, the antecedent to Outsider Art is generally acknowledged to be the classification ‘art brut,’ coined in the mid-1940s by French artist Jean Dubuffet. For him, art brut described a kind of primal, unsullied creativity; he was especially interested in the mentally ill, seeing them as being beyond societal and cultural influence. Bosse is keen to debunk this view, and has selected artists for this exhibition whose work, she says, “convincingly argues against the idea that interiority lies at the heart of their practice.” These seven artists, she points out, are very actively engaged with the external world, and their work, far from displaying a romantically-conceived solipsism, expresses their deep interest in everyday objects and experiences.

Indeed, what inspires the works in Everyday Imagining is recognisably the same everyday world that we all live in: a world of things, people, obsessions, doodlings, abstractions, patterns and geographies. On entering the gallery, the fabric sculptures of Terry Williams issue a haptic invitation (alas, one can’t actually touch them): there are various cameras, a fridge complete with opened door and constructed food items inside, a teapot, a ghetto blaster—all replicated in forensic detail, sometimes life-size, sometimes uncannily out of scale. Their lumpy forms are reminiscent of some of Louise Bourgeois’ works—versions of things that should be hard, their rough seams exuding puffs of Dacron stuffing, like well-loved stuffed toys. There’s a feeling of leakage, of porosity between objects and world—but no lack of skill in the making. Anyone who has ever wielded needle and thread will be able to imagine the trials of attaining the near-perfect proportions, achieving the three-dimensional construction and patiently persisting with details (you can look right through the camera viewfinders). The objects crumple and strain against pressure, their seams give. And their fuzzy disarray suggests the archaeological—they are like a leaking history of the familiar, crumpling and straining against time: shrouded and stitched.

Jonathan Griffin has posed the question: is Outsider Art “a reactionary throwback to anachronistic ideas of artistic genius, suffering and dysfunction?” Similar tropes include that of the ‘unwell’ or disabled artist for whom art-making is a form of ‘medicine’ or ‘therapy.’ Sarah Boxer mentions the case of Adolf Wölfli, a late 19th century Swiss ‘outsider’ whose compulsive drawing “calmed him down.” In Everyday Imaginings, Bosse points—without didacticism—to the possibility of such a motivation in the work of New Zealander Martin Thompson, whose intricate, patterned works in felt-tipped pen, created by filling in 1mm squares on large sheets of graph paper, are so flawlessly executed that at first glance they appear digitally created.

Thompson’s symmetrical, monochromatic designs shimmer like snowflakes or starfields. Different impressions emerge from them like magic-eye pictures, or appear cross-hatched like thick embroidery. They map out planes of not only obsessive, perhaps meditative markings, but of myriad subtleties as well—fine deepenings or lightenings of colour that betray the hand of the artist, his body and his attention in the moment of making. One work seems to have been excavated for the viewer, with one broad edge of the page left uncoloured and finger-smudged.

Like Williams’ fabric sculptures, Thompson’s intricate grids remind me of the notion of ‘women’s work’—that of sewing, crafting, embroidery; in Thompson’s, a pixellated crafting that precedes the digital. Indeed, in the USA, Outsider Art has at times been classified alongside or within ‘folk art,’ and it’s tempting to wonder whether these tactile, intimate engagements, privileging the domestic or the introspective over grand themes, unwittingly undergo some subtle conflation with the feminine, that other great ‘outsider’ category. I’m reminded too of Ann Cvetkovich’s writings on crafting as habitual counter to the insanity of Western modernity, in her book Depression: A Public Feeling.

Equally, it seems that these artists just do what artists always do: shaping form out of chaos (see Elizabeth Grosz’s Chaos, Territory, Art); exploring representation, abstraction, topography. Both Thompson’s patternings and Andrew Blythe’s paintings on paper map out distinct landscapes, two-dimensional architectures whose regularities and inconsistencies play off one another. Blythe’s paintings, created entirely from repetitions of the X symbol and the word ‘no,’ seem to deliver a message, up close, but at a distance have the simultaneously 2D/3D shimmer seen and felt in some Aboriginal dot paintings. Lisa Reid and Jack Napthine both depict bodies and objects: Reid in stripped-down life drawings that relay the character of her models with cartoonish accuracy; and Napthine in a long and colourful mural, both map and narrative, that includes the names of places and events woven around bright drawings of light globes and locks. Where Reid and Napthine bring ‘reality’ into sharp, lean focus, Julian Martin and Kellie Greaves move in the opposite direction, abstracting familiar objects to create colourful paintings that leave the ‘thing’ behind, or obscured, focusing instead on colour and form.

Whether or not there is really an ‘inside’ or an ‘outside,’ Everyday Imagining shines a well-focused light on the work of these seven artists and opens up a productive space for exploring the edges and conflicts of the notion of Outsider Art. Perhaps, as Museum of Everything founder James Brett has suggested, we are all in any case on one ‘spectrum’ or another and creativity is “a version of dysfunction.” Personally, I’m partial to Louise Bourgeois’ famous words: “Art is a guaranty [sic] of sanity”.

Everyday Imagining: New Perspectives on Outsider Art, Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, 1 Oct, 2014-18 Jan, 2015

DVD: The Infinite Man

Australian director Hugh Sullivan’s sci-fi rom-com was generally regarded by local critics as a very interesting if flawed first feature. However, the film was nominated for Best Film, Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor (Alex Dimitriadis) by the Australian Film Critics Association. Meanwhile SXSW Film Festival (Austin, Texas) deemed it “Indie time travel mayhem at its best…the kind of movie you are going to want to watch time and time again. And time again…And time again… And time again…” Decide for yourself.
5 copies courtesy of Madman Entertainment

DVD: What We Do in the Shadows

Comically melding vampire folklore with life’s more mundane concerns, this engaging horror mockumentary from the director of Boy, Taika Waititi, and Flight of the Conchords’ Jemaine Clement charts the trials and tribulations of vampires in a New Zealand share-house. Squabbles over the washing-up are soon forgotten when 8000-year-old housemate Petyr accidentally brings a new vampire into the fold. It’s a heart-warming tale, despite all the blood that’s spilt.
5 copies courtesy of Madman Entertainment

Book: Bodies of Thought: 12 Australian Choreographers

From RealTime and Wakefield Press, a groundbreaking new book for lovers of Australian contemporary dance, focused on innovative choreographers, concentrating on a work by each with an accessible interview and an insightful essay by a leading dance writer. Edited by Erin Brannigan and Virginia Baxter.
(If you miss out head to www.wakefieldpress.com.au
RRP: $34.95 inc GST; purchase in bookshops)
3 copies courtesy of RealTime

Please note you can nominate for ONLY ONE GIVEAWAY.
Email us at giveaways@realtimearts.net with your name, postal address and phone number. Include ‘Giveaway’ and the name of the item in the subject line.

Gail Priest in front of artwork by Dran, part of the exhibition INSIDE, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 20 Oct, 2014-10 Jan, 2015

After 15 and half years of service, frequently above and beyond the call of duty, our much loved Associate Editor, Online Producer, writer and layout artist Gail Priest has surrendered her 7/10th position with RealTime to transform her 3/10 life as an artist into a full-time career with the help of a well-deserved Australia Council Fellowship. Her intelligence, creativity, humour, sense of team work, her generosity and commitment to the artists and writers who fill our pages have made life at RealTime an enduring pleasure, whether in the office or ‘on the road,’ writing and mentoring in Bristol, Melbourne, Adelaide, Singapore, Perth, Hobart and Vancouver. We congratulate Gail for taking the plunge and wish her all the best for her career in writing and experimental music. An inspiring companion on our journey, there is no substitute for Gail.
Virginia & Keith

Even though Columbia Pictures’ head Harry Cohn famously derided putting ‘messages’ into films (“If you want to send a message, use Western Union!”) Hollywood cinema has ended up the largest global producer of ‘messages.’ More promiscuous than an Amazon.com entry, they can take any form and be conservative or subversive, populist or messianic. They circle the world like FedExed Legionnaires disease, suggesting that their rampant distribution accounts for their globalist totalising effects.

But such media analyses are focused on the messenger, not the message, whose aura and make-up encode its fuller meanings. Most importantly, these ‘messages’ detach from their hosts to circulate in unfounded ways, often cross-fertilising with others completely out of context. Thus Hollywood films appear to be authored and voiced, but they’re oppositely generated, thereby requiring alliterate modes of reading.

In the case of Mark Foster’s World War Z (2013), a type of ‘semiotic listening’ is required to prise any message from the movie’s semantic din. In its most fascinating and confounding moment, a mass of Israelis and Palestinians gather at processing gates inside a humongous wall Israel has built to keep out a plague of infected ‘zombies.’ A young Palestinian woman grabs a microphone and starts singing through a low-fi PA system. Accompanied by non-stop feedback she sounds like a wounded mule. A young Israeli woman grabs another mic and joins in singing the unspecified untranslated song, which presumably has something to say about unification. Their inept carolling is smeared with whining sine waves and whelping whistles from the military-issue sound system. Yet this magically moves all the civilians of conflicting denominations to join in, generating a nauseous sonorum of campfire togetherness.

Is this deluded humanist cinema dreaming it’s outrageously optimistic? Or is this a cynical damnation of cinema that wishes for such a moment? Whenever actual noise is rendered on the film soundtrack—here embedding bad singing with bad audio—it signifies something occurring beyond legibility. Notably, beautiful wailing women’s voices are globalist clichés on current Hollywood film soundtracks. This scene’s impetus for terrorising its own soundtrack signposts a post-literate realm, where words alone and their utterance as message do not adequately explain the audiovisual scenario under scrutiny.

Before one can answer this conundrum, the feedback and its painful vocalisation hits the ears of the zombies outside, triggering them into extremist violence. Are these zombies symbolic of the torture endured by those who are annihilated by terrorism? Or are they terrorists enraged by the platitudes which suppress their logic of rage? And if on the other side—in that ‘Free World’ trapped by the gigantic CGI-transmogrified Wailing Wall of Jordan’s Temple Mount—Jews and Muslims sing a song of hugging devoid of Zionist and Islamic pressure, who and what exactly are the zombie Other, squealing in pain at their utopian wails? Columnists covering the Middle East (as well as writers for religiously aligned publications) have mostly thrown their hands up in despair over the confused messages delivered by World War Z, excited initially by a rare instance of Hollywood attempting to symbolise anything to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, yet perplexed by the lack of fixity or substance in the film’s ‘voice.’

Their lack of patience and perception is telling. As the ‘Free World’ searches for terrorist needles in Islamic haystacks, critiques of extremist fundamentalist strategies proceed as if everything should be in plain sight. Extremist attacks are deplored for their unjustifiable actions, yet their reasoning and logic might be as hidden as those haystack needles. The ‘Free World’ press chooses to employ humanist ethics and globalist morality to dismiss extremist rhetoric—the very same sentiments which form the bulk of ‘messages’ in Hollywood’s post-9/11 cinema. But in less democratic realms, a deadly butterfly effect is proffered: The Chinese state-run Global Times (an English-language publication) recently inferred that “what Western developed societies have gone through is payback, as it is their historical acts of slavery and colonialism which led to their current demographic structures.”

Meanwhile in World War Z, the traumatised zombies are reborn as an Other beyond Others. They become a rhyzomatic flood of flesh-entangled tentacles, pouring like a unified mass toward the wall which keeps them at bay. Like decrepit corporeal treacle moving according to an upturned gravity, they shoot skywards in a spiralling tornado of rotting flesh. If terrorists are indeed cells, then this is their hive uncovered. It’s an explosion of bodies driven by collective force, blindly forging ahead against all obstruction. They do not need to see anything: their senses are aligned by something beyond the sensible, the literate, the perceivable. They vibrate like sound waves, responding to the force of being struck, agitated into a deadly wave of negative energy.

For once, Hollywood CGI goes beyond its Tinkerbell fairy-dust facials and shows bodies not as singular identities, but as an uncontrollable mass of aggravated chaos. The zombies form a human eruption of self-scaling bloodlust, reaching the wall’s ledge and piling over like sparks from a welder’s arc. They crash below, again and again, bearing the weight of nothing more than statistical probability: enough will fall to create a landing carpet for the others, all eventually becoming agency for further agency. It’s like a time-condensed visualisation of the ideological breeding supported by fundamentalists of all persuasions and sides: for each of us that falls, ten more shall take our place.

Here, Temple Mount has become an arena for rock spectacle. The zombies are stage-diving into the crowd, either breaking neck and limb as they hit walls, grates, rooftops, or snapping and biting at any living thing in their path—from startled IDF soldiers to scarved singers. Like a swarm of suicide bombers, they ‘CGI-bomb’ every frame of this sequence. Yet they resemble disaffected scruffy teens circa-Grunge—possibly the rebel soundtrack to the formative years of many working on this film’s production. (They’re even wearing plaid shirts and camo-gear.) Is this Brad Pitt’s company Plan B Entertainment making a plea for peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, by utilising the para-Survivalist Amero-secular voice of Grunge rage? For while World War Z is sci-fi to the eye, to the ear it’s a musical.

Musicals are aberrant by nature and disruptive by form. They constitute a narrative type predicated upon unleashing libidinal, transformative, utopian & pathological energy through the incursive act of singing in what otherwise is a normative text, shaped by literature, actualised by theatre, and rendered by photography. Songs become decimating agents within their film, wherein the world becomes a stage. Once a character starts singing, things will change—internally (for the character and for the film) and externally (for the world it depicts and our experience of that depicted world).

When that young Palestinian woman started singing, she set into motion more than can be accounted for—and far more than can be rationalised by the global intelligentsia and its elitist acultural op-ed columnists. The film’s ‘message’ is in its noise.

Improvisation, especially when packaged boldly as a MoveMe Festival presented by STRUT Dance, the nation’s new centre for choreographic development, simmers into consciousness as a sensory evocation of Deleuze and Guatarri’s idea of becoming, of ideas and entities struggling to be born and yet ever trembling before the act. This resistance to being known is a goldmine for possibilities though one fraught with inevitable frustrations. The week, perforated with performances and workshops, certainly fired (and tired) the Perth contemporary dance population as they embraced an array of international guests and knuckled down to the serious stuff of playing with movement, sound and text.

Jo Pollitt, Paea Leach and their co-performers “pick[ed] up and put down their feet” … and arms, torsos and clipped breathing in Beast #3. This version picks up and puts down compositional and random vibrations, split three ways in pairs (with an interlude from a guest duo). The mathematical structure, even in its light-hearted looseness, spawned paired metaphors ranging over control meeting spontaneity, rigour flipped to parody, rhythm inverted to scatter and conversation become noise. The cross-fades mesmerise, yet hover beyond articulation or the parameters of precise meaning. Individual movers emerge and slip back into shared spaces; this becomes particularly evident in the third section where the game of changing leadership is explored. Text threaded further poetic resonances through the quivering patterns though the dialogue invariably faded below my hearing and, consequently, I missed much of the reeling choreography of this mode of expression straining towards form.

Beast’s pairing turned into a three-way overlap with Rosalind Crisp, Hansueli Tischhauser and Andrew Morrish in No-one Will Tell us …, equivalent in many ways to Cage and Cunningham’s coincidence of happenings occurring in the same space and time. Crisp begins in silence and a single throw of light, the right attention to accentuate fingers and toes and the myriad isolated impulses given to an embryonic corporeal enunciation. Like nascent language, the tiny gestures begin and, yet, never arrive to speak. Then Tischhauser’s sonic landscape spreads, the electronic bass reverberating over the miniature gestures in voluminous sonorities which penetrate the senses and leave Crisp’s movements like obscure memories. Into that mix comes “there is no story, just bits or shards” as the charismatic Morrish proceeds to tell a story of Brian, psychic arms and sheep. As nonsensical as those phrases may appear, Morrish does actually concoct a tale which bounces off the movement and sound like an ironic overplay or, in retrospect, like communication come into being.

On another evening, Ros Warby ties up embodied hierarchies and their elimination in Court Dance, an intellectual exercise which rummages through the historical framing of dance as a discipline. Courtly behaviour is engraved in balletic form and its European heritage: the foppery of over-elaborate flourishes marking out the aristocracy as much as does the convention of turn-out, purported to display the body for the consumption of an elite. Warby insinuates these associations in bowing port de bras and squared movements which quickly disintegrate into faltering awkwardness. The transitions are appealing, even comic in moments, but the constant fidelity to undoing loses momentum and strangely, for the unpredictable nature of improvisation, trails away into democratic evenness. The second work on the program, No Time to Fly, re-examines Deborah Hay’s original choreography, giving Warby licence to tangle with the non-linear reality of the maker’s point of departure and the intervening experiences of being involved in this same score for three soloists. Fragmented murmurs of movement and sound under scrutiny ripple and twist beneath the light and disappear before continuity settles. Like Court Dance, non-linearity tends to settle into its opposite.

After the spate of rigorous investigations brought by the works above, Michael Schumacher and Alex Waterman’s Dans le Jardin spun improvisation across the imagination in mysterious ways. Schumacher and Waterman obviously pre-plan to exploit the unseen potential of the available ‘garden’ spaces that come their way, in this instance, Perth’s State Theatre Centre courtyard, a balconied, partial enclosure set with tables and chairs and minimal saplings-just-become-trees to validate the horticultural title. The artists had studied the architectural surfaces and dimensions in which sound and movement could play but they could not have foreseen what imprints their choices might have in moments of actuality. The telling image for me came after Schumacher had set up a kind of hide-and-seek game, disappearing in between the downstairs foliage and isolating arm and fingering against the upstairs surfaces. His next appearance, only hinted at with a subtle change of lighting, was picked-up by two small boys who ran to the slightly removed grating which separates the courtyard from the formidable underfoot illumination of the main-street entrance to the complex. The boys clung to the wire as silhouetted figures, upright and totally attentive, against Schumacher’s controlled fall in the dazzling light. It was a geometric moment and one filled with angles of unspoken meaning before the viewing adults, realising the location of the action, moved to exploit the youthful intuition and obscured the image.

Human intuition, communication and play fused in that moment and confirmed the inestimable value of improvisation. I saw that irradiating pathway anew, heard the sonorous cello sweeps expand around the enclosure, felt the body stretch beyond itself and knew that there was a purpose in a confluence which happened to and was crystallised by those boys. Improvisation, planned, derived from experience and performed in the moment had arrived. In the ensuing activity where Schumacher returned to the courtyard and the sophisticated adult environment, the boys stuck like glue to his incidental encounters, becoming part of the performance, gleefully guarding a found (or placed) twig he entrusted to them as he wove from a beer at the bar to a hand balance, from a swivel salute to a skitter around the now entrancing space. This garden bloomed from an urbanised enclave to an enchanted arcadia of surprise. Improvisation, with all its degrees of design and improbability became performance and confirmed MoveMe’s conception as a festival.

STRUT Dance, MoveMe Improvisation Festival, Beast#3, Jo Pollitt & Paea Leach with Tony Currie, Gregory Lorenzutti, Rachel Arianne Ogle, Patricia Wood, guests Isabella Stone & Ella Rose Trew, composer Mace Francis, lighting Ellen Knops; No-one will tell us …, Rosalind Crisp, Andrew Morrish, Hansueli Tischhauser, lighting: Marco Wehrspann; Court Dance, Ros Warby, music Helen Mountfort, voice Ria Soemardjo; No Time to Fly, choreography Deborah Hay, adaptation, performance Ros Warby; Dans le Jardin, dance Michael Schumacher, music Alex Waterman, lighting Ellen Knops; Perth Cultural Centre, 22-29 Nov, 2014

Under the leadership of creative producer Angharad Wynne-Jones, Arts House has been at the forefront of a growing engagement by artists and the arts sector with environmental sustainability and the global condition of climate change.

Initiatives such as their Greenie-in-Residence program are helping to implement changes to the internal practices of arts organisations, encompassing areas from recycling regimes, hospitality choices and technical and production upgrades, to different approaches to touring and travel. Other events, such as the biennial Going Nowhere program, are focused on commissioning new work, providing platforms for responses to climate change by artists and exploring more sustainable modes of artistic exchange.

The three-day festival presented four commissioned projects seeded from the first iteration of Going Nowhere in 2012: 360°, Dan Koop with Andy Field and Nathan Street; nowhere, one step at a time like this with Helen Cole and Alex Bradley; Reach Out Touch Faith, Sarah Rodigari with Joshua Sofaer; and The Second Before, Willoh S Weiland with Julian Crotti and Fritz Hauser.

These new works were developed as exchanges between Australian and international artists in a partnership with Cambridge Junction (UK). Most will be presented again at a Julie’s Bicycle event at Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, in January, with 360° to be presented again in May. Each of the works was made through collaborative processes across hemispheres without anyone actually getting on a fuel-guzzling plane. An additional ‘rule’ for each commission was that artists not purchase anything new in making their works.

The experiences created ranged from joyfully camp to deeply meditative; perhaps unsurprisingly given a reliance on email and skype in the creative development process, one of the strongest qualities of the pieces I saw was beautiful text in each, whether an audio-tour, promenade performance or performed lecture.

Sarah Rodigari’s Reach Out Touch Faith tackled the heart of Going Nowhere head-on: how to create a live performance without travelling when the artist’s presence is so crucial. Her collaborator, UK artist and psychologist Joshua Sofaer used online Relational Dynamics coaching sessions with Rodigari to explore this question and the outsourcing of both performance and authenticity.

We are presented with a compelling performance lecture, delivered on behalf of Rodigari by performer Emma Hall wearing a Lufthansa air blanket fashioned as a poncho, accompanied by the artist’s spirit animal, a goat. While the monologue questions the personal ramifications of sustainability and survival as an artist, the fear of missing out if not present and making real personal sacrifices in order to reduce one’s carbon footprint (which for many artists means travelling less), the goat crunches on hay, moves around the small stage, eyeballs members of the audience and shits at remarkably perfect moments.

Two other commissioned works added to the overall flavour of Going Nowhere. The People’s Weather Report was a stunning installation created by eco-designer Tanja Beer and sound designer Nick Roux. Beer’s gorgeous recyclable, compostable kokedama plant installation held many voices: weather reports sourced from people around the world, with further contributions added live throughout the weekend. Selections of the reports can also be downloaded at ABC RN’s Soundproof and Radiotonic.

Tristan Meecham’s live art work The Everyday Imaginarium created a space for the utopian and fantastical alongside the everyday. Meecham curated nine sages and storytellers who, over the course of the weekend, became a kind of intimate community fair under a shaded balcony at North Melbourne Town Hall designed by Yetti Turnball. With glasses of Pimms in hand, audience-participants were gently encouraged to choose from a menu of one-on-one conversational experiences. Popular choices were environmental Tarot reading with Sylvie Leber and life drawing sessions with Marjorie Barnett and her pet chicken Blackberry. Both Leber and Barnett are members of the Council on the Aging (Victoria) Green Sages program; the Green Sages were involved in a number of Going Nowhere projects.

I participated in a highly amusing and personal audit of my carbon footprint with Sam Hoffman (while at 230 points my footprint is less than the average 300, a sustainable footprint is 100 points; according to Hoffman, like many arts-workers I need to reduce my flights and eating/drinking out. Unfortunately, I flew from Adelaide to Melbourne and back for Going Nowhere).

Most delightful was my conversation with Stephen Mushin, artist and industrial designer, who is developing an illustrated book and exhibition—Now If What Then—of wildly satirical yet seemingly feasible designs for radical solutions to climate change, such as the Ethical Polar Bear Burger and Hoodie Factory Farm: Sustainable Post-Arctic Polar Bears. Clever, whimsical, affirming, The Everyday Imaginarium was one of the highlights of the weekend for me.

Going Nowhere was bookended by two activist events. The weekend began with a PechaKucha Melbourne evening, themed as Maiden Speeches for a New Parliament (with the Victorian State election a week away at the time).

Some speakers took on this provocation with gusto, while others used the opportunity to promote their entrepreneurial successes with very little critical reflection. The event highlighted the many divergent and contradictory political strategies inherent in the ways we tackle climate change and sustainability within capitalism (Q: can we?) and how we might speak beyond our own inner-city ghettos. Highlights included Sally Wills, director of Small Change Design and Construction, whose vision is to address Victoria’s housing crisis through the growing small house design movement; journalist Janak Rogers, who explored how we receive stories; and writer and commentator Van Badham, whose polemic lifted the room and attempted to answer the question above (A: no, it’s very likely we can’t).

On the final day, Arts House and TippingPoint Australia presented Game On!, a day-long workshop billed as part forum, part game, part action planning. During the morning, a range of artists, producers and activists took part in an exercise called the State of Emergency game—an illuminating if somewhat frustrating experience—developed by game-maker Harry Lee. In the afternoon we were asked to consider how we (specifically and pointedly those in the room) could contribute to a cultural shift around climate change. An Open Space Technology process facilitated by Greenie-in-Residence Matt Wicking and Angharad Wynne-Jones generated over 20 new project ideas, at least some of which are sure to see further life, creatively documented live by the Aphids team as part of their Post Impossible online archiving project.

Going Nowhere was a weekend of collaborations, ideas, participation, difficult propositions, illuminating and frustrating conversations, and artists grappling with all of them. With the last two events linked through the development of key international exchanges that culminated in November and early this year, it’ll be exciting to see where in coming years this important development program and sustainability event will head.

On 27 November 2014, the ill-fated day of the super-cell storm in Brisbane, I sat down with independent producer Dave Sleswick, founder and director of Motherboard Productions, to talk all things performance and Motherboard’s latest show Or Forever Hold Your Peace (The Story of Iphigenia) at La Boite Indie. I had just seen the show (see review) and we were crossing paths in a wind-lashed cafe near La Boite before he flew out that night to attend the prestigious Asian Producers Platform Camp in Korea (see report).

Chatting with Dave Sleswick is like being on a date with the future; he is an artist who slides between places and cultures with relaxed grace and a certain glint of wickedness in his eye. Laptop slung casually under one arm, he looks ready to make a deal or to run a rehearsal room anywhere. Indeed, the question for Motherboard has always been who rather than where or when. The team has created an extended international family of artists who have produced a broad repertory of work including the shows Underground, La Voix Humaine and Deluge (RT124).

Motherboard also offers producing services, hence Sleswick’s attendance at the slightly Soviet-sounding producers’ camp. To quote the Motherboard website: “We partner with seasoned artists to create new work and to deliver that work to venues and presenters. We have created and continue to nurture an eco-system of like-minded artists who are making and disseminating innovative and socially ‘now’ performance events. We believe in work with a social conscience and with a desire to create change in the world.” Companies under their producing banner include The Danger Ensemble, Little Dove Theatre and Red Moon Rising and individual artists Jeremy Niedeck, Nathan Stoneham and Morgan Rose.

This emphasis on relationship and ethos has meant that there isn’t necessarily a signature kind of Motherboard show, but as noted in RT124 Motherboard is one of the inheritors of the physical theatre tradition blazed by pioneer local companies Frank and Zen Zen Zo. Indeed, Sleswick was General Manager of Zen for a number of years, and his mane of dreadlocked hair flung back in an arc of frenzy was a performance image as iconic of noughties Zen repertory as Christopher Beckey’s sinuous writhing had been in the 90s. After leaving Zen, Sleswick produced for Danger Ensemble, Next Wave, MAPs for Artists, MONA FOMA and Marguerite Pepper, while living between Brisbane, Melbourne, Seoul and New York.

Indeed, it was during his time in New York that he formed a relationship with avant-garde American playwright Charles Mee, Anne Bogart’s resident writer at her SITI company. ‘Chuck’ as Sleswick refers to him in the show’s program, was excited at the thought of a vibrant Australian company adapting his Iphigenia 2.0, which was written in a fever in 2007 at the apogee of then American President George W Bush’s second term, when it seemed as if the American empire was intractably bogged in the moral and practical quagmire created by successive invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Mee is an American paradox. Fiercely politicised since Vietnam, he is also the only playwright I know who has had a Wall Street financier as a patron. He is a Harvard graduate and a professional historian yet he seeds the found texts he collages to make his work with an anarchic energy and brutally elegant poetry. Sadly, Mee’s work hasn’t been widely programmed in Australia and it was a typically astute decision by Motherboard to redevelop Iphigenia 2.0 in time for production during the rather uneventful G-20 Summit in stormy November Brisbane.

What I love about Motherboard’s adaptation of this work, alongside American/Australian Morgan Rose as dramaturg, is that it emphasises the political and intellectual traditions of that particular Suzuki/Bogart footprint in Australia. I think that Australian performance-makers have been guilty at times of embracing the body-saturated Suzuki training with a kind of wilful blindness to its political agenda, or at least the strain of that work as exemplified by Mee and Bogart’s longstanding collaboration.

Sleswick wanted the work to explore the responsibilities and culpability of political leadership at a time in Australian political life where there seems a dearth of reflection and little acknowledgement of error. To quote Sleswick quoting Mee, we have lost the rhetoric of failed leadership: “I admit I made a mistake. Tell me what you think. I’m open to suggestion. I hear you.” He also wanted to explore the effect of technology on language and communication, particularly in the years since Mee first assembled the text.

The show was first developed in 2012 in collaboration with Vena Cava Productions (QUT). The 2014 version at La Boite featured a 16-strong ensemble comprising committed and passionate new graduates and emerging artists working as a chorus to support a core of senior actors and performers. They trained together intensively: Sleswick has a reputation as a dynamic director who fosters a sociable and highly collaborative hothouse environment with, again, an emphasis on building relationships. As he says, “Why not make work with people we love and admire?”

While Mee gave the Motherboard creative team free rein, the bulk of the adaptation involved a fairly subtle dramaturgical textual framing to evoke Australian voice and political context, and enlarging the cast from 11 to 16 in order to build the synchronised and quasi-militarised performance sequences that flesh out Mee’s taut text to the 160-minute full-throttle rollercoaster ride that is Or Forever Hold Your Peace (The Story of Iphigenia).

As the world outside went grey and Thor-like thunder and lightning hailed down, the unflappable Sleswick slid out of the cafe to spend time with his cast and crew before departing for Korea. While he conceded he was a little tired by the end of 2014, Sleswick’s program for the company in 2015 looks as frenetic as ever, with a new work directed by Jeremy Niedeck, Shimchong: Daughter Overboard!, auditioning and the exciting news that Motherboard will finally have a base at the home of Brisbane performance-making, Metro Arts, which has a new Artistic Director in the warm and energetic brainbox director/dramaturg Dr David Fenton.

The ever gregarious, always welcoming Jeff Khan, Artistic Director of Performance Space, looks fitter than ever. “You have to be fit,” he says, to manage the job he’s in: the meeting and greeting, negotiating of commissions and partnerships and seeking out, nurturing and producing idiosyncratic artists in the territories of experimentation, hybridity, indigeneity and queer culture that are the province of Performance Space.

How does he do it? “Boot Camp for the last six months three times a week. I’m not a morning person, so it kills me every time, but I love it. When you spend a lot of time in your head, thinking about art and ideas, it’s great to be reminded that you have a body as well.”

The arts is one of those areas where there’s a very blurry boundary between work time and social time with all of the openings and functions and drinks. On the one hand I’m blessed to be working with people I love and with whom I’ve developed relationships over the many years of my career at Next Wave and now at Performance Space. So it’s a blessing and a curse, that blurry line, but I think it’s all about being cognisant of that balance. Sometimes you have it, sometimes you don’t. You need to get outside of this very complex, very tangled sphere that we move in and see it from a bird’s eye perspective so you can be ready to dive back in with energy.

A key cultural hub, nurturer and producer of innovative art, Performance Space, now under the sole artistic direction of Khan (after the exit of co-director Bec Dean in 2014) has radically remodelled its programming for 2015 and beyond. With the experience behind him of two hugely successful Next Wave festivals [2008, 2010], doubtless the notion of one big Performance Space festival was very appealing—to focus in one place, the entire Carriageworks building, and at one time on the results of sustained production development. Likewise the prospect of attracting an audience with a festival, as opposed to competing across the year with the host venue’s own rich program, must have been irresistible. But first we discuss producing and the delicate gestation of new work, like Vicki Van Hout’s Long Grass, premiered in the 2015 Sydney Festival.

It certainly pulls no punches. The thing that strikes me again and again about this work is its honesty in not flinching from those aspects, which are often difficult to discuss within the community involved, let alone outside them. This was one of the reasons that Vicki was so cognisant of the need to work alongside the community. In the final stage of development in December, (the artists) actually travelled up to Darwin and did a community showing with a lot of the Long Grass community who responded really well and appreciated the honesty and saw their lives in it. That was a great acknowledgement of their struggle and their reality, which, of course, could so easily be smoothed over or ignored.

We commissioned the first development and once the project hit its stride we entered into a co-producing relationship with Harley Stumm of Intimate Spectacle. Sydney Festival was always interested in the work. It was a long dialogue and ‘courtship,’ as it usually is, but they’ve been terrific really.

And what about Tamara Saulwick’s Endings? Another emotionally tough subject—dealing with the voices of the dead and those grieving them.

Absolutely and I think it’s another hallmark of Performance Space through the years—that very responsive, very contemporary issues-based approach to work. Endings began for us with Tamara’s earlier work, Pin Drop, which we presented as part of a Mobile States tour in 2012 when she was not well known in Sydney. Pin Drop was based around women’s experiences of violence and home invasion and was such a beautifully crafted work, a compelling subject and truly interdisciplinary, pivoting around sound in lots of ways.

After our audience responded fantastically to Pin Drop we were very interested in what Tamara was doing next. We were in dialogue about the early stages of Endings and I flew down to Arts House in Melbourne last year to see a showing, which was very strong. It really had the bones of the idea of voices speaking from outmoded analogue playback devices with Tamara almost harmonising with them in her performance. It was so beautiful that we decided we’d co-commission the work with Arts House. And part-way through that process Sydney Festival became interested—director Lieven Bertels loved Pin Drop. Tamara was an artist he wanted to strongly support as well. So having already committed to it, we would have presented that work in our 2015 program but it was such a fantastic opportunity with Sydney Festival that we decided to split it down the middle and co-present. It will travel to Arts House in May.

Let’s move on to how Performance Space produces itself. How have you shaped 2015?

We’ve moved from a year-round program to mini-seasons—festival seasons that occur twice through the year. This year that model is evolving into a single annual building-wide festival of experimental art, LIVEWORKS, at Carriageworks in October-November this year and will recur at a similar time in future years. Essentially, it will collect the work we’ve been doing all year round and give it a stronger platform curatorially and, from an audience perspective, a bigger critical mass of work. Having the whole building means we can present in different scales, from very large works in Bay 17 to very intimate work in the corridors and interstitial spaces of the building to sited events in the public spaces, public programs in the Tracks and create a really dynamic interplay between the scale and styles of work. I’m super-excited; it’s a very logical progression from the way we’ve been programming towards one big moment that can be a real showcase for Australian experimental art. I think our experimental and independent artists need that kind of platform, that kind of visibility not only for our audiences here in Sydney but for national and international audiences as well. Hopefully that’s the direction it will grow in future years.

What kind of re-shaping does this new model mean in terms of the organisation, staffing and the way you work?

On the whole, it means we’re carrying forward with our existing staff structure but using our resources a little bit more intelligently. It also opens up the opportunity for us to be more focused, intensive and rigorous about our research process—researching the artists we’re working with and the artistic practices that are happening that might feed into the program—and how we develop work—making sure that we really understand the context of those works, the history of the practices. We’ll develop materials for publication or public programs to maximise [the impact of] the works.

Absolutely—increasing that curatorial depth when you’re not just focused on getting a show on or producing it or logistically making it happen. You’re having a deep artistic dialogue with artists, something that has always happened at Performance Space but this just means that we’re giving a bit more time and weight to that process.

How does this fit with your relationship with Carriageworks’ own programming?

If you look at the programming environment at Carriageworks now it’s much busier than it was several years ago. For the first few years of Carriageworks we were the year-round program and that was a really important role we played. Carriageworks now has its own year-long program as well as those of other presenters, organisations and artists that Carriageworks has successfully drawn to the venue. That’s fantastic because it means audiences are coming to the building like never before, it’s on the map like it never has been. What’s the best contribution that we can make in that new context? It’s a very logical shift for us to be able to provide something unique in the annual program and in terms of the NSW and Australian cultural landscape.

You’ll of course continue focusing your research and producing model as a point of difference?

We’ve done a lot of development with contemporary Indigenous work across the visual and performing arts including Long Grass, which we nurtured over three years. We produced The Fox and the Freedom Fighters, which led our BURUWAN Island season last year and the Ken Thaiday exhibition was a co-commission with Carriageworks. This year we’re very excited to be developing a new performance work by the Stiff Gins [Nardi Simpson and Kaleena Briggs], the Indigenous musical duo with their first step into the realm of contemporary performance. They’ll be collaborating with a theatre director and composer Felix Cross who’s just moved to Australia from Britain. Spirit of Things: Sound of Objects is a 2015 residency project looking at issues around the repatriation of Indigenous objects in museum collections. The Gins visited the Australian Museum where the objects ‘spoke’ to them, so they’re finding ways to release these stories.

When Bec Dean and I took the helm as co-directors we were really interested in revisiting and reviving all the discourses around issues of gender and sexuality that has been a hallmark of Performance Space on and off through the years. In that first year of our co-directorship we co-curated SEXES, the big contemporary art festival around sex and gender with Deborah Kelly. That continues to be a strong curatorial theme in our program. The Stephen Cummins Bequest residencies for emerging queer artists are going strong. This year they’re in their fourth year. Day for Night (February 20-22) is our next big project off the ranks in conjunction with Mardi Gras and that’s curated by myself and Emma Price. It starts as a big queer dance party in Carriageworks with six artists presenting performance interventions into the party. At the end of the night the party shuts down and reopens the next day with the same performances continuing across the weekend but as an exhibition.

Performance Space has always been a bridge for the way that work develops and grows in the queer subcultural context and often translates across into a broader contemporary performance frame. Our key artistic collaborators in Day for Night are Stereogamous—Paul Mac and Johnny Seymour—and, of course, they’re deeply involved in the queer party scene around Sydney and run a lot of the really interesting alternative queer happenings from their weekly night Voguey Bear at Tokyo Sing Song in Newtown to Johnny’s involvement with Club Kooky, a club night that’s been running for 18 years. For us this is an opportunity to bridge two worlds and to create a context where the underground can be more visible yet hold its integrity.

Sometimes these cultures are very self-contained. Does the underground want to be overground?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. These alternative cultures are very relevant to the rest of society. Their ideas around gender and sexuality are some of the most exciting and progressive that we know. What we seek to do is to create a platform where some of those ideas can be discussed in a broader context.

Sometimes artists who come in from those areas, their vision looks strong but perhaps the movement and vocal skills are not quite there.

That’s exactly what the Stephen Cummins Bequest residencies were set up to do. They match emerging queer performance artists who might come from these underground or sub-cultural contexts and match them with experienced mentors. Over the years we’ve had excellent mentors like Chris Ryan, Victoria Spence, Martin del Amo, Victoria Hunt who are all about sharpening those performance skills and bringing these artists to new levels of ambition.

It very much is. Club Kooky was one of the first party events that I went to in Sydney and I’ve been following it ever since. I see the performance world being inspired by these kinds of communities. Justin Shoulder is an artist who has really come up through that scene. His fantastic creatures developed through short performances at club nights. Benji Ra, who’s in Day for Night this year, is a rigorously trained contemporary dancer who’s been at WAAPA and trained at the Martha Graham School, but he’s also a Voguer with a bit of Filipino traditional dance to boot.

Does the community that goes to Club Kooky and like venues come to Day for Night?

Absolutely. Last year when we did the first Day for Night there was such a warm and excited response from the community, from Club Kooky and other parties. There are those who want more from queer culture, for it to be more than a mainstream fight for marriage equality or Oxford Street on a Saturday night. I think Mardi Gras had seriously engaged in cultural programming for the first time in a while and the audience was hungry for it.

We have a few lead projects we can reveal now, one of which is a large scale new work by Wade Marynowsky called Robot Opera. This is definitely his most ambitious project to date because it’s a live performance with robot performers that corral and herd the audience. Wade is collaborating with Branch Nebula (Lee Wilson and Mirabelle Wouters) to choreograph it and to do the sound and lighting design. Also involved is sound artist Julian Knowles. Robot Opera will be presented in Bay 17 as one of the key works in the festival.

We’ll also be presenting a major commission by Aboriginal artist Jonathan Jones and the premiere of a work by Hissy Fit, a young, emerging artist collective who came through the Stephen Cummins Bequest program two years ago and were included in the first Day for Night last year. The work centres on the figure of the hysterical woman—the pathologised figure that arose through 19th century medical discourse and psychoanalysis re-imaged through the ‘hysterical’ women of all-girl Punk rock culture and the Riot Grrl movement from the 1990s.

Our site-specific program this year is titled Streetworks, taking artists and audiences out onto the streets and into public spaces with all the associations with protest and the tension between the individual and the collective that those actions might imply.

It kicks off with a residency followed by the premiere, in May, of a new pvi collective work called Black Market, which will be sited in Kings Cross and sends audiences out onto the streets armed with their own possessions to trade with pvi operatives for goods and services. The work is set in the context is of the GFC and informed by the Occupy movements. The conceit is that this financial meltdown has occurred and you have to go out on the streets and trade your own goods and services for the things you might need to survive the financial apocalypse.

We’re also presenting SDS1, which is the new work by Ahilan Ratnamohan in a Mobile States tour. It’ll be presented in a sports stadium in Western Sydney, in partnership with Blacktown Arts Centre. Bec Dean will curate Sydney Metres Squared in September, inviting artists to respond to a square metre of Sydney, looking at alternative ways [other than economic] to value space in terms of its history, or its poetic qualities or the way people use it. That will be a walking project through the city.

The flip side to our residencies are the more concentrated laboratory initiatives where artists gather to spend an intensive series of weeks exchanging and developing new skills and exploring collaborative potential. We’re holding two of these this year. The first is called Nula Nura, an Indigenous artist laboratory on Cockatoo Island that we’re developing with the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust. It’s evolved out of the Indigespace and Indigelab programs that we’ve done through the years with a new focus on site-specific work and responding to this very culturally loaded environment of Cockatoo Island. It’s a ten-day lab with a public showing at the end of it where people can travel to the Island and engage with the works in progress.

The other lab is Time_Place_Space, which we reignited last year with support from the Australia Council and our partner Arts House. Time_Place_Space: Nomad is a travelling laboratory where artists moving across various Australian landscapes and paring their work back to the essentials of their practice with whatever they can bring with them on that journey. It was a huge success last year, the artists responding to the challenge of working more sustainably and responding to different environmental contexts. This year Time_Place_Space will happen at the end of the year and will travel through regional Victoria and wind up at Arts House (see RT124).

A workshop for attendees to become familiar with each other, Asian Producers’ Platform Camp (APPCAMP), courtesy APPCAMP

December 1 was an auspicious day: Seoul’s first winter snow fell. It descended on Marronnier Park in exuberant flurries and tapped at the windows of the ARKO Arts Theater in Seoul’s Daehakro Daehangno district. In a rooftop rehearsal studio, some 30 Asian creative producers and sundry organisers and observers from the region swapped their boots for slippers, ahead of a week of research, skills exchange and networking at the first Asian Producers’ Platform Camp (APPCAMP).

The camp, an initiative organised by the Steering Committee for the Producer (South Korea), Performing Arts Alliance (Taiwan), ON-PAM Open Network for Performing Arts Management (Japan), Performing Lines (Australia) and Live Performance Australia, was hosted by Arts Council Korea and the Steering Committee for the Producer and supported by Arts Council Korea, Japan Foundation and the National Culture and Arts Foundation, in association with Arts Council Korea-Performing Arts Center. APPCAMP aims to foster a strong network of Asian performing arts producers, developing work and sharing cultural knowledge across the region.

Monday

The facts: five producers are here from each of four core countries: Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Australia. Pending funding, the core group will remain constant for three further annual APPCAMPs. Also here are eight producers from other countries, this year including China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Macau, Indonesia and Malaysia. The focus is on independent producers but the mix is broad, including participants from small and large arts companies, government projects and festivals. Many have not worked internationally before. Many have. Some are already collaborating across the region. So there’s a real cross-section of producing models and environments.

The vibe: friendly! The morning is spent getting to know each other: we play a kind of clowning game; we gaze eye to eye; we tell personal stories in small groups; we line up in order of whose hands are warmest. The kind of thing, says one producer, that they are used to making their artists do! After two hours we’ve made friends, scattered around the studio floor tucking into a delicious packed lunch, with the snow still swirling energetically outside. In the afternoon each producer outlines their practice, their interests and the creative landscape they work in. These range from organisations like Seoul’s Marginal Theatre Festival to Hong Kong’s burgeoning West Kowloon Cultural District; from ‘robot theatre’ (Seinendan Theatre, Japan) to a Korean non-profit street festival called Funny Revenge to the Boring World.

Friendships, say the organisers, are at the heart of APPCAMP: although driven and supported by several organisations, the Camp grew from personal connections between key members of these organisations who had long wanted to see a producer network in Asia to complement existing major arts centre and festival networks. Both Performing Lines’ Fenn Gordon and Kyu Choi of the Steering Committee for the Producer hope friendships will develop alongside APPCAMP’s professional gains—hence the retention of the core group over four years. They stress the significance of APPCAMP as an independently driven network—a less common structure in Asia than in Australia—in terms of potentially nurturing creative projects that may not emerge under existing government or market-driven programs.

Tuesday

The snow sparkles on thick-tiled rooftops, it’s around -4°C and the sun shines in a clear sky. In the morning APPCAMP tackles the role of the producer: the tangibles, the intangibles, the nuts and bolts. Gathered around trapezoidal desks and supplied with butcher’s paper and coloured markers, Campers tease out the history of producing in the region and develop an energetic job description that encompasses everything from financial planning to “crazy thinking.”

In the afternoon, guest speakers present a thorough outline of Korean arts policy and funding structures and participants compare the local situation with those of other Asian countries. With strongly government-driven arts sectors in Korea, Taiwan and Japan especially, questions arise: what creative niches can be identified and developed by independent, internationally focused producers outside the remit of departments of culture and foreign affairs? How can producers operating in less well-funded arts sectors—those of Malaysia and Indonesia, for example—meet the challenge of financing creative projects when funding is often restricted to major institutions and flagship national companies?

The multi-skilling of the creative producer is a recurring theme. Producers ‘do everything,’ combining diverse skills with supportiveness, flexibility and ‘gut feeling.’ In the context of current Asian arts policies, it seems these diverse and ‘shape-shifting’ abilities might enable independent producers to both successfully exploit existing opportunities and to create new ones, catalysed by a growing understanding of each other’s cultures and challenges.

Wednesday

Mid-week, APPCAMP’s pace is shifting—first-up we meet at a cosy basement cafe, Radio M; then after lunch head to the Seongdong district’s über-cool Veranda Industrial Studio—a renovated warehouse venue whose exposed brick walls are sparsely decorated with hip ‘found’ objects and typographic art. Far from chilling out, though, it’s here that Campers delve more vigorously into what brings the group together. What is ‘Asia’ anyway? What do producers in the region need? And how can they collaborate?

Australians are used to the guilty feeling of knowing more about European than we do about Asian arts, but as Kyu Choi points out, it turns out that most participants—not just the Australians—admit to having little knowledge of the arts beyond their own countries. So what’s needed, then, is to know each other better, culturally and individually. Also discussed is the need to work through cultural and language differences by allowing extra time in international collaborations—this alongside building independent, conceptually driven, nimble and responsive networks. Independence is stressed: for participants it means free and open communication, lighter structures, reduced bureaucratic engagement and, importantly, ‘room to fail’—essential for testing new ideas and presentation forms.

The research

Throughout the Camp participants have lived in five traditional Korean houses, with each house ‘group’ undertaking research for presentation to the Camp. Living in close quarters is intense, but in Kyu Choi’s words “more Asian”—true to the philosophy of meeting on one another’s cultural ground. On Thursday, Campers take their research to the streets and meet local artists and producers, gaining a close-up view of Seoul’s performing arts scene. Having already met many local artists at Wednesday night’s networking party and attended performances on other nights, they wrap up the research day at a second party, this time joined by Seoul’s Daehakro Arts Ecology Project—a cross-artform network of some 28 members established to promote open collaboration and experimentation.

Of the research presented and then developed into broader discussion in Friday’s Open Talk session—also including invited local artists and producers—the topic dubbed Traditional vs Contemporary explored especially rich territory. While marketing strategies might favour clear distinctions between ‘traditional’ and ‘contemporary’ arts—especially in international touring—the reality in Asia (including Australia) is more complex. Traditional forms such as Chinese opera continue to evolve and be ‘renewed’ in contemporary productions, while some Asian artists are highly trained in European theatre forms before learning the ‘traditional’ techniques that are assumed to be their ‘first language.’ The colonial legacy also clouds the notion of ‘tradition.’ Hong Kong Campers, for example, commented that in fact they are currently in search of their tradition.

Lee Hee-moon Company showcase, Asian Producers’ Platform Camp (APPCAMP), courtesy APPCAMP

Funding is often ‘tradition-friendly,’ it was noted—and exoticism sells tickets. But how to successfully market work internationally without resorting to exoticism? Attracting audience ‘curiosity’ was proposed as an alternative, potentially developing new audiences without relying on stereotypes or sensationalism.

Research exploring local Place/Space/Community was also illuminating, although time limits precluded deep discussion. The phenomenon of ‘creatives’ moving into and reviving depressed urban areas is familiar, but researchers presented a vivid picture of Seoul’s Itaewon district renewal following an influx of artists committed to preserving the area’s unique qualities—aiming not only to resist commercial re-development but also to strongly engage the area’s existing community. The Crossing Usadanro project specifically proposes “collectivism as a new form of urbanism,” offering an artist-led urban strategy as an alternative to outside investment and gentrification. Ambitiously outlined in a brochure styled to rival those of slick developers, Crossing Usadanro suggests the potential of creatively focused producers to play significant roles in both the arts ecosystem and the broader social landscape.

As APPCAMP wound up, participants tabled some concrete initiatives, including an agreement to create an informal Producer In-Kind residency whereby participants host one other—providing accommodation or office space—to help make international projects more viable. Korean independent producer Sounghyo Ryu invited Campers to collaborate in developing an independent producer residency and festival in Korea’s southern city of Busan. The idea is to match international producers with local producers and artists developing site-specific work within the broad theme of city rehabilitation, architecture and space. It’s early days—and highly funding-dependent—but at the time of writing several participants are already involved.

During APPCAMP’s intensive week of talking, bonding, networking and skill sharing, what struck me beyond the wealth of experience and engagement in the room was the critical mass enjoyed by Asia’s comparatively large populations and high-density cities. Seoul’s Daehakro Daehangno theatre district alone boasts around 140 small and medium sized theatres, for example; such scale, extrapolated across participant countries, means enormous potential for developing innovative independent projects in specific locations.

Over the coming three years APPCAMP participants will continue to explore each other’s creative landscapes, meeting next in Taiwan in late 2015. New Zealand will join the network this year, with other countries following. Friendship, as organiser Fenn Gordon reiterates, will remain key. In Korea, I learn that, ‘traditionally,’ those who witness winter’s first snowfall together will have a long and happy relationship. If ‘tradition’ is anything to go by, things are looking good for APPCAMP 2015 and beyond.

Melbourne-based writer and artist Urszula Dawkins attended APPCAMP as an observer. You can follow her at lightblue.com.au. This article was commissioned and the writer funded by RealTime. Air travel and accommodation were provided by APP. Find out more about APPCAMP and its participants at asianproducersplatform.com.

Over a couple of beers with participants after a day of the Live Art Camp at Melbourne’s Arts House discussion turns to the growing prevalence of laboratory workshops in the Australian arts ecology. “It’s because our universities are failing to produce artists,” voices one individual. It is a provocative point. Whether true or false the group considers the dichotomy between schooling culture at tertiary institutions and the problematic nature of a bureaucratic and risk-averse infrastructure. Nobody believes that simply obtaining an arts degree makes one an artist either, although, the Australia Council insisted that emerging artists possess one in order to apply for an ArtStart grant.

Another reason suggested for the trend towards arts laboratories is the difficulty in establishing and maintaining an arts community in the current economic and political climate.

It is not entirely clear towards what end our temporary micro-community at Live Art Camp has been formed. We are a diverse group of more than 30 artists, national and international, emerging and established, who have come together for a week of workshops at the Arts House Meat Market. The international artists are present as facilitators alongside local facilitators including the groups pvi collective and one step at a time like this. Have we come together towards an exploratory sharing of practices and critical discussion? Producing new work? Is it an audition to join camp conveners and curators Katerina Kokkinos-Kennedy and Melanie Jame Wolf (who work together as triage) in their vaguely referred to Hotel Obscura project in Berlin? Our time together is loosely all these things, the processes structured by notions of intimacy with one-on-one performance practice at their centre.

Artists break into smaller groups to attend a selection of concurrent workshops. Two days are spent with visual artist David Cross (New Zealand), who brought in a selection of his inflatables for mediating intimate encounters with viewers. Cross generously offered these medium/small-scaled participatory playgrounds for our reconfiguring and ‘pimping’ in an exploration of how artists from different backgrounds might approach his sculptures as performative props and tools.

Cross’ installation works, which had originally involved the engagement of his own body in a trusting encounter with another, left him bearing traces of our blood, toothpaste and glitter. What we had interpreted from this practice was then extrapolated into performative exercises sans the objects, concluding with a discussion on what it means to be intimate in art practice and what value it has.

A one-day workshop run by Austrian collaborative duo notfoundyet (Laia Fabre, Thomas Kasebacher) focused on devising personal folk dances in pairs and then sharing these choreographies with the group. The intimacy of these communities of two is then driven towards the communal as we learn a selection of dances, sacrificing the personal for en masse impact.

Half-day workshops were facilitated by performance artist Georges Jacotey (Greece) and theatre-maker and performer Gemma Paintin (UK). Jacotey leads the group in making and sharing “Videos of Affinity,” which take the form of DIY video-blog manifestos. This process of self-reflexivity is a troubling encounter for some. With Paintin, of duo Action Hero, we create abstracted versions of Queen’s “I Want to Break Free” and karaoke renditions towards rough one-on-one performance ideas which are shared for reflection at the conclusion of the session.

The headline workshop, lead by triage, is titled Artificial Hells: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Just Make Art for 24 Hours. It was what the title suggested, with curators concerned that their schedule be held sacred. The all-nighter workshop was broken into sessions in which small groups were instructed to devise one-on-one work for hotel rooms, in faux hotel rooms set up in the Meat Market. As the night wore on, and more and more participants were lost to sleep, delirium triggered some surprisingly joyous practices from Jacotey and performance artist Rosana Cade (Scotland). These included blindly inserting fingers into unknown and heavily lubricated body parts, drawing lips on other body parts in lipstick and then lipsyncing with these lips to pop songs, the voices of Gough Whitlam and Frank Booth from Blue Velvet, and all the while making and wearing facial masks. By the time the sun was up a form of dancing hysteria had taken over the last artists standing, lead by dance-artist Eric Minh Cuong (France).

Live Art Camp as a whole could have been more responsive (like the methodologies it was dealing with) and more clear and concise in its agenda. Perhaps it could have borrowed more explicitly from the Open Space session on Live Art issues that curiously comprised the first day of the camp, emancipating participants from the workshop structure which at times felt like a combination of being back at school and an audition and without the agency ideal for pedagogical discovery or project making in these contexts. Nonetheless it felt like a good time was had by all involved. Certainly, creating safe places for temporary micro-communities to reflect, share practice and generate work by dipping into an array of practices is always a good thing.

In November last year, the annual Communicating the Museum (CTM) conference was hosted in Melbourne, headlining the theme “Optimism and New Opportunities.” An international organisation boasting 300 members from institutions in 40 countries, with a mission to share “innovative success stories,” CTM is part of a widespread movement of cultural change sweeping through the museum world. Innovation, reinvention, optimism: the message is relentlessly upbeat, but the enthusiasm is driven by a pulsing anxiety that is all too evident.

A fixation on success stories can betray a fear of failure; operating under the banner of optimism signals a need to banish pessimism; insistent use of the term ‘innovation’ indicates a stressed relationship with heritage and tradition. Since heritage and tradition are core business in the museum world, the culture of institutional reinvention, sometimes badged as the ‘postmuseum’ movement, is inherently fraught. This is the first of a two-part enquiry into the underlying cultural values of the movement, and its perspectives on public culture.

A threatened species

The Macleay Museum on the University of Sydney campus is currently presenting an exhibition titled Stuffed, stitched and studied: Taxidermy in the 19th century. In the essay “Dried and Dessicated—Drawn and Quartered: Natural History Illustration 1700-1877,” curator John Kean focuses on the relationship between biological specimens and images of them from the “lavish natural history monographs of the nineteenth century.”

With its array of bottled reptiles, stuffed mammals, insects pinned in glass cases and information cards inscribed by specialists, the Macleay is an example of the museum itself as a preserved specimen. As an institution, it is a vestige of the past, now a rarity, and certainly a threatened species.

Now hybridised

Major natural history museums in capital cities around the world have evolved into new entities. They have hybridised with other varieties of the science museum to become giant fun parks where you can experience earthquake tremors, tunnel into simulated deep-sea environments and encounter holographic evocations of primordial creatures in ancient landscapes.

This phase of reinvention and change management is underway among cultural institutions of all kinds, but is especially marked in the case of the natural history museum. There may be something about the perversity of keeping large collections of dead things that provokes the human instinct for renovation.

When PT Barnum acquired the American Museum in New York in 1840, he described the existing collection as “stuffed monkeys and gander skins…dead as a herring.” But waste not, want not. With a lick of paint (a touch of gold did wonders for flea-bitten feathers), some inventive storyboarding and the addition of live acts, he transformed this zone of morbidity into the most popular social playground in the city. When it became overcrowded because people refused to leave, he put up a sign saying “To the Egress” so that they would be lured through the exit door in quest of another mysterious creature.

The visitor-activated museum

It is worth recalling then that the longer-term history of the museum is a mixed picture. It is not all about conservativism, conservation and the preserves of a social elite. Museums have not always been places where visitors were expected to keep quiet, move carefully and avoid touching the precious objects. Yet in cultural industry forums around the world, the museum of the 21st century is being defined in opposition to just such a stereotype: instead of being a repository for objects, it is an open venue from which exhibitions spill out into open-air locations or migrate to pop-up spaces on the high street. Visitor participation is the main game.

Museums, perhaps more than any other cultural institution, are undergoing an identity crisis. There are dynamic aspects to this, but the determination to create an identity in antithesis to a stereotype is likely to produce another stereotype.

The Macleay, as an example of the traditional museum, is not a stereotype but a prototype. As such, its counterpart is Questacon, the National Science and Technology Centre in Canberra. Both types have their place in a diverse cultural landscape, and both have a history. The Macleay is on a university campus and caters to scholars and specialists, while Questacon is an educational foundation aimed at primary and early secondary school students.

When I visited recently, Questacon was teeming with children in summer holiday mood, most between the ages of two and 12. Early childhood concentration works in irregular bursts. A six-year old will skid across the floor ignoring a sequence of displays, then fix on something for several minutes, often having to be pulled away so as to keep up with the family group.

Engineered visitation

The impulse to mess about with buttons and levers is well catered for, but interactivity is a designed process, in which the chaotic experiments of the child to test the limits of the gadgets are funnelled into a more systematic form of engagement, through which a particular principle can be learned. But young children are very good at confounding attempts to second-guess their reactions.

I watched one small visitor as he came upon an installation that records the voice and plays it back in simultaneous sound and image, showing the wave patterns on a monitor. He quickly got the idea of trying to spike the sound waves with guttural retches. His mother approached, smiling, “Fascinating, isn’t it?….Let’s go now.” “Let’s go now, let’s go now,” he squawked, and as she pulled him away, the machine chimed in, “Let’s go now….let’s go now….”

In the guise of providing the visitor with agency and play, there is actually an attempt to engineer behaviour and determine the learning process. After witnessing this brief victory for the counter-determinist side, I moved on to the next gallery, packed with over 60 multi-media exhibits on the theme of Perception/Deception. Optical illusions, counter-intuitive relations between image and touch and weird textural sensations presented themselves at every turn, each bearing an information placard with the slogan, “Warning! Science Ahead.”

The transmission of fascination

‘Fascinating, isn’t it?’ One of the ingrained determinations of museum curators is that fascination must be transmitted. Whether they try to do this with shelves of bottled fish or a battery of flashing machines, I feel a sense of imposition that makes me want to head for the egress. When Barnum invited the public into his museum, he challenged them to be on the alert about where they might be taken for a ride. Instead of being a target for pedagogy, they were participants in a guessing game about the nature and parameters of reality. Was that actually the missing link? Or the skeleton of a mermaid?

MONA: the uncalculated risk

Barnum’s successor in our own times is David Walsh, founder and director of the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart. Walsh, who financed his museum from wins at the horse races and the casino, has a philosophy based on gambling. He interprets the world and his own achievements in it in terms of accident and calculated risk. As a professional gambler he is deeply involved in processes of trying to manipulate the odds, but where his museum is concerned, he was spinning the wheel in a game he didn’t know. The investment was massive, and he stood to lose most of his capital.

Would people come? If they did, how would they respond? Those are the factors on which museum directors around the world are focused, and they want to manipulate the odds in their favour, but Walsh doesn’t seem to have any interest in trying to channel the inclinations of other humans. He has described himself as “introverted to the point of autism in his youth”; evidently objects come before people in his world.

MONA, with its spectacular waterside site built into a rockface, its surround of cafes and markets, its scrolling menu of avant-garde arts events and its weird and wonderful galleries, is in many ways a prime example of what many curators and directors envisage as the museum of the future, but in terms of the binary debate about traditional and contemporary museums, MONA is a paradox. Richard Flanagan describes it as “a mash-up of the lost city of Petra and a late night out in Berlin” (The Monthly, Feb, 2013).

As a teenager, Walsh took to hanging about amid the stuffed Tasmanian tigers and ethnological artefacts in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, and started his own collections of coins and stamps. When he branched out into more serious adult collections as a means of investing his winnings, he bought Magritte paintings, ancient gold coins, carved doors from a Nigerian palace, central American statuettes, Roman sculptures…well, pretty much anything that a traditional museum would be wanting to acquire. Walsh opened the Moorilla Museum of Antiquities in 1999 in the original Roy Grounds-designed house on the site he’d purchased, holding parties at which his collection could be viewed in formal cabinets.

His subsequent decision to invest in a large-scale, purpose-built public museum was the greatest gamble of his life, and if it remains a financial liability, it has generated so much cultural capital that it is now a major state asset. Visitor numbers of 1.4 million by the end of last year exceeded the population of Tasmania by some 50%.

MONA is an international tourist destination, and in terms of visitor profile, is the envy of major flagship institutions throughout the world, but its cultural orientations are distinctively Tasmanian. Its primary imaginative relationships are with the heritage collections of the Tasmanian Museum and Gallery that inspired it (MONA drew on it for exhibits in the Theatre of the World exhibition, 2012-13) and the Port Arthur Museum.

Aptly, the entry ticket to the Port Arthur site is a playing card. Each visitor is given a one at random and invited to ‘find the convict’ who corresponds with it. As you tour the site, the stories of named convicts are followed through the workplaces to which they were allocated. That was a lottery in which some found a trade or profession that led to a prosperous future as free citizens; some continued through a life of punishment and hard labour; some fell sick and died.

David Walsh’s success with MONA has much to do with his fundamental respect for the role of chance and speculation in human life. When it comes to a competition with pedagogy and designed experience, it’s the uncertainty principle that always wins out in the appeal to human curiosity. How much more intriguing is it to be given a sense of what we don’t know than to be told in ever more animated ways what we do?

As part of the 2015 Sydney Festival, the biennial Australian Theatre Forum was a chance for the scattered tribes of theatre communities across the country to gather for 63 events and 140-odd speakers in and around the foyers, studios and theatres of the Seymour Centre. Curator David Williams encouraged everyone present to go on their own journey through the program on offer, even if that just meant going to the bar. The only stipulation: this gathering was not a market.

Freedom from the pressures of a marketplace allowed all manner of convivial practice-centred conversations: pragmatically bureaucratic, charmingly nostalgic, helpful and heated on matters of diversity, viability and the environment.

While perhaps lacking some of the ‘deep hanging out’ of the previous ATF in Canberra due to the draw of summertime festivities in Sydney, a provocative thread was woven about how contemporary practice lives with its history and is informed by this history into the future. What does it mean to make and present theatre today, and what will it mean tomorrow?

The forum itself took on the same form as in Canberra. Rather tenuous titles were given to an eclectic and busy mix of presentations, panels, Q&As and roundtable discussions. Rather than a single keynote speech, keynote events took place daily. This served to tell us: there is no single keynote that needs hitting for our discussions and that no one central note would suffice.

Actor, director and Artistic Director of Ilbijerri Theatre Company Rachael Maza began with the opening keynote of the forum, focusing on Australia’s Indigenous theatre history. Maza noted that politics and theatre have always been inseparable for Indigenous Australians, and from the 1960s onwards Indigenous theatre has been used as a vehicle for self-determination in action. She observed a current shift in psyche with the growing canon and programming of Indigenous works. She also remarked that we still have a way to go to overthrow the White Australia myth that power structures perpetuate. Ongoing issues remain around cultural ownership, exchange and appropriation when white Australian theatre makers engage with Indigenous theatre, stories and representation [Maza cited in particular the marginalised role of the Aboriginal characters in the Sydney Theatre Company production, The Secret River; see also RT113, Eds].

Anecdotal reflections and parables from Maza and her fellow Indigenous keynoters—singer/songwriter, author and poet Richard Frankland and actor, producer, director Rhoda Roberts—complemented the Respect Your Elders stream of the conference. This saw the likes of performance photographer Heidrun Löhr, actor Uncle Jack Charles and writer and publisher Katharine Brisbane engaged in discussions that reminded us of important facets of our theatre history, taking it beyond mythology and text-book documentation. The session on the national women’s performance writing network Playworks (1985–2006) allowed for contemporary reflection on the all too familiar issue of unequal female representation in theatre and how a previous generation worked to overcome it. We have had a recent push of female directors, but what of female writers? Elsewhere a panel on diversity debated whether a quota system would affect the integrity of theatre work and whether what is needed is a cultural shift away from perceived difficulties in attaining diversity and more towards the richness it offers.

Country Arts SA’s Steve Mayhew led a discussion on practices enabled by the growing use and interest in digital platforms and the changes these are bringing to the way we make work. It was stressed throughout that digital technologies should always be used holistically rather than simply tacked on, and should never be treated as neutral. The rationale was that technology, no longer a novelty, is central to life and consequently to contemporary practices, as tool rather than subject, enabling new ways of working and new forms of access. It is no substitute for liveness—or not yet at least. When might that be a concern? Should it be?

Living and practicing contemporaneously was approached from a different angle in a lively breakout session led by Greenie-in-Residence at Melbourne’s Arts House (see p4) Matt Wicking. The discussion focused on the growing momentum towards sustainable arts practices for the sector, pros and cons for ‘going green’ and whether didacticism works. Wicking encouraged all present to engage in personal reflection. What does it mean to be human? Are we separate from the world? What is our relationship to it?

For the closing keynote of the forum, Belgian festival director and curator Frie Leysen delivered an impassioned address, “Embracing the Elusive; Or, the necessity of the superfluous,” at Sydney Opera House that reflected on why we need theatre and why we should continue the struggle to embrace the elusive in a world ideologically opposed to what it represents. Leysen likened the arts to an irrational and unknown third leg that assists in supporting us. She quoted Proust on the need to see the world through the eyes of 100 different people in order to grasp it, and the idea that theatre might assist us in a continual process of unlearning and unknowing towards this. Jakarta and Melbourne based Chinese-Indonesian actor and performance-maker Rani Pramesti, a refreshing voice of an underrepresented next generation at the forum, acutely equated Leysen’s urgings to the need for decolonisation throughout theatre and all of its processes. Colonisation might be irreparable, but how we live with it is not. We might not change the world, but we can at least contribute to changing ways of thinking. The forum conversations were not about be-alls and end-alls, but about processing thought through practice, through addressing complex histories and legacies, and asking how all this might contribute to the future?

An outcome of these conversations was a Motion of No Confidence drafted by delegates over the course of the forum critical of the Liberal-National Party Australian Government’s attitude to the arts. Describing the letter as a political gesture that was symbolic at best, David Williams read it aloud with writer Vissolela Ndenzako at the close of the forum, encouraging those present to sign if they so wished (there were 52 signatories at the forum and another six subsequently). Given “the actions and ideology of the Federal government currently lead by Prime Minister Abbott,” the letter referred to “The irreparable social and cultural cost to the future of this nation [which] will be felt for generations and must be urgently resisted. “

If the protest was “symbolic at best,” the letter was properly symbolic of the forum’s conversations actually adding up to to a form of action. In the wake of wondering if talk was simply repetitive—like the scattered catch-cry that artists need to be more political—this represented a step forward from a known history into an unknown future, with a sense of hope (however symbolic). It’s what Frie Leysen urged, that we don’t simply aim to please everyone, but dare to be disturbers, and that we “valorise the risk, the adventure, the ephemeralness, the uniqueness of the experience and the temporary community that is created” through theatre.

2015 Sydney Festival, Australian Theatre Forum 2015, Making It, curator David Williams, producer Theatre Network Victoria (TNV), 21-23 Jan,
www.australiantheatreforum.com.au

Performance Art can be a thorny term, recalling for many a 1960-70s-specific canon and aesthetic that while significantly challenging and innovative, evokes the seemingly obligatory nudity, bodily fluids and discomfort in rupturing forms and norms. The Venice International Performance Art Week, curated by Verena Stenke and Andrea Pagnes (AKA artistic duo VestAndPage), grouped durational works, a gallery-style exhibition, nightly performances and daily talks exploring contemporary usage of the term and associated strategies.

Pertinent is the 2014 theme of this biennial art week: Ritual Body—Political Body, as performance art continues to hold to ‘the body’ as a site to explore relations between ritual and the political, and broader questions of action and efficacy.

Two beautiful 18th century palazzos played host to the event, with Palazzo Mora offering three floors of marble, ornate plaster and chandelier emblazoned exhibition and performance spaces. Attendance was free. In a country whose government, as I heard lamented, provides negligible funding for independent arts, securing such venues and notable international artists was an impressive achievement. Many confirmed the sentiment that the event had been enabled by the extensive network surrounding its curators. Local businesses, volunteers, documenters and publics were likewise mobilised. Here was an intervention into a city that exists in the art world imaginary as a place of grand institutions and international art biennales.

The conditions of production for the Performance Art Week suggest cultural decentralisation at play, yet this was not necessarily reflected in the works or in the audience experience. There were still heavy-handed symbolic actions indifferent to the audience-as-witness. For example, in one of the short evening performances, Lady on a Cross, Jill McDermid (US) arrived by gondola in a wedding dress and carried a large cross upstairs to strip down to black underwear and lie with the cross. We witnessed self-mortifying endurance characterised in Benjamin Sebastian’s (Performance Space UK) Three Cycles of Otherness, in which we witnessed his tattooing, scanning and printing of his body parts, and screaming over loud drums in 20-minute cycles for three days.

The works billed as “durational” unfolded over the 3-7pm opening hours for between three and seven days in a row. Marilyn Arsem’s (US) durational piece Marking Time was more an invitation to pass time, though not necessarily more actively, with her as a participant. A woman occupies a room for four hours at a time seven days in a row doing precious little. Arsem is an artist who has created performance works for 27 years; a body aging in public. There were discernible motifs that allowed moods of futility, disappearance and fragility to hang in the air alongside the soundtrack of a ticking clock. She sits, cocooned in a black shroud, on one of two chairs, slowly, incrementally, inching away from the other. For half an hour I watch her make a pile of stones, getting higher until one topples the lot. The clock ticks seem slower and louder. We watch a body dying, we are dying too.

In ritual, as in political acts, the presence of a particular body endows its significance. Such is the case with Sarah-Jane Norman’s Bone Library, a work previously performed in Australia and the UK, deserving a more extensive review than I can provide here. As Norman undertakes to engrave a lexicon from the Aboriginal Sydney Language (commonly miscategorised as Eora) onto bleached cattle bones—a collection that grows over the week, methodically labelled and laid out on padded white tables—it is important to know that Norman is of Indigenous heritage herself, her grandmother being one of the last known speakers of the language. As she sets about her meticulous task she may be the image of a cosmopolitan artist, dressed in black including thick-rimmed glasses and cowboy boots, yet, like the objects she makes, she is positioned to straddle worlds. The bones recall a colonial industry that took Aboriginal land and labour yet now they contain an extinguished language that is enlivened by one who can act from duty and belonging. (See review & realtime tv coverage of Unsettling Suite including the Bone Library.)

Melissa Garcia Aguirre, Desapareciendo/ Disappearing, long durational performance, 2nd Venice International Performance Art Week, Palazzo Mora, 2014

While the presencing of ‘authentic’ bodies remains a feature of performance art, there were many works that addressed a notion of standing in, to borrow a term from Julie Vulcan’s work shown at the festival (see realtime tv interview Vulcan). Melissa Garcia Aguirre (Mexico)’s Desapareciendo / Disappearing was a durational work in which 30,000 kernels of dried corn were solemnly picked, counted, washed and ground by six performers—a surrogacy for the number of lives lost so far in Mexico’s drug wars in an essentially poetic and sad gesture.

The exhibition was an opportunity to explore a large collection of records of performance art, many from its pioneers. Perhaps what could be said is that the astute or poetic gesture in performance is communicable also in mediatised forms. The video works of Regina José Galindo (Guatemala), viewable on two monitors in a dark corner of the Palazzo, were some of the most political and disturbing (see Performance Now review). In Hilo di Tiempo the artist is placed in a black knitted bag in a public square with a loose thread that the impromptu audience proceeded to unravel. I liked the idea of a found duration—the video went for as long as it took to unravel the bag, it encompassed a public and public space beyond its art audiences, and the care with which this public completed this action, untangling the wool from Galindo’s feet, legs and neck as they went was touching. Galindo has for over 15 years created actions in public, galleries and natural environments that move between overt political statements concerning violence, war and torture and musings on the precarity of human life and experience.

Ritual and politics are linked in the weight given to action intended to achieve transformation. In ritual, this can be more spiritual, as in Singaporean artist Zai Kuning’s refreshing short performance drawing on ancestral rites of which he asserted “it’s not art, it’s an offering.” Politics in performance addresses a relationship between action and causality in the making of social forms. It was very interesting to see the contribution of Tania Bruguera, a highly celebrated artist, more through evidence of ‘extra-artistic’ activities. As Prem Sarjo, the guest curator who invited Bruguera, said in conversation, “she is finding new ways of doing art.” Her performance was a manifesto on the rights of migrants distributed among members of the audience, and that same evening I was asked to complete a postcard of her design petitioning Pope Francis to grant migrants citizenship of Vatican City. I later heard that Bruguera had caught the train that night to Rome to seek an audience with his Holiness.

Migration and border crossing has long concerned the ‘radical pedagogy’ of La Pocha Nostra as introduced in one of the morning talks, “(In)visible Cultures—(In)visible Borders,” through workshop activities. The company’s artistic director Guillermo Gomez Pena activated the forum with a ‘jam session’ making verses out of “my home is…”, “my body is…” in inspiring and charismatic style. The presence of La Pocha Nostra had a ludic effect, like the circus coming to town, though their own performance extravaganza on closing night saw tropes of contemporary performance at times wheeled out like empty ritual. I think we’ve come to a point where nudity and pigs’ heads in performance are not transgressive in themselves. Thus ritual can suggest significance arrives merely in repetition. Despite this danger, by and large the artistic strategies evident in the Performance Art Week showed sustained attention, even in repetition, as a means to respond to new contexts and remain open to innovation.

Venice International Performance Art Week 2014, various artists, curated by VestAndPage, Palazzo Mora, Venice, 13-20 Dec 2014; performances by Australian artists Sarah-Jane Norman, Julie Vulcan and Barbara Campbell were curated by Leisa Shelton-Campbell.

The modernist lineage of experimental strands of Contemporary Art has long been magnetised by the volatile category of bodily performance. Performing ‘the body’ has provided a secure base for gender politics (fuelling chauvinist piercing and feminist flaying). It has also consistently queried the fixity of object, form and space confined in and by the white elephant of the white cube. Yet like so many modernist and experimental strategies, the liquidity of bodily performance is dependant on the rigidity of the gallery environment to highlight these schisms.

The dialectical theatre formed by the gallery space heightens, frames and ultimately mummifies all gesture, providing bodily performance a clear target in the museum’s ossifying impulse to document and objectify. Through fey rebelliousness and self-serving intervention, performance art in the gallery context thus often dances around self-generated and short-circuiting problematics.

The 5th Tokyo Art Meeting staged at the prestigious Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, is a welcome shock to the normative art discourses which purport to radicalise bodily performance. But to support this claim, some careful critical unpacking is required. First: the curatorial context. The Tokyo Art Meetings are annual events which, in their words, “present a range of possibilities for new art by facilitating encounters between various genres of expression, mainly in the field of contemporary art but also including design, architecture and other specialist fields”. The 5th TAM is titled “Seeking New Genealogies: Bodies / Leaps / Traces.” As with most Tokyo Art Meetings, it is “advised” (essentially, curated) usually by someone outside of but connected to art and artists. This TAM is by Mansai Nomura—a renowned performer of the 600 year-old form of theatre/dance form Kyogen. Mansai studied under his father Mansaku II and his late grandfather Manzo VI (both Living National Treasures); as a Noh performer, he has been designated as an Important Intangible Cultural Property.

Second: the originating form. Kyogen floats like a corporeal mist around Noh’s internalised ritualisation of mannered presentation, and the bodily inscription of gestural energy evident equally in Kabuki and Bunraku. These three dominant forms of Japanese physical theatre have over centuries inscrutably digested the spectrum of bodily energies in order to strike poses, balance shapes and articulate spatio-temporal habitation. The palpable result is to experience the body rendered as an immaterial cypher which paradoxically expresses sublime performative control. Japanese traditional theatre embraces costumes, masks and dolls as material embodiments of performative energy, and in doing so heightens the precision, frailty and dynamism of bodily mechanics. In its adherence to spatial protocol, gestural stricture and refined momentum, Kyogen especially forefronts this sensibility, resulting in rituals which enact a meta-figuration, which declares these perspectives through a demonstrative solo dance choreographed to variants of traditional Gagaku court music accompaniment.

Third: the perceptual through-line. Nomura’s subtitle “Bodies / Leaps / Traces” encapsulates how he perceives bodily energy lines as a performer, and how he detects a similar perception in a range of performative artists. Essentially, all the works in this large exhibition are concerned with intersections between moving bodies, the costumes which enhance their movement, and the space articulated by that conjoined movement. In traditional western Modernist terms, we would be talking about the mixed-media fusions typified by Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg—key figures in blurring the distinction between theatre and art, dancing and moving, choreography and painting. But what’s fascinating about Nomura’s TAM is how a parallel radicalism is apparent in the comparatively ancient form of Kyogen. And here’s where “Bodies / Leaps / Traces” completely diverges from all Eurocentric notions of theatre lineage: Nomura’s own body is perceived as the divining rod for tracking the genealogies of bodily performance presented in the exhibition. According to the spiritual notion of ‘isshouden,’ the physical memory of the past line of Kyogen masters has been literally (not metaphorically) transferred to and installed in Nomura’s master. As the program note calmly points out: “in 2014, his body carries the same ‘presence’ as when it existed in the space and time of 600 years ago.”

What a refreshing way to approach the proscriptive, rationalising compulsions behind so much thematic curation of Contemporary Art! In its resolute acceptance of mystical inheritance, Nomura’s TAM links forbears to their progeny by accepting the inevitability of Kyogen’s trans-historical status. His curation was not a binary assertion of traditionalism against modernism: it swept the two away like vaporous interference to Kyogen’s formal continuity. This was clearest in one of the major works in the exhibition, Dumb Type’s 8-screen 7.1 4K audio presentation Memorandum OR Voyage (2014), which tracked and marked how their collective bodies moved through space in their live works Memorandum (1999), OR (1997) and Voyage (2002). Here was incontrovertible evidence of how thoroughly Dumb Type have subsumed traditional forms of bodily performance into a panoramic deconstruction of mediatised images which simultaneously create the space for their performance and transmute their bodies into a screenic dimension. Their work in TAM operated like an exegesis of how their oeuvre equally presented screens in a live setting and performed bodies in an installation format. The Europeans labelled this ‘image theatre’ back in the 80s, but the term completely missed how Dumb Type were harbingers of celebrating corporeal presence by nullifying humanist centrality.

Elsewhere, bodily transcription was investigated as a harsh clinical methodology by Ka Fai Choy. As part of his Prospectus For A Future Body (commenced in 2011) he analysed video documentation of Tasumi Hijikata’s Butoh performance A Summer Storm (1973), charted his bodily movements, then programmed a sequence of electrode triggers to involuntarily twitch and flick a performer’s muscles like a controlled mannequin mimicking the original performance. Forwarding a new approach to “performance art documentation,” Choy’s electronic take on isshouden suggests that the body itself is the best medium for transcribing bodily performance. Performance group chelfitsch (with director Toshiki Okada) explored a different mode of transference in their work 4 Little Things That Always Happen At Train Stations (2014). Four separate vertical life-size screens showed dancers interpreting discrete short narratives about oddly banal observations of people doing simple things on a crowded train platform. One heard the story being told via overhead speakers while watching the dancers improvise an ‘anti-dance’ concatenation of chopped gestures and poses. Their bodies started to resemble a plastic bag tossed around in the wind, continually changing shape through ungainly contortions.

Along with performers Denstu Lab Tokyo, Jiro Yoshihara, and Guttai action painters Atsuko Tanaka, Saburo Murakami and Kazuo Shiraga, Nomura channelled this Japanese stream of performers into a parallel irrigation system alongside a European grouping of artists, taking in the markings of Henri Matisse, Cy Twombly, Jackson Pollock and Ernesto Neto, and the motion experiments of Noa Eshkol and the Avshalom Pollak Dance Company among others. Amazingly, every work in the exhibition echoed, reinforced or simulated Nomura’s thesis of bodily transference: “Through performance, our bodies are fermented, transformed and can become the foundation for new cultural creation.”

The design of the space was as considered as the strict zoning of space upon the Kyogen platform, and the time it took to move from one artist’s work to the next generated an elegant series of temporal transitions. The final work in the exhibition was a video documentation of Nomura himself performing a Kyogen piece, filmed onsite for an earlier performance. But instead of faithfully presenting the work at human scale, it was projected onto a 20-metre-high screen. At first, this imposing scale seemed to trivialise the work’s delicate aura of fabric swishing, ko and shou frequencies, and the tantalising floor stomps typical of Kyogen dances. But after watching the video for nearly an hour, I felt like I was watching all the previously encountered works in the exhibition laid on top of Nomura’s projected body: this was a genealogy defined by simultaneity, not linearity. If there is a nexus between the intangibility of live bodily performance and the intangibility of Japanese traditional culture, I certainly felt it there in that space.

Tokyo Art Meeting 5: Seeking New Genealogies: Bodies / Leaps / Traces, Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, 27 Sept, 2014-4 Jan, 2015

Mohammed Lelo, Toby Martin, Phu Tran, Alex Hadchiti, Songs from Northam Avenue, Bankstown:Live

Around dusk we file into the Northam Avenue backyard of local resident David Cranston for the first of our Bankstown:Live experiences. Offered Aerogard to ward off the evening’s likely bloodletting, we enter past the scented gum, turn left at the passionfruit vine, past the cactus flower, to spaciously uneven rows of unmatched chairs. I step over the self-seeded spinach to my seat and take in the suburban staging—the ever evocative wire screen door, the porch peeling paint, the empty birdcage, the sombre tool-shed—door ajar. The sky is huge, birds zooming overhead and there’s a scent of eucalyptus. This might just be enough theatre for me.

But there’s more. Performer Hazem Shammas appears under fluoro light to recount episodes from Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s The Tribe—in conventional storytelling mode with subtle physicality and occasional musical accompaniment from Oonagh Sherrard on cello. I enjoyed reading Ahmad’s successful novella, a richly detailed evocation of everyday life from the perspective of Bani, the youngest in a family who are all members of a small Muslim sect who fled to Australia before the civil war in Lebanon. In this brisk 40-minute adaptation by Ahmad and director Janice Muller, Shammas at a microphone deftly inhabits the persona of Bani at various ages. Intensely physical memories range from his grandmother Tayta’s belly to a vivid account of a wild family wedding, alongside reflections on Shia and Sunni heritage and a darker, almost surreal episode involving a death in the family. Meanwhile, under the portico Sherrard adds a recurrent melody interspersed with glides and percussive taps on the cello strings underlining Bani’s emotional recollections.

Further down the street we sink into possibly too comfortable lounges laid out in the front yard of Wally Arends, another Bankstown local. As resident artist over two years, singer-songwriter Toby Martin has become familiar with these people and their houses, hanging out at the coffee shop, picking up strands of conversation to connect with his own life and weave into lyrics for Songs from Northam Avenue. His musical collaborators are first Anh Linh Pham on Vietnamese zither (a relative of the koto and other Asian instruments) and Phu Tran on Vietnamese monochord (with its almost Theremin warbling), then Alex Hadchiti on oud and keyboard and Mohammed Lelo on the Middle-Eastern quanun, a fascinating zither-like instrument with 81 strings; Martin describes it as the antecedent of the Western piano. There’s a rich layering of sounds in each of the trios, although the microtones of Vietnamese instruments are not always an easy fit with Martin’s Indie folk. The songs range across a man’s life from the 30s to the present, the waiting lover (the monochord gently soaring like an electric guitar), a Lebanese father’s melancholy awareness of his son’s ignorance of the brutal realities of Middle-Eastern conflict and the tension in a couple over English pronunciation. There are unusual tales, striking word pictures and some immediately catchy melodies.

The Urban Theatre Project (UTP) producing model is a mix of “lead artists” and others from within the community and outside it working with the multifarious talents of local participants to collaboratively shape ideas and display them to best advantage.

In “a creative spirit of community, diversity and togetherness” (program note) members of the extensive Filipino community working with artist Alwin Reamillo and builder David Hawkes constructed a decorated bamboo Hopping Spirit House (in the spirit of Bayanihan, the traditional practice of community group work in rural Philippines). Following the traditional Aboriginal “Welcome to Country” by Darug elder Uncle Steve Williams, in a symbolic representation of the power of community, the huge structure is hoisted onto many shoulders to be transported down the street with Williams leading the way.

This clears the way for collaborating artists Emma Saunders, Nancy and Albert Oh to assemble locals who dance the rumba so lightly on the asphalt you’d think it was sprung and later demonstrate a joyous “Hokey Pokey for the 21st Century.”

Under a Hill’s Hoist, audience don earphones for The Last Word, a series of monologues written by seven Western Sydney residents, all reflecting on a departed friend or relative. Each piece has been carefully crafted, sensitively voiced by professional performers and accompanied by James Brown’s pulsing music. It’s a poignant listening experience.

In stark contrast to the mostly modest houses in the street, late in the evening we find ourselves at the fence line of an opulent two-storey villa. On the concrete driveway is the prone body of a woman in white. It’s Sofia Brous, composer and “genre-defying chanteuse” who’s worked with members of the community who are called upon this time to volunteer their lullabies. Tonight she sleepwalks among faux pillars and water features, ‘waking’ to sing from her collection of songs in nine languages. As Brous sings, a woman near me mouths the words under her breath. We’re not provided with the cultures of origin or the words to the songs, so we guess, cued by linguistic cadences and, not least, the playing of UK multi-instrumental collaborating artists David Coulter and Leo Abrahams, whose vivid accompaniment from the garage evokes Asian flutes, African electric guitar, eastern European zither and much more. Brous, who has an impressive vocal range (barely warranting the more than ample reverb), ornaments each song with precise gestures and soothes us with the strangely familiar melodies she has gathered.

And then there are films! Van is a short animated cautionary tale by Vinh Nguyen referencing his father’s journey from Vietnam to Australia. UTP director Rosie Dennis has directed Bre & Back, a beautifully observed portrait of the lives of four Indigenous women including former local resident and cultural adviser, Lily Shearer and her mother Noeleen, now living in Brewarrina.

I couldn’t beat the queue to take a turn in the Family Portraits booth on the footpath. Here photographer Joanne Saad staged a gathering with one of four local families. Audience members were invited to enter, join in a conversation and a portrait. On the night I visited, before a backdrop of colourful cloths, five members of the Banguras family from Sierra Leone were seated around a coffee table displaying family photographs. With infinite grace, the Banguras entertained their array of temporary guests appearing very much “at home” as indeed did we all on this hot January night in Northam Avenue, Bankstown—locals and blow-ins alike.

Urban Theatre Projects, Bankstown:Live, 150-160 Northam Avenue, Bankstown, artistic director, Rosie Dennis, 22-25 Jan

The curators of Experimenta Recharge 6th International Biennial of Media Arts ask three questions, only one of which intrigued: “can artists illuminate knowledge for new generations?” From computer-based animation, through DIY electronics to intensely introspective installations, the multidisciplinary DNA of the current generation of artists has been adjusting, if not exactly mutating, familiar ground.

A generation has indeed passed from the time when ‘new media’ (the ‘media’ recently decoupling from the ‘new’ to re-emerge assuredly as ‘media art’) was first identified and named. Back then, while interactive constructions took tenuous shape, using the few software applications available, experimentation with the new tools often took precedence over intentions. Knowledge, as a by-product, was formalised later. Appropriately, the Recharge title of the exhibition proclaims the work is “inspired by and entangled with the past,” an historical line tempered with the invitation to celebrate the novel, the fresh, the invigorating.

Experimenta’s historically successful biennial format enables the packaging of the exhibition with events and performances followed by a national touring program. Bringing together apparently “disparate technologies and disciplines,” a space exists for focused assessment on what emerges as new from within the contemporary arts. The Biennial, like several similar international media art events, stands apart from the world’s art biennales which continue exhibiting the trusty formula of object, installation, video screen and an occasional performance, but generally drawing the line at artists choosing to combine all three. Media art shows experiment—Recharge commissioned five works—usually involving complex use of electronics. This is high-risk stuff.

Ei Wada’s monumental installation, Story of Falling Records, mounts four analogue audio tape decks atop four-metre transparent bins into which the audio tape spills as an ominous rumbling is heard; then, when the bin is full, rewinds rapidly back to the spool, over the heads, revealing a catchy tune. This was “undergoing maintenance” early on in the show; clearly the risks associated with selecting such important modified-analogue works also risk losing an audience. Later by checking an elegant documentation of the piece on YouTube, I realised this as a major work. Furthermore absence of a catalogue—now available—forced me back to the web for contextual help. Is the web now confirmed as rivalling the white cube, becoming the preferred place for exhibiting media art, simultaneously storing knowledge gleaned in steady accumulations of feedback?

A collective, La Société Anonyme also addresses the problem of archiving, assuring us that their “collection of binary code from sound and image media art files from the SKOR archives…is intended to last well beyond the years of present day technological systems.” We learn that black and white square structure of binary code format is “visually appealing and translatable,” made for an elegant display to one side of the main space. Knowledge invisible to the naked eye becomes a sculptural object.

Three people provided curatorial input: Jonathan Parsons and Elise Routledge (both Experimenta staff) and Lubi Thomas. The 20 artists participating included seven from overseas, two of whom had completed residencies, a novel one-off innovation administered as part of the event. One of the Korinsky brothers, Abel, resident at RMIT, referenced the much discussed Big Bang reverberation using the closed ‘cube’ space of the gallery to deliver a rush of sound in (or of) the ears, the head, the body. We perambulate a construction reminiscent of solar sails, or a filled umbrella-like apparatus gathering ‘cosmic winds,’ which, when suddenly plunged into darkness, glows in the dark. In silence.

Also based in Berlin, the other artist-in-residence, the Brazilian Anaisa Franco, was guest for two months in the Creativity & Cognition Studios at the University of Technology Sydney. Her three exhibits included the newly made Your Wave of Happiness, one of a ‘sensitive sculpture’ series activated into pulsing light by someone climbing onto the peak of a mound of light rope. Placed on a landing to one side of the exhibition entrance, it was one of several instances of awkward presentation in the miscellaneous spaces that make up the RMIT Gallery. An older ‘reactive sculpture,’ Paranoia, an hilarious set of chattering false teeth activated with visible circuitry, was by contrast so much in your face as to become a navigational hazard. More often encountered in the clean spaces of the white cube, was the gloomy architecture of the gallery part of the scene-setting of ‘the past’?

Stuart McFarlane and Darrin Verhagen use light in highly manipulated narrow beams over an area the size of a supermarket trolley to create staccato changing colours. This made it difficult to identify the object creating the shadows in among the pulsating light beams at the centre of this little arena. As all the exotic contenders are eliminated, it is identified as a bent paper staple; back to the 19th century. Replace clip and multiply.

A riveting single channel video projection of an ancient story is told by Yunkurra Billy Atkins, a Martu elder (from the Western Desert, West Australia), a collaboration with the Perth-based digital animator Sohan Ariel Hayes. Maree Clarke, a Boonwurrung woman from northwest Victoria uses video as part of an installation in which she tells new stories based on pre- and post historical contact. Award-winning Raymond Zada is of the Barkindji/Paakintji peoples in South Australia and in his video installation ironically floats the street signs of Adelaide over its central square, “the red earth of Kaurna country.”

Khaled Sabsabi, 70,000 Veils 2014, 100 channel digital video, courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

The disputed territories of the Middle East emerge from 100 screens in Khaled Sabsabi’s 70,000 Veils, a reference to the depths of Islamic teaching. Arranged in two large six-metre panels forming the shape of a V—or hands held out in prayer—the 70,000 images gathered on his travels are presented 700 to a screen as a single file that takes 700 seconds (about 11 minutes) to play through as successive composites. The effect is more static and reflective than this suggests as transparency levels are slow to change. A deep rumbling sound resonates and crescendos around the shared space, unavoidably it seems, layering into the other works nearby.

The Experimenta Biennial of Media Arts is to be congratulated for taking the risk and maintaining the opportunity to engage with these approaches to making art, with nods toward the sciences. The illumination provided by and for the new generation reiterates the view that knowledge is like an exhibition: a construction in need of constant attention by audience, artists and curators together.

Experimenta Recharge, 6th International Biennial of Media Arts, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 28 Nov, 2014-21 Feb, 2015

I recently travelled to Brisbane to look at screens: the Too Much World exhibition of the film essays by Hito Steyerl at IMA and the RoseLee Goldberg curated videos of international performance works at the QUT Art Museum. These shows are well-staged, spaciously ample and low on sound bleed and there’s occasional seating, allowing sometimes long works to be comfortably experienced. QUT Art Museum (with ICI and Performa) and IMA (with partners Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands and the Goethe-Institut Australia) are to be congratulated for staging these significant exhibitions.

I enjoyed both immensely. However, there were not a few moments when I wondered why I wasn’t in a theatrette or at home with the DVD player instead of wandering about waiting for the starting points of long videos or when I might gain access to the headphones or how much of the seven seven-hour Marina Abramovic performances I would be able to take in. The validity of showing these kinds of works as if pictures hung on walls becomes questionable as durations accumulate.

Hito Steyerl, Too Much World

In Sight & Sound, filmmaker Kevin B Lee describes the film essay as a form that “critically explores cinema through the medium itself,” in an age when almost anyone, “with or without a camera,” can do so given the enormous availability of images and technical resources (“Video essay: The essay film—some thoughts of discontent,” 8 Aug, 2014). Lee asks, “Does this herald an exciting new era for media literacy, or is it just an insidious new form of media consumption?” It’s a question inherent in the works of Hito Steyerl.

Film essays can look like documentaries and will deal in facts, but they are principally and unashamedly subjective, often poetic in form and playful with film language. One of the most acclaimed contemporary film essayists is Berlin-based Steyerl, who complains that while galleries will pay to show her work they will not fund her films, forcing her more and more into cheaper methods of production and having to learn digital skills. This is evident in 2014’s Liquidity Inc, a wild 30-minute ride through interview (a stockbroker turned cage-fighter), raw performance, animation, appropriation and vision-mixing in an assault on the schizophrenic condition that is Neo-liberalism. Roles, images, titles and images of weather (Steyerl’s masked daughter delivers The Weather Underground Report) and climate all become fluid in what appears to be a post-GFC, post apocalyptic world.

Next to Liquidity Inc (2014, 30mins), The Guards (2012, 14mins) is quite formal—as close as you’ll get to a straight documentary from Steyerl—in which two black American gallery guards reveal their backgrounds as policeman and marine. Their language and the marine’s miming of his stalking and attack routine in the quiet white gallery rooms with their famous paintings bring home the police mentality and militarisation pervading the everyday. As the film proceeds, the guards’ attitudes and moves are almost threatening. Finally, we see Steyerl, seated, smiling, watching the guards at work, but they have been superimposed over the paintings and into their frames, supplanting the art, as in earlier scenes artworks had become live footage of police pursuit and war scenes.

Adorno’s Grey (2013, 14 mins) is also neatly if more laterally constructed, documenting a formal attempt to find the grey paint beneath the white walls of a lecture theatre where the great Marxist cultural theorist Theodor Adorno taught until, in 1968, three female students walked to the lectern and bared their breasts, and he fled never to return. The film is part of an installation in a viewing space in which the screen is made up of large, leaning vertical planks in shades of grey. The black and white video itself is consequently shaded grey adding to the sense of ambiguity central to the film (why grey? why flee? why bother?). Smaller versions of the planks are found outside near two walls of text dating the history of protest as action or art.

Disappointingly, key Steyerl works (November [2004], Lovely Andrea [2007] and Free Fall [2009]) that were included in the Van Abbesmuseum in Eindhoven (Netherlands) do not appear in the Brisbane iteration of the exhibition. I’ve seen Lovely Andrea but not November and Free Fall, missing the opportunity to see how Steyerl self-critically positions herself as subject, performer and maker in each. There are DVDs available in Europe of Lovely Andrea and November. Time to invest in some reflective home viewing.

There’s a fine small catalogue of good essays accompanying this well-staged exhibition with abundant stills from the videos of this influential artist. It includes Steyerl’s widely delivered and published lecture “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?” (you’ll easily find it online), a wonderful mind bender in which “digitisation slip[s] off-screen and enter[s] the material world” (Editor’s introduction, Too Much World) which, in turn, as in Liquidity Inc, becomes dangerously fluid.

Performance Now

Rose Lee Goldberg, author of the seminal book on performance Performance Art: From Futurism To The Present (1979) and founder and director of New York’s Performa festival, has curated a travelling exhibition of performances, some stand-alone screen works, others documentation. Most have been made since 2000. Irritatingly, there’s no catalogue, captions are basic, sometimes not even indicating country of origin, and there are blanks for all the links to artists on the website of Independent Curators International, the co-producer of the exhibition with Performa. Under these circumstances, for the committed viewer Performance Now just manages to work, piquing curiosity, sending the odd shiver up the spine or putting an idea into orbit.

Marina Abramovic’s Seven Easy Pieces (Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2005) comprises seven resurrected performances (including her own and works by Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci) set on circular platform stages. The set-up of seven eye-level screens side by side on a gently curving wall suggests perhaps that Goldberg only intends us to dip into these epics. The videos of these durational works for the most part appear as still lives at seven hours each. After 15 minutes or so of standing with no capacity to (desecratorily?) fast forward and concern building about time limits, the eye is attracted to the screen on which the gilt-and-honey-masked artist cradles pieta-like a dead hare, sets up and demounts easels and blackboards, opens a trapdoor and taps the frame furiously before subsiding into stillness, hare in lap. It’s Abramovic’s recreation of Josef Beuys’ How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), regarded by some as the artist’s masterpiece. It is richly suggestive and strangely beautiful, even if experienced at a pronounced remove. These videos simply ignite a desire to have witnessed the performances. They are more homage than experience.

In a work seen in Australia in 2012, a grand piano is slowly rolled around a gallery followed by a curious audience. A circle has been cut from the grand’s centre and some two octaves of the relevant wires and keys put out of action. In the centre is a man, pushing the piano from the waist, leaning over the keyboard to play a piano reduction of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony back to front, using the dead keys percussively and plucking and stroking the strings. We fill in the missing notes in our heads and muse over the creation of an unfamiliar interpretation from Guillermo Calzadilla and Jennifer Allora (Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on “Ode to Joy,” 2008, Puerto Rico). In interviews (eg bombmagazine.org) the pair have cited their fascination with the relationship between music, sound and violence exemplified in the ode’s theme of ‘universal brotherhood’ alongside its quoted Turkish military band theme. More evident is the work’s playful resurrection and synthesis of 20th century avant-garde visual art tropes in the form of piano as readymade, piano desecrated (if not destroyed), piano prepared a la Cage and piano for performative installation.

I particularly enjoyed the political motivation evident in a number of works. In Regina José Galindo’s video, one of the show’s, most intriguing, in what appears to a be a Latin or South American city a young woman in black carries a bowl of red liquid, stopping frequently to dip a foot and leave red footprints along the streets and footpaths. Simple though it is, the association of Catholic culture with extreme forms of penance and pilgrimage is casually evoked but barely noticed by people the woman passes. Only later, having not registered or understood the gallery caption and searching for reference to the work online, I discover its title and meaning: A Walk from the Court Of Constitutionality to the National Palace of Guatemala, leaving a trail of footprints in memory of the victims of armed conflict in Guatemala, 2003.

A more overtly political work, And Europe Will Be Stunned/Mary Koszmary (Nightmares) (2007, 11 mins) by Israeli video artist Yael Bartana, is staged in the deserted, overgrown National Stadium in Warsaw. A suited young man at a microphone speaks to a small group of young people as if addressing a larger audience, low camera angles lending him stature. He declares, “Jews! We miss you!” The young people stencil “JEWS” onto the field. “Even when you left, there were those who kept telling you to leave,” he says. However, in the end the sense of enlightenment is diminished as the young people line up in dark uniforms with red neckerchiefs, suddenly evoking Stalinist or Zionist Youth fervour. It’s bitterly ironic, made in the manner of propaganda films of the 1930s-50s but with full-colour, feature film production values that tell us this is a film about now. Bartana was chosen to represent Poland at the 2011 Venice Biennale.

Liz Magic Lazer’s I Feel Your Pain (US, 2011, 80mins) records the recreation of interviews with famous people, including a bitterly funny television exchange between Bill and Hilary Clinton after the revelations about his infidelities. It’s performed in a theatre, the actors sitting with and moving about the audience with cameras trained on them, their images projected onto the cinema screen. With an adroit fusion of live verbatim theatre and parodic media technique Lazer incisively focuses on the rhetorical tactics and cliches politicians and political commentators deploy, especially when under pressure.

Among the more striking works on show is a modest two-minute film Ukungenisa (2008) that comes with significant post-colonial ramifications. A black woman (the South African artist Nandipha Mntambo) is transformed into a Mozambiquean bullfighter preparing to fight in an abandoned Portuguese arena. She wears not only the requisite outfit but also a large animal skin as if she is at once hero and victim, scraping a foot across the sand like an impatient bull.

Several works pivot around the modern family. Guy Ben-Ner’s widely seen (including on YouTube) Stealing Beauty (Israel, 2007) in which the artist and his wife and two children invade successive IKEA stores and inhabit display rooms is wickedly funny. The dialogue between family members focuses on consumerism and property (“Is Mom private property?”) with a mock-Marxist slant which is nonetheless apt. Stealing Beauty is a model of guerrilla filmmaking of the most amiable kind (Liz Magic Lazer also conducts filmed live performance interventions).

If Ben-Ner mimics conventional filmmaking, Ryan Trecartin runs wild with the camera: bodies lunge into frame, close-ups are in-yer-face and there’s a lot of dress-ups and dialogue that you have to grab at. And if Ben-Ner’s family seems quite normal, Trecartin’s fictional one, in A Family Finds Entertainment (US, 2004, 40 mins), is a high-level bizarre mix of folk ordinary and wild. The artist plays demented teenager Skippy (knife wielding, teeth blackened,) who is ordered to leave home by his “Snake” mother. He’s hit by a car, survives and parties with a wild girl, Shin, while being followed by a woman making a documentary about “medium-aged kids all over the world.” But narrative counts for little in this wild melange of home video, animation and vivid theatricality. What it adds up to is a sense of release from family life—if from one mad world to another. See it to believe it (sometimes found on YouTube).

Kalup Linzy’s black family soap opera All My Churen (US, 2003), built around a series of telephone dialogues, is not as visually delirious as Trecartin’s, but the dialogue and the artist’s convincing comedic playing of all the roles in various wigs, outfits and voices are likewise gripping in their excess.

In the foyer there’s a sculptural work by Brisbane artists Clark-Beaumont, the only Australians represented in Performance Now. It’s a carefully crafted, sharply angled rock face, a duplicate of the one that Sarah Clark slid down before being rescued by Nicole Beaumont while they were on a walking trip. The near-serious accident was re-created for the opening of Performance Now. A machine fault meant that the video was not showing during my visit. But reading the accompanying wall text and appreciating the sculpture, a friend commented that imagining the performance was oddly satisfying.

Big questions arise out of the Performance Now experience. Is this simply a video art exhibition? What does it actually have to say about performance today beyond the fact that art performance has diversified and is less precious than its forbears? Can an exhibition of performance on screen be meaningful without context? As Mike Leggett, driven online by the absence of an Experimenta Recharge catalogue, asks (see article), “Is the web now confirmed as rivalling the white cube, becoming the preferred place for exhibiting media art, simultaneously storing knowledge gleaned in steady accumulations of feedback?” You can see Performance Now (allocate a day) until 1 March and ask yourself.

Too Much World, The Films of Hito Steyerl, curators Aileen Burns and Johan Lundh in association with Annie Fletcher, presented in cooperation with the Van Abbemuseum and the Goethe-Institut Australia; IMA, 13 Dec, 2014-21 March 2015; ICI (Independent Curators International) and Performa, Performance Now, QUT Art Museum, Brisbane, 6 Dec, 2014-1 March, 2015

“If you were in my country I could show you places and you could see the picture in front of you. The story is alive and well and in front of you.”

Edwin Lee Mulligan, painter and poet, often referred to as a dream catcher, is telling me the story of Dungkabah, an ancient ancestor from his area around Noonkanbah in North Western Australia. Dungkabah, who steals people in their sleep and “entombs them in the spirit world,” is the maker of the “poisoned gas” that is now such a valuable commodity. We are sitting in Carriageworks in urban Sydney and while Mulligan admits it is hard to understand the full resonance of the story without access to its physical home, he offers a quiet but urgent invitation to contemporary Australia to try just that little bit harder to see from an Aboriginal perspective.

Mulligan is working with the Broome-based company Marrugeku on their latest show, Cut the Sky. It is conceived by Dalisa Pigram (co-choreographer) and Rachael Swain (director) and will premiere at the Perth International Arts Festival in February and play at WOMADelaide in March. Cut the Sky is dance theatre that attempts to grapple with the issue of climate change—particularly from the Aboriginal perspective on land and resource management. Along the way it draws on a number of other cultural and thematic touchstones: The Noonkanbah Protests against state-sanctioned mining on sacred sites in 1980; Werner Herzog and Wandjuk Marika’s documentary Where the Green Ants Dream (1984); and the Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weil opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Set in the aftermath of a future man-made environmental disaster, the characters, including mining workers, a geologist, a sex worker, a displaced traditional owner and a protester, have to find their way in the radically changed world.

The show has developed from the Listening to Country laboratory that took place in 2013. Pigram says, “We took dancers to specific sites close to Edwin’s country, including Wandjina Gorge and places close to Broome. We were interested in trying to find ways of listening to country to effect our dramaturgy in this kind of dance theatre making. And we found something there for sure which led to us thinking, What if we don’t listen to country? What if we set this piece in the future and the damage is done… [We are also] finding ourselves being propelled back into the times of the Noonkanbah Protests in Edwin’s country. Have questions changed, or are they the same? Are we processing these ideas of resource management and caring for country in the right ways to sustain our lifestyles and our people?”

Along with the research from the laboratory, Mulligan’s poems also have had a direct effect on the choreography. Pigram says, “From the moment [Edwin] starts to speak about these physical dreams he’s actually experienced and turned into poetry it really opens your mind to seeing in a different way and allows [you as a] dancer to take that into your body…to develop the movement language and start to shape scenes.” Mulligan, primarily a painter and poet, is happy to have found a different medium for sharing his dreams: “I’m really privileged to work not only with Dalisa but other dancers too, where we [ex]change words and stories…translate stories into dance patterns.”

Music is also a strong driver within Cut the Sky. The show is divided into five acts or “mediations” based around five songs, two extant from Nick Cave, one from Buffalo Springfield and two commissioned from pop-funk artist Ngaiire [Joseph]. These are performed by singer/actress Ngaire Pigram under the musical direction of Matthew Fargher. Dalisa Pigram explains, “We’re looking at the function of the songs to be a bit like protest songs, the voices of the people that spoke up along the way, towards this future that we’re inevitably going to face.”

As with all Marrugeku shows, the collaborative team is a truly international affair. Movement is devised by the cast along with choreography by Pigram and Serge Aimé Coulibaly from Burkina Faso and Belgium. Dramaturg Hildegard de Vuyst is also from Belgium. The media designers, Sonal Jain and Mriganka Madhukaillya (Desire Machine Collective) are from Assam in India. And of course there are a range of Australian—Indigenous and non-indigenous—collaborators as well. Pigram says, “From its birth Marrugeku has been an intercultural company…working in Indigenous contexts and communities to help tell these stories and share this perspective. [It’s about] a reciprocity, learning from one another and sharing that through our art making. To have perspectives from Burkina Faso in Africa, from Belgium, from Assam in India…is really valuable in this particular show especially considering climate change is ultimately going to affect and is [already] affecting all of us across the world. And we feel the importance of finding these opportunities to share Aboriginal perspectives, as these ancient knowledge systems can be beneficial for all humankind. If we share these things, hopefully it leads to new ways of looking at them and maybe we have a chance to make a difference.”

Despite the future setting of Cut the Sky suggesting a pessimistic outcome, both Pigram and Mulligan seem to have an overall optimistic outlook. I ask Mulligan if he has hope that his message—the Aboriginal perspective—will get some traction in mainstream Australia. He responds, “There’s a saying: we’ve all been given the gift of mortality and having the gift of mortality we all have the ability to dream, and by dreaming and by saying these stories, through whatever medium, we’re able to…” Pigram continues the thought “…shift people, and find new ways to look at things rather than coming up against each other all the time. Edwin has often said [that there is] this soft way to tackle such a heavy issue with such conflicting opinions…to share this in a soft way so people can take it in and feel it and hopefully they can see the other way to look at things.”

realtime tv interview

Marrugeku, Cut the Sky, Perth International Arts Festival, 27 Feb-1 March, https://2015.perthfestival.com.au/; WOMADelaide, 7-8 March, http://womad.org; WA regional tour August 2015; European tour Oct/Nov 2015

When I was a little boy on the north coast of NSW my brothers and sisters would crawl into the long grass to bend, arrange and ‘weave’ the stalks to make fragile cubby houses there to play in. Other native creatures also did this, and hid there all the time of course. Often there were more than a few deadly snakes but, blind to the danger, we never seemed to encounter them. In the Darwin tropical north bandicoots and native rats build their nests in the grass and live off the stalks, seeds and thriving resident insect-life. Snakes of all kinds in large numbers come to pick them in turn.

In the country town where my family lived in post WWII rural Australia, there were homeless Aboriginal people, a resident population, who lived in vacant unkempt grassed blocks (they never seemed to be able or want to ‘squat’ in the numerous derelict houses). They seemed to drink and party a lot—the ‘goomies’ as they were called. Their presence reminded us of a lifestyle we were possibly one step away from.

Colonial Australia, it seems, has always had a ‘pest’ problem. There has always been the ‘Aboriginal problem’—authorities used to ‘disperse’ Aboriginals once upon a time. As I’m writing this, a ‘rabbit cull’ is taking place in the dark outside my ranger’s cottage. I can hear the short quiet ‘snap’ of what sounds like 0.22 ‘silencer’ bullets all around me. Darwin has always had a multicultural homeless population—Xavier Herbert’s novel Capricornia begins there, but authorities have periodically attempted to eradicate what they saw as freeloading pests—physically shipping people on boats back to what is now Maningrida just after WWII, and kicking out the hippies on their way to London in the 1970s, and Aboriginal people through laws to do with public drinking in the 1980s. There was a touch of jealousy for this loose life free from the nine to five workload, so different yet right in your face. What would happen if everyone lived like this?

I came to work in Milingimbi in 1979 and spent scattered time in Darwin as a transit place when passing through to southern cities. In the 1980s when I began to collect autobiographies from local artists at Milingimbi and Ramingining, early in the tales would be episodes of Darwin sojourns. An historian told me that within two years of Darwin being established Aboriginal people came to live there on the fringe. Most of the senior men had, in their teens, walked the 500km westward, cross-country to Darwin looking for ‘the action,’ for adventure. Darwin was a freer place then. They sometimes lived in prescribed areas like Bagot Reserve but as often camped with relatives on beaches and in the many convenient ‘long grass’ spaces in the centre of the city. Particular community groups had their own site-specific ‘grass’ sites; Parap, near the Oval, Rapid Creek, Fanny Bay, East Point, and with the hippies on the Esplanade or Casuarina Beaches.

Most expatriate workers I knew experienced their own, often darker, Darwin story: someone they became close to, who went to Darwin to live in the ‘long grass’ only to be lost and die there. A friend pointed out how walking into the sunset metaphorically was walking toward death. In the Arnhem Land society of arranged marriages and another consciousness, there are countless runaway brides and refugees from family disputes, convenient victims of accusations of sorcery. Many people come to the ‘long grass’ accidentally—they may have come to Darwin to go to hospital, to attend an education course or a political or church meeting and ‘fell in with friends.’ People also talked of ‘having a holiday’ after a big win at cards, or the final payout of a work contract.

It is timely to examine these lives; in other societies they appear romantically and seriously in literature, film and folklore. Outside of Herbert’s Capricornia in 1939 and Stephen Johnson’s 2000 feature film Yolngu Boy it’s a subject rarely explored. The experience of Vicki Van Hout’s Long Grass reminded me of surreal scenes in Fellini’s 1969 film Satyricon, but less high camp, and also the beauty of the players and positive energy of the music and dance portrayed in Marcel Camus’ 1959 Black Orpheus, another tale of refugees on the fringe.

I was told recently that all art could be described as form, content and context. Long Grass is an immersive, captivating work in form and style that charms, seduces and positively takes you into its arms. Its context, and some of its content, is the existential question posed by Camus and facing many Aboriginal youth today: to commit suicide or not commit suicide; after that everything is simple and structured.

There are many reasons for being depressed and committing suicide and many ways to do it; drinking yourself to death is a common one. I remember a particular man.

A totem is temporal—it exists in a physical site, in time and a season. There was a man from a small almost extinct clan group. We were close friends and at one stage talked about sharing a house due to the housing shortage. He belonged to a ‘line of clouds’ totem group that included anchovies and stingrays. His name meant a species of stingray. He was also a painter of small, fine pointed subject matter. I remember a year of ‘king’ tides when schools of small fish would come into the shallows and skip across the water. The tides spilled onto the land such that you could scoop the fish out of the gutters at the side of the coastal road. ‘Stingray’ had just finished a contract and before he holidayed in Darwin he took a painting with him to make extra money. We joked about the ‘mokuy’ dead spirit in his painting and how it was a self-fulfilling prophecy in the long grass lifestyle. Within several weeks he’d died there.

All through the wet season and just into the dry everything magically grows, seemingly overnight. The ‘long grass’ can be two or three metres high. I remember driving through walls for more than an hour with nothing in sight other than this straw curtain in front of me. In April comes the violent powerful ‘knock’em’ storms that flatten the grass and clear the line of sight. Watching Long Grass I thought of Vicki Van Hout as an amazing ball of energy like these storms that come out of nowhere to energize, create and be gone again before you can blink.

Vicki Van Hout’s Long Grass in the 2015 Dance Massive, the fourth of these two-week festivals of innovative Australian dance, follows the appearance of Marrugeku’s Gudirr Gudirr (RT114), a cross-cultural collaboration featuring dancer-choreographer Dalisa Pigram in the 2013 program. Together they signal that contemporary Indigenous dance is becoming both more visible and aesthetically and culturally diverse.

The programming of Indigenous dance has not been easy for Dance Massive given the dominance of Bangarra Dance Theatre (with whom Van Hout has danced) and a paucity of works elsewhere. Pigram (see interview) and Van Hout are changing this, while the emerging TSI choreographer Ghenoa Gela (whose work appeared at last year’s Next Wave and in Force Majeure’s developmental workshop season Cultivate and who inventively choreographed the finale of that company’s Nothing to Lose; see review) represents the promise of works to come.

Long Grass

Van Hout is at once auteur and collaborator—her vision and choreography are exquisitely distinctive, her creations woven through collaboration. She’s an integrator, drawing on the many Indigenous dance practices people have shared with her across Australia and her fellow artists’ ideas and experiences. (She is also a formidable writer, blogging enthusiastically and insightfully for Western Sydney’s FORM Dance Projects. The Aboriginal English dialogue in Long Grass is witty and revealing). For Long Grass she invited Darwin dancer-choreographer Gary Lang (whose long established work needs to be seen beyond that city) to work with her as cultural consultant and co-choreographer. Van Hout, with Lang and lighting designer Clytie Smith, created the ring of tall grass, representing the vacant land where homeless and displaced Aboriginals (called “long grassers”) gather in Darwin. True to the work’s ambivalence about Long Grass culture—at once violent and communal—the tall grass catches the light, sparking in a bleak world. Close inspection reveals the stems and flowerings to be intricately crafted—the knotting and weaving, hours of labour—the kind of detail also evident in Van Hout’s design for her first major work, Briwyant in 2011 (RT103).

A sculptural design centrepiece is of another kind of weave: a bed frame with a mattress support woven from long strips of material by the performers: it symbolises rest, intimacy, sensual seduction, entrapment and boundaries as it cradles and entangles dancers and is deftly manoeuvred about the stage framing action (see the cover of this edition).

The action is discursive; a series of vignettes of Long Grass life played with a laidback naturalism, recorded and live voice-overs (Lang), songs and eruptions of dance. This is dance theatre that really dances; the great power and precision of the highly articulated movement contrasts painfully with Long Grass inertia—drugged states and the incapacities of old age (a funny but finally sad motif). The forceful dancing represents the creative potential of joyous communality, too often distorted into sexual competition and violence—a woman beaten by one man immediately becomes target for another in a harrowing sequence, all the more ugly for its meticulous crafting. The dancers are uniformly superb in solos, duets and groups, Van Hout realising dance for the men with a rich variety of articulation and inflection. Only occasionally does the structure and tempo of Long Grass falter (a drunken night-on-the-town trio) or suggest that it’s too discursive.

Long Grass is an important work, culturally, sociologically and aesthetically, revealing in observant detail the lives of the dispossessed with humour, bitterness and sadness. It’s a brave work: not everyone will be able to reconcile the portrayal of hopelessness with Long Grass’s inherent optimism: a fraught community with ancient if damaged roots is better than none. Not least, it is the fine weave of dance, drama and music, resonant with the design, that makes Long Grass at once tautly and casually cogent, with dance writing hope large upon the stage and on our psyches.

2015 Dance Massive

Once again Dance Massive is very largely a Victorian affair, with NSW (Force Majeure, Vicki Van Hout, Sue Healey) being the only other state represented this year. Given the paucity of major dance festivals around Australia (save for Perth’s new MoveMe Dance Improvisation Festival, see reviews by Maggi Philips & Nerida Dickinson), Australia Council investment in the event and the National Dance Forum occurring in Melbourne at the same time, interstate artists must be wondering about their standing, let alone their careers, as Dance Massive markets programmed works by bringing in international producers and presenters.

The willingness and courage of Arts House, DanceHouse and Malthouse to commit so consistently to Dance Massive is admirable and doubtless there are advantages in showcasing local works already funded and which do not require expensive transport costs to mount in an already dance-dense culture. Artists and companies from other states might not be ready to fit the Dance Massive two-year cycle or the costs to participate might be beyond them. Whatever the reason, Dance Massive looks like a festival for and by Melbournians when it should be more than that.

Massive themes

The body-machine nexus continues to enthral choreographers much more than it does playwrights and theatre directors. In dance, the authentic body is at stake; as new technologies become more pervasive, providing electronic and mechanical prostheses and robotic substitutes, choreographers envisage co-option, cooperation or defeat. Antony Hamilton and Alisdair Macindoe in Meeting “share space with 64 robotic percussion instruments… the bodies enter[ing] states of heightened physical and mental agency, with all actions carried by the meditative pulse of the machine beat.” Rebecca Jensen and Sarah Aiken’s Overworld, “inspired by our immediate and unlimited capacity to access pop culture just as easily as ancient ritual and spiritual practice,” assays “how we access and broadcast information online, how we connect to information and to each other, what is meaningful and what is not” (see review from Next Wave 2013). Atlanta Eke (see review of recent work at Alaska Projects) performs Body of Work in which the human is “a biological organism and technical machine; a cyborg blurring the lines between who choreographs and who is choreographed.” In Stampede the Stampede, Tim Darbyshire performs “within a turbulent yet controlling choreographic apparatus…. the work attempts to expand choreography by means of machinery, object, lighting and sound configurations.”

In Motion Picture, Lucy Guerin looks to an older media technology that is still potently with us, taking “the 1950 film noir classic D.O.A. as a choreographic score to explore the tensions between live performance and cinema.” Rudolf Maté’s movie is screened behind the audience, but seen and interpreted by the dancers—who or what choreographs here, film or Guerin? As with our relationship with new technologies, this work “both pays homage to the moving image and rebels against it.”

Connectivity in terms of space and materiality is explored in a number of Dance Massive works. Rosalind Crisp engages with design (and the talents of Helen Herbertson and Ben Cobham) in The Boom Project while Melanie Lane in Merge relates to objects created by visual artists Bridie Lunney and Ash Keating. Prue Lang’s SpaceProject “is the investigation of movement through the perception of space.” Chunky Move’s Depth of Field (a term long associated with filmmaking in respect to lenses and perception of space) breaks out of the theatre into public space in order “to reveal the unseen in the everyday.” Shelly Lasica’s Solos for Other People is performed in a basketball gym and Natalie Abbott’s Maximum conjures the gym inside a theatre.

A different kind of space is entertained in BalletLab’s Kingdom, where “four men—poof, queer, homo, fag—who also happen to be choreographers, come together to articulate how their individual and collective desires intersect with art, life and sexuality.” The dancer-choreographers “penetrating each other’s artistic territories,” are Matthew Day, Luke George, Rennie McDougall and Phillip Adams working in close collaboration with visual artist Andrew Hazewinkel to explore “ideas of utopia and a relationship to habitation, nature and identity.”

The body itself is the subject of Force Majeure’s Nothing to Lose, a bracing entertainment in which proudly corpulent artists stare down prejudice, enact favourite performances and dance gloriously. Rawcus’ ensemble of artists with and without disabilities likewise aims to reveal the potential of marginalised bodies and lives: “From karaoke to bedroom dancing and imagined celebrity, 12 performers grace eight stages side-by-side in a tableau that becomes an exhibition of human expression.” In Do You Speak Chinese? non-Chinese speaking Melbournian Victoria Chiu “plays with the many ways our bodies speak for us, often before we’ve even had a chance to open our mouths,” and in 10,000 Small Deaths, Paula Lay foregrounds “the experiential body,” directly addressing with dance, video and music “the transience of our corporeality and the beauty and sadness of existence.” Sue Healey’s On View: Quintet presents portraits live and on film of Martin del Amo, Shona Erskine, Benjamin Hancock, Raghav Handa and Nalina Wait, “explor[ing] the dimensions of portraiture and how we view each other.”

The body and space, perception, identity and technology with the odd hint of transcendence and a touch of dance metaphysics: what beyond music and our inner pulse dances us? That’s Dance Massive waiting to be danced in 2015.

Set with the aging, ramshackle objects of a worn out music school, the stage ticks with the polyrhythmic certainty of a collection of metronomes, each keeping their own meter while pushing the others just slightly out. A luscious red curtain falls limply away from its anchor, placing us somewhere antique. Nioukhine (Michel Robin) meanders on stage with a hobble and a hunched back. He exits and enters absentmindedly, playing for gentle laughs while three of his “seven, no six, … no, seven daughters”—the musicians (violinist Floriane Bonanni, pianist Emanuelle Swiercz and soprano Muriel Ferraro)—wait with poise at their instruments, in modest bustled gowns.

Originally dubbed a farce by Chekhov, On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco presents the character of Nioukhine at the dusk of his life, intending to deliver a public lecture on the evils of smoking, but instead offering a series of reflections on marital entrapment and wasted life. While his presence offers some slight lazzi [commedia dell’arte clowns. Eds] touches, Chekhov’s final version of the monologue largely subdues outward comic physicality in favour of text that works towards subtler tragi-comic reflection. There are the familiar themes, then, of a lament for lost youth and of life lived through the rapid socio-economic upheaval of Tsarist Russia in decline, for which Chekhov’s signature works are recognised.

The pathos of a character bemoaning his less than tragic fate is underscored by the musicians who materialise the play’s ironic subtext. Bach’s Sonata No. 1 in B minor for Violin and Piano opens to move us from melancholy to paced, playful fervour. This is extended to crescendo with a call to presence by the shy soprano, who flits from the stage the moment her bold rendition of Tchaikovsky’s Romance, Op 47, No. 1, is over. As Nioukhine lulls into reverie—“How I long to run away and to forget … I was young once …”—Berio’s Sequenza VIII for Violin punctuates his brooding with cutting repulsion. This exasperated performance, played with Bonanni’s audible gasps, shoots Nioukhine’s reminiscence out of the past and into the present. It feels as if we are as disjointed as them all: both in and out of time.

Stage relationships with time take on a different flavour in Have I No Mouth which produces a distinctive sense of presence carried by the three performers who play themselves. Cast as a mother-son-psychotherapist trio, Feidlim Cannon, Ann Cannon and Erich Keller craft a delicate theatre of distant intimacy to contemplate what it is to work through the sudden experience of losing a family member. Feidlim’s father, Sean Cannon died from misdiagnosed Guillain-Barré Syndrome, and mother and son draw to the surface their entwined histories of family, grief and memory in order to examine the unresolved feelings they carry about a seemingly avoidable loss.

While in theme the work risks making the stage a place for therapy, Have I No Mouth rather enables the inverse to happen: therapy and memory become theatrical, self-reflexive and at times comical. At the forefront of the work is the dynamic played out between Feidlim and Ann which traverses sentiment as well as sarcasm as they paint, via a series of memory vignettes, a landscape of Feidlim’s Irish-Catholic youth. In one such re-enactment, Feidlim finds Ann’s rather ominous selection of significant objects—a coffin for a baby, a telephone, a roll of bandage –“a little negative.” So begins the kind of familial banter that can only have been rehearsed over 30-odd years, now brought to subtle theatrical visibility. While Feidlim judges Ann for “talking about the horrible shit,” Ann likes to think she knows her son better than he does himself: “Are you telling me that you don’t believe in God anymore? Well I don’t believe that you don’t believe in God anymore.”

What is exquisite about this work is the complex (un)self-conscious clarity the performers bring to the presentational status of their on-stage selves. As a ‘therapeutic’ method in itself, this allows for an ever-refracting play between performed-present and performed-past selves that is further enabled by gentle dramaturgical disruptions to the ownership mother and son hold over the past. When Feidlim reads—verbatim on a microphone—his mother’s account of the loss of her third son soon after birth, a startlingly affective, almost biblical beauty emerges in place of what would otherwise be a catharsis of emotion. As Ann is blessed in a stream of gently falling confetti, Feidlim speaks her words: “It was snowing. I said: ‘I know he’s gone, isn’t he?’” In sifting so poetically through time, these performers expertly use theatre to share their collective journeys to self.

2015 Sydney Festival: Théâtre des Bouffes Du Nord, On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco, director Denis Podalydès, concept Floriane Bonanni, Sydney Opera House, 22-25 Jan; Brokentalkers, Have I No Mouth, co-directors Feidlim Cannon, Gary Keegan, Seymour Centre, Sydney, 15-18 Jan

A wordless drama exploring the ritual of cooking and a silent slapstick rort about the darker side of clowning are both entertaining; neither entirely tasteful. The Long Pigs aims to upset and does so superbly, while The Kitchen provides a garish divertissement that is formulaic save for its well-structured thematic circularity and glorious evocation of Indian tradition

The Long Pigs

Physical theatre supergroup with particularly black humour, WE3, bring The Long Pigs to Sydney Festival. These sooty-nosed clowns aren’t quite right. WE3’s regalia is shabby, like their innocence. Their dirty little hands are conspiring, selfish, gluttonous, cannibalistic and animal: they’re in a pig-eat-pig world where exclusion, derision and brutality get you places. Caught between their mundane reality with its status quo security, and a forbidden fantasy of colour and joy, the three clowns non-verbally quest for mental and physical sustenance. Slippery bananas, a clowning stock-standard, come to represent not only humiliation but human meat (“long pig” is Melanesian Pidgin for human flesh). Bananas are the currency that affords these sorry souls survival. Every banana is a life; well, the life of a joke.

The wide stage is set like an abattoir or dusty factory. Shadowy clumps dangle from the ceiling like carcasses shrouding forgotten furniture. Silly-walking industrial underlings shuffle in to go about their repetitive, drab and nonsensical business. This factory routine, a meta-jab at comedy, is merciless. Jesting calls for freshness amid stale replication and these clowns know it, mock it and yet live it.

Nicci Wilks, Clare Bartholomew and Derek Ives-Plunkett make up the paranoid and disenfranchised comic trio. Director Susie Dee, along with set-designer Anna Tregloan and lighting guru Andy Turner bring the wags’ inner workings into a spatial concept. It’s Jethro Woodward’s engaging score though that balances macabre with ludicrous, synchronising intent with action.

So much is mysterious and left so. Why are these grim buffoons manufacturing—or is it murderously collecting—red noses? Are they feeding them to something? Do they work together or against each other? Their satire scissors at Judeo-Christian sanctimony and uses the divide between black- and red-noses as a metaphor for racism. They even deride the entertainment industry when they clamber into the audience to take payments from patrons who might like to stone Jesus (who is crucified on stage) from their seats. Violence is okay when it’s funny, and it’s even more okay when you pay good money for it.

The Kitchen

Roysten Abel’s non-narrative, non-verbal theatre work, The Kitchen, is highly dependent on symbolism: it combines on-stage cooking of Indian sweet Payasam (warm milk with rice, nuts, raisins and spices) with live musical accompaniment. It’s a sensory smorgasbord that delights smell and taste, especially when upon exiting the audience sample the dessert.

Twelve Kalamandalan drummers are perched on a copper kettle-shaped scaffold, with only their hands and drumskins lit. The effect is of cooking flames licking and lapping epicurean rites. Their collective sound thuds euphoniously but twangier solos cut through the air which is at most times balmy with cooking smells and billowing steam. In front of the drummers two actors (Mandakini Goswami and Dilip Shankar) prepare Payasam silently in near unison, their individual timing representative of our quirks and misalignments in love and compromise.

Director Abel, inspired by the Sufi mystic Rumi, says of the two pot-stirrers, “Even though they don’t act in the usual sense, they make an emotional journey during the performance. There is no real plot, but you get to see pieces of their story, the manner in which their relationship develops” (program note). After ghee and sugar, they pour in milk and once the milk-bowls are drained the actors rehearse their pouring actions from now empty vessels in a deeply sensual allusion. Like romance, it is the beautiful ache of longing, or lack, which makes union so sweet. Through cooking, the pair pass through infatuation, irritation, reconciliation, acceptance, devotion, boredom and many other emotional states in vignettes familiar to lovers.

In Hindu mythology, the human body is considered to be a kettle that holds the soul. Hence cooking holds potent metaphors for bodily and social transformations. Kettle shapes recur in The Kitchen, theming set design, action and even the bodies of the accompanying mizhav drums. Mizhav (small-headed copper or clay kettle drums common in Kerala’s temples) are traditionally heard in life rites like Namakaranam (naming ceremony), Upanayanam (boy’s introduction to education) and cremation. They’re associated with Brahmacharya (purity of sexual intent, often chastity or fidelity). Due to their place in pivotal life celebrations, each mizhav is treated with the status of a person—for example when the instrument wears out it is given a dignified burial. These associations make the mizhav the perfect accompanist for this dramatic presentation of relationship rituals, themselves microcosms of initiation and death.

The Kitchen’s symbolism is tidy and recursive, but it relies on associations with honorable traditions—Rumi’s take on love and hypnotic, ecstatic drumming—to add gravitas to the work’s banal showiness. Its most beautiful elements felt like justification for pleasing an audience out to taste-test sensuous entertainment this summer.

Sydney Festival; The Long Pigs, performer-devisors Derek Ives-Plunkett, Clare Bartholomew, Nicci Wilks, director Susie Dee, Everest Theatre, Seymour Centre, 15-18 Jan; The Kitchen, direction, lighting Roysten Abel, set design Neeraj Sahay, York Theatre, Seymour Centre, Sydney, 22-25 Jan

Time spent with the magnificent Buddha (artist Zhang Huan, China) built of 20 tonnes of incense ash in the Carriageworks foyer provided the serenity with which to reflect on a handful of bracing, sometimes over-produced Sydney Festival shows, each boldly coalescing creative forces in intriguing ways, testing meaning and expanding theatricality in an era of pervasive hybridity.

Tamara Saulwick, Endings

As in Pin Drop (RT111), so in Endings Tamara Saulwick intensively theatricalises sonic experience with the same meticulous attention to lighting and simple movement. If Pin Drop is a nightmarish account of a woman’s fear of home invasion in which every sound is significant and light reduced to shadow, Endings is another journey into darkness—with the voices of grievers for the dead and dying and that of the artist’s father just prior to his death. For one critic, who must have missed out on 30 years of ‘confessional’ performance, it was all too personal. Others in the audience were moved, recalling their own dealings with the deaths of parents. Some of us thought the recordings too much in the same warm groove. Also, the work’s potential for focusing on the power of the vox momento was underplayed in favour of the grievers and a superfluity of visual (superbly orchestrated by bluebottle) and musical material (finely sung—if lyrically limited—by Paddy Mann) along with intense sound design (Peter Knight) and some melodramatic bombast in the treatment of the father’s voice. Saulwick and Mann’s turntabling and play with aged reel-to-reel recorders and looping were more moving in a work with undeniable potential.

The Experiment

Mark Ravenhill and David Chisholm’s The Experiment focuses on responsibility for death—allowing a child to die in order to find a cure for the many who are ill. It’s not played out in the corporate sector (if alluded to) where the worst sins against children and animals are enacted, but in a couple, with one partner (the onstage narrator Mauricio Carrasco) consumed with guilt and denial (projecting the scenario onto his neighbours) about what the couple as scientists perpetrated with great cruelty on their own child. Presumably playwright Mark Ravenhill wanted to bring the issue as close to the personal as possible; the result seemed rather eccentric and apolitical. Carrasco’s anguish is conveyed in word (softly delivered without quite enough emphasis to always make sense of the script), two guitar solos (the first, sad and softly flamenco-ish by Fernando Gamero; the second scraping and raging on an electric guitar aptly mounted in a metal medical cabinet) and, finally, the triggering of ‘Siamese twin’ electric guitars which madly play themselves into entropy—a long, fading, stable chord closing a performance otherwise without easy resolution. The narrator’s inner life is also represented in striking visuals (Emmanuel Bernardoux, Matthew Gingold) that frame and fill the stage with a timber bush home, aberrant cell life and a multitude of faces. As in Endings, a superfluity of devices and the awkward merger of performance and concert, along with the complexity of Ravenhill’s script and Chisholm’s demanding score, make for an overly complex experience. The 20th century’s theatre of simultaneity and disjunctive linearity is still strongly with us, but it requires of artists restraint and focused vision. The Experiment was fascinating moment by moment, but its totality was elusive—and not in a radical way.

Darkness and Light

French organist Bernard Foccroulle and Australian media artist Lynette Wallworth came together in Sydney Town Hall to create Darkness and Light, a program of organ works from the 17th, 18th and 20th centuries that displayed, in no uncertain terms, the boldness and brilliance of their composers, and were played at the keyboard beneath large screen projections by Wallworth, with further imagery provided by NASA and other sources. The music was nothing less than complex, not least for some in the audience unfamiliar with the range, power and exacting subtlety of the organ in concert. The busier Wallworth and Pete Bundle’s editing, the harder it was to connect sound and image and consistently gauge thematic continuity. At its best, at concert’s end, Wallworth returned to the opening morning image of a long road, seen from human perspective, stretching into nowhere beneath the Moon. This time it was from twilight to night, and here Wallworth simply held on to the image as Buxtehude’s beautiful Passacaglia in D minor played out. Elsewhere connections were sometimes literal—birds on fences and in flight for Messaien—or lateral: scenes of a lake, rushes and water droplets in close-up for Foccroulle’s delicate “Coloured Flutes.” Lagoons and other landscape features were given the Rorschach treatment, industrial sites fumed and sparked furiously in tune with Gubaidalina’s “Light and Darkness,” and the cosmos hung deep above. I revelled in Foccroulle’s playing and admired Wallworth’s image making and its sense of the Australian landscape as sacred as a cathedral, but I was not rhythmically at home with its conjunction of competing manifestations of transcendence. Such melding can work, but the video has to make more space for us to accommodate the complexity of the music.

Nothing to Lose

Force Majeure’s Nothing to Lose puts the corpulent body on display, testing our prejudices. Bodies are spread about the stage. A deep, rumbling score with subterranean pings accompanies the performers as they move about on all fours and then fold comfortingly into one another. This initial aura of inertia associated with the fat body will be dispelled over and over in Nothing to Lose, the performers revealing persistence, dexterity and, as their defiant gaze confirms, pride. More than that they celebrate their bodies, the casually brazen lifting and dropping of bellies, revelling in their voluptuousness as they stand on plinths—soft statues that slow-wave to us, shimmy and gently sway, dipping slightly at the knee, slapping an upper arm: a simple dance: elegant and eloquent. Later there will be more elaborate and exacting movement, but instead of evolution there are interruptions.

Earlier, the cast deliver a litany of all the imaginable clichés and abuse directed at fat people, as if we didn’t know, and now audience members are invited onstage to feel the performers’ bodies: the heart, the armpits, “inhale the scent,” “lay your head on the stomach.” There’s a little embarrassment but the scene says nothing more. Shortly, another litany: queries including, “How much do you eat?” and “How do you have sex?” Fortunately, Nothing to Lose gets stranger and less didactic. A performer brutally backflips—a scary, unexplained moment. Words become more convincing when a woman in red (Ally Garrett), reciting the nonsense aimed at her as she grew up, shape-changes by manipulating the dress’s stretch fabric until she is herself and can remove and then use it to amusingly mimic Japanese Kinbaku (“tight binding”) bondage.

Nothing to Lose goes on to reveal more about the aesthetic and psycho-sexual inclinations of these seven large-bodied, confident performers. These are not novices; they have trained and practised widely and a number of them come from the established underground scene. At the end they are joined by 13 volunteers trained to perform a very grounded, compulsively rhythmic finale, cleverly choreographed by Torres Strait Islander Ghenoa Gela to delightfully fractured dance music by Stereogamous. Nothing to Lose is a fascinating work in which we get to know unfamiliar bodies that flow when they dance and shine when they articulate their own art. It’s finely directed by Kate Champion, working with Artistic Associate Kelli Jean Drinkwater, and lit by designer Geoff Cobham who evokes gallery, catwalk, club and the inner spaces of safe display.

Puncture

Puncture, by Legs on the wall, FORM Dance Projects and Vox-Sydney Philharmonia Choirs, focuses on social dancing, principally male body to female in a thinly delineated dance hall romance triangle. Ballroom, tango, folk, jitterbug and smoochy casual all make appearances while rave is bizarrely depicted as a drugged, angry and violent swirling mass. The performers, dancers, the design, the singing and playing (piano Luke Byrne, percussion Bree Van Reyk, composer Stefan Gregory) were excellent. Choreographer (Kathryn Puie) and director (Patrick Nolan) inventively marshalled the large forces involved, longeurs and plodding scene changeovers aside. But Puncture does nothing to rupture our notion of what social dancing is, beyond that it has all too well-known meaning for individuals, pairs and the mass. In an era of rapidly changing sexual boundaries and new waves of migrant social dancing not glimpsed here, Puncture seemed very strange; indeed elderly.

2015 Sydney Festival, Endings, Carriageworks, 8-11 Jan;The Experiment, Carriageworks, 15-17 Jan; Darkness and Light, Sydney Town Hall, 9-10 Jan; Nothing to Lose, Carriageworks, 21-25 Jan; Puncture, Riverside Theatre, 21-25 Jan

In a recent report to the federal government Pricewaterhouse Coopers predicted that Australia would significantly slip down the ladder of economic wealth over coming decades because of a fixation on a mining monoculture and a failure to innovate or properly support new approaches in information technology, bio-technology, nanotechnology and responses to climate change. As if we didn’t know. But without equally good investment in education and the arts, the break from a monocultural mindset will be impossible.

Inequitable re-distribution

Just before Xmas, the Abbott Government snatched $6m (over three years) from an already slashed Australia Council budget for the mysterious new Australian Book Council to be administered by the Minister of the Arts, George Brandis, in another assault on peer assessment. Clearly, after his foray into determining the outcomes of the Prime Minister’s Literary Prizes, presumably the PM feels that the Culture Wars are best fought on the publishing front or Brandis is looking to fill his bookcase. The money is for the publishing industry (promotion, data collection, distribution) not for writers. Susan Wyndham in the Sydney Morning Herald Spectrum (31 Jan-1 Feb) writes that to compensate the Council “plans to use money from across its new grants program and strategic projects in all artforms.” This has exacerbated anxiety among artists already concerned about the new grants program, in which six-year funding to key organisations, while granting (the catchcry) ‘certainty,’ could well lock Australian arts into a period of cultural fixity. Let’s hope not. The innovators of the small to medium sector who succeed in attaining six-year funding will doubtless keep us on our toes, although some say six-year planning is not as easy as it is for large companies that already operate long-term. And what will the value of money granted from 2016 be in 2021? As for project and other grants, what will be the effect of the budget cut and the $6m robbery?

RT125 feature Modes of Production—referring to Karl Marx’s inextricable linking of productivity and social relations (reinforced by an ideological superstructure that includes the arts)—reports on a range of activities that attempt to position, promote and develop the arts in Australia and Asia. Some of these are familiar and going through new phases, some are new, some problematic, some creatively liberating.

The producers

In the first of our new series The Producers, Kathryn Kelly interviews Brisbane-based Dave Sleswick. At the 2013 Australian Theatre Forum, David Pledger, concerned about the rise of a producer and managerial class with power and money and lodged parasitically between bureaucrats and artists, provocatively declared, “a producer can never be an artist” (noplainjane.wordpress.com, 29 May, 2013 – site no longer active). Sleswick, as you’ll read, certainly is producer and artist, while others, like Harley Stumm (see RT126) and the indefatigable Marguerite Pepper, also serve the small-to-medium sector admirably and with the invaluable ‘outside eye’ of a sensitive producer. These and their like may be the exception to Pledger’s rule. They make life easier for artists, allowing more time to create, and they know and have access to the networks that artists are often unaware of or lack time or the personalities to engage with. For those of us who performed in the 1980s and 90s and struggled to tour, the current mobility of groups across Australia and beyond, with the support of various federal and state networks, a former Theatre Board producer scheme and artists’ own duly emboldened initiatives, looks miraculous.

Organisation as producer

We look at producing from another perspective in an interview with Performance Space Artistic Director Jeff Khan, who delineates the various ways the organisation develops, produces and co-produces new work with attention to experimentation, Indigenous, queer and site-specific art. For 2015 Performance Space has restructured its program, drawing all of its productions into one season in which it takes over Carriageworks with a LIVEWORKS festival. As a producer Khan believes this will benefit artists above all, as well as Performance Space’s profile in an increasingly competitive market.

Asia-Australia, again

Over two decades we’ve watched attempts to establish a market for Australian art in Asia and then exchanges that might underpin such a market. While Asialink has been fruitful, especially at the individual level, many an event and exchange have been short-term successes but without long-term pay-offs. It’s hoped that a producer network-led initiative will change this. As Urszula Dawkins writes of her APPCAMP experience in Seoul, this involves producers really getting to know each other’s cultures and increasing their personal contact. It’s also a four-year plan with annual meetings to ensure continuity.

Camps and lab

Malcolm Whittaker has also been camping. After reporting on the Performance Space-Arts House initiative Time_Place_Space: NOMAD for us in RealTime 124), in this issue he reflects on his experience of another in the growing number of arts laboratories, Arts House’s Live Art Camp. Whittaker values labs for “creating safe places for temporary micro-communities to reflect, share practice and generate work by dipping into an array of practices…” By producing such gatherings, Performance Space and Arts House and their like nurture their communities and fuel potential works for their own programming and networks.

Greening production

Going directly at the role of artist as producer of their own work, Arts House’s part-lab, part-forum Going Nowhere vigorously explored the possibilities of reducing the scale of art’s globe-trotting carbon footprint. Emma Webb reports on the gathering’s diverse activities: personal carbon footprint audits; international collaborations in development minus jet fuel; conversations with green designers and writers; a fantastical greening event with Tristan Meecham; and the conjuring of possible projects.

Museum & galleries: the framing of experience

The production of knowledge is highly institutionalised. In museums it is increasingly ‘packaged.’ In the first part of a two-part article, Jane Goodall takes a look at the post-museum—an institution constrained by its commitment to educate and entertain (and generate funds as government support diminishes) at the expense of a sense of mystery. She contrasts it with gambler David Walsh’s “success with MONA [which] has much to do with his fundamental respect for the role of chance and speculation in human life.” Elsewhere in RT124, Mike Leggett and I ponder the relationship between the contemporary art gallery and screen works and other digital art it exhibits. Philip Brophy at the Tokyo Art Meeting addresses the nexus between the performing body, East and West, and the gallery. Curation is more than presentation; it’s another layer of production, shaping our reception of the work. In a Kings Cross car park, Ilana Cohn witnesses Atlanta Eke’s performance with motor vehicle.

“Don’t simply aim to please”

In the social media era of an astonishingly heightened desire to belong, much art is likewise packaged to improve reception: a theatre subscription might come with all kinds of benefits (parties, meet the actors, talks, discounts) but also a sense of Facebooked and Tweeted community. It takes more than art these days to please an audience. It’s not surprising that Malcolm Whittaker reports from the 2015 Australian National Theatre Forum that keynote speaker, Belgian festival director Frie Leysen urged that artists “don’t simply aim to please everyone, but dare to be disturbers,” and that we should “valorise the risk, the adventure, the ephemeralness, the uniqueness of the experience and the temporary community that is created through theatre.”

Regionally yours

In recent years, we’ve admired the exponential growth of innovative art in regional Australia, focussing principally on the Riverina and, in RT124, productions in regional Victoria (see reviews of Rebel Elders in Ballarat and Packed in Wodonga). In RT125 Murray Arts General Manager and Regional Arts Development Officer Karen Gardner tells us how work is produced across a vast territory with five councils, and about nurturing local artists and the desire to attract innovative artists to the region.

Ideology laid bare

The authoritarianism of the Abbott Government and the totally unnecessary cruelty of its austerity budget, its censoriousness while demanding free speech, the doubtless Captain’s Call of snatching back $6m from the Australia Council, its desire to sell off public assets for short-term profit for itself and developers, its inhuman treatment of refugees and its failure to address Indigenous disadvantage, have outed it as ideological. A lot of us have known this of the Coalition for a long time, but the Government’s gross misbehaviour has made it clear to all and sundry, just as has the Tea Party-Republican ‘coalition’ in the US—but here the counter-reaction, as seen in the Queensland election, has been incisive (Campbell Newman’s first Captain’s Call was to eliminate the Premier’s Literary Awards).

As David Pledger argued in Platform Paper 41, August 2013: “Re-valuing the artist in the new world order,” Western democracy is in the grip of Neo-liberal ideology with its goals of privatisation (its eye on the ABC and public space like national parks and gardens), deregulation (freedom for developers), globalisation (for corporations bigger than nations) and tax cuts that require the defunding of health, science, education, research, social welfare and the arts. It’s a totalising ideology in which all human activity is perceived as and manipulated to be simply a matter of economics. The state capitalism of China and Putin’s Russia—dictatorial leaders and the free flow of money—is very appealing to Neo-liberals. The un-mandated Abbott-Hockey budget is a clear indication of like-minded, un-consultative, anti-social thinking.

The intrusion of Neoliberalism into the arts in Australia has been evident in the appointment of managers and administrators rather than artists to head performing arts organisations and events, as Ralph Myers argued in his Phillip Parsons Lecture (The Australian, 1 Dec, 2014): “Our theatre and dance companies, our festivals and orchestras are what we have left. We cannot surrender them to the markets. We can’t let the businesspeople and their managers take charge. They’ve got their hands on pretty much everything else in our lives, but we must fight to keep the dreamers in charge of the arts.”

The modes of production I’ve outlined in this introduction represent a small part of the activities of an increasingly networked arts community in which participation ranks high through co-productions, forums and labs, as it does in the growing participatory art movement for audiences in all fields. Art in itself, didactic or not, can be a form of protest, but beyond that our consciousness must be alert to the mode of production that governs our lives as citizens and artists. Just as we should audit our carbon footprint, we might ask how much of Neoliberal ideology have we less than consciously taken on in art and everyday life?

Reason for travelling
From Oct 2014-Jan 2015 I was in residence in Bourges hosted by the media arts organisation Bandits-Mages in association with La Box, Ecole nationale supérieure d’arts de Bourges (ENSA) as part of the European Media Arts Residency Exchange program.*

Ancient alchemies and future fantasies
Bourges is situated in central France, two hours south of Paris by train. It’s an old, old town inhabited back in the BC by the Romans under the name Avaricum, surviving the invading Gauls due to its strong walls and surrounding marshland. It still boasts the remains of a fourth century Gallo-Roman wall or rampart hidden beneath modern wood and stonework. The end of the Middle Ages saw the town extend beyond the ancient walls with grand constructions such as the awe inspiring cathedral, Saint-Étienne de Bourges, begun in the 12th century, the Palais Jacques Coeur and the Hotel Lallement built in the 15th century and the former 16th century Jesuit seminary which is now the art school. There are of course the requisite sprawling modern suburbs (Bourges has a population of around 70,000), but the centre of Bourges is utterly magical, with cobbled streets, winding lanes and vertiginously tilting Tudor-style houses replete with carved woodwork often still intact. Given its age it’s not surprising that the town that has a strong association with things alchemical and feels a little haunted.

However I was in residence to think about the future, working on a project exploring science fiction and sound art, so in some ways I was living in parallel worlds, in a zone of cognitive dissonance. This disjunction was happily reinforced by the fact that this ancient city has a thriving contemporary culture particularly in the areas of media and video art, sound and experimental music.

Culture: connectivities, collectives and cooperation
While it’s not always the case that smaller towns breed closer connections, the intimate size of Bourges and its mix of proactive and passionate artists and arts workers results in good relationships between organisations which gives it an immediately tangible sense of community—one with an experimental, queer and underground bent.

My host organisation, Bandits-Mages was founded in 1991 by graduates from the local art school, Ecole nationale supérieure d’arts de Bourges (ENSA). It offers an annual program of workshops and projects particularly focussed on video, multimedia and digital art and also runs a festival, which since 2013 has become annual. The 2014 manifestation, Rencontres Bandits-Mages took place in November and I was a guest. Highlights from the eight day program included an impressive exhibition developed with Galerie Kapelica from Ljubljana, Slovenia comprising the ‘remains’ of performance art pieces that had been performed at the gallery by leading body artists such as Franco B and Kira O’Reilly. Also presented by Kapelica was Maja Smrekar who created a performance piece, K-9_topology: I Hunt Nature, and Culture Hunts Me (see video), with three wolf hybrids (in association of the Jacana Wildlife Studios which we also got to visit—I did not think I would be looking at lions and tigers in central France). Spanish duo Quimera Rosa offered an electro-kinky performance and workshop using Arduino circuits and body piercing to make the body a playable instrument; the exhibition Hall Noir presented risqué and high-camp video and performance installations in the impressive architecture of the old water tower, the Chateau D’eau; and there was a workshop conducted by writer/producer Pacôme Thiellement and actress Hermine Karagheuz with local students from ENSA making radiophonic pieces themed around alchemy which were broadcast on a temporary radio station.

As evident in the above, the association between Bandits-Mages and the art school remains strong and is mutually beneficial. ENSA is one of the seven nationally run art schools and is housed in an amazing 16th century building offering an enviable amount of hands on studio space. I was attached as a mentor to the Post-diploma in sound (something after a Masters and before a PhD). The students attend one week a month for lectures and to work on projects for a concluding exhibition. My residency was also attached to the La Box program which offers a number of three month residencies to artists (national and international) often with exhibitions in the school’s professional gallery.

Bandits-Mages is but one of the organisations in the arts complex La Friche L’Antre-Peaux which is just outside of the old town in a former industrial complex. Along with rehearsal studios, a circus and theatre company there is also Emmetrop which presents theatre, dance, music and exhibitions with a strong underground and queer agenda. The whole complex is fetchingly feral but is about to be renovated. This meant that Laurent Faulon, the artist presenting the last exhibition in the Transpalette space—a three story tower-like building—was given free rein. For his exhibition, Mon Ciel, Faulon excavated the central area of floor using the clay to coat a large number of everyday objects—ranging from oversized teddy bears to gumboots, to cement mixers to washing machines and even a motorcycle. These objects sat on the edge of the mezzanine levels of the tower that opened vertiginously into the void in the middle. Viewers ascend via a spiral staircase which always shifts the perspective of the whole. On the opening night the derelict roof allowed a misty shower to grace the inside of the building, pooling in the open cavity of the floor—a breathtaking integration of art and site.

Elsewhere around town are two venues for experimental music offering a truly underground experience; both are cellars, or ‘caves,’ in established old share houses. On my second night in town I was taken to the aptly named Odeur de Cave (ODC), the waft of centuries of mould and clouds of cigarette smoke offering the true scent of Europe. I was scheduled to play there at some stage but even in Bourges there are pesky neighbours: ODC had to cease activities for a while. However, the other venue, Cave 40, in collegiate Bourges style, put on the remaining shows. These artist-run venues present local, national and international artists doing all manner of things, mainly with electronic tools, to a dedicated and engaged audience there for the listening, the drinking, then later, sometimes, the dancing. These venues confirmed to me that whether it’s a warehouse in Marrickville in sweltering 40 degree heat or a cellar in France at a freezing four degrees, there’s a strong and vital community for noise and sonic experiment—and it always feels like home.

The overground cultural scene in Bourges, centred around the Maison de la Culture de Bourges (MCB), is currently homeless. The centre was in the process of being renovated when ancient archeological ruins were discovered and the site subsequently quarantined. At the moment the activities happen around the town with most of the dance and performance presented at the auditorium attached to the local Conservatory of Music. MCB produces a few of its own shows as well as forming part of an active regional touring circuit. I was very happy to catch the lovely life-affirming dance work of Christian Rizzo, D’après Une Histoire Vraie (see RT122).

For refreshment…
Bourges drinking and dining is in keeping with its ancient surroundings—traditional. A favourite place of those I often dined with is Le Guillotin on Rue Bourbonnoux near the Place Gordaine which offers an impressive array of grilled meats and their lamb and duck are pretty delectable. While I couldn’t bring myself to try to the horse steak tartare it was a favourite with one of my dining companions. At the other end of the Rue Bourbonnoux is La Gargouille which has a similar menu but with a slightly more modern interpretation and offers very nice desserts. I also spent a lot of time at Le Cujas in the centre of the old town because it was well appointed for someone hanging out alone—ie has small tables in corners with windows—and the waiters learned to put up with stumbling, incorrectly gendered French. Their Irish Coffees, with more than a healthy shot of whiskey and topped with cream, are just the thing on a cold afternoon.

The local wine regions of the area are Sancerre and Menetou-Salon and I prefer the white of the first and the red of the second. They seemed much lighter than my experience of French wines imported to Australia. Chinon is also nearby (closer to Tours) and wine from here offers a bit more oomph and that old mould taste (technical terms) while still being on the lighter side. But don’t be surprised when your half-carafe (a very civilised idea) comes with some bubbles from its extrication from a cask as this Australian invention has been well and truly embraced in France.

One of the most pleasant food related activities is going to the markets (open on Thurs/Sat/Sun at various locations), each big enough to feel rich and plentiful yet small enough to not be completely overwhelming. My favourite products are the wonderful local honeys made by bees that have supped on lavender and acacia; crottins de chevre (small goats cheeses of varying maturity and smelliness); big pears which, after you peel off their not so attractive tough brown skins, are like ambrosia; and the most perfectly packaged fruits, the clementine. Originating from Algeria it’s a neat little citrus related to but oh so much better than a mandarin.

And for the wanderer…
If feeling touristic, the climb up to the top of the bell tower of Saint-Étienne cathedral is worth the wheezy 396 steps offering a full 360-degree vista of the town and surrounding region. However be warned that the crypt tour takes 45 minutes (in French, and could be done in 10), making it feel like medieval torture. The Palais Jacques Coeur is particularly impressive. This local 15th century merchant and friend of King Charles VII was at one point the richest man in France. When charged with counterfeiting and fraud he tried to claim his wealth came from alchemy. His house is seriously weird and wonderful—a maze-like affair with ceilings like boat keels, an amazingly ornate personal chapel and what is possibly the first sauna in France.

Finally you can’t go to Bourges and not take a walk through the Marais—the marshland only 10 minutes walk to the northeast of the old town. Between snaking creeks and canals are nestled over 1,000 gardens, allotments and summer houses. Even in the dead of winter, the Marais is beautiful, in a spooky, melancholic way. And you can never really get lost because you can always see the towering Saint-Étienne cathedral to guide you back to the light.
*The residency was part of the European Media Arts Network: European Media Arts Residency Exchange (EMAN#EMARE) program which in 2014-2015 offers residencies to Australian and Canadian artists, with European artists hosted by Experimenta (see RT124), UTS Creativity and Cognition Studio and QUT’s The Cube. The project is supported by the Culture 2013 Programme of the European Commission and the Goethe Institut.

Thanks to the lovely people who hosted me and showed me around: Sandra Émonet, Isabelle Carlier, David Legrand, Julien Pauthier, Marta Jonville & Thomas, Ewen Chadronnet, Caroline Delaporte & Chris, Éric Grimault, Jean-Michel Ponty, Roger Cochini, Alexandre Castante, Chloé Nicholas, Véronique Frémiot, Manon Chavigny.

Co-conceiver and choreographer Dalisa Pigram and storyteller/dream catcher Edwin Lee Mulligan discuss the process of creating Cut the Sky, premiering at the Perth International Arts Festival (27 Feb-1 March, 2015), followed by WOMADelaide (7-8 March, 2015).

Reason for travelling

From Oct 2014-Jan 2015 I was in residence in Bourges hosted by the media arts organisation Bandits-Mages in association with La Box, Ecole nationale supérieure d’arts de Bourges (ENSA) as part of the European Media Arts Residency Exchange program.*

Ancient alchemies and future fantasies

Bourges is situated in central France, two hours south of Paris by train. It’s an old, old town inhabited back in the BC by the Romans under the name Avaricum, surviving the invading Gauls due to its strong walls and surrounding marshland. It still boasts the remains of a fourth century Gallo-Roman wall or rampart hidden beneath modern wood and stonework. The end of the Middle Ages saw the town extend beyond the ancient walls with grand constructions such as the awe inspiring cathedral, Saint-Étienne de Bourges, begun in the 12th century, the Palais Jacques Coeur and the Hotel Lallement built in the 15th century and the former 16th century Jesuit seminary which is now the art school. There are of course the requisite sprawling modern suburbs (Bourges has a population of around 70,000), but the centre of Bourges is utterly magical, with cobbled streets, winding lanes and vertiginously tilting Tudor-style houses replete with carved woodwork often still intact. Given its age it’s not surprising that the town that has a strong association with things alchemical and feels a little haunted.

Culture: connectivities, collectives and cooperation

While it’s not always the case that smaller towns breed closer connections, the intimate size of Bourges and its mix of proactive and passionate artists and arts workers results in good relationships between organisations which gives it an immediately tangible sense of community—one with an experimental, queer and underground bent.

For refreshment…

Bourges drinking and dining is in keeping with its ancient surroundings—traditional. A favourite place of those I often dined with is Le Guillotin on Rue Bourbonnoux near the Place Gordaine which offers an impressive array of grilled meats and their lamb and duck are pretty delectable. While I couldn’t bring myself to try to the horse steak tartare it was a favourite with one of my dining companions. At the other end of the Rue Bourbonnoux is La Gargouille which has a similar menu but with a slightly more modern interpretation and offers very nice desserts. I also spent a lot of time at Le Cujas in the centre of the old town because it was well appointed for someone hanging out alone—ie has small tables in corners with windows—and the waiters learned to put up with stumbling, incorrectly gendered French. Their Irish Coffees, with more than a healthy shot of whiskey and topped with cream, are just the thing on a cold afternoon.

And for the wanderer…

If feeling touristic, the climb up to the top of the bell tower of Saint-Étienne cathedral is worth the wheezy 396 steps offering a full 360-degree vista of the town and surrounding region. However be warned that the crypt tour takes 45 minutes (in French, and could be done in 10), making it feel like medieval torture. The Palais Jacques Coeur is particularly impressive. This local 15th century merchant and friend of King Charles VII was at one point the richest man in France. When charged with counterfeiting and fraud he tried to claim his wealth came from alchemy. His house is seriously weird and wonderful—a maze-like affair with ceilings like boat keels, an amazingly ornate personal chapel and what is possibly the first sauna in France.

*The residency was part of the European Media Arts Network: European Media Arts Residency Exchange (EMAN#EMARE) program which in 2014-2015 offers residencies to Australian and Canadian artists, with European artists hosted by Experimenta (see RT124), UTS Creativity and Cognition Studio and QUT’s The Cube. The project is supported by the Culture 2013 Programme of the European Commission and the Goethe Institut.

Gail Priest is a sound artist, writer and curator. She has worked for RealTime since 1998 in various roles, currently as the Online Producer & Associate Editor. In 2015-2016 she is the Australia Council for the Arts Emerging and Experimental Arts Fellow.

Links

To kick off 2015 we’ve asked RealTime contributors for a little recap of 2014—what, thrilled, challenged, inspired or knocked their critical socks off. They also let us know what they are hoping to see in the upcoming Year of the Sheep (or Goat) which the ever reputable internet tells us is a symbol for the arts!

I’d like to say that UK performance artist Bryony Kimmings’ Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model was one of the most stirring experiences of 2014, but that would be wrong. The 2014 bit, I mean. I’m far from alone in nominating it as a work that will alter my theatre-going expectations for years to come, and I know of a range of artists and audience members who have already said the same. It was impassioned, outraged, hilarious and heartfelt; a Quixotic attempt to wage war on the culture industry that sells young girls an image of themselves as commodities (see RT120).

Kimmings’ earlier autobiographical work Sex Idiot was also a favourite among many Melburnians last year but Credible… is to me more compelling in the way it sees its maker shifting from a solipsistic practice of self-interrogation to one that scrutinises that self’s place within a larger context, and tries to find some agency through which to change that environment. I’m excited by Kimmings’ next venture here, Fake It ‘Til You Make It (http://www.bryonyandtim.com), in which she collaborates with partner Tim Grayburn to do battle with taboos surrounding male depression. I can’t think of a more capable warrior. (John interviews Kimmings in RT125.)

Red Stitch’s production of George Brant’s Grounded took the theatre of a more literal war as the starting point for something approaching the sublime (see RT122). Kate Cole’s depiction of a fighter pilot landed with a desk job controlling a military drone evoked the heightened electricity of the combat-addict and the soul-crushing alienation of high-tech state-sponsored terror. Far from a ripped-from-the-news-pages war drama, its unfolding was more like a visitation from the beyond.

The Rabble’s Frankenstein was a more cosmic kind of horror, and one bereft of any hope of transcendence. It offered some of the most viscerally upsetting imagery the company has yet dreamt up. While it’s not a world I’d ever want to live in, it suggests at least that there are those among us willing to venture deeper into the darkness than most of us are able (see RT120).

If there’s a common thread apparent in these three works it’s one I’ll be hunting for more earnestly in the year to come: an engagement with issues personal, political or philosophical that doesn’t ‘explore’ so much as push through, taking its audience to a place that hasn’t yet been articulated, leaving them with the task of finding their own way back. Or not. Maybe there’s no way home.

A reason to care for strangers
John Bailey: Bryony Kimmings, Melbourne International Comedy Festival, FOLA
RealTime issue #120 April-May 2014 pg14

Dark mothering
John Bailey: Katie Warner’s Dropped; The Rabble’s Frankenstein
RealTime issue #120 April-May 2014 p41

Ben Brooker

How to hold in the mind a total image of live performance in Australia in the year behind us? Not possible. Better to try for a single impression, a freeze-frame that speaks of what preceded it and what must, we imagine in hope or despair, surely follow.

Perhaps more than anything else, 2014 saw Shakespeare, ever our contemporary, revitalised once again. My year was bookended by two flawed but ambitious and important productions, Malthouse’s King Lear retelling The Shadow King (creators Michael Kantor and Tom E. Lewis, see Stephen Carleton review RT124 & Keith Gallasch review RT119) and the State Theatre Company of SA’s Othello (director Nescha Jelk). Holding up lenses of, respectively, indigeneity and feminism, both productions violently transposed Shakespeare’s canonical texts to the here and now, illuminating the individual and social costs of institutionalised prejudice and subjugation.

In contrast, Toneelgroep’s Roman Tragedies (director Ivo Van Hove, see RT120) eschewed critique, paring back the poetry of Shakespeare’s Roman histories to plain, contemporary English (via Dutch) and rendering the plays with the urgent, pummeling aesthetic of the 24-hour news media. Audience members will recall for a long time performances, especially those by Gijs Scholten van Aschat, Frieda Pittoors and Hans Kesting, of a rare intensity—Shakespeare given back to us by way of nothing more alchemical than the actor’s craft in unencumbered motion.

“If there is a sphere whose very nature precludes all prognostication, it is that of culture, and especially of the arts and humanities.” With Creative Australia shelved and funding for the non-elite arts gutted by the Coalition, Vaclav Havel’s cautionary words resonate freshly. The only certainty looking ahead into 2015 is likely to be uncertainty as our artists and arts facilitators continue to attempt more with less. It is ominous that, judging by reports, the mood at this year’s Australian Theatre Forum was siege-like, culminating in a statement aimed at the Abbott Government and signed by 52 delegates: “… we are compelled to respond by our urgent concerns about the ideologically-driven erosion of our collective social fabric, which, unless checked, will radically reduce our capacity to hope, dream, imagine, build and share.”

While the forum was on, an independent two-week season of readings of new Australian plays was happening in Adelaide.* Eleven of the 14 playwrights were women, many of whom travelled from interstate to share the dreams—bold, angry, messy, beautiful—that they had each built on a shoestring. Perhaps we will always find ways of restaging Shakespeare as though the centuries that separate us are an illusion. This is one kind of vitality that sustains our stages. Another is predicated on the living playwright and it is to her that I hope 2015 will belong.

The imagination writ large
Benjamin Brooker: 2014 Adelaide Festival—theatre
RealTime issue #120 April-May 2014 p22

Urszula Dawkins

2014 felt like a year of individual triumphs and collective headway. I loved seeing events like the Festival of Live Art create critical mass for such a physically, viscerally and psychically engaging form (see Gail Priest review RT120). My 2014 live art highlight was one step at a time like this’s profound and intimate piece, nowhere, which felt like ‘active philosophy,’ setting off deep intellectual and spiritual resonances.

Works that privileged the emotional, without sentimentality, also thrilled me—Roslyn Oades’s Hello Goodbye & Happy Birthday was one. I saw younger artists acknowledging history and making it new (see John Bailey review RT124): James Welsby’s dance work Hex achieved this beautifully re the past and present history of AIDS. It’s been great too to see feminism’s renewal in incisive works by artists like Mish Grigor or I’m Trying To Kiss You (see Jana Perkovic’s review RT121).

I sense growing collectivity and togetherness within the performing arts especially, both in emerging/experimental arts, and across the established/emerging hierarchy. More flagship companies seem to be finding resources to create development opportunities and ‘emerging’ seasons for younger artists. At the same time, I sense ‘emerging/experimental’ artists themselves are collaborating more ambitiously to produce successful, larger-scale independent events. Perhaps there’s a politics of resistance at play, a sense of urgency that if artists don’t get together and do it themselves, things just won’t happen.

In 2015 I’d like to see more of all of this. More togetherness, more art as social intervention, more DIY and more support for the risky, the devised, the collective and the hard-to-define. A busting open of the divides between visual arts, performing arts and literature. More chances for great new work to further develop and tour. More small and medium-scale philanthropy, including creatively interactive crowd-funding. And for arts/non-arts collaborations to burgeon, loosening ‘the arts’ from its categories and letting creativity roam wider in a world where it’s sorely needed.

It’s all about you
Gail Priest: FOLA, Arts House
RealTime issue #120 April-May 2014 p15

In others’ words
John Bailey: Melbourne International Arts Festival
RealTime issue #124 Dec-Jan 2014 p10-11

Risk yields new forces
Jana Perkovic: Next Wave 2014
RealTime issue #121 June-July 2014 p34-35

The primordial present
Urszula Dawkins: Melbourne International Arts Festival: Dance Territories
RealTime issue #124 Dec-Jan 2014 p12

Body/tech crossings
Urszula Dawkins: 2014 Melbourne Fringe Festival
RealTime issue #124 Dec-Jan 2014 p19

Nerida Dickinson

Festivals brought the Perth cultural scene to life in early 2014 with eruptions of performance bookending the year. The summer madness of FringeWorld saw an expansion into suburban hubs and an explosion of diversity and number of acts. Perth International Arts Festival kept standards high and brought new modes of theatre to audiences, with immersive pieces from Punchdrunk Theatre (The House Where Winter Lives) and Rimini Protokoll (Situation Rooms, see Keith Gallasch review RT120), as well as showcasing music in the Festival Gardens. Proximity Festival celebrated the magic of one-on-one performance, expanding horizons of participating artists as well as audiences (see preview RT123 & review RT124. Also pushing artists to the edge of their practice and beyond, the MoveMe Improvisation Festival explored the potential of spontaneous creative performance (see reports in RT125).

Beyond festivals have been steady productions from the Perth Theatre Company and Black Swan, who delivered a range of exciting and provocative new works—including 8 Gigabytes of Hardcore Pornography—and solid straight theatre—A Streetcar Named Desire. Independent productions had a good year at The Blue Room Theatre, the highlight being the debut of Finegan Kruckemeyer’s Those Who Fall In Love Like Anchors Dropped Upon The Ocean Floor, and also at PICA Performance Space, where The Last Great Hunt’s Falling Through Clouds impressed on many levels (see RT124). Barking Gecko Theatre Company constantly inspires, with onefivezeroseven pushing theatrical boundaries beyond its nominal teen audience. STRUT Dance Company provided opportunities to see dance creativity in development, from SHORT CUTS, to IN SHORT and PRIME CUTS (see interview RT121). Touring dance companies provided inspiration—Chunky Moves with Keep Everything and Sydney Dance Company’s explosive 2 One Another stood out.

In 2015 if these festivals, venues and companies continue to thrive, they will provide the infrastructure for talent to work in Perth, as well as create new opportunities for artists to develop creative practice. In broader terms there should be plenty of opportunities for audiences to experience new things, feeding back into a vigorous local creative culture. Of particular interest in the next 12 months will be the development of politically charged intimate performance from Toyi-Toyi Theatre, who have been tackling topical issues of social justice and immigration policy (see my review of their The Queue in the Proximity Festival).

Five days in other worlds
Keith Gallasch: 2014 Perth International Arts Festival
RealTime issue #120 April-May 2014 p17-19

Flight from extinction
Nerida Dickinson: The Last Great Hunt, Falling Through Clouds
RealTime issue #124 Dec-Jan 2014 p45

Choreographic boom for WA
Erin Brannigan: Interview, Paul Selwyn Norton, Director, STRUT
RealTime issue #121 June-July 2014 p30

Kathryn Kelly

I spent a lot of last year trying to understand the impact of the rise of TV and the decline of film on Gen-Y and millennial performance. LaBoite Indie, home of hipster zeitgeist was a case in point: three of the four shows by terrific new playwrights displayed experimentation in form and plot but a curious flatness in the naturalistic dialogue (see RT123). This is TV reshaping the cadences of our performance texts.

Screen culture as framed by film has long been old fashioned in mediatised work but last year we went organic with media experimentation in performance: a fluid psychological interiority that echoes the bell chamber of screen culture in darkened media rooms or tunnels of concentration with i-Phones. Highlights for me included Circa Associate Ben Knapton’s projection work in Margi Brown Ash’s He Dreamed of Trains which began with the most subtle distortions within a picture frame that gradually colonised the entire naturalistic interior of the set, as if we were inside the mind of the dead man who owned the home.

Look out for a monograph by academic Sandra Gattenhof in 2015 all about how under 16s go to the theatre for each other, not for the content. Liveness is all. So cause for optimism perhaps? While joyful about the potential of performance as experience in the coming age, I couldn’t shake the feeling last year that we were the New Edwardians and that like them, we have lost the ability to predict the future based on the past.

Australian theatre has finally woken up with a start to its whiteness and maleness and the resulting initiatives are like water in the desert. Big highlights include Future Fidel’s autobiographical show at LaBoite: a live boxing match as Fidel recounts the experience of being a child soldier in the Sudan. Rather than a centre giving way to a margin, this seems to me the way forward: authentic cultural collaboration, artist to artist in rooms of our own, live or digital.

Degrees of risk and violence
Kathryn Kelly: Finding the Silence; Hedonism’s Second Album
RealTime issue #123 Oct-Nov 2014 p35

Matthew Lorenzon

Last year was one of goodbyes. If I can stretch the year to include December 2013, then the year included Margaret Cameron’s Opera for a Small Mammal, directed by David Young (see RT119). An imagination like Cameron’s is rare, a team like Cameron and Young even rarer. When Cameron passed away in October, Australia lost a medium listening at the threshold of theatre and music (see RT’s obituary and archive)

We bid farewell to Australia’s only national contemporary music radio programme, Julian Day’s New Music Up Late, along with the ABC’s live broadcasts for Sunday Live. Without these shows, Australia’s contemporary music scene will become more fragmented and disparate. We were deprived (temporarily, this time) of two excellent ensembles who have contributed so much to our musical life. James Rushford and Judith Hamann from Golden Fur joined their band mate Samuel Dunscombe on the sunny shores of California. The power couple behind Brisbane’s Kupka’s Piano, Liam Flenady and Hannah Reardon-Smith, moved to Brussels.

The year was also one of returning. ELISION made a much-anticipated tour of Australia and Liza Lim returned from Huddersfield. I look forward to hearing more of Lim’s detailed and enchanting music in 2015. Richard Barrett’s visit with Speak Percussion showed that the complex and virtuosic textures of Lim and Barrett’s generation have reached an almost classical maturity.

The Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music was my standout experience last year (see RT123). Under David Chisholm’s careful curation, the intensive three-day festival explored some of the most daring works of the 20th century alongside commission-fresh new music. I might not go to hear Stockhausen’s opera Sirius at midnight in the dome of a 19th century library again, but I probably won’t have the chance either. I certainly will be going to hear more music by Claude Vivier and performances by guitarist Mauricio Carrasco.

In 2015, Chamber Made Opera will wake up from a year of development and mount several new shows. Keep an eye out for a new Liza Lim and anything by the emerging composer Samuel Smith, who recently accepted a commission from Adelaide’s Soundstream Collective with his fascinating piece BUTTERFLY 3. Check in with Melbourne’s quiet achiever the Medley Hall Concert Series, especially for the musical responses to Heather Swann’s “Nervous” exhibition.

Matthew’s music blog Partial Durations is published in association with RealTime; https://partialdurations.wordpress.com

Unerring explorations
Matthew Lorenzon: Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music
RealTime issue #123 Oct-Nov 2014 p41

Drums pound in ceremonial commencement; a lone throat singer issues a deep incantatory note; a choir of male voices loom in warning, their mordant harmony blending with a metallic wash of strings, the sound rent by a wailing clarinet; a savage muttering appears, half-formed echolalia cut with madness; the texture rises to a peak, a voice calling out in almost snarled lament, then suddenly cut off, leaving the buzz of a lone insect scuttering over the deep hum of industrial machinery. Then all hell breaks loose.

Thus opens Geocidal, the debut record of tētēma, a new collaboration between Australian composer, pianist and electronic wunderkind Anthony Pateras and maverick vocalist Mike Patton, demi-god of 1990s alternative rock outfits Faith No More and Mr Bungle, high-priest in the church of John Zorn and most recently dapper interpreter of 1950s-60s Italian pop. With Geocidal they have produced a densely visceral offering that endeavours to “create a sound world from scratch.”

The pair became acquainted after Pateras sent recordings of his grindcore duo PIVIXKI to Patton’s label, Ipecac. Something must have clicked, as Patton got in touch while touring Australia with experimental metalheads and miners of pop-culture Fantômas in 2009. “I’ve dealt with a lot less famous people who are all about food anecdotes and career monologues and it’s incredibly tedious,” says Pateras. “It was unnerving to us both how natural it [working together] felt. I really respected the fact that there was this guy who could basically just cruise on major label royalties if he wanted to, but instead chose a path of interrogation.”

A path most certainly shared by Pateras, whose extensive back catalogue of works for solo piano, small ensembles, percussion and electronics regularly pushes into the underexplored sonic terrain that lies between notation, improvisation and electronic programming. Moreover, he cleaves boundaries between the ‘culturally sanctioned’ sphere of traditional composition, offering commissioned works such as most recently A Reality In Which Everything Is Substitution (2014) for solo amplified flutes and electronics or the forty-minute piano solo Blood Stretched Out (2014), while also pursuing more avant-garde projects such as PIVIXKI or Kayfabe, a glitch spattered collaboration of experimental electronica with Natasha Anderson. “Composition is amorphous across the board,” Pateras comments, “all of your experiences in playing, listening and reading feed into everything you do. It’s counterproductive to distinguish.”

From the ritualistic opening of “Invocation Of The Swarm,” Geocidal chews its way through an at times unsettling and often vicious exploration of rhythm and timbre. Patton, who absorbed Pateras’ musical tracks over a year before contributing vocals, uses his extraordinarily versatile voice as much for atmospheric or textural effect as for delivering lyrics. A song such as the seven and a half minute centrepiece “Ten Years Tricked” contains sections of eerie quasi-Gregorian chorus but also deep droning, spitting, gurgling, girlish sighs, imaginary words and other timbral effects. Other songs such as “Irundi” or “Tenz” are built around pulsating rhythms, Pateras’ orchestration providing touches of colour in framing Patton’s voice. “When I was doing this, ostensibly writing songs, which normally prioritise pitch and form, I was coming at it from a different angle,” says Pateras. “Maybe to some people it’s danceable, but to me it was about creating something physical—not in the macho noise sense of the word, nor the superficial-buzz-word ‘psychoacoustic’ sense—[but] trying to make something which reflects what I love about sound and which has a physical affect on me.”

An important undercurrent to this prioritisation of rhythm over other musical elements came about in his response to the ideas of French cultural theorist Paul Virilio, who argues that the accelerated development of technology has disrupted humanity’s natural rhythms. Pateras was particularly drawn to Virilio’s equation of the instanaeity that modern technology provides with human immobility and paralysis—“even when immobile we are in motion” chants Patton on “Tenz.” “Instead of accumulating skills, which takes time and focus, we just want to go fast,” explains Pateras. “I was very conscious of somehow magnifying rhythmic and timbral nuance in the music when I could…I wanted to de-quantise everything, deny instantaneity, create a space where going the long way around didn’t matter, because you find important ideas that way. The idea [that] you open your computer, pull up a few presets … it’s death, but that’s what gets taught as composition these days. We teach musicians how to die before they even start.”

Having developed the seed of the record over a couple of weeks staying in “a really shitty part of France—depressed rural community, lots of drunk soldiers, middle of nowhere,” Pateras enlisted drummer and percussionist Will Guthrie to assist in fleshing out the lacerating rhythms that propel many of the songs. “[We] riff[ed] on variations of the core ideas together, recording the drums and prepared piano simultaneously,” he explains. “I intentionally ran the session to generate the most flexible material possible—things which could be stitched together in unorthodox ways. Ultimately they were just rhythmic cells recorded for maximum elasticity.”

From there, the material was edited and wittled down, synthesisers added and parts written for the diverse array of instrumentalists, strings, clarinet, trumpet, percussion, acoustic guitar and recorders, whose contributions lend the record its dizzyingly multi-faceted texture. “I had the idea to…record every single element in the real world and manipulate/edit it electronically,” Pateras says, “encouraging [the musicians] to mimic or ornament the synth parts…so there’s always this hybrid electro-acoustic thing going on.” As he explains, this approach was informed by “[Morton] Feldman’s observation on what makes Xenakis’ music interesting: taking conventional instruments and bringing them into a world of hallucination, rather than using hallucinatory instrumentation, and bringing it into a world of convention. This record…was about canalising the tools I had to find a unique constellation.”

For a record so preoccupied with the collapse of boundaries – even the word “Geocidal” suggests the death or erasure of place—this concern grew less from any desire to make a broader political point, but emerged from a desire to explore both “the idea of the finisterre, or always being on the edge of known territory” as well as the practical circumstances from which the recording emerged. “I moved country twice while making this,” says Pateras, “I was constantly insecure and decentralised because I was in a permanent state of adjustment. And that is a really amazing place to make music in, because you have nothing but the material that’s coming out to guide you. I feel that’s what’s wrong with a lot of music—it becomes about filling a brief rather than simply using what you have at your disposal to see what happens.”

Vic McEwan, the artistic director of the Birrego-based CAD Factory, is no stranger to water. His 2013 work Yenda Rain looked at the devastating impact of floodwater on a small, rural community and in the same year, Tipping Point explored the politics of water in relation to the Murray-Darling basin. But with his interactive, multimedia installation Almost an embrace, McEwan is happy to look beyond the destructive and political aspects of water and focus on its pleasurable and playful sides.

One senses Almost an embrace well before entering the upstairs space at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery. There is a freshness in the air and the sound of running water—an alluring and unusual mix considering we are indoors. Stepping into the space we are quickly won over by what is on offer, and on a fundamental level, our response may well be driven by the fact that 50-75% of our own body mass is made up of water.

What we encounter are 20 hoses suspended from the gallery’s ceiling in the outline of a perfect square, each hose yielding a gentle stream of water into a raised, square pool on the floor. The gallery’s walls complement this movement with 12 column-like projections of glistening, running water. The sense that we glean—within the construct of it all—is of order, beauty and peace. Significantly, the hardware driving the installation is nowhere to be seen; McEwan and his curator, Drew Halyday, have ensured that the purity of the work’s focus is never compromised.

Beyond its quiet mode the installation has much more to offer—it is, after all, an interactive work. By placing one hand on the metal rim of the pool and another into the stream from one of the hoses, things quickly begin to shift. Water, electricity and outstretched hands—the “near embrace” of the work’s title—may sound like a dubious combination, but in this instance our safety is guaranteed and by becoming a conductor we effectively close the circuit and push the installation into active mode. Accordingly, the movement of one’s hand up and down the stream, or in and out of it, triggers a percussive soundscape and a more frenetic response from the projectors—psychedelic, even—and the more people ‘playing’ the installation, the busier and more diverse its response becomes.

From my perspective, the value of the installation’s active mode has less to do with the sense of play that it offers in the moment and more to do with the contrast that emerges when one steps away from the work and it returns to the Zen-like atmosphere of its quiet mode. This is when the work is at its strongest, a testament to the Modernist maxim that less can indeed be more. But beyond this personal preference it is usually the sum of a work’s parts that defines it and generates its appeal. Based on the enthusiasm with which Almost an embrace is currently being received—by locals and visitors alike—McEwan has every reason to believe that with this work, he is genuinely hitting the mark.

The CAD Factory/Vic McEwan, Almost an embrace, curator Drew Halyday, Wagga Wagga Art Gallery; 6 Dec 2014 -1 March 2015

Tētēma is the new duo by Australian composer/musician Anthony Pateras (currently based in Berlin) and US rock vocalist Mike Patton (singer for Faith No More, Mr. Bungle, Fantômas). Geocidal is their first release on Patton’s Ipecac label. Following is the full version of Oliver Downes’ email interview with Pateras about the collaboration, the compositional process and the complexities of “chrono-diversity.”

It comes from Artaud, who I’d been researching a lot due to my involvement in Sylvère Lotringer’s film The Man Who Disappeared (which is loosely based on Artaud’s trip to Ireland in the 30s). We were looking for a band name and it made sense to me to evoke something physical, sensual and unnameable, so of course Artaud’s great for that. There is a part of Fragmentations when he talks about cauterising a wound with a flame, twice over and the word refers to that.

How did you first come in contact Mike Patton? What sort of mutual familiarity with each other’s work was there beforehand? Was there an initial spark to collaborate or did the project germinate more gradually?

Mike became aware of my work through me sending some PIVIXKI stuff to Ipecac to consider for release. I sent my second Tzadik record with the demo also. I really didn’t expect him to listen to either, but as it turned out something on both of those recordings resonated with him (PIVIXKI and he did a show together in 2011). Ultimately the spark really came from Mike—he was on tour with Fantômas in 2009, called me for a beer out of the blue.

Of course I was familiar with his work—Faith No More were huge when I was in high school. After that I was always into the more exploratory side of it—I went to see Maldoror at Joey’s, a duo with DJ Schizo at The Punter’s Club and all ages Bungle shows at the Corner Hotel. I really respected the fact that there was this guy who could basically just cruise on major label royalties if he wanted to, but instead chose a path of interrogation.

How was collaborating with Patton different from previous collaborations you’ve been a part of?

It was unnerving to us both how natural it felt. For me it was just great to see someone in that position to still be asking questions, still be curious, still be respectful of colleagues and 100% committed to making great music. I’ve dealt with a lot less famous people who are all about food anecdotes and career monologues and its incredibly tedious.

Recording wise, I think my favourite part was Mike screaming directly into my ear acoustically to demonstrate the different upper harmonics he could achieve by varying throat positions.

There’s some extraordinary textures on the record, both in the electronics and in Patton’s vocals—what was the recording process? How do you think that process influenced the final work? To what extent was material pre-conceived rather than emerging through the process of recording?

Basically it panned out that I took care of the instrumental parts and Mike took care of the vocals (although he contributed some excellent Moog). The recording process for the instrumentals was long and multi-faceted and then we did most of the vocals in 2014. There was really no deadline for this and I learnt a lot about how that can affect one’s compositional decisions. For example, if you’re trying to squeeze out a certain amount of music for a commission in a certain amount of time, you’re already dealing with a prescribed length of time and I’ve found that can mess with your structural thinking. If you don’t really know what something is, or when it should be done by, anything can happen, right? The sounds, the duration, the intensity—it’s all up for grabs.

As the press blurb states (and has been widely misconstrued), I locked myself away for a couple of weeks with just pen and paper and my record collection. This was in a really shitty part of France, in Picardie to be precise—depressed rural community, lots of drunk soldiers, middle of nowhere. I was in an ex-convent which is kind of like an arts residency (except you gotta pay). I then went to Paris and met with Will Guthrie. I had about 26-28 solid notated ideas that I either sung to him or played on prepared piano for him to articulate on the drum kit. He didn’t have to learn entire songs or anything, so we just went rapid fire through this list in bursts, riffing on variations of the core ideas together, recording the drums and prepared piano simultaneously. I intentionally ran the session to generate the most flexible material possible—things which could be stitched together in unorthodox ways. Ultimately they were just rhythmic cells recorded for maximum elasticity.

Over the next few months, I added synths at WORM and Piethopraxis, editing the drums and cutting sounds in over the top. Songs began to drop off, till I had about 15. I then began to orchestrate the synth lines, first with strings, clarinets, revox, trumpet, then proceeded with orchestral percussion, acoustic guitar and recorders. By the end I whittled it all down to 12 and then sent everything to Mike. He spent ages (almost a year) absorbing the music; then I went to San Francisco for a 48 hour rapid scratch session for the vocals. This was insane not only because we found how easy it was to work together, but how much great work we got done. He then kept elaborating on the vocals over the next six months, sending [them] to me over email, for mixing and comments.

Once we had it all down I returned to Bruxelles, which is where I started the whole thing, and did a lock down at Ateliers Claus for two weeks to mix it. Bruxelles is pretty bleak, Anderlecht even bleaker. Being the “capital of Europe” the place has a sense of doom and disarray, given what a mess the EU is in. You have people in the Berlaymont building trying to run the place while sex trafficking is going on no more than a few blocks away. I guess what I’m trying to say is, this kind of energy, this dissonant theatre of things supposedly working but clearly not, fed into the album.

How does the process of making electronic music differ for you from writing for an ensemble for instance, or creating a piano work? Is a different brainspace demanded or are there more similarities than differences?

This album was very much about creating a sound world from scratch—every sound on it is recorded and edited. Early in, I had the idea to make a “sampler record without a sampler” (or specifically, Dilla’s Donuts, but without vinyl)—to record every single element in the real world and manipulate/edit it electronically. It was a very specific mindset with a very specific goal. I’m sure my ensemble or piano thinking played into that and I’m sure it would’ve impacted on my process of selection, in terms of what sounds came alive to me.

Composition is amophous across the board, all of your experiences in playing, listening and reading feed into everything you do. Its counterproductive to distinguish, because then you get involved with stuff like “this is a classical piece, I can’t do that” or “this is a song, I can’t do that”—when its probably precisely the thing you need to do to give something a life.

A diverse array of musicians were brought together for this project—what were you looking for in collaborators? To what extent were parts improvised by the musicians or pre-composed?

I basically hired people who I think sound great. Will and I collaborated on some of the drum parts, in the sense that his kit has a very specific sound and he has a very personal feel, but ultimately most of the grooves were shaped around the prepared piano and edited in post production. In some cases I muted the prepared piano, so you just have the drums playing along to it without being able to hear it in the mix, which got some pretty odd feels or particularly idiosyncratic rhythmic emphases.

For the rest, everything is orchestration of the ARPs [synthesisers] I used at WORM and the various bits and pieces I used at Piethopraxis. For example, musicians were told to mimic or ornament the synth parts which I had already played in, so there’s always this hybrid electro-acoustic thing going on.

In many cases this approach was informed by Feldman’s observation on what makes Xenakis’ music interesting: taking conventional instruments and bringing them into a world of hallucination, rather than using hallucinatory instrumentation, and bringing it into a world of convention. For example, even though Xenakis used an orchestra with orchestral instruments in something like Hiketides or Synaphaï, the way he organises it in relation to itself recontextualises those instrumental forces into a whole new thing, He succeeds getting the orchestra out of the orchestra (and Feldman does too, for that matter.)

So for me, this record was about trying to timbrally get the song out of the song and to do that, its wasn’t about getting a didgeridoo, or a sheng or some interface to create unique sound palettes, it was about canalising the tools I had into finding a unique constellation and because I was always moving around, those tools were always changing.

The last thing I added, which was Jessica Azsodi’s voice on the track “Irundi,” was extant from this process to some degree, as that material grew out of a solo piece I wrote for her called “Prayer For Nil.” I was working on both things simultaneously and somehow the wires got crossed in a great way.

The album is at times fiercely kinetic and there are many sections that are almost danceable—to what extent were you consciously commenting on or riffing off, I suppose, more ‘commercial’ uses of rhythm?

Rhythm is one of the only fundamental parameters of music that comes to me naturally and I would say timbre runs a close second. So when I was doing something like this, ostensibly writing songs, which normally prioritise pitch and form, I was coming at it from a different angle. Maybe to some people that’s danceable, but to me, it was about creating something physical and not in the macho noise sense of the word, nor the superficial-buzz-word ‘psychoacoustic’ sense, it was about trying to make something which reflects what I love about sound and which has a physical affect on me and that was it. I can’t get involved with what’s ‘commercial’ or what’s ‘experimental’—how do you deal with something like Spring Breakers [Harmony Korine, 2012] when you’re thinking like that? Immediately you’re in trouble, because the reason why a film like that is so powerful, is because it completely sidesteps that whole distinction to make something which exists in its own space and still manages to clearly communicate.

“Geocidal” seems to suggest to me a death or erasure of place, almost having a synonymous quality with the idea of ‘sacrifice zones’—areas of land or communities ruined through corporate practices. Was there an intention for the record to hold those kinds of environmental and political resonances?

Its not about politics, I’m not qualified for that and anyway there’s nothing more sick-making than an artist using the political zeitgeist as a platform for their self-aggrandisement. Sure, its important to be aware of your environment and you do what you can, but for me, what I was more interested in was exploring the idea of the finisterre, or always being on the edge of known territory (my edge, at least). I moved country twice while making this and I was totally castrated. I was constantly insecure and decentralised because I was in a permanent state of adjustment. And that is really amazing place to make music in, because you really have nothing but the material that’s coming out to guide you. And in my experience making this, that always gave a stronger, truer, more vital orientation than sticking to some construct or macrostructure, or trying to fulfill some kind of artist’s statement. I feel that’s what’s wrong with a lot of music—it becomes about filling a brief rather than simply using what one has at your disposal to see what happens.

You say in the press blurb that: “the whole geocidal thing is about coming from no place, re-birthing, watching the place you are from be altered beyond recognition that you have nothing to do with it anymore”—what are your feelings towards Australia at present?

Mostly his, but there was one instance on “Kid Has Got The Bomb” where I sat down and translated the glossolalia from the SF scratch session into words, because I suddenly started hearing phrases within all of these abstracted mouth sounds. I was afraid of giving it to him, because it was the first time I had written lyrics, and you know, its ‘Mike Patton’ and I’ve never written lyrics in my life, but he was totally into it and was like (North Cali accent) “Man these are great, this is what we used to do in the old days in Bungle!” So he’s very open to ideas and through that experience, seeing that he was prepared to trust me on that level, made me see how creatively stubborn I can be, to be honest. We all get caught up in our own head and making work for me is a constant oscillation between letting things in and keeping things out and I find that balance very difficult to judge.

One aspect of the album that really appealed to me was the ritualistic, almost incantationary, quality that seems to hover over it—even a title like “Invocation of the Swarm” suggests an entering into some sacred, alien space. Was this something you envisaged from the outset? Is there any link to Zerzan’s idea of the ‘future primitive’?

I was not aware of the work of Zerzan, thank you, I’ll check it out! If anything theoretically specific, Virilio’s ideas were very important to this music, I mean, the second track “Pure War” is named after his 1983 interview with Sylvère [Lotringer]. I was really into his stuff while making this music, particularly his ideas on chrono-diversity.

I wasn’t aware of Virilio or the idea of ‘chrono-diversity’—perhaps you could flesh out the idea a bit as it applies in your mind to the record?

Virillo’s ideas revolve around the science of speed, or to use his term, dromology. They are, compositionally speaking, very useful when understanding the environment in which we make music now. Basically I found that when I read The Adminstration of Fear [Semiotext(e), 2012], there were passages in there which lucidly articulated what had been bothering me about making music that I couldn’t effectively formulate myself and I was just relieved to find that someone else had to clarity to say them like he has.

Its difficult of course to summarise without doing it some kind of disservice, but in brief, he argues that, largely due to technology, we as a species are losing rhythmic diversity. Our emotions are becoming synchronised, interactions destabilised, we are becoming “de-realised”—we lose our place and our body on a daily basis. A thing I love is that he equates instanaeity with immobility and I think what he means is something like—if you need to know something, you look it up and bang, there it is. But in that process, you don’t actually learn and retain something, you just get shown something and then its most likely gone. Speaking for myself here, but I can feel my memory is compromised now. I can feel my concentration is shot. I feel I could be much smarter but my discipline to commit to knowledge has eroded. Its becoming very fashionable to talk about this and you can even book tech-detox retreats, but Virillo is quick to point out its not an ancients vs moderns debate. In fact, he has been dealing with it since the 1970s and he shows that speed, tempo and our relationship with them largely dictates how we experience and make a life and by extension, how we experience and make art.

So when it comes to music, you see the affects of speed everywhere. Its all geared towards acceleration. New gear and operating systems are not made for musicians, they’re made for the market. Or as Virilio puts it, “accumulation is left behind in favour of acceleration”—instead of accumulating skills, which takes time and focus, we just want to go fast. And I think something dies in that, some inherent energy or level of craft which makes records from 30 or 40 years ago sound a lot different to the ones made today, not just on the level of sound quality, but in the depth of musicianship itself.

So in terms of what I did, how I approached this problem, I was very conscious of somehow magnifying rhythmic and timbral nuance in the music when I could. Preserving as many live takes as I could, coaxing the most idiosyncratic performances I could. I wanted to de-quantise everything, deny instantaneity, create a space where going the long way around didn’t matter, because you find important ideas that way. The idea you open your computer, pull up a few presets…it’s death, but that’s what gets taught as composition these days. We teach musicians how to die before they even start.

Will there be any live performances of the Geocidal material? How will they work?

We don’t know how they will work, but it will definitely be in duo format and possibly with a cinematic element. We’re already working on the next record and won’t be able to play live until 2016 because of Mike’s commitments, so both of those things have a big impact on how it’ll be on stage.

I’m working on my fourth large improvising ensemble piece for a group in Lille, writing an extended electro-acosutic piece for the Audible festival in Paris and releasing a ton of vinyl on my Immediata label. I’ll also be working on the next tētēma album and trying not to be yet another Australian in Berlin who speaks shitty German!

Find

February 2015

The Ferrymen

Entanglement

Happy Little Accidents

IOU3

Augustus ergens op de vlakte

Rosas, Partita 2

Rosas, Golden Hours

Fake It ‘til You Make It

A circuitous career

DVD: The Infinite Man

DVD: What We Do in the Shadows

Book: Bodies of Thought: 12 Australian Choreographers

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

The research

A threatened species

Now hybridised

The visitor-activated museum

Engineered visitation

The transmission of fascination

MONA: the uncalculated risk

Hito Steyerl, Too Much World

Performance Now

realtime tv interview

Long Grass

2015 Dance Massive

Massive themes

The Long Pigs

The Kitchen

Tamara Saulwick, Endings

The Experiment

Darkness and Light

Nothing to Lose

Puncture

Inequitable re-distribution

The producers

Organisation as producer

Asia-Australia, again

Camps and lab

Greening production

Museum & galleries: the framing of experience

“Don’t simply aim to please”

Regionally yours

Ideology laid bare

Reason for travelling

Ancient alchemies and future fantasies

Culture: connectivities, collectives and cooperation

For refreshment…

And for the wanderer…

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