Roy Andersson’s Venice Gold Lion Winner A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence captivated cinema audiences with absurdist humour loosely centred around two salesmen selling joke toys, badly.
Email us at giveaways [at] realtimearts.net with your name, postal address and phone number. Include ‘Giveaway’ and the name of the item in the subject line.
Offer closes 6 July.
Giveaways are open to RealTime subscribers. By entering this giveaway you consent to being subscribed to our weekly E-dition. You can unsubscribe at any time.
RealTime issue #133 June-July 2016
All the Time in the World
By turns measured and playful, entertaining and experimental, four films from this year’s Perth International Film Festival offer striking and unexpected perspectives on everyday habits, customs and sights, prompting questions about the nature of language, society, time and loss.
Aaaaaaaah!
With echoes of Will Self’s 1997 novel Great Apes, writer-director Steve Oram’s first feature presents a Swiftian scenario in which suburban humans behave like chimpanzees. Oram takes his place among an ensemble cast that includes off-beat comedy stars Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding as well as versatile character actor Julian Rhind-Tutt and Lucy Honigman, all of whom adapt their body language and vocal delivery with simian verve. Singer and actor Toyah Wilcox is notably expressive as the matriarch Barabara (sic).
As with Sightseers, the 2012 horror comedy directed by Ben Wheatley and co-written by Oram with Alice Lowe, Aaaaaaaah! (UK, 2015) explores domestic savagery in a distinctly English setting. The set-up provides a great excuse to poke fun at various social phenomena—TV celebrity chefs, stereotypical gender roles, ‘alpha’ males, shoplifting teens—while letting loose with scatological and sexual humour. But it also can be taken as something of a Dogma-style thought experiment posing questions about social rituals and niceties: eating with utensils, for example—or not having sex with your mother-in-law.
Aaaaaaaah!
Highlighting this anthropological approach, Oram occasionally uses nature documentary techniques: characters seemingly stalked by the camera; heightened naturalistic sound (eg heavy rain); zoomed-in close-ups of glaring eyes; and an ominous drone in the lead-up to a fight. In contrast, other passages are accompanied by driving rock instrumentals from King Crimson, situating the narrative more within contemporary cinematic drama.
In this world without elaborate language, where sound and physical cues are all-important, it’s surprising how clearly a wordless narrative emerges, how easily you’re drawn into the new normal. After the grunting, humping, shitting, murderous farce draws to a close, it takes a few moments to readjust to the more mannerly world of articulate speech.
All the Time in the World
With All the Time in the World (Canada, 2014), Canadian documentarian Suzanne Crocker chronicles her family’s experience living for nine months in a cabin in the Yukon wilderness, leaving digital devices, electricity, and—significantly—clocks behind. As with almost every task performed on camera—chopping wood, building a cache high above the ground to protect supplies from bears, digging an outhouse, berry-picking—the making of the documentary feels like a collaborative affair, one of the many imaginative projects that Crocker, husband Gerard and their three young children undertake during these isolated and rewarding months.
A few incidents occur that must have felt painfully tense at the time, but Crocker weaves them smoothly into an account that is largely one of unfolding delight. Her aim is not to create fly-on-the-wall suspense, but rather to relate retrospectively the transformative effects of her family’s woodland sojourn. This is both a warm portrait of a family adapting to nature’s rhythms and a contemplation of seasonal change in a part of the world where winter goes on for so long that “it has its own seasons.” The film is pieced together with exquisite long shots of the river freezing over, footage of children clambering through snow-laden woods, of woodland creatures and of the family’s ginger cat reacting photogenically to unfamiliar stimuli. Moving from the panoramic to close details of plants, animals and her children’s faces, Crocker evokes the rich diversity of the experience and the place.
Time, as the title suggests, is a recurring theme throughout. With this exploration of how our outlook changes when strict routines and time-keeping instruments are shed, Crocker issues a delicate call to reflect upon what is of value.
Invention
Invention
Invention (Canada, 2014), a compendium of several of artist Mark Lewis’ film installations, is an intense, inventive study of urban spaces and art objects, along with the incidental life that goes on within and around them. Like All the Time in the World, Invention concerns itself with the process of contemplation, but while Crocker’s documentary gently encourages its audience to slow down, Lewis offers no such choice, immediately immersing the viewer in a situation that proceeds at a luxuriantly unhurried pace, for example with languorous circling of a supine marble nude in a darkened museum. For most of its length, the film is silent. This is all about the eye: the act of observation; visual perception.
The camera moves almost imperceptibly. Action—of pedestrians, birds, vehicles—is slowed. Perspective tilts: down is up, up is down. There’s a sense of weightlessness, almost as though we’re underwater, especially in the gallery scenes. Lewis gravitates towards reflections, towards harmonies and repetitions within the landscape, whether random or architectural. The V-shape made by a window frame is echoed far below by a V-shaped path cleared of snow. This close observation and framing of scenes mimics the eye of a painter or photographer in search of a satisfactory composition.
The familiar is often rendered unfamiliar, the ordinary graceful, as in a scene of legs walking, viewed upside-down, making them appear oddly swanlike, or perhaps resemble marine life swaying in a nature documentary. In expansive aerial scenes, distant people become focal points, some reappearing, deliberately but unobtrusively, like ‘characters.’ Invention might require a concerted effort to breathe deeply, slow down and adjust to Lewis’ glacial pace, but the experience yields a fresh outlook that carries over into the real world. It’s hard to imagine a more absolute antidote to an over-stimulated age.
The Whispering Star
The Whispering Star
Slow pacing, extended landscape takes, use of repetition and the location of narrative interest within fine details also characterise Sion Sono’s reflective dystopian science-fiction feature. Like Invention, The Whispering Star (Japan, 2015) requires its viewer to slow down and focus. Shot almost entirely in black and white, exquisitely lit and composed, the film follows the methodical life of Yoko Suzuki, an android courier in a post-apocalyptic galaxy who travels from planet to planet delivering mysterious white boxes to the inhabitants of desolate locations. Everyone whispers, as though they have lost the power to speak.
The people Yoko encounters through her work are ghost-like, seeming to haunt the ruins of once populous places. Disconcertingly, the scenes where Yoko lands and walks with her box through various bleak vistas were shot in Fukushima. As Yoko makes her way along deserted roads lined by blighted trees; crosses a blasted seashore peopled with motionless black-clad figures; or cycles to an eerily derelict department store, The Whispering Star becomes a meditation on the loss of everyday life; a testament too to the stoicism of those affected by man-made disaster.
When Yoko is back on board her space-ship—a traditional Japanese dwelling on the outside with huge rocket booster, but banally humble within—the film’s progress is marked by the passage of days and the revolving set of mundane chores Yoko performs. In her life we witness routine, repetition, loneliness, perhaps—but also moments of inventiveness and curiosity side by side with quiet contentment; a meditation on what it means to be human and what it means to live.
The sunlit charm of dancer and choreographer Rhagav Handa burst irrepressibly through the phone from Cairns as he spoke candidly about the 12-year journey towards making his third solo work Mens rea: The Shifter’s Intent which debuted at the Cairns Contemporary Arts Centre and will travel to the Judith Wright Centre in Brisbane in early July.
While the artist acknowledges that his third work is “pushing at the very limits” of the solo form, its origins lie with Handa’s earliest and most enduring connections to dance. He tells a story of his mother—a familiar character to those who saw Tuk’re and clearly a force to be reckoned with—trying and failing to interest his sister in traditional Indian dance classes and, as a young boy, being corralled into taking her place. The enduring image he describes is his delight at dancing with bells on his feet.
Although the influence of these traditions lessened as he grew older, the pull of dance proved irresistible and his first stage role was as Chino in West Side Story. Dance captured him, but once again he pushed past traditional forms and, in the early noughties, in a series of those accidental inevitabilities that often occur, he met his mentor, the extraordinary Indigenous choreographer and cultural leader Marilyn Miller and made his debut with her ground-breaking work Quinkan in 2004 at the Adelaide Fringe (remounted in 2008).
Handa then embarked on a sustained career within the blossoming of Indigenous dance that we have been blessed to witness in the last decade, performing in Raymond Blanco’s Intentcity and Vicky Van Hout’s Wirad’journi, My Right Foot Your Right Foot and Briwyant (reviewed here and here).
Handa was born in India and raised in Australia, yet here he was learning ancient and important traditional dances, shapeshifting into fluid embodiment within the safe confines of the rehearsal rooms with powerful Indigenous choreographers. Nonetheless, he understood that this was work he could not begin in a room of his own. Yet the elders would watch him and say that he danced like a blackfella—a Darwin boy specifically. Why did he feel so comfortable, so at home within the gestural vocabulary of traditional and contemporary Indigenous forms?
Raghav Handa, Mens rea
His neglected Indian heritage and the malleability of his own cultural practice were to be the starting points for what he thought would be a single solo work. As it turned out, there were three works, with KumKum and Tuk’re being strongly autobiographical meditations on his lineage and the traditions of Indian dance and contemporary form.
Both shows were greeted with joy, not just their intimacy and charm but from a sense that at last there was a genuine, new cross-cultural voice for the representation of Indian-Australian performance. This is not to dishonour the long and often neglected connections between traditional Indian dancers and Australia, but rather to acknowledge the excitement of the integration by a choreographer fluid enough to hold multiple traditions within his gestural and choreographic vocabulary alongside a desire to experiment—and with a nuanced understanding of contemporary form.
Indeed, in an attempt to deeply interrogate his connection to Indigenous dance Raghav Handa set up two potentially antithetical processes to investigate the question at the heart of Mens rea. What triggers your intention to act, your shift of intent and the subsequent shift of atmosphere before you move into physical action? What is at the heart of this delicate and potent shape-shifting?
The first process involved visiting, with his mentor Marilyn Miller, Indigenous communities in Far North Queensland like Laura and Yarrabah and talking with elders such as King Vincent Jabaan Shreiber of the Gunggandji people.
The second involved a collaboration with the Deakin Motion Lab. Knitting together these two highly disparate interrogations is the section of the sacred Sanskrit Indian text, the Ramayana, preoccupied with motifs of shape-shifting, The Theft of Sita. Although there are many different versions of the story, essentially Sita, the wife of the God Rama, is kidnapped and then rescued by demi-God Jatayu, a shape-shifter who can become a vulture but who, in turn, is captured and mutilated by Ravana, a shape-shifting demon.
The Deakin team used their nifty motion capture system to record and then animate each of the characters, although Handa says that his characteristically energetic style meant that the Lab didn’t end up doing much additional animation over and above the capture.
Raghav Handa, Mens rea
Mens rea, unlike the personal and candid tone of Handa’s two works promises a more epic and ambitious form, with different aesthetic languages and spaces for each character as well as the arresting shape-shifting projections that he created with Deakin that engulf and transmogrify him at various points in the production.
Handa acknowledges that pushing the solo form that has served him so well previously is a risk, as is trying to ‘organically’ integrate technology into his intimate but intense and rhythmically complex gestural form. Finally, the potential sensitivities and protocols required to even begin to explore cultural and gestural connections between Indigenous and Indian dance forms such as Kathak are immense—these have grown in the 12 years of the artist’s career.
However, although Handa says he fears he might be “punching above his weight,” I cannot help but think of how the best artists I know do exactly that—they do what they fear they cannot. All of this bodes very well for an evening of intimate contemporary dance full of visual allure and shifting cultural engagement, truly the kind of work that pushes into the future and shows us what sophisticated cross-cultural form can be.
–
Mens rea: The Shifter’s Intent, creator, performer Raghav Handa; Judith Wright Centre for Contemporary Arts, Brisbane, 8 and 9 July
What exactly is Virtual Reality? It’s not film. It’s not television or web storytelling. It’s not art. It’s easy to describe its characteristics: with the aid of an individual headset and headphones, VR creates a multimedia vision with depth of space and progression of time. But it’s much harder to get a sense of this nascent creative technology’s aesthetic possibilities, of the things that make it unique relative to art.
Until engaging with Down the Rabbit Hole, the 2016 Sydney Film Festival’s VR exhibition, I had not met a VR work that leapt beyond purely technological appeal. Its artistic possibilities strike me as still latent. The absence of hard-and-fast rules and conventions make it an exciting area for artists to work in—to play freely and experiment.
One recent experiment in applying narrative principles to the 4D world is artist Lynette Wallworth’s Collision, shown at Carriageworks last month. The winner of SFF’s inaugural UNESCO Sydney City of Film Award, Wallworth has made a career of using immersive technologies to create filmic works, with Collision forging a space between VR and documentary storytelling. But generally, without the progression of plot, VR is at the point of exploring the visual and spatial mechanics of the medium—an infatuation with the actual technology.
That was the feel of A History of Cuban Dance (US, UK, Cuba; lead artist Lucy Walker) and The Rose and I (USA; lead artists Eugene Chung, Jimmy Maidens, Alex Woo). Inspired by The Little Prince, The Rose and I reimagines Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s iconic illustrations as animations. In a candy-coloured galaxy, the Prince emerges on a small, lonely planet. He watches a rose bloom from a crater and tends to it within the wider expanse of his empty universe, the sun rising and setting all the while. In a sense, the Prince’s lone predicament should be well suited to the VR format. When attended alone, cinema can offer a type of public solitude, in contrast with SFF where you are likely to be in a packed auditorium with 800 strangers. Virtual reality, on the other hand, is a purely solitary experience. With your helmet on, the experience of the work is unsharable.
At five minutes and with a linear, single concept, The Rose and I feels most like an animated short film with a few 4D enhancements. Similarly, A History of Cuban Dance had the feel of a documentary from the online magazine Vice. In brief chapters of live action, dancers in various Havana locations perform the Afro-Cuban Santería rumba, mambo, cha-cha-chá, salsa, breakdancing and reggaeton with typographical information popping up to the viewer’s left and right. The project’s success lies in the way it harnesses the potential of VR to capture wide vistas. By combining traditional one-point-perspective with a 360-degree view, Havana’s long seaside roads and cavernous architectural interiors are made quite real and quite lovely.
Hossein Valamanesh, Char Soo
Though enjoyable, neither of these films felt more immersive than a fully-realised video work, such as Hossein Valamanesh’s Char Soo currently showing at Sydney’s Carriageworks and as part of SFF’s Beyond Cinema program. Here the artist places the audience at the centre of an intersection in an Iranian market, its roads extending out and away via four video channels with discreet edits to transition us through a whole busy day in this market’s life. Sometimes a motorbike will cruise towards you on one screen and turn the corner into another. The scale of the projection and the four-screen set-up make for a genuinely immersive experience barely matched by most VR works, which by comparison are small, intimate affairs offering an often passive and solo spectatorial experience. In a way, Char Soo is more cinematic than animation projects like The Rose and I. Indeed, it’s produced by art and film production company Felix Media, manifesting a much larger set of professional video skills than any single contemporary artist could ever muster.
The most engaging work of Down the Rabbit Hole, to my mind, made that isolation a strength rather than a weakness. Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness (UK, France; lead artists Arnaud Colinart, Amaury La Burthe, Peter Middleton, James Spinney) is an extension of Notes on Blindness, an experimental documentary in competition at SFF. When theologian John Hull’s sight began to dim in 1983, he commenced recording audio diaries in order to come to terms with the meaning of blindness. Filmmakers Middleton and Spinney rearticulated the diaries in filmic form for their documentary. The VR project (see the trailer) takes this one step further, plunging us into the eyes of Hull, who for several years could detect light at the periphery of his field of vision and as it bounced off forms. The effect in VR is very much like seeing images of light pollution around the world: dark and monochromatic with spidery pinpricks of soft light. We sit on a bench in a park, listening to Hull’s observations, seeing and hearing the world as he sees it. “I hear the footsteps of people walking past,” he says into our ears, and those footsteps appear aurally.
In this way, we come to understand the importance that sound holds for the blind. The work uses audio sourced directly from Hull’s tapes and presented binaurally, which means the sound changes depending on how you move your head. When sitting under a park pagoda, we look at a bird, we hear it chirp; when we look at a leaf, we hear it rustle with others; when we look at a duck in a pond, we hear it paddling. At Hull’s instruction, we look to the right, and hear a breeze moving through the trees. He says that all these sounds create “a world of activity. In the blind person’s appreciation of weather, wind takes the place of sight.” In particular, the sound of rainfall in the park creates a totally different auditory picture of the surrounding landscape. The work is a wonder.
The project’s great quality lies in the sense of empathy provokes. Through the specific technological and artistic capabilities of VR, we are pulled a step closer to knowing the sensual predicament of sightlesssness. As such, the work offered something more immersive than a regular film screening, even a 3D one, and genuinely marked an extension of the original documentary, which is in itself quite miraculous and experimental. With form and content bonded, it actually needed the technology of VR to realise its aim of giving the audience some sense of the experience of incipient blindness.
Up until Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness, my experiences with VR had felt most akin to those I’ve had with video games. This was especially the case with Björk Digital at Carriageworks in Vivid Sydney last month, which the artist admitted was not fully realised. The experience was marred by poor event management and overcrowding, but also possibly because the work was ill-conceived artistically. Staged inside Björk’s mouth with the audience situated on her tongue and with the back of her teeth visible, the work was interesting and worthy as an experiment, but I sense that VR is more suited to broad horizons, imaginable scales and tangible sets of spatial dimensions.
Perhaps VR is not so much a discrete discipline or a new branch of an existing artform as a platform and means of delivery; like television, its aesthetic application can vary depending on the project. Tellingly, all the works in Down the Rabbit Hole were put together by small-scale production teams, the kind that also produce short films, high-end commercials and video clips. This is not the arena for a solo artist, or even an artist with a production team behind them, as is usual with large-scale video works.
It’s exciting that a technology exists that allows for changes to the world of film and art far away from Hollywood. But until the content catches up with the form, VR will continue to be about experiments in form. Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness showed what might be possible in this emerging technology’s artistic future.
–
2016 Sydney Film Festival, Down the Rabbit Hole, Virtual Reality at the Hub, curator Mathieu Ravier, Sydney Town Hall, 9-19 June
Are video games art? It’s a question which, like most that can be answered with a simple yes or no, is relatively uninteresting. It’s also a discussion which both enthusiast and mainstream games discourse has largely moved beyond. Despite this, artists continue to interrogate the line between art and game by producing and sharing small, personal “artgames.”
While the aforementioned debate is for the most part over, art and games are still treated as separate entities in many ways. To understand this divide is to understand artgames. According to certain commentators, big-budget, mainstream video games simply cannot be art and therefore we need a separate category: we need artgames. So what places artgames closer to art than to game? From the outset, they’ve featured a distinctive or highly stylised aesthetic, which is perhaps in response to the tech-centric desire for hyperreal reproduction of physical space which permeates mainstream game production. They explore a distinct artistic, cultural or political condition, usually illuminated via artist statements and post-development reflections. They are the product of an individual or small collective with a specific vision: artists producing art.
The Graveyard
Almost above all, though, is a de-emphasis of the (still disputed) formal elements which traditionally constitute a video game. One of the foremost artgame partnerships, Tale of Tales, explicitly rejects rules, objectives and challenges. Their Realtime Art Manifesto (2006) called on artists to challenge dominant notions of what constitutes video games. From this thinking came The Graveyard (2009), a short game in which players guide an old lady through a cemetery. It’s a slow, laboured experience, but her frustratingly slow movement encourages empathy. Finally reaching the bench at the end of the path is a bittersweet relief, where the woman sings of dead friends and the constant shadow of death.
Mountain, 2014, David OReilly
Mountain
The anti-game sentiment of earlier works like The Graveyard has been reflected in similar manifestos and movements across the past decade of game design, with ideals which in turn can be traced back through the disruptive and playful art of the last century. Just as video games in general drew on ideas about audience participation and repeatable, sharable performances from Fluxus, artgames continue the Dada tradition by interrogating the artistic and cultural value of video games. Like Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) almost 100 years before it, David O’Reilly’s Mountain (2014) presents a game seemingly without purpose. It begins by asking the player to produce a series of drawings in response to key words such as “soul,” “children” or “the past.” They are then introduced to the mountain which gently rotates and occasionally makes comments, ranging from complete nonsense to the deeply profound as day, night, rain and snow pass over it.
By shedding almost all interactivity, Mountain asks: what is the purpose of such a game, and why were we asked to pay money for it? Tellingly, a large group of players simply didn’t know what to do with it. Mountain barely seems to react to input from either mouse or keyboard, save for some spinning of the in-game camera and some lonely piano notes echoing across the scene. It doesn’t have any discernible objectives, and there’s a complete lack of challenge or obstacle. In the same way Dada questioned what was expected of early 20th century art, Mountain questions what is expected of early 21st century video games.
The rise of virtual galleries
The link between contemporary video games and contemporary art is stronger still in the art of New Zealand-born game maker Pippin Barr. Virtual galleries are becoming a staple for artgames, appearing in everything from the work of English developer Strangethink https://strangethink.itch.io/, to Los Angeles-based collective The Arcane Kids, to indie darlings Cardboard Computer (have a look at Kentucky Route Zero). But the motif is a particular focus for Barr, whose recent work V R 2 (2016) virtualises Donald Judd’s 100 untitled works in mill aluminum (1982-1986) to explore notions of digital presence and absence in game spaces.
V R 2: virtualising art
V R 2 consists of two virtual gallery spaces, each populated with 24 featureless white cubes. At the entrance to the first gallery is a sign, describing the contents of each cube, from a 13-word sentence to a sound recording of rain falling. The second building has a similar sign, with slightly different labels: 24 instances of “a cube in default material.” Barr states on his blog that the work isn’t really about playing a joke on the player, but rather an exploration of “invisible” objects in a virtual space and whether or not they create the same sensation for the player as Judd’s physical version did for him. By placing existing art in the virtual (he also produced a game based on a Marina Abramovîc performance, The Artist is Present [2010], among other works), Barr asks questions about these kinds of works that really couldn’t be asked otherwise.
Reflection, 2015, Ian MacLarty
MacLarty: interacting art and audience
Finally, rarely is the interaction between art and audience more important than in the work of Melbourne game designer, Ian MacLarty. His work Reflection (2015) continually generates a virtual 3D landscape based on the input of the player’s webcam, intertwining the form of the digital space with the player’s physical movements and environment. As well as the startling intimacy of the player’s own image staring down at them from the sky, any physical action the player makes is reflected in the virtual space in real time. Smiling causes murky yellow pillars to rise from seething, fleshy ground. Raising a hand or tilting the head can displace the avatar’s position in this world, as the ground is raised and lowered depending on the images the webcam is exposed to. It’s a fascinating work which integrates play, time, the virtual and the body in ways that few other games or artworks do.
Emerging from decades of politicised game design manifestos, a desire to challenge and expand ideas of both games and art, not to mention hundreds of years of art practice and theory, artgames in 2016 are beginning to step out of the shadow of their big-budget predecessors. Like most mainstream games, artgames are produced by a depressingly straight, Caucasian, male-dominated group of creators, but the diversity of artists and works is expanding every day. With support from artists, critics and audiences, artgames continue to challenge what it means to be both art and game.
Participants in the Lotus Asian-Australian Playwriting Project, First Draft Intensive, 2016, Sydney
Look one way, and new Australian playwriting seems to be in a parlous state, underrepresented by the major performing arts companies and, through its closeness to the small to medium sector, at the coalface of swingeing cuts to the budget of the Australia Council. Look the other, and it’s possible to detect distinct signs of life, especially in the flourishing of work by writers from Indigenous and culturally diverse backgrounds, and a new formal adventurousness responding to the advance of live art.
Both of these views were covered during my conversation with Tim Roseman, Artistic Director of Playwriting Australia, ahead of the 9th annual National Play Festival, a series of play readings, artist talks, workshops and industry forums showcasing works from PWA’s various development programs. This year the festival is returning to Melbourne—“the source of so many of our great stories, and home to over one-third of all Australia’s playwrights,” according to Roseman—following its first time in Adelaide in 2015 (”Creativity, generosity and taking the pledge”).
Alongside the main program of six plays, there will be two regional showcases—highlighting work by Asian-Australian and New Zealand-based playwrights respectively—two panel discussions featuring impressive line-ups of speakers that include John Romeril, Hannie Rayson, Joanna Murray-Smith, Tom Holloway, Van Badham, Jane Montgomery Griffiths and Angus Cerini, various workshops and masterclasses and a keynote address by Michael Gow titled “The Agony and the Agony: A Totally Impractical Guide to Playwriting.”
Participants in Indigenous Playwrights Bundanon Retreat, 2015
In conjunction with the Media Entertainment & Arts Alliance’s Equity Diversity Committee, the Adelaide event saw the launch of a Diversity Pledge, intended to be incorporated by writers in their play scripts to discourage producers from what Roseman calls “presumptive Anglo casting.” I ask Roseman what his sense is of how the pledge has landed within the wider theatre community in the 12 months since its launch. “I would say,” he replies, “that it has been strongly embraced by the writing community and that since its inclusion in all of our application processes, around 70% of play scripts we’re seeing at PWA are engaging with it in some way.” Of the works showcased in last year’s festival, five, according to Roseman, “have had some kind of further life”—Phillip Kavanagh’s Deluge, Elena Carapetis’ Gorgon, Michele Lee’s Rice and Lachlan Philpott’s Lake Disappointment among them—but Roseman stresses the festival is not a marketplace but “a smorgasbord—I never want it to feel like if these plays aren’t produced then they have failed.”
I remind Roseman that in Adelaide a showcase of local emerging writers was a feature—and, indeed, for many, a highpoint—of the program but hasn’t been retained this year, replaced by region-specific programs Aotearoa Now and Lotus. Roseman explains: “We always at the Play Festival have some kind of showcase of emerging artists. Last year in Adelaide it was local playwrights because we didn’t think there were many opportunities for Adelaide-based writers to reach out and connect with the national playwriting scene. If you’re in Melbourne, chances are you’ve already got that access. So we wanted to use the opportunity to, again, introduce the industry to artists that they may not be familiar with yet. For the last two years we’ve been running the Lotus Asian-Australian playwriting program in Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales. We’ve chosen four of that program’s writers—Katrina Graham, Natesha Somasundaram, Ngoc Pham and Shari Indriani—to each exhibit a 15-minute section of first drafts of plays they have been working on at quite a high level of artistic development with leading playwrights from across the country.”
Roseman sees both showcases as redressing significant holes in Australia’s theatrical landscape—“We’re far more conversant,” he opines, “with new work from America and the UK, and even Canada frankly, than from New Zealand”—but it’s the paucity of Asian-Australian playwriting that is of palpable concern. “Lotus,” says Roseman, “evolved out of a tragic absence of new Asian-Australian plays on the stage. When we started the program, we looked at the tens of thousands of published Australian plays from the history of theatrical production in this country and could find less than five play texts that were published by Asian-Australian playwrights. So there’s a massive problem that our stages don’t reflect the culture of our population and this is our first step in putting together a cohort of talented, hungry playwrights who can address that.”
Melodie Reynolds-Diarra
As for the main program, featuring works by Melissa Reeves, Steve Rodgers, Emily Sheehan, Olivia Satchell and Chris Summers, it’s Skylab by actor Melodie Reynolds-Diarra (a Wangkathaa woman from Western Australia) that I nominate, from what I’m told of it, when Roseman throws back to me my question as to which of the plays he is most excited about. The play uses the 1979 crash-landing of the US space laboratory Skylab off the southern coast of Western Australia as a jumping-off point for an absurdist yarn about, in Roseman’s words, “how our Indigenous communities function outside of the main conversations that we tend to colour them with.” What is it about Indigenous sci-fi at the moment, a seemingly unlikely genre reflected in, for example, ABC TV’s Cleverman and Warwick Thornton’s video work The Way of the Ngangkari in the Tarnanthi exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia in 2015?
I wonder aloud what next year’s festival, the 10th, will bring. A special celebration? A retrospective of past achievements? Then Roseman tells me there isn’t going to be one; the cuts to the Australia Council have seen to that. “We’ve lost around $150,000 a year from our Australia Council grants,” he says. “So we’re down exactly what it costs us to put on the Play Festival each year. What we’ve decided to do is change the Play Festival to a biennial event so it will return in 2018.” This is further evidence—as though any were needed—of the Turnbull Government’s shortsighted and irresponsible approach to arts funding but Roseman, despite conceding the “disabling” nature of the loss of funds, is characteristically chipper: “We’ll be in a position where the same number of plays will be coming out of our programs—in fact, a couple more plays a year I think—but it does mean a refocus for us and it means working out how we sustain our long-term mission to change the shape of the Australian stage when there are fewer opportunities for work that isn’t already connected to a producing framework.” It’s a question that will be on many minds when the Play Festival opens in Melbourne.
–
Playwriting Australia: The National Play Festival, Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, 27-30 July
Site-specific performance improvisation, Louise Morris, Anne Scott Wilson, Lorne Sculpture Biennale, 2016
It had been something of a grey day in Lorne. I was there as the Lorne Sculpture Biennale’s guest writer and had spent the day wandering along the shore among uncanny sculptures. I almost missed a site-specific performance devised by Louise Morris from photographs by Anne Scott Wilson and carried through by some dedicated students apparently sunk in Samadhi [intense meditative concentration. Eds]. Rain was lurking somewhere out at sea, throwing a damp, chilly pall our way. Over the hill the ashes from the destruction of Wye in the Christmas Day bushfires had not long gone cold.
I was tired at this fag-end of a strange day and sat on a CCA-treated fence on the shelf of rock above the beach, waiting for the performers to arrive, passing the time analysing patterns of discarded cigarette butts, pretending I was a gumshoe in a film noir. (Conclusions: the person who sat there before me was shorter, a left-handed smoker, probably wearing a voluminous raincoat, who some time the previous evening had used binoculars to watch something unfolding in the car park about a kilometre distant).
As I was in this odd, distracted, forensically reflective state of mind, the performance began. Scene: a stretch of beach at low tide; a lagoon almost drained of water; sand churned up by the day’s beachgoers; wind backing into the west; dusk approaching; light becoming increasingly granular; a time of the day when the streets are emptying, so the world can feel a little forlorn. The Real is just outside your field of vision, eating away at the edges of your security.
Six women dressed in black moved across the sand. Silence bracketed by the distant rush of waves. Some of the women were dragging winding pieces of crimson fabric. They walked as though nobody was present. The watchers became invisible, became the impossible thing: the observer who isn’t there.
Site-specific performance improvisation, Lousie Morris, Anne Scott Wilson, Lorne Sculpture Biennale, 2016
The women fanned out across the beach; slow, slow-motion. But when my gaze returned to any one figure, she seemed to have moved further than time would have allowed, as though little glitches in reality, like edits in a strip of film, were parsing our cognition. Some women were down at waves-edge, in limicole. I felt a little anxiety rising in me, as though we were in the margins at the end of the world, an attenuated space where it was just, just, possible to speak of what really matters. I thought some random violence might intervene: black vans; radiation; something from the sky. Just below the knuckle of black rock where I was standing, kettled into my jacket by the cold air moving in from the ocean, a performer had burrowed under one of the sheets of crimson fabric, which was suddenly not like fabric at all, but something sinister and powerful, a little totemic. It began to undulate in slow convulsions. It seemed to be growing bigger, but the light was fading imperceptibly, things disintegrating an atom at a time, so that it was difficult to maintain a depth of field that one could trust in. It was still dusk and dusk was going on forever.
It was like a low-tech outtake from Bowie’s Blackstar: women in mourning carrying through the rituals that will annihilate melancholia, in the wastes outside the village of Ormen.
A woman lay on the sand. Jetsam. An omen to take into our dreams tonight. The atmosphere was of prophecy, the dance an oracle speaking, the women as they moved making images on imaginary Tarot cards. I tried to imagine a drones-eye view, the spatial relationship between one woman and another, to imagine a pattern, to fake up an analysis in different time signatures. But my mind—soaked up into the slow ritual movements, carrying, as rituals do, the things we cannot carry alone—couldn’t find a grip on a linear image.
Hours passed. Or perhaps only minutes, ticking. Two of the women crossed the lagoon. The others followed, as if slowly picking up a hidden current. They crawled and rolled up the steep bank toward the empty road, as though, having taken the measure of gravity they could match it, gram by gram, make it work against itself.
The next day, I took a cab out to the airport at Avalon with a driver who spoke to me of time-travel and passengers who vanished into air. I looked at him suspiciously and wondered if he had been on the beach, watching me.
Site-specific performance improvisation, Lousie Morris, Anne Scott Wilson, Lorne Sculpture Biennale, 2016
Site-specific performance improvisation, creators Louise Morris, Anne Scott Wilson; Lorne Sculpture Biennale, Lorne, Victoria, March 19
Somewhere towards the end of Stephanie Lake’s If Never Was Now I’m suddenly aware that I’m hearing a short section of music repeated from the first work in the double bill, Ross McCormack’s If Form Was Shifted. Apart from that moment of recognition detaching me ever so briefly from the action, it otherwise barely registers that the two choreographers are working from the same tight parameters set by Dancenorth’s Artistic Director Kyle Page.
Very few ideas overlap in the works despite Page’s challenge to Lake and McCormack to each create a 30-minute work with the same five dancers, selecting sound from a one-hour score by composer Robin Fox, creating costumes from one pattern and limited materials with costume designer Andrew Treloar and utilising lighting from one grid designed by Bosco Shaw.
Neither is there any sense that the choreographers have contrived to make the works different, they simply are. Page’s interest in how we construct self and meaning from the perspective of our unique experience is played out in this exercise, which is imbued with the mischievous rigour the Artistic Director brings to all of his creative explorations with the company.
McCormack’s If Form Was Shifted is dark, twilit from a single point overhead and centred around a cluster of speakers where most of the dancers initially stand unmoving. Mason Kelly bucks and writhes on the floor like something not quite machine nor organism, but newly born and trying to map himself and his immediate territory. He gives off a palpable sense of oppression and anxiety, described in impossible angles. He makes it to a speaker, sits and drags his clothes half off to briefly reveal the lithe lines of his muscular back, momentarily elegant, transfigured.
As rumbling industrial sound rises, the others place their hands on Kelly’s face, exploring and smothering. They stretch him out, each taking a hand or leg, the five forming symmetrical geometry for a few heartbeats. In a repeating gestural motif, they raise their hands to their temples, elbows out and then reach to touch the temples of the next dancer, again creating sudden shifts between awkwardness and coherence of form.
Kelly and the expressive Ashley McLellan twitch and entwine, pushing their fingers into each other’s faces, babylike. The music, its beat grinding and vibrating, becomes almost unbearably loud. Jenni Large opens her mouth wide and slowly draws a resistant Harrison Hall’s open mouth to her own, and shares breath, while pulling a flailing, anonymous hand from below to her groin. The orgiastic scene continues as she stands on top of and walks over the group, until it collapses again and it’s hard to tell whose limbs are whose.
The performers return to the orderly temple dance, connecting as if drawing on each others’ thoughts and energies and becoming a single organism or machine. Georgia Rudd sees out the piece with a solo of emotional flux between ecstasy and bewilderment, while the others slowly return to being transfixed by the speakers. Rudd sits on a speaker and flicks the off switch.
If Never Was Now, Dancenorth
In contrast to McCormack’s chiascuro, simple set and understated, neutral costuming, Stephanie Lake’s If Never Was Now has the dancers in playful neon pink pants, carving out spaces through a mass of tiny foam balls which form an ever changing landscape as they move. The lighting is vari-coloured, directional and shifting, at times creating a second cast of enormous shadow dancers on the periphery.
The action is bigger, with some precarious but controlled acrobatics, as the dancers lift, toss and manipulate. Jenni Large wallows in the foam, wild-eyed and exuding strength, flexibility and sensuality. She and Hall have a beautifully connected duo under blue light before fighting it out, lifting each other from the ground and literally butting heads. Hall is blown, rolled across the floor by the others fanning the foam, which forms a primal sea or shifting sands.
Kelly and McLellan mirror shrugs, influence each other’s space without touching, breathe to their gestures before running, crashing, embracing, hitting and spinning off one another.
All the dancers synchronise, an ensemble moving to a pounding beat and their own vocalisations, the squeak of the foam balls under pivoting feet adding more texture to the sound. The space grows darker and darker, the music softer and softer, four dancers retreating to the corners and using boards to fan the foam across the floor. It is so quiet now that you can hear the gentle shhhh of the waves of beads as McLellan is left in the centre where there is just a shaft of light and a trickle of ‘snow’ falling from above onto her head.
Both choreographers’ intentions are realised in their creations: about If Never Was Now, Lake writes, “this work and the dancers… are continually transmuting and being affected by rapidly changing conditions,” while McCormack describes If Form Was Shifted as “[r]eflecting the body at odds with its purpose—a device grappling with its complexities and placement…somehow spectacular yet also pathetic.” Page’s parameters may have limited choice in certain physical aspects of the production, but his If _ Was _ premise opened up limitless possibilities.
Dancenorth, If_Was_, choreographers, Ross McCormack, Stephanie Lake, performers Harrison Hall, Mason Kelly, Jenni Large, Ashley McLellan, Georgia Rudd, composer Robin Fox, lighting design Bosco Shaw, costume design Andrew Treloar; Townsville School of Arts Theatre, 9-12 June
Taeyoon Kim, Steady Griffins, five-channel video, random loop, colour, no audio, 2014
With a solo exhibition, 1980s-born South Korean video artist Taeyoon Kim once again brings fascinating video works to Brisbane. At the MAAP Space entrance is the two-screen work 1204, shot as if looking out from an elevator in an apartment building. One elevator per screen, each apparently moving in opposite directions. Unsynced. As the camera travels up and down we glimpse repeated sequences of stairwell landings and the blackness between floors. The landings seem to be places to leave bikes: kids’ bikes, bright plastic colours, solitary or clumped together.
After a while one recognises that the landings seem to repeat but it is not obvious at all if the sequence of landings and floors is the same each time or even if the lift travel is real. Maybe Kim has saved every landing to a separate file and then accessed those files at random, interspersed with another file that looks like a ‘between floors’ shot. These landings are of a muchness anyway and does it really matter if the journey is real or just an impression of a possible journey? All that lift experience blurs into a generalised representation of ‘In the lift going up. Still in the lift, but going down.’ I doubt I’d even notice if the floor sequence I glimpsed in an unfamiliar building on the way up was the same as the one I saw on the way down. I’m still not sure if it is or isn’t in Kim’s video. I would have to investigate.
Taeyoon Kim, “1204” two-channel video, random loop, colour, no audio, 2014, MAAP
The largest work is Steady Griffins, five screens scattered across floors and walls, wires trailing. Each screen shows a soft and blurry fragment of an iPhone screen streaming Family Guy. Occasionally a generic ‘Play’ icon pops up. The video fragments were taken by placing another iPhone hard up against the first, so that each of the five screens of Steady Griffins is playing back just that tiny array of cartoon pixels that a phone camera lens can span. Change is slow and randomised, courtesy of some everything-is-a-database media scripting. Although without getting into the database and code we don’t know how those little Raspberry Pi computers are actually being used.
The gentle pacing of the videos alludes to production methods in TV animation. In the old days (eg the Renaissance) a painter might be allocated costly pigments, like ultramarine, according to weight and volume. Higher beings commanded, ‘Paint my princely robes with that really expensive pigment and put shitloads of gold on them as well. Paint everyone else cheaper so they don’t look so important.’ Today digital colour is free, or at least all colours are equally specified, and there is as much of any colour as one can possibly want. The main input cost that can vary is labour, where so many hours at so many dollars/won/yen allows some specific number of unique drawings. As Family Guy is hand-drawn, most of the screen acts as a static backdrop to reduce labour hours and that budget move constrains significant action to a speaking mouth or blinking eyes and arms that flap rather than move realistically. And, as with the Renaissance, the important figure gets the money and every other character remains unnaturally still in the background.
Taeyoon Kim, “1204” two-channel video, random loop, colour, no audio, 2014, MAAP
I’m reminded of Brian Eno’s early generative videos in the way the screens act as both image for the aesthetic gaze and as light source illuminating those who gaze upon it. A beautiful amalgam of lo-fi—just a phone camera and cheap Raspberry Pi media computers—and ultra tech: billions of dollars of research into materials science, quantum tunnelling, free operating systems, image compression algorithms and undreamt of optical technologies packaged into a phone camera and a computer on a stick. Hard-shop or buy them online. You don’t have to know how they work.
A bit tucked away is Clear Away, a puzzling video of blurred and dirty particles hurtling across the screen. A conversation starts up in the gallery as we try to get a consensus on what the particles actually are.
1. Snow. Probably snow but the way the particles hurtle across the screen seems more blizzard-like, which would make standing out there problematic. And the video lasts seven minutes, by the end of which we can see the background is a sky gone from leaden cloud to patchy blue and the snow has dropped to nothing. Not that familiar with the possible time courses of blizzards, but doesn’t seem right.
2. Locusts. The whole effect of the particles is definitely one of swarming or streaming. I can see this as a window onto millions of hysterically frantic insects—except the particles are too blobby and varied in size. Plus, by the end the particles are falling more gently and a mass death of locusts mid-flight seems unlikely (although maybe they aren’t dead, maybe they are just exhausted and floating down to the ground below).
3. Dirt. Swirling in water. Sure, could be, but there doesn’t seem to be evidence of turbulence distorting the image.
4. Rain. Maybe, but there doesn’t seem to be any indication of high winds working the clouds with the sort of force that could drive the rain across the screen so quickly, and if there was a high enough wind then the raindrops would be the same size, much smaller, possibly breaking into high velocity white-out.
I don’t resolve my thoughts about what we are seeing until I get home and look at the information sheet and see a clue there in the title: Clear Away. The video is perhaps the output of a snow blower or similar. The clearing of a path, cunningly portrayed through its effects and not its mechanism. Like Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op detective, I’ve got my plausible story and that will do. Case closed. MAAP delivers, yet again, richly intriguing video from our timezone and to the north.
Taeyoon Kim, “1204” two-channel video, random loop, colour, no audio, 2014, MAAP
Increasingly, for contemporary feminist thinkers and creators, there’s no such thing as ‘too much information.’ It has been used to flag inappropriateness, a listener’s discomfort, perhaps concealing small-mindedness. Confronted by questions of intimacy, bodily functions or sexual idiosyncrasies, the phrase puts a lid on discussion, harking back to old-fashioned notions of ladylike propriety and, at worst, stymying progress on women’s reproductive health rights, as if what happens between the sheets or in a woman’s body is ‘too much.’
Mira Fuchs, the pseudonym Melanie Jame Wolf has employed in her eight years as a stripper, presents a performance ‘essay’ on her former life and in the chapter titled “On Shame” a short video loop displays a close-up of, we assume, Wolf’s genitals. But I tear ahead. The work is not confessional; in a way its dismantling of the notion of ‘too much’ is perhaps more successful than its exploration of sexual transactions and whether or not stripping can be considered feminist.
Like its subject matter, Mira Fuchs is revealing, most of all of how we the audience react, what level of comfort we cling to, what our own assumptions are on the exchanges of power that happen during a lap dance.
A consummate performer, Wolf is adept at withholding information; just as in her resume there are omissions so her years as a stripper are unaccounted for. In previous performances, most memorably a one-on-one as J Dark, she has absolute dominion over the performance space. “What’s your real name?” is the unimaginative nightly interrogation strippers endure and which Wolf can dodge like a bare-knuckled boxer. While seemingly letting you into her confidence, she won’t tell you anything she’s not prepared to part with.
With the audience seated in a circle, Wolf enters the room and holds the gaze of every member by turn. Often she will turn to address a specific person. “My job is to make you feel like you are special,” she says, this time while staring me squarely in the eyes. Put on the spot, I feel my body stiffen as the room turns to look at me. Soon she disrobes completely, but then slips on a flesh-coloured body suit and towering stripper heels.
Melanie Jame Wolf, Mira Fuchs
Presenting chapters that chart a career encompassing an estimated 30,000 lap dances and expose the group dynamics of her patrons, Wolf carefully feeds us information. What health and safety regulations must be adhered to—customer’s feet wide apart, bottom deep in the back of the chair to support the dancer’s weight as she gyrates on your lap. What men receiving lap dances would most likely say when her g-string came off—“So, what are you studying?”—as if ascertaining whether exposing herself was ‘worth it.’ How she saw her made-up face in the mirror looking back at her as her father in drag. The time she had only made $20 all night and in an act of defiance, spent the last 15 minutes of her shift supine, arms and legs raised stiffly like road kill.
When she redirects attention back to the audience, we watch each other receive or reject lap dances. One woman’s face becomes a mask of arousal and it feels wrong to watch. Is this act private? Is it too much? Tellingly, men are shy to accept, stripped as they are of the drinks, the throb of music, the late night blur; this strip show becomes a different beast.
In a video recording Wolf playfully imitates her own open-mouthed face of seduction, incrementally exaggerating it until her jaw is almost unhinged and her eyes feline-slits. “Too much?” she asks onscreen and the audience titters. The answer is no. Wolf files her essay with an intellectual vigour but also warmth. It’s a safe room in which to learn.
Perhaps the most powerful and, dare I say it, poignant admission came when Wolf told us that she was a stripper for such a long time because it meant that she could perform every night.
–
Arts House: Melanie Jame Wolf/Savage Amusement, Mira Fuchs, choreography, performance, video, text Melanie Jame Wolf, sound design Carl Anderson; North Melbourne Town Hall, 2-22 June
Lindsay Vickery, Scale Variable, Decibel, Tura New Music
The influence and the legacy of Roger Smalley (1943-2015) are somewhat legendary in Western Australian new music circles. Having emigrated from his European home to Perth in the early 1970s, Smalley spent over 30 years teaching composition at UWA before retiring in 2007; consequently many of his former students now hold senior positions in Western Australian universities and ensembles. As a young composer myself I feel his influence in many ways, despite having never actually met him, since nearly all of my teachers received his tutelage in some form. A notable ex-student is Cat Hope, Artistic Director of Decibel New Music Ensemble, a superstar of Australian new music and curator of Intermodulations, a recent concert in Smalley’s memory featured in TURA’s Scale Variable series.
In pre-show interviews and at the concert, Hope made a point of explaining how Smalley felt his early music inappropriate for Australian audiences, whose distance from the European scene and general inexperience with new music had cultivated a fear of the unknown and relative distaste for electronic music. This concert was, by and large, dedicated to those early European works, which Hope is adamant today’s Perth audience will enjoy—largely due to Smalley’s lasting legacy. She’s not wrong.
Decibel’s concert comprised four smaller chamber works in the first half featuring members of the ensemble in various iterations, and one large-scale work for ensemble and electronics in the second, for which the full ensemble assembled.
First up was Didjeridu (1974), an electroacoustic work for four-channel tape of samples of Australian Indigenous music from the Mornington Peninsula. The characteristic sound of the didjeridu is at first distinct, but gradually distorted beyond recognition, an unconscious—or was it conscious?—comment on the atrocious treatment by whites of Indigenous culture. Appropriating Aboriginal music for a European electro-acoustic work is at best kitsch and at worst racially insensitive. Today composers understand this (mostly) but in previous decades it was hugely popular, an exciting way to combine different musical styles. Doubtless Decibel leader Cat Hope isn’t blind to this, the work functioning more as a window into the past of Australian composition than as contemporary social comment.
Decibel Ensemble, Scale Variable, Tura New Music
Two works for piano and electronics follow: Transformation (1968, revised 1971) and Monody (1971-2). Both use the same electronic technique (ring modulation) to extend the colour palette of the piano and, although composed around the same time, they really sound nothing alike. Transformation is virtuosic and grand, featuring drawn-out sweeps and glissandi and fierce bass notes drawing as much colour as possible from the full range of the piano. It’s almost exhausting to watch guest artist Adam Pinto perform with such depth, from the most intense hammering sounds to suddenly subdued, glassy chords. If this piece is excessive, the second is refined, featuring a sole one-note melody throughout. It’s still extremely technically demanding on the performer but in a different way, as they must play piano with the right hand and control the sine wave frequency with the left, occasionally also moving to triangles and congas. The use of ring modulation in this piece is more melodic and seems to play a more active structural role than in the first. The tonal palette of the composition is unique, almost quirky, as many of the combined frequencies of piano and sine wave don’t conform to equal temperament.
We also hear Impulses (1986), an acoustic work for chamber sextet. This is a rhythmically driven conglomeration of sounds in which percussionist Louise Devenish and cellist Tristen Parr shine as the most assertive performers.
Decibel saves the best for last, assembling onstage to perform the 45-minute-long Zeitebenen. This unique and charismatic work, premiered in Germany in 1973 by Smalley’s new music ensemble Intermodulation, has never been performed in Australia until now, the score spending the past 40 years collecting dust somewhere in the University of Western Australia. It’s immediately obvious that this work draws on influences from each of the four smaller pieces performed earlier, sharing melody with Monody and recalling the electronic soundscape of Didjeridu. Here Smalley’s ideas are given the space they need to be completely aired. The work is politically charged, featuring sounds of warfare alongside those of children, storms, car horns, seagulls and whistles and, at one point, alluding to Tibetan throat singing and featuring colourful conversations between viola, clarinet, vibraphone and piano. This strikingly imaginative piece ends with a definitive thud from Devenish’s bass drum.
Intermodulations was extremely well-received by Perth’s new music audience. The resounding takeaway message was this: let’s not allow Roger Smalley’s music to be forgotten, as has happened to the compositions of so many Australian composers of his generation.
Decibel Ensemble, Scale Variable, Tura New Music
Tura New Music, Scale Variable: Intermodulations, Decibel New Music Ensemble; State Theatre, Centre Studio Underground, Perth, 7 June
Perth-based composer Alex Turley’s City of Ghosts was performed by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in the 2016 Metropolis New Music Festival. He was a RealTime-mentored music reviewer at Perth’s 2015 Totally Huge New Music Festival.
I ask Jack Sargeant, Program Director of REVELATION Perth International Film Festival (REV), how the 2016 event is shaping up. “Well, we have a spine now,” he replies drily. “I might be wrong but I don’t think any other film festival has a spine on their program. That’s a thick program. The festival has grown a lot. We have some 200 screening sessions.”
Sargeant describes his work on REV as “seeing a few films for half a year and in the second half working like a maniac watching films for 15 hours a day. As well as feature films, shorts and documentaries there’s an academic conference, industry panels and workshops. It’s a huge program. It just grows and grows each year. So the workload gets crazier and crazier. The way it works is that I search out films, we have the call for entries and then Festival Director Richard Sowada and I just watch everything.”
I assume Sargeant and Sowada watch a lot of DVDs, but I’m corrected. “I think it’s the end of the DVD. Almost everything we watch now is on Vimeo or some other platform. I don’t think anyone sends out DVDs any more. 90% of what I watch is online. Most of what we now screen in the festival is sent as DCPs (Digital Cinema Packages)—a lot cheaper than 35mm prints. So the whole exhibition system has changed.
“A lot of what I do for REV is chasing people, chasing films, following an interest, an emerging stylistic trend or whatever, and also, of course, [watching] hundreds of films that come from our call for entries—I watch all those online.”
I ask if the call for entries comes with criteria issued to applicants. “No criteria. As soon as you start putting criteria on things, you miss out on other things. You just have to be open to whatever is happening in the industry, whatever is happening artistically, in communities, with audiences. From all that, Richard and I will start noticing trends or ideas that are emerging and we’ll debate them. Sometimes we’re asked why we’ve rejected a film. It’s not because the film is bad; it’s because we have three other films that explore the same area.”
I assume that Sargeant has a big screen at home on which he sees many of the films he selects from. “No. That’s the thing. You love film but you’re not allowed to watch it properly. You have to watch and choose from a small screen. Then you don’t get to see how really beautiful a film is until the festival itself, same as everyone else.” But there are also films that Sargeant sees on big screens at other festivals.
All The Time In The World
All the Time in the World
One of these films is All the Time in the World (dir Suzanne Crocker, Canada, 2014, 89 mins), which, he explains, “is about a Canadian family who leave what’s already a rural community to go into the deep bush to live for winter where it’s -40 or so, the river’s frozen, there’s deep snow. It’s an amazing essay film, kind of intense and beautifully filmed. The family—and the kids are quite young—are just talking about their life. It’s an exploration of what it means to not be in the rat-race at all. I saw it at the Sydney Underground Festival October last year and thought, that’s great, we’ve got to screen it.
Invention
Palpable trends: slow, big and immersive
I wonder if there any palpable trends Sargeant has noticed, although acknowledging they might emerge over several festivals rather than in one year. He’s wary about declaring trends because there are so many people making films that trends can be identified in any number of ways. “However,” he adds, “one thing we have noticed—and this has been going on for a while now—I guess you could call it ‘slow cinema.’ You know, long, long takes, not a lot of action—maybe even no action. It’s about watching and listening. We have a film called Dead Slow Ahead (12 months of life inside a vast grain tanker; Mauro Herce, Spain, 2016, 74 mins), which is like that; another, Human (astonishing visual perspectives on relativities of scale; Yann Arthus-Bertrand, France, 2015, 190 minutes), has long, contemplative shots. There’s Invention (Mark Lewis, Canada, 2014, 87 mins), which is ‘just’ footage of architecture. You’re on an escalator watching someone walking along or whatever. It’s almost like one of those classic ‘city films’ from the 1920s and 30s, but instead of hustle and bustle, it’s all long, long takes. I suppose it has to be a reaction to all those Hollywood films that have edits every three seconds.
“The main trend we’ve noticed is an… almost immersive quality. It’s slow, it’s big. It’s spectacular without [being] spectacle. It’s not about explosions—although it can be. It’s not about fast editing.” Above all it reveals for Sargeant that “filmmakers are still making film for the big screen. There’s still an interest in the cinematic even though we’re getting ever more used to watching in smaller and smaller formats. Maybe this ‘slow film’ [trend] is almost a response to that. You need to watch these films on a big screen, you need to hear them properly.”
Human
It’s a short leap from a possibly significant trend to Sargeant’s passion for cinema on the big screen and the shared cinema experience: “I think cinema is such an important medium. However often people say that TV will replace film or computer games or VR will replace film, I don’t think any of that’s true. I think there’s something about sitting in a cinema with a group of people and experiencing something collectively that’s so important. It’s kind of intrinsic to the process of cinema that it’s a communal experience. I suspect people might be forgetting that. Lots of writers on film say things like, ‘This is so spectacular, so exciting…’ But it’s only spectacular and exciting when you watch it in a cinema. If you’re watching The X Men in a cinema with 200 people and they’re all getting wrapped up in the plot and cheering, that’s great. Watching it at home by yourself, there’s not really any fun.
“I would like to think that the films we have in the REV program will really work on the big screen with a crowd and that people come out talking about film. We screened The Tribe last year and people are still talking to me about it. To me that’s such an important thing—that film has that power to affect you forever. The year before we had Under the Skin and again, people are still talking about it. We need culture that stays with you, the ideas stay with you.”
All Things Ablaze
Creative documentary: All Things Ablaze
Sargeant thinks All Things Ablaze will have such staying power: “It’s a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the Ukraine with three or four camera crews among pro-democracy protestors. It’s the middle of winter. There are speeches which get more and more heated. There’s no didactic voiceover, no cutaways to talking heads, the cameras aren’t telling you anything—it’s just footage. It’s incredible to watch because we [as a rule in Australia] don’t end up in these kinds of conflicts. The film is visually very powerful and sounds great. Even though you don’t understand the language, you certainly understand the urgency. It’s a beautiful film.”
Sargeant stresses the creative calibre of the festival’s documentaries. They include Notfilm, the documentary by Ross Lipman (UK, US, 2015, 130 mins) about the making of the Samuel Beckett-scripted Film (featuring Buster Keaton; director Alan Schneider, UK, US, 1965, 20 mins) which will show on the same program. He also singles out an animated documentary, NUTS! (Penny Lane, USA, 2016, 79 mins), about Dr John Romulus who “somehow invented everything from junkmail to the infomercial” (program). “Coincidentally,” says Sargeant, “It’s a really strong year for documentaries about the arts.” There are films about Tony Conrad, Robert Mapplethorpe and Robert Frank, as well as Laurie Anderson’s documentary about her dog Lolabelle, Heart of a Dog (USA, 2015, 75 mins).
“We also have wilder documentaries, like The Other Side, set in poverty-stricken, rural Louisiana. It’s not really about poverty. It’s about giving people space who are not normally seen on TV or heard on radio, certainly not seen in cinema. It’s an incredible film—and kind of terrifying as well. The Land of the Enlightened (Pieter Jan De Pui, Belgium, Ireland, Netherlands, Germany, Afghanistan, 2016, 87 mins), about kids in Afghanistan, is also beautifully shot (in 16mm) and tells its story about the country slowly. [Because it stages re-enactments] there’s some debate about whether it’s documentary or a hybrid. Sydney Film Festival programmed it as documentary but they also draw attention to its hybridity.”
Notfilm
Feature films
We move on to the feature film program where some names will be familiar to REV audiences, says Sargeant. “We have works by younger filmmakers we’ve been following for a while, like Zach Clark (Little Sister, USA, 91 mins, in which a young nun returns home when her soldier brother returns from Iraq). We’ve screened three of his films at REV including White Reindeer (2013). This year, we’ve also got Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise (2015), his sixth feature film. We’ve previously screened his A Field in England (2013), Kill List (2011) and others. These are filmmakers who’ve emerged in the past 10 years and whom we’ve been following—not intentionally; it’s just that they’re producing consistently interesting work that draws you to it. Anna Billo who made The Love Witch is another filmmaker whose work we’ve screened previously. The Love Witch was shown recently at the Stranger with My Face festival in Tasmania. It’s another beautiful film.
“Der bunker (Nikias Chryssos, Germany, 2015, 85 mins) is a crazy film about a teacher who goes to study in a rural outpost and stays in a house which is a bunker and is asked to teach the owner’s child. It’s halfway between John Waters and David Lynch, so strange and very, very funny. If you like a good neo-noir crime thriller, Saburra (set in Rome’s waterfront suburbs; Stefano Sollima, Italy, France, 2015, 130 mins) is fantastic.”
Rating high in Sargeant’s opinion is “The Whispering Star (Sion Sono, Japan, 2015, 101 mins), a film about a woman whom we discover is a robot who delivers packages in outer space, spending years and years travelling between planets. It’s like a meditation on existence, with the planets she lands on all shot around Fukushima. These weird deserted landscapes are, of course, contemporary Japan. Cinematically it’s stunning. When SF film is really good, its contemplative aspect is really foregrounded. I think we saw that in Under the Skin.” Another film that plays with our sense of reality is Aaaaaaaah! (Steve Oram, UK, 2015, 79 mins), “which is like a kitchen sink drama but everyone in it is acting like a monkey. It’s quite fantastic and very funny as well. You could argue that films like this and High-Rise and All Things Ablaze are about the breakdown of society.” But what is REV without something from the outer limits? “ASMA HorroX (Pat Tremblay, Canada, 2016, 101 mins) is a wild, beautiful and psychedelic SF horror film.”
The Jim Henson Legacy
A major component of the 2016 festival program is a Jim Henson retrospective featuring two feature films, The Labyrinth (1986) and The Dark Crystal (1982), feature-length accounts of Henson’s commercials, experimental films, performance films, the Sesame Street story, plus Tales from Muppet Land and A Muppet Musical Moments and documentaries about the filmmaker at work. Sargeant says, “It’s a total education with some of it to be shown for free as Mini-Rev at the State Library. So it’ll be a real community event and get more children involved in cinema.”
Shorts and long-term values
Shorts feature in the Get Your Shorts On (WA emerging filmmakers), Experimental Showcase and ICS (Indigenous Community Stories) programs alongside another 40 or so short films. Of the latter, Sargeant admires in particular Upside Down Feeling by Eddie White (Australia, 2015, 10 mins) about a young boy preoccupied with death and disease “via the vivid images he sees in movies” and Clare by Tony Lawrence (Australia, 2015, 18 mins) in which a girl “finds herself in a strange place where she is confronted by desire” (program note).
One of the festival’s key pleasures for Sargeant is its Super 8 Masterclass and the showing of its outcomes on the final night of the festival. Central to it is hands-on filmmaking: “We’re keeping Super 8 alive. There’s something about the tactility of Super 8—and about working with actual film in general. It’s a magical aspect of cinema, being able to feel film. [The participants] might not necessarily be ‘Super 8’ people but they’ve done something in Super 8 and have learned something.”
REV in 2016 features 143 films, 14 world premieres and 42 Australian premieres. Sargeant muses, “Once I start talking about it, I think, ‘This is just insane. How did we do this?’” What pleases him above all, with his love of the big screen is a new generation of 18 year-olds who are coming to the festival and are excited by cinema in an era which challenges the form’s durability. Jack Sargeant is a believer: “People do actually like cinema and they need cinema and it matters to them.”
From the Editors: Don’t miss Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog, a funny, moving and philosophical coming to terms with loss—of a dog, a mother and a lover—and made with the experimental verve we expect of a great artist, not least in the work’s implicit homage to the home movie and 20th century experimental filmmaking.
Dale Harding, Mardgin dhoolbala milgangoondhi – rifles hidden in the cliffs, 2016
Dharawal kiskisiwin (remembering Dharawal) is a digital animation of Google map images charting the journey from the Dharawal Land Council along the roads, past the brick homes, through fields and into thick eucalypt scrub. We arrive at a scene of cliffs on private land in Appin, not far from the outer Sydney suburb of Campbelltown. In this animation, the cliffs are marked with a yellow pin titled “Site of Appin Massacre.” A parabolic sound cone above the animation wails an offering in Cree and English to the Dharawal for their loss. This pin is not just a mark made as part of the recent artwork by Canadian First Nations artist Cheryl L’Hirondelle—seeking to stand in solidarity—but in fact one of many such points that can be found on multiple Australian maps with a quick internet search: maps that identify over 30 such sites of frontier atrocities on the mainland that range from Appin in 1816 to Conniston in the Northern Territory in 1928.
“The upper scene depicts a massacre that took place early in the 20th century,” explains a text about the work of Gija artist Queenie McKenzie, which she painted in 1996 to map one of many stories from the Kimberley. “It is part of Aboriginal oral history but is not reflected in Western written histories of the area.” This statement is, in essence, the key curatorial premise of Campbelltown Arts Centre’s With Secrecy and Despatch; a bold political response, it protests the national amnesia about colonisation and, in particular, the denial of massacres—stories of great loss that have been written out of our nation’s history. This is an undeniably important topic deserving of attention. The only issue is that the exhibition presents this notion at such volume and from so many focal points that it could have in fact benefited from being three separate shows.
Visitors are welcomed into the gallery by two imposing black walls that block the standard sightlines through to the sunlit garden. The black vinyl title and introductory text on these walls is intentionally hard to read without making an effort and moving across the space. It is a clever device that gives the text the appearance of having been etched into the wall, as on a stone memorial, and implicates us in a responsibility to seek out the knowledge it offers. These words explain that using April 17 2016—the bicentenary of the Appin Massacre—as a catalyst (it could have been exhibition one), this show features 10 newly commissioned works by First Nations Canadians and Aboriginal Australian artists to “not only speak of the Appin Massacre,” as curators Tess Allas and David Garneau explain, “but to brutalities that have occurred globally” (exhibition two). A three-year-long project in the making, With Secrecy and Despatch—titled after the words Governor Lachlan Macquarie used to describe the way in which the Dharawal people were to be forcibly removed from their land and killed if they resisted—also brings together 13 existing works by 11 Aboriginal artists that map massacres across the country, on loan from three major cultural institutions (exhibition three).
Fiona Foley, Annihilation of the Blacks, 1986, courtesy National Museum of Australia
Regardless of the show’s scale, there is one very strong and pertinent leitmotif that, as you enter the large open-plan central gallery space, is made immediately and unapologetically apparent; it is just simply ‘massacre.’ The earliest work in the show, Fiona Foley’s 1986 sculpture Annihilation of the Blacks, commands centre stage and sets the tone. A political work at its outset, Foley’s sculpture—as Allas explained in her curatorial walk-through— is now also bound up in the Howard-era History Wars once its removal from public display at the Australian Museum had been requested.
The work comprises a branch suspended between two stripped-bare trees from which hang nine coarse ropes, of the type used to dry fish in the tropics. Only on this occasion, the ropes are nooses that suspend nine small, black, carved wooden bodies, while a single white faceless figure stands by below. In this display dramatic lighting scatters shadows of the bodies across the plinth below and well beyond, over the floor of the gallery, so that visitors cannot avoid their presence. Like McKenzie’s, Foley’s work was made in reference to a story passed down via oral history; relating the atrocities at Susan River in Queensland, as well as the actions of colonial soldiers in suspending the bodies of those killed from trees as a warning to any survivors. Each work in this show carries this intensity, this weight of words spoken and unspoken, stories that have been told—as this show reminds us—in contemporary Aboriginal art for over 30 years.
Tony Albert, Blood water, 2016, courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney.
Colour is also used to dramatic effect in tying together the show’s 30 diverse works. Allas explained that a distinct shade of red emerged independently in the commissioned works of Tony Albert, Vernon Ah Kee, Frances Belle Parker and Marianne Nicolson, as well as already being present in the works of Judy Watson, Freddie Timms and re-enforced in a second state of Laurel Nannup’s woodblock print. It is of course a confronting and unmistakably ‘bloody’ shade that was also selected for the exhibition room brochure’s paper. As well, the same dense matte black of the entrance walls that defines Albert’s works punctuates the soft grey and white of the main open gallery space, as well as all four smaller rooms off to the sides. This darkness sucks the light out of any perception of depth in these rooms and there is a sense of claustrophobia, particularly in the space featuring works by Nannup, Ah Kee, and Dale Harding.
Harding’s commissioned installation, Mardgin dhoolbala milgangoondhi—rifles hidden in the cliffs 2016, presents just that: a ‘cliff-face’ of rawhide marked with ochre outlines—“splatters,” Allas calls them—of handprints, shackles and period guns. Indistinct in dim lighting, like a sepia-toned recollection, for Harding this work honours both the loss of and the acts of resistance by his ancestors, for whom the sandstone cliffs of their country in central Queensland became “keeping and hiding places.” On the opposing wall, Ah Kee’s ‘portraits’ of violence, Brutalities 2016, offer the singular refection in this show on the image of the perpetrator. The three images present faces dehumanised, almost dematerialized: eyes and mouths blackened depths with all surrounding form and skin seemingly blown apart.
Genevieve Grieves, Remember, 2016.
In this room the air feels thick and sound is muffled by the carpeted floor; visitors speak in whispers. An awareness of periods of silence weighs heavily in this exhibition as it is punctuated every 15 minutes by the crackling melody of God Save the King and a gunshot, marking the start of Adrian Stimson’s two-channel video AS ABOVE SO BELOW 2016, a drone footage homage to the landscapes that bore witness to the massacres in Canada’s Cypress Hills and in Appin. Stimson’s loop is accompanied by the haunting voice of a child repeating “remember,” part of Genevieve Grieves’ memorial installation of the same name. At other times, and across other spaces, it is also possible to glean Nardi Simpson and Amanda Brown’s commissioned soundscape: the whip of a lyrebird and an eerie melody that echoes a child crying—the sound believed to have given away the Dharawal people’s hiding place to colonial officers.
Tying the concept of this incredibly ambitious and timely project in with a local atrocity, the Appin Massacre, its bicentenary and with an international residency is the brilliance and complication in the messages the show leaves us with. What is unequivocal, however, is the overall greater historical and political purpose. In her commanding video work HUNTING GROUND (2016), Julie Gough instates snippets of accounts of violent encounters from over 170 texts about violent encounters found online over just the one mapped record that references massacres which took place across Tasmania. She writes in the accompanying text, “The evidence of what happened here is often marked with absence…absence of an acknowledgement of these ‘difficult’ histories…” Secrecy and Despatch not only acknowledges, it adds a much needed layer of visual, conceptual, personal and political context to those pins that map the true histories of colonial Australia.
Vernon Ah Kee, Brutalities, 2016, courtesy the artist & Milani Gallery, Brisbane.
You’ll find more images from the exhibition and an interview with the curators here.
–
Campbelltown Arts Centre: With Secrecy and Despatch, curators, Tess Allas (Australia), David Garneau (Canada), Campbelltown, 9 April–13 June 2016
I have never understood the hang-ups people have about white cubes. The more you try to remake and remodel its void—let alone vanquish it—the more you prove its power. Surely the white cube has become a most promiscuous public space wherein anything is acceptable and all is possible.
How many times have you walked into a gallery or museum whose white cube zone has been deterritorialised, deconstructed, demolished? Walls are punctured, flooring is covered, air ducts are exposed. Or, frames, partitions, boxes, shelving and rooms are constructed as metaphorical refugee encampments or sites of resistant occupancy. For many, this enlivens contemporary art’s critique of architectural politics—a shallow view, considering the cultural context within which galleries and museums ape lifestyle trends of customisation and empowerment, while IKEA and Bunnings encourage you to transform your domestic space into a personalised white cube. The Block vs The Sydney Biennale. Grand Designs vs The Turner Prize. Is there really a difference?
In an exhibition featuring Cassandra Tytler’s video installation, I’m Sorry (2016), this familiar scenography appears once more. Another artist-run space with concrete floor, white walls, track lighting. Another box-room built within the space, sitting like a defiant edifice, reclaiming the space to make a personalised art statement. That’s how it looks from the outside, what with its ugly exposed ‘interior’ wall studs and framing, the kind that Institutional Critique loves to ‘expose’ within a gallery or museum.
The difference with I’m Sorry, though, lies in its awareness not only of the pitfalls of even bothering to critique ‘art’ (what is it with artists doing it all the time?), but of the precise reasons for making a shitty Bunnings box construction inside a gallery space. This work is not about where you are in the gallery: it’s about where this box comes from. Like a random container drop, it imports a plain suburban room into the gallery. You enter through a Bunnings door to find yourself inside a scaled-down living room of sorts—low ceiling, white walls, faux-Afghan carpet, a small table with flowers in a vase. Two ‘windows’ (actually flat-screen monitors) on the left and right walls are each positioned at chest height. It’s neither a house nor a home; it’s just a dumb space, a petite hell for its inhabitants. This room is a domestic void, placed within the void of the white cube. As a visitor to the gallery where art and reality pathologically mirror each other, one is now trapped inside this portal to the domestic world where shit happens.
All public galleries these days run boutique vodka tastings, kids’ craft workshops, comedian talks, themed cooking classes and senior citizens’ walk-throughs—for even the most rabidly, politically oriented contemporary art exhibitions. Like the medieval ‘city square’ notion of congregational activities which contemporary urban planners flaunt in all global cities desperate to be socially relevant while hysterically building pseudo-inner-city lifestyle developments, public galleries domesticate their space as an antidote to the solipsistic core which silently throbs in so-called socially motivated art. Amid this neurotic, curated reassurance that art and society miraculously mandate each other’s co-dependency, how does an artist today even frame the outside world, let alone provide commentary from an artistic perspective?
I’m Sorry, Cassandra Tytler,
The ‘window’ flat screens of I’m Sorry feature Tytler dressed and made-up as a man. It’s ineffectual and unconvincing: elfin short hair, some fake stubble, no lipstick or eye-liner—a drag king shopping at IKEA. He first appears on the right screen, banging on the glass, barking again and again and again, “I’m sorry.” We know the story: he is the lover/partner/husband singing a pathetic refrain of repentance which fuels the cyclical nature of domestic violence. It’s never a one-off or last time; only ever a loop, a return, a repeat. He exits the window on the right and appears on the window on the left. And starts up again with his banging and pleading: insistent, dogged, irritated by having to state his case. He gets angrier with each mantric utterance. He moves to the right window again. Then the left. Then the right. Then the left. By now, he has dissolved into a breathless, indignant cartoon of frustration. The remorse faked earlier has been retracted; he’s now insulted by having to even acknowledge wrong or be engaged in any ridiculous reconciliation. The apologetic has now transformed into the apoplectic.
It’s a queasy performance. Firstly, Tytler moves from drama school acting into eventual full-blown melodramatic mime. Unlike most contemporary video art which now employs the Cate Blanchetts of the world to sycophantically infuse its art with cinematic performativity, Tytler’s performance in I’m Sorry mirrors the inauthentic posturing of the repeat offender inured to both clinical strategies by therapists and passive-aggressive manipulation by do-gooders.
Secondly, I’m caught remembering how embarrassing it is when you see how pathetically people act when cornered, exposed, caught, tried. No-one hangs their heads in shame these days. Everyone feels they have the right to fuck up how they choose. The socio-cultural persistence of domestic violence is bound to send subliminal messages to the ethically-skewed mindsets of its perpetrators, who feel violated by the humiliating exposure of their private domestic hell. Like Tytler’s ‘everyman,’ the abuser feels more wronged than wrong. Standing inside the crappy Bunnings room built by the artist, I thought of countless dads fixing up their houses, smoothing over their problems, patching up their relationships, plumbing their anger, building up their frustration, hammering away in self-loathing. The proliferation of TV reality shows predicated on constructing dream homes built by hunky metrosexual elves accrues an icky reactionary prescience under these conditions. The flaccid melt-down performance of I’m Sorry amplifies these connections: dad is just a dick.
And then there’s that sound heard throughout the video. A non-stop banging on the window, like the Big Bad Wolf pleading to be let in. It’s the distinctive sound of a hollow boxy boom, frail in force yet ungainly, articulated by upper-bass-range thudding. It’s the sound of someone gagged and trapped in a box begging to be let out. Or the sound of yet another temp employee with a clip-board wandering through the suburbs trying to get you to change from one branded service to another, for no good reason other than flat-lined marketplace competition. Or the sound of a million tradesmen fabricating a million boxes for designer shanty towns, bashing away with tools bought at Bunnings. Or the sound of your neighbours banging on your wall. Or you on theirs. It’s the sound of the outside world, never leaving you alone, even after you have modelled your petty square meterage into that IKEA image of retro-Euro-Modernism aping Bauhaus-revivalist contemporary art museum café design. Ironically, it’s also the sound of pseudo-cinematic video art projections inside black boxes inside white cubes (or disused industrial sites à la mode) for biennales around the world. A psycho-acoustics demonstrating the deafness of video artists fawning over their hi-res imagery but deaf to anything sonic, aural or vocal. Here, it’s the sound of the outside world banging on the windows of art. With its consistent performativity and tonality, I’m Sorry unapologetically has nothing to say about art, galleries, white cubes and their glorified relevance to the outside world. Apology gratefully accepted.
–
Cassandra Tytler, exhibition, Tock Tock, work I’m Sorry (2016), video installation, Gallery One Trocadero Art Space, Footscray, Melbourne, 18 May-4 June
Cassandra Tytler works with single channel video, performance and installation, focusing “on processes of embodiment of the gallery space and how movement, vision and audio can create an intersubjective feedback between viewer and artwork… [with] an ongoing examination of masquerade and mimicry in video-based practice.” She has presented live video performances and exhibited works in Australia, Paris, Turku (Finland) and Miami, has a Masters degree (RMIT University, 2003) and is currently a PhD candidate at Monash University, Melbourne.
Margaret Cameron was one of those idiosyncratic performers who—like Judy Davis, Gillian Jones and Cate Blanchett—refashion language as they speak, finding unanticipated spaces and patterns that yield surprising meanings and emotions and thrillingly blur demarcations between character, persona and self. When I read Cameron’s I Shudder to Think: Performance as Philosophy (2015, launched 2016), I hear her and, something more, having seen her perform since the mid 1980s, she is present. But Cameron’s aim is not to revive the memories of privileged audiences, but to deeply engage any reader.
“I hope to lift the words off the page and invite you to audience the stage of acting in the body of the performer.”
She will do the lifting, you will be an active recipient (recipiency is everything in I Shudder to Think and “audience” is a verb with “muscle”) and the stage is not a room, it is the performer’s body.
To achieve this, Cameron’s language has to be special. It is, because it stands alone as poetry of a high order, not only in the performance texts but also in in the essay (part of her PhD) which occupies the first 65 pages of the book, drawing in threads from the scripts that follow in order to weave thought that is restless, theoretical and anecdotal, exulting in a sense of creative renewal, always personal. The theorising lightly anchors the restlessness so that the shifts between thought and recollection, feeling and method cohere and, as in the effect of Cameron’s speech, surprise.
“Feeling thought” is central to the book, experienced by Cameron when a child before the arrival of language, “before form” and, like a Romantic poet, yearned for thereafter. But how do you conceptualise, without divide, the oneness of feeling and thought? Through language, and in Cameron’s case, through performance. She was a prize-winning young elocutionist, if told by adjudicators “my voice was a little shrill. (in-breath) I was highly strung. Who wouldn’t be?”
“All that poetry and all that speaking aloud of thought and sensation had given me a sense of sound…I responded to cadence, caesura, lilt and syntax, was sensitive to modulation, could inflect, articulate with precision and I resonated, Yes, I resonated, but I do not think I resounded.” The desire to ‘resound,’ to be responsive and responded to by others, nature, objects and self drives Cameron throughout I Shudder to Think, but it is both acutely realized and hard won, and it requires thought.
If elocution was to give Cameron a voice, thought did not come easily; at high school she feared “the ‘amputation’ of my sensibilities by the fear of this fear” of thought. A sense of threatened wholeness sat side by side with anxiety about ability right up to the point when the adult Cameron who will write this book “decided to to ‘stop acting’ and start writing. I wondered if I could find words that were not a source of ridicule and alienation.” She manages this late in her career by creating a persona, Regina Josefine del Mouse (in Opera for a small mammal, 2012-14), who is proud of being small and thinks big, thus assuaging a sense of inferiority, and acknowledging “that an artist very often moves towards their greatest difficulty. It is the very thing in the way, the uncomfortable grit of one’s nature and biography that rubs.” So she proceeds to think, working at her irritants, making a PhD, yielding pearls. “The very Grit that worries is to become Pearl./ In the nitty-gritty We change Our Self /By way of Our Reception” (Opera for a Small Mammal).
The ‘grit’ is deeply felt. Two brief poems prelude the essay proper, each involving a panicky exit from a theatre—one in profound envy of a male singer (“Is he the only living being in the whole eternal universe?”). It leaves her howling: “I have swallowed the night in my lungs.” The other, motive unspecified, results in a dash into the dark to “gulp… down the wind and the rain./ (On the out breath) Ah the night!” Feelings are frequently portrayed in terms of extreme physical states, highlighting a strong correspondence between Cameron and nature: “I am a tree stars now for eyes…” Elsewhere it might be a rock and always the move “in/out” between self and nature. When she comes to write her solo performance Things Calypso wanted to say (1989, published in R Allen and K Pearlman, Performing the Unnameable, Currency Press with RealTime, 1999), it was another young mother she turned to, director-writer Jenny Kemp: “With Kemp’s vision and reception the work becomes cartography, a mapping of inner and outer perspectives that change place.” It is Kemp’s “conceptual dramaturgy” that aids in completing the looping of thought and perception. Her project receives sustenance from the thinking and writing of Helene Cixous, Trin T Min-Ha, Luce Irigaray, Marguerite Duras, choreographer and dance conceptualist Deborah Hay and Kemp and Cameron’s conviction that she is writing as a woman, no matter at times how difficult she feels it.
To explain her thesis, Cameron keeps her thinking performative: her works are “scored;” she will “unpack a kind of traveling methodology” in a “performed exegesis;” her work is “sculptural;” “scripts or scores are defined but the actual performance is ‘played’;” “It is easy to do the moves and say the words, but what else is happening?” That is the question. The answer was to be found in perception. She writes that the American choreographer with whom she worked closely from the mid 90s returned her to her body: “…a dancer asked me what I was doing with my body [in a performance]. I said, ‘I am checking I have one’.” This was not simply a physical return, but one rooted in perceptual phenomenology and with conceptual potential to arrive at ‘feeling thought.’ She learnt from Hay that “perception…is the work…. a rule of art and artistic practice. Now the question always returns to how—returning and returning as an infinitely regenerating and self-generating proposal.”
There are blocks to this regeneration, not only ‘the grit,’ but in one of the most alarming of ‘felt’ and panicked images in Cameron’s writing, something larger: “[I have] a crab clamped on my face.” She asks, “How might I…prise from my body a socio-political personal (and cultural) narrative that clings and gags? What is it—a kind of exoskeleton? It is on me and there is no space at all between it and me. Instead I ask: how is it?” She will meet profound anxiety with thought.
A small irritant—a dress purchased but then not wanted—can provoke thought: “What if the dress is a question?” And larger thoughts: “A costume a question?” And on to the nature of performance. “The artist is always first audience to…kinetic transformations. She is the ’I’ yearning for a dimensional experience of the world, the ‘I’ that hears herself hearing herself hear, sees herself seeing herself see, feels herself feeling herself feel. She is the questioner.” In this perpetual loop of self-interrogation “Thinking becomes “an experiment, a practice of thought…Nietzsche’s preparation for the ‘eternal return’ as perceptual …” But some blocks to regeneration are large: where does one fit in the Cultural Corpus?
One of the artist’s irritants is about feeling insignificant, as artist and person, “of not being perceived.” A joke Cameron hears in Berlin is liberating, “The elephant said to the mouse, You are very small, The mouse said to the elephant, I have been sick.” Cameron adopts a persona, Regina Josefine del Mouse, for Opera for a small mammal. She writes, “The mouse stands in for the ‘I’—also the ‘I’ of a larger body, the Cultural Corpus,” asserting that “Difference in Size is is not the thing/ That makes the Difference,/ but rather it is the State of Our Self.” This beautiful final work by Cameron is a declaration, a performative lecture, a summation of thinking with feeling, with and through the body and an 18th century neoclassical ‘I am dealing with big ideas’ boldness, capitalising the first letters of key words. Her self is firm, she is the Cultural Corpus, a mouse and much more despite her introduction: “her domain is the lowercase letters of art,” her people those “who live in the dark behind the scenes.” She is always the democrat, challenging her own status by crying out, “Off with Our Head!”
Cameron arrives at art’s purpose and nature, “Germinating possibilities and delaying closure, opening a view elsewhere, art is a mutable knowledge practice …” “Art is a friend who takes my hand with irony and a libido to generate possibility when closure threatens.” In her performance texts, closure is flatness—domestic for Calypso and mocked “flat flat flat” by Regina—or a drying wind spoken against by the child of a drunken father in a 2005-8 work, the proscenium. The flatness of not being perceived is felt at its worst in Knowledge and Melancholy (1997-2005)—“If you do not perceive me / I will cease to exist”—a devastating account of love betrayed in which Cameron’s Actress persona becomes the maddened Charlotte Corday of Marat/Sade, her final words, “remember me.”
But there’s life in her yet: “The actress dies or falls asleep from boredom. Wait four beats and snore loudly. Fin.” There is wisdom too in Knowledge and Melancholy: “Understanding loss is the recognition that we have loved/ What a strange lesson.”
Questioning, thinking, writing, these will regenerate the writer: “[B]ecoming palpable, palpable/ Engendering Our Pearl against/ The drying wind of all that is Known” returns dimensionality and body.
Language, at one with and in perpetual dialogue with thought and body, powers Cameron’s writing. Her poetry, its sensual and sometimes visceral engagement with the world, makes the exchange palpable in the act of writing: “I shuck the flesh from the shell of the word to hear it resound in the empty pencil-line of its shape. The word, like a conch and like your presence, becomes a greater ear through which to hear my writing amplified (made more not necessarily louder).”
When young Cameron knew she did not ‘resound,’ but in Opera for a small mammal, she knows what she can achieve and with what means: “we hunt the Scent of Thought/ with the pores of Our Flesh…./ Our ears and nostrils flare for Resonance.”
Margaret Cameron will be remembered, her presence felt: “The words are not over once they are said, Speaking is a choreography of the breath…I place the hands of my voice on words, on you who listen and touch a touch that is also within me.”
Read Cameron aloud, starting not with the essay, but in the middle of the book with The proscenium, a necessary return to childhood pain vividly realized, and you will feel the pulse of her poetry and be touched. She writes, “Language is a tool to revolutionise my reception of the world.” Hers does ours.
A last word, about the book’s title. It’s not simply negative, a very real physical response to anticipated fear, but for Cameron a necessity, a shuddering with which to think and to begin again: “[In] the dark depressions of the flat-flat-flat/ We do shudder to think.”
Profound thanks to Ladyfinger Press for publishing an invaluable work, more than a book, that will profit performers and readers for many years to come.
Margaret Cameron died in 2014 after an extensive career in which she worked on stages large and small and other spaces with Richard Wherrett, Nico Lathouris, Chris Barnett, Arne Neeme, Murray Copeland, Rex Cramphorn, Jenny Kemp, Deborah Hay and David Young, among others. The writing in I Shudder to Think was originally a component of her PhD in conjunction with a series of live works: Bang! A Critical Fiction, Knowledge and Melancholy and the proscenium.
–
In 2000, Virginia Baxter interviewed Margaret Cameron and Ian Scott when they were performing Joanna Murray-Smith’s Nightfall, directed by Jenny Kemp, for the Sydney Theatre Company. It offers further insights into Cameron the actor.
Our obituary for Margaret includes links to RealTime reviews of her performances.
Margaret Cameron, I Shudder to Think, Performance as Philosophy, Ladyfinger Press, Brisbane, 2016
From Ladyfinger Press a copy of Margaret Cameron’s book of her performance scripts, reflections on the very personal roots of their creation and an emerging philosophy of being and performing.
Email us at giveaways [at] realtimearts.net with your name, postal address and phone number. Include ‘Giveaway’ and the name of the item in the subject line.
Offer closes 22 June.
RealTime issue #133 June-July 2016
Revolutions, Fight with a Stick
I’m sitting with 20 spectators on a small wooden platform. We’re very close to performer Sean Marshall Jr who is at a table with a small stack of books. Next to him is an ancient brass bed covered in a mountain of white sheets. Hidden under the linen, someone (Delia Brett) has been rolling back and forth in an almost imperceptible wave-like motion. The wrinkles in the sheets are what hold my attention—it’s more about the fabric than the figure beneath.
We’ve been confined to a very small room. Clues to a greater expanse are evident in Nancy Tam’s sound design—small creaks and a clarinet-like drone issuing from beyond the room suggest distance. The man begins to read from one of the books: “The reward of patience is patience. The cure for boredom is curiosity.” Aphorisms. The more I hear, the funnier and more meaningless they become. And the queasier I get. For some time I’ve been feeling mildly disoriented. I notice the bed has moved away from me. When did this happen? I realise with astonishment that it’s actually the audience platform that’s been moving—backward, inch by inch. The man has been following with us while the bed and back wall have receded. The plywood walls have stretched: the room is becoming a tunnel, longer by the minute. The bed is now way back there, and even the aphorism-speaker is getting smaller.
His search for some kind of truth in the book has felt sincere, as if finding the right tired cliché will give him the key to something. As the interior setting becomes somewhat miniaturised through distance, the whole scenography becomes less about the man’s search and more about relationships between things, audience included. I’ve read that the making of Revolutions was influenced by philosopher Jane Bennett’s theory of “vibrant matter” with its agency of things, human and non-human, and how “assemblages” of matter (a term from Deleuze) work in confederation to produce situations of shorter or longer duration. Fight With a Stick claims to have rehearsed “in confederation” with found and constructed materials to create Revolutions.
This becomes most evident when cracks appear in the walls and new objects begin to slide into the long tunnel. They’re rough, discarded objects: beach-worn planks or small timbers with large rusted hinges. As the man fades, the objects take over. They become aggressive. A huge stone-like block pushes in and out on the right. Then the back wall presses forward, sweeping the bed, table and other objects along, compressing the space (the man has disappeared unnoticed). Just before crashing into us, the carnage screeches to a halt.
Revolutions, Fight with a Stick
With an earth-shaking rumble the whole scene now explodes in slow motion. The wall on the right breaks apart in many sections. Each section floats away into the now visible warehouse. A far-away wall of concrete is revealed. It seems to have broken into geometrical sections that slide in and out of each other like puzzle pieces. This is a video projection of the wall onto itself. Closer, on my right, the moving pieces of wall pick up another projection—the grain of the plywood surfaces projected onto themselves. Video artist Josh Hite employed this technique—taking content from the actual space and disorienting the viewer by projecting it back onto itself as a moving image—in Steppenwolf, the company’s previous show.
When one of the walls suddenly rockets across the warehouse, followed by a second, a third and then several more, the effect is both terrifying and exhilarating. Tam’s sound installation thunders in sympathy. She’s mixed outside traffic, including rumbling transit trains, with the natural reverberating chamber of the venue. The walls, debris and rolling audience platform (all designed by performance artist Jay White) have been freed from the earlier human-scale domestic setting. We’ve been set adrift in an expanding cosmos. Revolutions seems to be about this relationship between our little domestic worlds and a nonhuman immensity of which we are only a part. The title suggests the traditional impulse to change society, but through a spatial exercise of portraying entropy we come to see our efforts in a much broader context.
Fight With a Stick, in only its second production, has put down a marker. The company’s collaborative approach is truly interdisciplinary and its spatial performance design is unique, both in concept and visceral affect. I find it particularly exciting that the work appeals to theatre and visual arts audiences alike. Historically, this relationship has been fruitful but uneasy. In Revolutions the opposing time-scales of gallery art and theatrical performance find revelatory convergence.
Sean Marshall Jnr, Revolutions, Fight with a Stick
Fight With a Stick, Revolutions, co-directors Alex Lazaridis Ferguson, Steven Hill, set design Jay White, sound design Nancy Tam, video design Josh Hite, collaborators Delia Brett, Beckett Ferguson, Sean Marshall Jr, Carmine Santavenere, Paula Viitanen; The Warehouse, Vancouver, Canada, 19-29 May
In Yirra Yaakin’s So Long Suckers—cheekily promoted as “Bangarra meets Beckett”—three ochre-faced men (Ian Wilkes, Emmanuel James Brown, Peter Docker), each bearing in stately fashion a tombstone-like box, enter a black corner stage draped with a veil of dangling chains. The ensuing action mirrors Beckett’s dramatisations of the self-conscious discourse of characters imprisoned within an indeterminate theatrical space. Although the text has a slightly laboured poetry about it, the performance rests upon the simple but powerful bearing of the performers, with choreography by Dalisa Pigram (with Jacob Lehrer) supporting Kyle J Morrison’s spare, occasionally knockabout direction.
Darren Reutens—Dazastah of the leading Perth hip hop band Downsyde—is visible throughout providing low-key atmospheric music while the fall and clinking of chains provides the drama’s acoustic signature. Short movement interludes evoke mournful dancing. Wilkes’ steely balanced poses, arms wide, and measured liquid dance phrases, are choreographic highlights.
Suckers is closer to Beckett’s precursors such as August Strindberg (Dream Play, 1907) and the German Expressionists of the 1920-30s. Echoing Sartre’s No Exit (1944), we observe three ghostly presences marooned in an uncertain afterlife wherein they struggle to recall their past and atone for their failings. This is very much an Australian post-colonial limbo. Encounters with “police, grog and jail” recur, with recollections of a party—or parties—that went wrong and a drunken drive along country—or urban—roads—that ended in a crash. The men have lost their heads—literally and metaphorically.
So Long Suckers, Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company
The narrative, if that’s the right word, is cyclic and enclosed. Motifs are introduced like keys in a choral development. The characters proclaim that they may be identified by their braces—red, green and white—leading to scuffles over ‘colour.’ Uncertainty permeates their memories as they grope for clarity. That horrendous motif of colonialism, the theft and display of the heads of natives and criminals, recurs as a particularly painful recollection. Each has lost his head, partly through his own actions—compromised, addicted—and partly at the hands of violent, legally protected oppressors. The tombstone-like boxes become, in the end, the tightly clasped heads which they reclaim.
As in Expressionism, the work is rife with Christian symbolism. Aside from redemption through suffering, the trio is initially introduced as the Three Kings or Wise Men, now Fallen, having (like the archangel Lucifer) lost their kingdoms and been forced to cross the desert. They joke that the cars are their camels, but the humour is sporadic and slurred by the grog.
The text for the production was compiled by Peter Docker from workshops and storytelling sessions with Bunuba Cultural Enterprises in Fitzroy Crossing, which involved his fellow performers. Tales of encounters with transit security guards on late night trains, of near misses on the road and the telling of jokes at parties, rest within the overarching Judeo-Christian poetics of the work. These half-remembered yarns act as sketches within a ramshackle structure. Suckers would benefit from dramaturgical and directorial sharpening. There are also several false endings which lead into weighty pauses before the work builds again. Finding heads or identities does not seem to conclude the characters’ journeys and the work drifts on.
So Long Suckers, Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company
The thread which binds these tales is the search for identity, the protagonists coming to realise that they embody Perth warrior Yagan (Wilkes), Bunuba warrior Jandamarra (Brown, whose portrayal introduces the Bunuba language) and Ned Kelly (Docker). The condensed narratives of Yagan and Jandamarra provide a strong historical reference point, locating the origins of contemporary racial torment in the past while sketching a distinguished lineage of Aboriginal resistance into the present.
The history of Kelly’s death mask and its public display received an intriguing twist with recent discoveries regarding the post-execution travels of the bushranger’s head. Docker’s uncritical acceptance of Kelly’s claims to be a displaced Irish resister of British rule and proto-republican recalls the attitudes of post-WWII Australian artists like Sidney Nolan or playwright Douglas Stewart (Ned Kelly, 1942). To compare a self-interested bank robber like Kelly with those who fought to stop white incursions into their territories jars.
Like many new Australian plays produced in a limited funding climate, So Long Suckers would benefit from further development. Nevertheless, it’s a great success, its charm lying in a slightly awkward but engaging blend of Expressionist moroseness and a vaudevillian desire to reprise and reinvent. The combination of motifs and a cyclical structure produces an evocative choral effect well supported by effective design and strong physical expression.
–
Yirra Yaakin & Bunuba Cultural Enterprises, So Long Suckers, director Kyle J Morrison, script Peter Docker and the company, performers Emmanuel James Brown, Ian Wilkes, Peter Docker, sound Darren Reutens, choreography Dalisa Pigram with Jacob Lehrer, design India Mehta, lighting Chris Donnelly; Subiaco Theatre Centre, Perth, 26 May-4 Jun
Studio One at Chunky Move headquarters in Southbank has been converted into a 21st century videodrome: a place where real life and screen life merge, with elements of the techno-surreal.
In the centre of the room a large white panel obscures our view of half the stage space and a flat screen monitor off to the side. Stephen Phillips stands in front of the panel, staring intently into a small video camera on a tripod. A live feed from the camera is displayed on the television screen. A few lights flicker and we hear the crepitations of an old vinyl record playing out its groove at the end of a side—a signal that something needs to be flipped.
A lurid flash, like green lightning, reveals Lauren Langlois standing in the shadows directly behind Phillips, ghosting his slow movements, hidden from the camera. Then she’s gone again.
It’s a spooky scene, artfully composed. Phillips, an actor who worked with Anouk van Dijk on Complexity of Belonging (2014), moves to the other side of the stage. Now he stands watching the television. Langlois begins to rotate her upper body in large circles over her hips, long hair flaring toward the camera. He follows, imitating her screen image.
Lucid, Chunky Move
What does the camera reveal? And what is hidden from the camera, outside of the frame or in the shadows? The action moves behind the large panel. Five cameras, some fixed, some directed by the performers, bring us close-ups and partial views projected in impressive high-definition onto the white panel. We see part of a face resting on the ground, or fingers drumming and dragging, chipped black nail polish glinting under the portable studio lights. Feet or arms appear briefly from behind the screen, and we try to reconcile this glimpse of the real with what the cameras show us.
Throughout, Lucid teases at the edge between screen space and real space, with the performers constantly slipping from one side to the other. With Ben Cobham’s atmospheric lighting and Jethro Woodward’s nervy sound design, it’s not so much an exploration as a mystification. Lucid revels in the glamour of the camera’s incomplete transformations; and our relationship with screens becomes a kind of dark romance.
In one scene, Langlois, partially visible behind the screen, vogues for the camera, smoking a cigarette with exaggerated sensuality; meanwhile, in front of the screen, Phillips plays the role of Hollywood casting agent. “She’s hiding a secret,” he says, wistfully. “She’s hiding a secret but it’s not in her eyes.” He’s looking at the TV, which has been turned away from us. Is he looking at the same image of Langlois as we are, or at a different fantasy woman?
Lucid, Chunky Move
As in a dream, one episode flows easily into the next. It’s as if the world behind the screen were an unconscious mind, a churn of desires and fears. Langlois and Phillips act out scenes from Oliver Stone’s film Platoon (1986) and discuss what it felt like, as a teenager, to see Charlie Sheen inhaling blowback through a gun barrel. Then there are a few lines of an Anne Sexton poem, a fragment of a Greek tragedy and an impersonation of Kayako from the Japanese-American horror trilogy The Grudge. And much more. Formative influences jostle in what seems like a psychoanalytical duet.
And the projected visions that the audience sees? Are these the unreliable insights of a lucid dreamer?
Lucid seems less a work of high-concept contemporary dance than physical theatre with a digital twist. There’s plenty of energetic rushing around as Langlois and Phillips—both wearing nondescript grey—organise the cameras, screens, lights and various props. There is very little dance, and yet the movement is constant, a restless cavalcade of scenes.
There are some interesting similarities in the way that screens and live camera feeds are used in both Lucid and in director Eamon Flack’s Belvoir production of The Glass Menagerie, which, by coincidence, is playing simultaneously next door at the Malthouse Theatre. In both, the screen works like a mechanism of fascination, amplifying our uncertainties about the real and unreal, the material and immaterial, stirring vague passions and deflecting critical reflection.
Compare this with the much edgier, more disconcerting ways in which, say, Benedict Andrews or Atlanta Eke use screens. Although it looks very slick, there is nonetheless something a little vulgar about Lucid. But there are some beautiful stage images, particularly in the use of the large central panel which is attached to the floor at one end like a giant flag and can be rotated in a full circle.
In the last moments of Lucid, Phillips and Langlois push this panel around and around and around, a vast sweeping motion, scattering the dream material. And then suddenly the performers are gone, disappearing into the shadows. All that is left is the spinning screen, slowing to stillness.
Lucid, Chunky Move
Chunky Move, Lucid, concept, direction, choreography Anouk van Dijk, dramaturg Anny Mokotow, performers Lauren Langlois, Stephen Phillips, composer Jethro Woodward, lighting Ben Cobham, video realisation Blair Hart, video system design Pete Brundle, James Sandri; Chunky Move Studios, Melbourne, 26 May-17 June
As the performance draws to a close and I’m wondering what to do with a welling tear, a woman sitting behind me promptly reminds me where I am with, “Well, that was cheery!”
Commissioned by Ilbijerri Theatre in 1993, Jane Harrison’s Stolen is now a classic, studied by many in school and extensively toured, though for me, this production is a first. Mounted by the newly minted National Theatre of Parramatta, directed by the ever inventive dancer/choreographer Vicki Van Hout, the production is clearly attracting an even wider audience.
Rather than a stark re-telling of painful history, Stolen is an often playful account of dark times initially seen through the eyes of five Aboriginal children who’ve experienced the dire effects of a government assimilationist policy of enforced removal from their families and institutionalisation.
Sandy (Kerri Simpson) is constantly on the move, searching for home. Ruby (Berthalia Selina Reuben) is forced to work as a maid, mistreatment leading her to the edge of madness. Ann (Matilda Brown) is adopted by a white family and forever conflicted. Removed from her parents, Shirley (Henrietta Baird) in turn has her own children removed. Jimmy (Matthew Cooper) suicides when he learns the mother who spent her life looking for him has died before they can be reunited.
Van Hout’s production whirls into vivid life as each member of the agile ensemble embodies versions of themselves at different ages as well as other characters, animals and mythic figures. They’re aided in these transformations by design elements created by Imogen Ross and Van Hout. Sheets of cardboard littering the stage are casually folded into objects: a reclining chair, a kennel, a gift package, a cut-out baby. Van Hout describes these objects in her program note as being used “like we would dancing feathers which when finished with are tucked back into the folds of our skirts, to be replaced by leaves or small branches acting as spears or the beaks of cranes, perhaps the motion of the west wind or of the fog rolling off the mountains.” Recalling the wildly idiosyncratic work of the Tjanpi Desert Weavers, a large onstage tree, its branches snaking into the stage space, is yarn-bombed with strands of multi-coloured wool.
Stolen, National Theatre of Parramatta
photo Amanda James
Stolen, National Theatre of Parramatta
The swirling shift between character and place is enhanced with tightly executed choreographed sequences. Speech is frequently accompanied by movement: Shirley distractedly snaps her fingers as she speaks; Ruby becomes a lifeless form pushed across the floor on the feet of the others as they spit out the instructions of her oppressors: “Cook for me, Ruby,” “Clean for me, Ruby.” As Sandy tells us how his mother was charged with child neglect by welfare authorities when they discovered an out of date can of peas in her cupboard, he performs a version of that ‘magic three’ shell game involving a cup and a disappearing pea and concludes by angrily kicking the table away. Jimmy, now incarcerated, is a fighter who turns violence on himself and has to be restrained, red gloves peeled from his fists and laid at the foot of the tree.
In these and other scenes in the play, memories cut like sharp stones tossed by a whirlwind. Despite the pace and humour of Van Hout’s production, an overwhelming sense of sad inevitability pervades.
Phil Downing’s score adds to the urgency of the telling. On the run again, Sandy’s flight is accompanied by rapid percussion followed first by a sudden flurry, like the wings of a disturbed bird, and then the beat of a train. “Can’t I stay here?” he pleads. Other sequences combine sounds (rooster crows) and words (“Willy, don’t get caught!”). Visual elements in the form of projections are also effective. A domestic blind becomes the page on which Jimmy’s mother writes the letters to her son that he never receives.
The indignities suffered by the children intensify as the performers regularly form a line to compare skin colour or fitness to be “chosen” for weekend release or adoption. The threat of “the Welfare” is ever present. Strangely, this is a mantra many white kids of the era will also recall. It’s as if the evils of government policy were seeping through the entire population via its most vulnerable.
The children and their adult selves fight back. To calm Ruby, who has been molested and “promised not to tell,” a dreaming story is re-enacted in the form of a fight with an invisible Mungee spirit that is devouring humans who are afraid of the dark. Bones are ground and thrown over the evil outcast, rendering it white and therefore able to be seen and defeated. Sandy reassures Ruby “It’s not the dark you need to be afraid of.”
Ann, ostensibly the most successfully assimilated among the children is also among the saddest. Her sense of identity destroyed, she can find no equilibrium with her Aboriginal family who live, not on the land but in a Housing Commission flat (“I just thought it would be different”) and loses all sense of belonging (“Who do I think I am?”).
From time to time, one of the performers sits cross-legged at a small typewriter resting on the roots of the tree. With the echoing of the slowly tapped keys comes a sense that someone, somewhere is getting this all down. Whether in the form of Human Rights reports such as “Bringing Them Home” or plays like Stolen, the truth will be told.
Stolen, National Theatre of Parramatta
National Theatre of Parramatta, Stolen, writer Jane Harrison, director Vicki Van Hout, performers Henrietta Baird, Matilda Brown, Mathew Cooper, Berthalia Selina Reuben, Kerri Simpson, design Imogen Ross, Vicki Van Hout, lighting, video design Toby K, composer, sound designer Phil Downing; Lennox Theatre, Parramatta Riverside, Sydney, 2-17 June
From Asia, with passion and daring Adelaide’s OzAsia Festival is soon to burst into new life with a thrilling program of contemporary performance, film and visual art from China, Taiwan, Japan and, above all, Indonesia, in a welcome move that will reveal some of the cultural scale and complexity of that nation.
The festival’s Artistic Director Joseph Mitchell—former Executive Producer at the Brisbane Festival and Senior Director and Producer at Luminato and the Toronto Festival—recalls being surprised, challenged and awed by Asian performance that breaks with tradition while, curiously, sustaining it.
This is the OzAsia Festival many of us have been waiting for, to see work we’ve only ever read about, glimpsed while travelling or, eager to learn, have never heard of, such is the paucity of contemporary Asian performance reaching Australia despite the dedication of a handful of producers. I met with the exuberant and passionate Mitchell in Sydney shortly after the Adelaide launch of his program.
What drove the choices you made? As the only international arts festival in Australia focused on Asia there’s a great responsibility to ask serious questions about the landscape of contemporary performance across the region and who the artists are breaking new ground. We’re not aligned to any aspect of tradition, like Chinese New Year celebrations; OzAsia is an arts festival in which we get a better sense of contemporary Asia. The festival brief is enormous; we’re talking about two-thirds of the world’s population.
What does Japan’s Miss Revolutionary Idol Berserker exemplify about your program? They’re a group of 30 young artists living around Shinjuku in Tokyo. They’re not interested in traditional performance or text-based performance or replicating performing art practices from the West They’re exploring the boundaries of art on their own terms, which is what OzAsia is about. It’s a complete amalgam of audience immersion, multimedia projection, theatricality and fast-pace choreographed movement. But if you said it was dance or theatre to a dance or theatre person they’d get upset. It’s not like anything you’ve seen before. They have a cult following in Japan and play in dingey 100-150 seat venues. I’ve seen them twice in Japan with audiences that might include a 50-year old businessman curious enough to go on his own or young uni students who’ve heard about a show where anything can happen.
They perform with such self-confidence that you take the show on as it is. You have to take your shoes off, wear a raincoat and you get pummelled with seaweed and tofu—the stereotypes of Japanese culture thrown in your face. They dance precisely with fluoro lights but at the same time it’s chaotic, with a lot of video projection and spoken word harking back to the young Japanese of the 1970s dissociating themselves from the culture of American occupation as well as from Japanese tradition and finding their own sense of identity. You can read all that in the work or just enter the madness for 45 minutes and say Wow!
Indonesia features strongly in your program. Tell ne about Teater Garasi?
[See p 20 for an interview with Yudi Ahmad Tajudin.]
Teater Garasi have built a body of work not from text or improvisation or dance, but fusing styles in a process of their own involving history and politics and issues of wealth and poverty, the rural and the urban and asking ‘are we ready to be a democracy?’ Again, like Miss Revolutionary their work is immersive, someone will give you beer or beg or ask you for identification. The Streets is dance theatre interspersed with monologues and statements about Indonesian culture now. Where else in the world does on an angle grinder cutting corrugated iron cut across a monologue in a dance theatre work? It’s what Jakarta is like.
Move Theatre’s John Cage appears to be an unusual choice.
Move Theatre’s Dear John features a dancer, a composer, a bowed piano player and installation and sound artists from Taiwan who’ve set up a black studio space with an installation of components that can be played by the artists and the audience. As a tribute to John Cage the work makes the audience hyper-aware of the sounds in the space around it. It’s not recreating or mimicking a Cage work but asks how he inspires us to play at the boundaries of music and contemporary performance-making in an immersive environment—it’s a living work of art that needs an audience that feels permitted to make it. It’s also a stunning, empowering work that comes from research, collaborating and thinking outside of the box.
You have included some explicitly traditional performance in your program.
The 600-year old Indonesian Topang mask dance from the Cirebon province on the northern tip of Java has rarely been seen in Australia. It’s traditional dance but absolutely hypnotic and you can see how influential it’s been on contemporary performance makers with its commitment to dropping into character, letting go of the self, gesturing to the gods.
Performance art has a special place in the festival as well as contemporary theatre. Does it connect with traditional performance?
The Indonesian artist Melati Suryodamo trained with Marina Abramovic, absorbed postmodern culture in visual and performance art and now, as a mature artist, she’s connecting with her Javanese roots with depth and rigour. She’s a world leader in performance art, but with a sense of it as 800 years old—the tradition that includes shamanism, the loss of control of the body and then the body itself as art. We’re building a special performance space next to the Festival Centre Gallery for Melati’s two-day durational performance, 24,901 Miles, on OzAsia’s opening weekend.
I saw work by Eko Supriyanto’s in Jakarta in 2010 and was impressed by its vibrant patterning and its deep connections with traditional dance while still looking very modern.
Eko’s Cry Jalilolo is probably my pick of the festival. He’s working with a group of young men, not professional dancers in a Western sense, who come from a village in Jailolo Bay in north Maluku (the Moluccas, east of Borneo), The regent of that area invited Eko to create a dance work as part of their summer festival. It’s a village with its whole culture built around fishing and coconuts. Eko watched the boys perform their island’s traditional dance, learned who they were, what their passions in life were and their concerns—destruction of their reef, dynamite fishing, rubbish and pollution in the ocean. He reconfigured the movement into contemporary dance in a perfect fusion and with respect for tradition. Tradition and the contemporary aren’t as separate as we sometimes think and artists like Eko are held in great respect. These young men are touring the work for the next two years.
Eko wanted to give something back to the community. I went to Jailolo with him where he taught the whole work to 200 children over two months and then they and the seven dancers performed the work to the whole population of the island.
From China you’ve chosen a significant theatrical production; is this another boundary breaker?
Amber [premiered Hong Kong, 2005] is a conventional play—but with singing, dancing and projections—from probably the leading Chinese theatre director, Meng Jinghu [director of the National Theater of China]. He doesn’t direct Western plays. His wife Liao Yimei is the playwright. He’s prolific, making fun, fluent shows about young people on his own terms. Rhinoceros in Love has been in repertoire since 1999. His shows touch a nerve about contemporary culture and are packed with under–40 audiences. There’s an inherent through-line of absurdity in his work, but with more of a narrative thread in Amber than Rhinoceros, [In Amber the heart of a man who is killed in an accident is transplanted into the body of a decadent character. The dead man’s girlfriend believes she can redeem the rogue redeem his soul. Eds]. It’s a love story, if not a straight narrative—he makes the audience work. It’s about finding your own path in the new China: is sex for fun or love, with whom can you have it, is it taboo?
Of a number of visual arts show, Alhamdulillah, We Made It appears to me the most intriguing.
We commissioned this from Indonesia’s Mess56, 20 people who have a studio in Yogjakarta and sometimes band together to do projects as a collective. They’ve turned the immigration issue on its head. Refugee detention camps are off the radar for most Indonesians. The idea was to get some sense of the people in this purgatory, why they’re there and where they think they’re going. The artists conducted it like a documentary research project with interviews and taking photographs. Then they digitally ‘migrated’ the people by superimposing images of them onto where they’d like to be, say in Australia. It’s not about the base level Asian-Indonesian debate over refugees but a fundamental questioning about detention camps in Indonesia and the feelings of the refugees.
With its boundary breakers, cross-artform and cross-cultural collaborators and inventive inheritors of tradition what does this OzAsia Festival add up to do you think?
A festival of strong contemporary art, not a festival of otherness. At the same time it will show Australians how young artists in Asia see themselves, their culture and their art.
OzAsia 2015 also includes Ryoji Ikeda’s large-scale performative digital media work, Superposition, and Play, a constantly evolving work featuring Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Indian Kuchipudi dancer Shantala Shivalingapp.
Adelaide Festival Centre, OzAsia 2015 Festival, Adelaide, 24 Sept-4 Oct
Mortal Condition
photo Daniel Purvis
Mortal Condition
When I interviewed Larissa McGowan about her new dance work, Mortal Condition, the dancer and choreographer quoted YouTube video tutorial maker Evan Puschak’s conceptual account of the virtual world of video games: “A meditation both on the unspoiled image of what we want, and its profound unsatisfactory reflection—what we are.” Introduced into the work’s development process by dramaturg Steve Mayhew, Puschak’s idea fed into Mortal Condition’s bipartite nature and remains pivotal to the finished work, which is divided into two distinct halves, titled Condition and Mortal Condition.
The first part, sound-tracked by the short, guttural vocal improvisations of Mike Patton’s 1996 album Adult Themes for Voice, is a duet between McGowan and Thomas Bradley, which interprets Patton’s electronically processed squeals, growls and rapid-fire jabbering as a series of miniature vignettes that evoke basic human interactions: fighting and love-making, casual greetings and aggressive separations.
There is no pretense at fluidity: each eruption of movement, hard and fast, is synchronised precisely to the Patton tracks, many of which are less than a minute long, and the dancers simply pause in between each, their breathing heavy in the silences as they wring the sweat out of their retro video game T-shirts. There is a disquieting sense in which they are being danced by, rather than dancing to, the recorded vocalisations, especially when their mouths yawn widely or frantically open and close in a nightmarish form of lip-synching. Bodily too, there seems to be a loss of control, limbs flung out to lead wildly gyrating torsos in short, demented arcs.
Nevertheless, the robust physicality of McGowan’s choreography is, characteristically, shot through with humour, the dancers often exchanging puzzled glances in between the vignettes as if to say, “What on earth are you doing that for?” There’s also an emphasis on taboo bodily functions—one of Patton’s tracks is titled “A Smile, A Slap in the Face, A Fart, A Kiss on the Mouth”—that manifests in gestures that resemble vomiting and furious, exorcism-like purges of the body. The dancers’ athleticism is unwavering as they continuously rise, fall and roll across designer Toby K’s rectangular, off-centred floorcloth, which, in its radiant whiteness, produces stage images of sharp relief.
The earthy preoccupations of the first part are contrasted with the second, which plunges McGowan and Bradley—now joined by Kialea-Nadine Williams—into the digital world. The casual T-shirts and track pants of the first half are traded for quasi-militaristic garb that recalls iconic video game character Lara Croft, while Bradley is reconfigured as the archetypal gamer, hunched over an imagined controller in a corner of the stage. Seven white banners suspended along the back of the theatre, a dozen or so squares punched out in each like a microchip or early video game cartridge, swing to face the audience, Toby K’s projection design emblazoning them with crude, pixilated icons of humanoid figures and a variety of weapons in the manner of a game user interface. Patton’s soundtrack is substituted for an original score by DJ Tr!p, which draws on the blippy simplicity of video game music from the 8- and 16-bit eras, as well as the increasingly cinematic lushness of contemporary soundtracks to games such as World of Warcraft.
Mortal Condition
photo Daniel Purvis
Mortal Condition
As in the first half, the interactions of the dancers—proximal but often contactless—can be read as explorations of human power dynamics, but here these are complicated by their gendered nature, McGowan and Williams the subjects of Bradley’s gaze. In the first sequence, the mechanics of a car-making game are invoked, a male voice-over dully intoning the attributes of a fantasy sports car while McGowan and Williams ‘model’ the vehicle using their bodies. This dynamic is later reversed as Bradley appears to corporeally transition into the virtual world where, as in a massively multiplayer online game, he slugs it out with McGowan and Williams, each cycling through a vast inventory of weapons—these depicted in increasingly rapid succession in the projections while the dancers contort their arms and bodies into the appropriate shape. He is ultimately vanquished.
Trading oppositions between the organic and the digital can be a fraught business in contemporary performance, establishing arbitrary hierarchies of value and disallowing that the relationship between the two is almost always a fluid and interdependent one. Perhaps this is why Mortal Condition felt, for me, weakened by its binary structure, the correlation between the halves too elusive to provide a fully satisfying conceptual framework. The design is similarly misconceived, especially in the second part where, curiously unintegrated with the dancers, its effect seems largely cosmetic. It’s not clear, finally, what the desiring, rapacious bodies of the first part’s corporeal world see in their virtual reflections, or whether, in looking back, the ‘unspoiled image’ contains within it the power to alter their—and, by extension, our—reality.
–
Mortal Condition, concept, choreography Larissa McGowan, associate director, dramaturg Steve Mayhew, dancers Thomas Bradley, Larissa McGowan, Kialea-Nadine Williams, composer DJ Tr!p, lighting, projection designer Toby K; Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, 11-14 May
What would a documentary of emotion look like? How can a documentary film make us feel the complexity of a situation without simply reverting to the manipulations of melodrama? Can the form be about feeling without becoming something else? A trio of titles at this year’s Human Rights Arts and Film Festival (HRAFF) provided some clues.
Tunes from the Berrimah Hilton: Prison Songs
Booze, songs and tears—they’re not ingredients typically associated with the documentary form, but Prison Songs is not your typical documentary. Inspired by the “musicals” of British filmmaker Brian Hill, such as Drinking for England (1998) and Feltham Sings (2002) (see RT 63), Prison Songs features inmates of Darwin’s Berrimah Jail telling their stories through song and dance numbers intercut with skilfully shaped interviews. Subtitles sprinkled throughout sketch facts that speak louder than any longwinded exposition: 98% of the inmates in Berrimah are Indigenous. At the time of filming, the facility built to house 115 prisoners was home to over 800. Director Kelrick Martin homes in on around half-a-dozen in his hour-long work.
There is anger here, as one would expect, particularly from one inmate imprisoned for inflicting punishment in what he claims was an enactment of tribal law. His song is all about “doing the white man’s time,” illustrating the meaninglessness of European-style criminal codes for some Indigenous people. More surprising is the humour and joy, especially in one number celebrating the pernicious pleasures of alcohol. The upbeat tune is a good example of the way Prison Songs deploys music to mainline the emotional experiences of these men and women for viewers—we feel the appeal of alcoholic oblivion even as we are confronted with its ugly social effects. The film also doesn’t shy away from some less attractive aspects of Indigenous cultural politics, featuring two young men of mixed-race parentage who sing and speak frankly about their experiences of marginalisation by both white and black Australia.
Above all, Prison Songs is a study in forging cinematic empathy. Martin blends images, interviews, songs and telling statistics to take us inside the emotional world of a group of Indigenous people locked up in Australia’s Top End. It’s also a celebration of creativity in the bleakest of environments. Building bridges of emotion with real people we might never otherwise encounter is perhaps documentary’s greatest—and rarely realised—potential as a creative form. Kelrick Martin admirably fulfils this potential.
Chasing Asylum
Crushing complacency: Chasing Asylum
I’d like to describe Eva Orner’s Chasing Asylum as incendiary, but more likely it will flare brightly before burning out, leaving a wisp of smoke and a discomforting smell we’ll disperse with a wave of a hand. Let’s face it, you can only explain the abuses a film like this documents by accepting that Australians are either gratuitously cruel or monumentally complacent. I tend to think it’s the latter—the harder of the conditions to change.
Nonetheless, Chasing Asylum is valuable for a number of reasons. Firstly it documents how Australia has systematically forged a bureaucratised system for inflicting extreme cruelty on people seeking refuge who arrive by sea. This record means that none of us can claim “not to have known” when later generations look back on us with disgust.
Secondly, the film features extensive footage shot secretly inside the detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island, locations long cut off from journalists and documentarians by the Australian Government. Of course, many other sources have detailed the horrific conditions in these places, but there is value in making Australians feel what it is like to rot in the hellish surrounds that we have created.
Lastly, through the secretly shot footage, along with accounts of Australians who have worked in these camps and snatches of testimony from incarcerated refugees (also recorded in secret), Chasing Asylum conveys something of the mind-numbing boredom and relentless pressures detained refugees face. These include searing heat endured in the tents and metal huts in which they live, toilets so squalid a cut foot can—and has—led to fatal infections, sexual abuse of refugee children and extreme violence from local police and security forces. Watching Chasing Asylum is to feel the faceless, bureaucratic callousness of a system that offers no way out except a return to the nightmares these people have fled. Again, this information is not new, but a film can make us endure something of what all this means for the people involved much more effectively than a UN report.
Much of Chasing Asylum comprises interviews with young Australians recruited by groups such as the Salvation Army to ‘help’ the refugees. Their naivety is telling. Despite the many years during which Australian politicians have openly proclaimed the need to create conditions so appalling they will stop people seeking refuge here, all of the young Australians interviewed recall their profound shock when they first saw conditions inside the camps. Are middle class Australians so disconnected from hardship that we don’t even realise what cruelty entails?
I’d like to think Chasing Asylum will function as a wake-up call, but everything it reveals has been on the public record for some time. All the evidence suggests we simply don’t care.
Hooligan Sparrow
Everyday fear: Hooligan Sparrow
Wang Nanfu’s debut documentary powerfully conveys what it is like to live under a state that knows no restraint—a salutary lesson for the Australian public. Wang wrote in The Guardian earlier this year that she wants viewers to “understand more deeply the sense of fear that so many Chinese people feel every day.” It’s the kind of statement often dismissed as pandering to Western prejudices by apologists for China’s ruling elite, but Wang is from a small Chinese village and has lived the depths of the dread she describes.
Hooligan Sparrow is ostensibly about the well-known Chinese activist Ye Haiyan—also known by her eponymous online nom de plume—but the emotion at the centre of this work is the creeping trepidation that overtakes the filmmaker as she documents Ye’s activities. The attempts we see by the state to prevent any recording of the abuses it inflicts reveal its true face, brutal and terroristic. The fear is palpable from the opening frames as Wang speaks to her camera while awaiting a visit from the police towards the end of her shoot. As we watch her earlier experiences play out over the next 90 minutes, it becomes clear her trepidation is well founded.
Hooligan Sparrow is a highly polished work from this first-time director, continuing a budding tradition of Chinese documentary films that dramatise the stark violence and intimidation on which China’s one-party state is founded. Depressingly, other works at HRAFF such as Chasing Asylum show that Australian authorities are quite prepared to inflict similar abuses on marginalised groups. We would be fools to think the same cruelties couldn’t be applied to us with the flick of a bureaucratic switch.
–
2016 Human Rights Arts and Film Festival 2016.hraff.org.au, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, 5–19 May, national tour 24 May–8 June
“If watermelon was chicken,” Kyle Page, Artistic Director of Townsville-based Dancenorth asks, “then…?” If _ Was _, the company’s new work, is more than a title, it’s a provocation for two prominent choreographers, Stephanie Lake and Ross McCormack, to create discrete works from shared materials, making dance that springs, says Page, from “mental simulations,” from the ways each sees the world.
“If I say ‘vegetarian lasagne’ you have an image and so do I,” Page explains. “They might be very different images or quite similar, but they’re unique to each of us. That image is based on your history and all your past experiences of vegetarian lasagne.” But If_Was_ asks the choreographer to take an image or a concept and implicitly address what happens if it becomes something else, say, “if blood was green” or “if war was harmless.”
Mental Simulation Theory is about how we build mental constructs and ‘read the minds of others’ in order to, in turn, construct ourselves, working by analogy and metaphor (to understand how pervasive this is, read James Geary’s wonderful I Is an Other, Harper Perennial, 2011). Part of the pleasure of If_Was_ will be seeing what images and meanings are conjured within the same parameters by two very different minds. Mental simulation is very much about creativity, as much for scientists as for artists in that both frequently work from images rather than concepts or formulae.
If Form Was Shifted, Ross McCormack for Dancenorth
photo Amber Haines
If Form Was Shifted, Ross McCormack for Dancenorth
Page tells me about the parameters he’s set for the choreographers: “You’ve each got one hour of music. Choose half an hour of it, chop it however you want. There’s one costume designer with one design pattern to work with, two fabrics to choose from and one bonus fabric to throw in the mix. You can shorten an arm or a leg and work around the edges of the framework. You have the same amount of time, the same dancers to work with and a lighting designer who’ll create one grid to light both works.”
A press release just to hand from Dancenorth reveals some of the thinking of the choreographers. Stephanie Lake has responded to the logic of change inherent in the proposition “if _ was _” by creating “a surreal hive of buzzing life….From marching automatons to wild hybrid creatures, the dancers are continually transmuting and being affected by their rapidly changing conditions. It’s about survival, symbiosis and rebirth.” McCormack’s focus is on “thought process structured through group manipulation…I see the body as a device grappling with its complexities and place, how it rather unnaturally manipulates itself is somehow spectacular yet also pathetic.”
For this impressionistic experiment in mental simulation, each choreographer’s proposition will be found in the program handed to the audience who will then bring their experiences, concepts and imaginings to bear on the works. “It’s quite a beautiful thing to celebrate different responses to shared experiences,” says Page.
Read an interview with Kyle Page about Dancenorth’s remarkable program and the fascinating vision that underpins it.
If_Was_, Dancenorth
photo Amber Haines
If_Was_, Dancenorth
Dancenorth, If _ Was _, Dancenorth, Townsville, 9-11 June; Mackay Entertainment Centre, 15 June; Proserpine Entertainment Centre, 16 June; Judith Wright Centre, Brisbane, 23-25 June; The Substation, Melbourne, 29 June–2 July
Kyle Page is Artistic Director of the highly regarded Townsville-based company Dancenorth to which he is bringing new vision and reach. In this interview he recounts the beginnings of his dance career, its extensive professional outcomes, his experiences in India and the Arctic, with partner and Dancenorth ensemble member and Rehearsal Director Amber Haines, and his desire to explore creativity and collaboration through cognitive science and neuroscience. These experiences and ideas fascinatingly cluster into a practice and far-reaching vision for Dancenorth that extends to the Torres Strait and extensive national and international touring.
STARTING OUT
I read you began your professional career at Dancenorth back in 2004, nearly 12 years ago.
When I was young, my first dancing experience was with Jangarra, an Indigenous dance group in Dubbo where I spent the first 11 years of my life. I was the first whitefella in the ensemble. I absolutely loved it and really connected with the movement and Indigenous culture as well. Then I started doing jazz, tap and ballet.
We moved to Brisbane when I was about 12 and I started dancing every night of the week really. I desperately wanted to do a full-time dance course at the Australian Dance Performance Institute but to do that I had to have completed Year 10 at school. I was in Year 8 at the time and we had a big meeting with the Principal and the Careers Guidance Counsellor and managed to convince them to allow me to skip Year 9. So I went from Year 8 to Year 10 in conventional school and then did Years 11 and 12 by Distance Education while studying dance full-time.
When I finished that—it was a very ballet-focused course—I was getting a bit older and I didn’t really feel such a connection to the lifestyle that a career in ballet would have demanded so I was a bit lost for six months. I did an audition for Jane Pirani, Artistic Director of Dancenorth, who was really interested in me but didn’t have any jobs available but said we could look at a long-term secondment. So I moved to Townsville, to work on the weekends to pay my way through a 12-month secondment. After about three or four weeks one of the ensemble members broke his ankle and I was thrown onstage and I’ve been working full-time ever since. Right place, right time. So I continued dancing there with Gavin Webber for four years and then moved to ADT in Adelaide.
THE CAREER
You’ve had an extensive career working with ADT, Lucy Guerin, Gavin Webber, Antony Hamilton, Jo Stone, Paolo Castro and Larissa McGowan. How have these experiences shaped your vision do you think? Did you have the feeling that you were heading towards being a creator yourself?
Not until three or four years ago. I worked with lots of amazing choreographers with very different approaches to physicality and making work, which really excited me. That was probably where my passion for collaboration and for engaging with a range of different creative partners on a project was really born.
As I was wrapping up my six years with ADT, in the last two I was really fortunate—following a few chats with [artistic director] Garry Stewart—to be able to perform in all the mainstage touring with the company but also work on independent projects with Lucy Guerin and Stephanie Lake and a few others. I moved out of my apartment in Adelaide, my wife Amber [a fellow ADT dancer] and I bought a little caravan and parked it on a friend’s property up in Woodside in the Adelaide Hills. The longest period we spent in the caravan was probably about five weeks but we did that over a number of chapters as we were either re-mounting or rehearsing work with Garry. Then we’d tour internationally with ADT, then internationally with Lucy Guerin Inc. We had a five-week development in Japan for Spectra, our first full-length work. And all of these programs and projects fell into place in quite an amazing way.
At the end of that two-year period, we were planning to leave ADT and maybe move to Melbourne. There were quite a few options; we had a full-year of independent projects lined up including premiering our duet, Syncing Feeling, and then Spectra at the OzAsia Festival. We also had a three-month residency in Varanasi in India. So all of these things lined up back to back. The other amazing thing was participating in an Arctic Circle residency.
Spectra, Dancenorth
photo Ash McLellan
Spectra, Dancenorth
ENTER DANCENORTH
And then the job at Dancenorth came up. Amber and I had kind of entertained the idea of one day running a company well into the future, but I thought, what a great opportunity. I had a connection with Dancenorth and I was moving into this territory more and more. So I figured it would be a wonderful experience to apply—these jobs don’t come up very often—to throw my hat in the ring and go through that process. In the final interview I remember leaving and having a very clear sense that we were going to move to Townsville and take over Dancenorth.
We managed to maintain a few of the projects we had lined up—like the Arctic Circle residency—while other projects we’d been funded for as independent artists we pulled under the banner of Dancenorth.
In 2014 we ran these two programs in parallel. Dancenorth had a program for their 30th anniversary inviting various guest choreographers to come and make work while Amber and I developed our work in parallel. It meant that for the first year at Dancenorth, one, I rarely had a weekend but, two, we were incredibly prolific and Dancenorth was seen on a number of stages around the country and in big festivals. It really felt like an an amazing catapult into this space.
THE VARANASI EXPERIENCE
What was the value of the Varanasi residency and how did it relate to your work?
India is extraordinary in so many ways. We decided after the first few weeks that we loved it, we hated it and in the end, we liked it—the contrast of old and new, rich and poor, death and life. The opportunity to spend that much time (three months) away from home, from friends, from phones, from internet—all those day-to-day routines that chew up life and easily form distractions or commitments—we had none of those things in Varanasi. We were free to explore creativity, choreography and to identify an artistic and conceptual base or trajectory. I don’t think I would have formed such global perspectives on creation had we not been afforded that experience. Asialink is an amazing program for providing such opportunities for artists and I think the three-month duration was really important. Being in the spiritual hub of the world was an intense time for personal development. It felt like I was really pushed and prodded and had to explore my values and belief systems.
Was there a spiritual dimension?
It became quite a spiritual experience but not because of chanting or yoga although we visited a few ashrams in Varanasi and felt a very tangible sense of something much greater. For me it was a very personal investigation of things I found challenging—walking along the streets and seeing death. In the West, death is practically taboo whereas in Varanasi not a day would go by when you didn’t see someone’s body burning on the funeral pyres down by the Ganges or someone’s body floating in the river or a group of people carrying the body of a loved one through the streets singing and chanting. It gave me a very different perspective on big things, like death.
CREATIVE THINKING IN THE ARCTIC CIRCLE
What did the Arctic Circle residency do for you and Amber?
The space! The space on the ship. You basically spend the entire time sailing on a barquentine, which is an old three-mast tall ship, around Svarlbard. Then you get off and spend time on landings. You’ve got three polar bear guards in a triangle around the group of artists. You have time and space to create. The whole trip we had no internet and no phone and, again, I loved feeling that detachment. The time for reflection, for thinking, brought so many ideas to the fore and really allowed us to carve out a vision, a creative trajectory for Dancenorth.
We took with us quite a few research papers relating to neuroscience, cognitive science and the cognitive processes of creativity and choreography. We had time to think through those ideas but also to be creative in a unique and very strange space—out in the snow, in beautiful, rocky mountain terrain or on the ship with its rocking buoyancy or swimming in water that was four degrees or sitting on massive icebergs. It was otherworldly, magnificent and beautiful—but humans don’t belong there. We watched monstrous chunks of ice falling off glaciers into the ocean and understood how that’s affecting sea levels and climate. We spent a day on the boat with five blue whales swimming around the ship for about two hours. These are solitary creatures and rarely spend time together. We came away with a real sense of reverence for the natural environment. In Townsville, I’m very connected to the natural world and frequently captivated by the magnificence of places like Magnetic Island and the ocean. But being in the Arctic where there are no people and it’s untamed highlighted all those things about the natural environment that I find so interesting and so engaging.
Syncing Feeling, Kyle Page & Amber Haines
photo Gregory Lorenzutti
Syncing Feeling, Kyle Page & Amber Haines
THE BRAIN, BODY & DANCE
Let’s turn inward to the Mind/Body. You have a mentor, Scott deLahunta who has worked with Wayne MacGregor, William Forsythe and Garry Stewart among others. How did you come to his work and your interest in neuroscience?
Scott was doing a research project with ADT while I was a dancer there and we really hit it off. My interest came earlier than that. I’m really interested in neuroscience and reading books like The Neurotourist and The Brain That Changes Itself and about neuroplasticity and mirror neurons—these scientific and cognitive theories that support some Eastern philosophies and ways that people have often viewed the world [in terms of] inter-connection, empathy and innate human capacities for engaging with one another. Working with Scott has allowed me to unravel a few of the mysteries about what creativity is and how it works. I still don’t know the answer but I’m starting to be more aware of priming techniques and how they can alter the course of a creative development in the studio.
I’m also starting to be aware that not all of it can be cognitive or can be explained. There’s a sensation, a feeling of “rightness,” when you just know. What is that? There’s an intuition that you have to follow when you’re being creative and sometimes that is very clear or overwhelming and sometimes it doesn’t appear for days or weeks. So there’s curiosity for me [somewhere] between the very literal, well-studied aspects of creativity and the really ephemeral, very beautiful, intangible space that creativity offers up.
Have you applied this sense of “rightness” to the practice and training of your company?
We begin each day with a mindfulness practice and that can be various forms of meditation—breathing, movement, Tai Chi. All of us separate the space outside the studio from the creative realm to be solely focused on the task at hand for the day. It’s not only generated a great sense of rigorous investigation but also an amazing culture around the company. People who join us on secondments or whatever often comment on it.
We also work with themes that come out of this arena. Syncing Feeling, for instance, investigates mirror neurons and some of the developments in that field in terms of empathy and decoding another person’s facial expressions, or imitation learning. Amber and I are collaborators, dance partners and lovers, and we decided that was a really interesting space for us to investigate, to try and go as far down that rabbit-hole as possible, to pour ourselves, our bodies and our brains, into that point of absolute connection, absolute empathy and understanding and connectivity on stage.
We’ve just premiered Rainbow Vomit in Townsville, a work for young people that investigates the effects of technology on cognitive development in the young. What we found from some of our research is that children playing games on iPads or Facebook don’t engage in divergent or open thinking because they’re working on set trajectories and don’t get to create or affect outcomes.
We also had Scott deLahunta working with the company for a couple of days on choreographic thinking processes and we’re currently working with him on “What happens in the studio,” which is a unique project in Australia. This year Dancenorth dancers are working with five different sets of choreographers on five new projects, so we thought it would be interesting to pose two series of questions: one set for the second week of development, the other in the final week. These highlight nuances and variation in approaches to creativity, how they work and which are more engaging for some dancers and not others, an opportunity to investigate various modes of creation.
How does this thinking connect with If_Was_ which comprises works by Stephanie Lake and Ross McCormack?
This is an idea that came to me when I was on that tall ship in the Arctic Circle. I was thinking about the Mental Simulation Theory. This is something that excites me about collaboration. If I say “vegetarian lasagne” you have an image and so do I. They might be very different images or quite similar, but they’re unique to each of us. That image is based on your history and all your past experiences of vegetarian lasagne.
[If_Was_ asks the choreographer to take an image or a concept and implicitly address what happens if it becomes something else, say, “if blood was green” or “if war was harmless.” Part of the pleasure of If_Was_ will be seeing what images and meanings are conjured within the same parameters by two very different minds. Mental simulation is very much about creativity, as much for scientists as for artists in that both frequently work from images rather than concepts or formulae. Ed. Read more about If_ Was_.]
[Page has set parameters for the choreographers, telling them] you’ve each got one hour of music by a composer [Robin Fox]. Choose half an hour of it, chop it however you want. There’s one costume designer with one design pattern to work with, two fabrics to choose from and one bonus fabric to throw in the mix. You can shorten an arm or a leg and work around the edges of the framework. You have the same amount of time, the same dancers to work with and a lighting designer who’ll create one grid to light both works.
So your investigations into the neuroscience and cognitive science realm provide a foundation for the vision that runs across the kinds of works and choices you make.
Yes. I really want Dancenorth to be recognisable and for audiences to relate to it not just as a commissioning body that employs a range of choreographers to create work on the company but as a company that has through-lines that ground the creative choices not only in terms of who’s making the work but also the kinds of works that are being crafted for various outcomes and touring opportunities.
How does that relate to Lee Serle’s The Three Dancers which is part of the Australian Festival of Chamber Music in Townsville this year?
Well, that one is slightly different in that the company had commissioned Elena Katz-Chernin to create a new composition based on Picasso’s painting “The Three Dancers” in 2014. I inherited the work and the relationship with the Australian Festival of Chamber Music, which is very important to us. We chose Lee Serle based on his extraordinary physicality, his experiences with the Trisha Brown Dance Company and the fact that he has a very different aesthetic from the physicality that Amber and I explore in our works.
COMMUNITY: FROM TOWNSVILLE TO THE TORRES STRAIT
Dancenorth is a regional company and it’s become increasingly viable for such companies to become influential nationally and globally. You’re working in a number of directions. You have a national tour of If_Was_ soon and Spectra is to show in Japan, but you’re also working with Indigenous people on a 10-year program. Now, that’s very long-term.
[In funding application forms] you are asked, “Are you engaging with various communities?” I thought, what an amazing opportunity to have a cultural and community engagement and education program that sits equally alongside the creation and development of virtuosic mainstage work. We’re engaging with Poruma Islanders. Poruma is a tiny island in the Torres Strait where 180 people live. It’s 1.4 kilometres long and 400 metres wide [and is under threat of submersion due to Climate Change. Eds]. The other issue with this communities ‘box-ticking’ thing is to ask, what’s the legacy? I would like to leave a powerful legacy, to generate a really sincere and genuine connection between the islanders, Dancenorth and Townsville. The only way I could foresee that happening in any meaningful way was to look long-term and 10 years seems to be fitting. If I’m not here in 10 years, I’d like to see the engagement continuing.
We’ve been to the island a couple of times. It’s a gorgeous part of the world and the culture of song and dance and storytelling is very alive. It was a beautiful experience for the dancers and me to spend time there. This year we’ve invited a number of the Urab Dancers, the local dance ensemble from Poruma, to come to Townsville to work with the company on a new project that will premiere next year in the Strand Ephemera outdoor sculpture festival in Townsville and then on to other locations around Australia. And we’re chatting about a few really large-scale, high visibility performance outcomes.
So do you feel this multi-faceted program is manageable?
I’m really confident with the team around me here at Dancenorth. We’ve got great support through the Tim Fairfax Family Foundation which has enabled us to employ a full-time Community and Cultural Engagement Facilitator (Susan Van den Ham) who has an assistant who helps her to deliver these projects. The Poruma Island one I’m overseeing because it’s a collaboration with the company. Susie is working with a number of disability organisations here in Townsville and developing a pro-active, reciprocal community action plan. Before we premiere a full-length evening work we have a soft performance for the three local disability organisations. Our projects are kind of big but also simple once they become an intrinsic part of the company, then they’re no more or less challenging or difficult.
And finally, how are you nurturing local talent?
We have a number of different engagement programs. Part of our school program involves engaging with refugee/asylum seekers and new arrivals. In April this year we performed with Townsville State High School kids. They spent two days at a full-time workshop with the Dancenorth ensemble finalising the creation of a work for Harmony Day. Then there’s our normal school program and working with dance schools to teach and host workshops throughout the year. The company hosts open classes generally taught by Dancenorth dancers. It’s a really excellent way for us to engage with the community of Townsville, which is our home and where our heart is. We’re very passionate about being a regionally based company and very proud advocates for this part of the world.
Well, it’s such a lovely total vision. Thanks for talking with me.
Such a pleasure. It’s an interesting opportunity to be able to chat through the progression, where we’ve come from and where we’re going. Thank you.
You can download the 2016 Dancenorth program here and see excerpts from Syncing Feeling and SPECTRA here.
–
Dancenorth, If _ Was _, Townsville, 9-11 June; Mackay Entertainment Centre, 15 June; Proserpine Entertainment Centre, 16 June; Judith Wright Centre, Brisbane, 23-25 June; The Substation, Melbourne, 29 June–2 July
We watch tropical landscapes, sunsets and waterways, hear birdcalls and the buzz of mosquitoes, but calm surrenders to quick-fire archival images from the mid 20th century onwards on two 60-degree angled wide screens tracing war, protest and key events (like Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s returning of Gurindji land to Vincent Lingiari in 1975) but also including footage of Pol Pot and the victims of the killing fields. RUCKUS, a Sydney-based disability-led contemporary performance ensemble, visited those fields when in-residence this year with Epic Encounters, a Cambodian company of principally hearing-impaired dancers. The weight and speed of history as well as the pace of the everyday are writ large in this ambitious production.
In the first part of Speed of Life, we feel the familiar, stressful pace of contemporary life escalating almost out of control as the performers work at vast banks of moveable pigeonhole cabinets designed by Kate Shanahan and eerily lit by Fausto Brusamolino. Wheeling in great circles to a pounding score (Peter Kennard), the workers manically empty the contents across the floor. The long disturbance is counterpointed with seductive video (Martin Fox) of a boy relaxedly and happily swimming underwater, evoking a very different sense of daydreaming time before a belligerent boss appears and berates his charges. Everyone literally hits the wall while images of Pol Pot flicker behind.
Recurrent phone calls interrupt the action. “Is it you, Rachel?” the performers ask, but the caller won’t identify herself, limiting her utterances gnomically to the likes of “I need to slow down so I can think about love.” There are other motifs, some built around traces—outlines of hands and bodies and plaster casts of the feet of several audience members. Performer-visual artist Digby Webster creates a complete work across one of the screens at his own pace while action proceeds elsewhere. These unhurried actions open out time leaving behind the workplace mayhem and grim politics of the first part of the work to engender a vision which is palpably artistic and cosmological.
Onscreen, a Cambodian man dances subtly and eloquently on a beach; on stage Chris Bunton informally mirrors him, moving with grace and spirit. The sole female performer, Audrey O’Connor, breaks from her role as documentary-maker to dance a circle around the stage. As a cone of sand is levelled and carefully raked, James Penny declares, “I’m becoming The Sandman,” spins dizzily, sinks into the sand and is cocooned in it by the others. It’s an escape from time or into some unhurried transcendent time, an image at once serene and funereal but, above all, one that encourages taking time out for reflection and release.
Speed of Life, Ruckus
photo Heidrun Löhr
Speed of Life, Ruckus
There are moments of telling humour—in a drolly funny exchange about sweeping, mopping and workplace dignity at Maccas, Gerard O’Dwyer and James Penny reveal the challenges of communication, in particular the time taken to react and to playfully embrace the rhythms of conversation.
A brief video appearance at the show’s end by the mystery caller brings home the importance of the show’s theme. Rachel Sugrim provided text and key ideas for the show, especially its poetic finale, but the speed of the production process apparently proved too challenging for her.
The time theme emerged from these performers’ lives. O’Dwyer decries how speed tongue-ties him—“the words won’t come.” But he comes to believe “it’s time to be heard; to breathe!” O’Connor’s mother’s fear that her child “won’t be able to keep up” is recalled. Her daughter is now able to say of her, “You’re proud that you were wrong.” This is not about the overheated time of the everyday, but the long-term time of development and maturation and its distinctive pressures.
It would have been interesting to understand what other temporal impediments impinge on the lives of these performers, but the creators principally opted to create a generalised workplace scenario in the first part of the work with everyone under the same pressure. However, a subsequent Q&A revealed that the pigeonhole cabinets reflected Digby Webster’s experience of working in a mailroom.
Set against a background of the turbulent rush of history and juxtaposed with a sinuous time-defying Cambodian dancer, Speed of Life’s transition from fraught labour to artistic freedom and philosophical reflection was magical. Although some sequences were dauntingly repetitive and over-determined and some images elusive, Speed of Life was admirably well-produced by a large team of collaborators fronted by utterly confident performers who engaged us with commitment, artistry and intelligence. For those of us without disabilities who struggle with time, we now know how much more difficult it is for others. But we also know they’re dealing with it.
Speed of Life, Ruckus
photo Heidrun Löhr
Speed of Life, Ruckus
Ruckus, Speed of Life, co-director, choreographer Dean Walsh, co-director, producer Alison Richardson, performers Chris Bunton, Audrey O’Connor, Gerard O’Dwyer, James Penny, Digby Webster, Rachel Sugrim, set, costume design Kate Shanahan, sound design Peter Kennard, video design Martin Fox, lighting design Fausto Brusamolino; PACT, Erskineville, Sydney, 25-28 May
Much contemporary art involves pointed social commentary. Current concerns with racism, domestic violence, the erosion of democracy, the failure to prevent conflict justified on the pretext of religious difference and the challenge of climate change, preoccupy many artists as well as activists to an unprecedented degree. Three compelling exhibitions explore the varying approaches taken by artists to address such issues.
Giving Voice, Art of Dissent
This touring exhibition was initiated in 2014 by Hobart’s Salamanca Arts Centre to show how artists go beyond mainstream media to respond to significant political and social issues. Curator Yvonne Rees-Pagh has assembled a body of work created over several years in which artists address racism, asylum seekers, the environment and armed conflict.
The exhibition includes some significant works that demonstrate Rees-Pagh’s theme. Richard Bell’s incisive and ironic 2008 video Scratch an Aussie probes white Australia’s psychological predisposition to racism by placing Indigenous people in the role of psychiatrists treating both themselves and privileged, white youth. Khaled Sabsabi’s video Guerrilla (2007), made in response to the 2006 Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon, is a quasi-documentary in which three unidentified speakers discuss their different strategies for dealing with the conflict.
Richard Bell, Scratch an Aussie
video still courtesy the artist and Flinders University Art Museum
Richard Bell, Scratch an Aussie
Cigdem Aydemir’s video Bombshell (2013) shows a woman’s black burqa swirling in the wind, recalling storm clouds and also ironically parodying Marilyn Monroe’s billowing dress in the film The Seven Year Itch. In Aydemir’s photograph Site Occupied (2011), a woman’s black niqab is enlarged to envelop a gallery space like a shroud to prevent entry. Both of Aydemir’s images reference restraints on women through control of their appearance.
Megan Keating’s The Ministry of Pulp and Smoke (2014) addresses the repudiation of the Tasmanian Forestry Agreement and its consequences for the environment using video imagery constructed from paper cut-outs. In Pat Hoffie’s drawings, Smoke and Mirrors (2012), storm clouds gather over sinking refugee boats.
James Barker’s Lest I forget (2014) is a confronting photographic triptych in a hinged, head-high frame showing images of sculptures of the stacked corpses of people killed in conflicts. The framing suggests a memento of deceased relatives. Locust Jones’ Everyday Atrocities (2008) is a drawing on a three-metre-long scroll resembling a giant stream-of-consciousness doodle. He redraws images of conflict shown in the news, thus distilling and aggregating key events to create an epic tale of unfolding, unending horror. Michael Reed’s many-faceted installation includes a pair of carpet runners, entitled Right, Might, Profit & Carpet Bombing/ Runners for Corridors of Power (2009) that bear texts such as “guns will make us powerful.” His work questions how anyone could work in armaments industries knowing the destruction they cause.
The artworks in this survey take a range of approaches from documentary video (Sabsabi) to expressionistic painting and drawing (Jones and Hoffie) to parody (Bell). Bell’s video Scratch an Aussie is unique here in offering an alternative position and a glimpse of a way forward by inverting stereotypical roles and directly challenging racist thinking. Former political adviser Pete Hay’s probing catalogue essay articulates the failure of democracy and suggests that recent social and technological developments require its renewal. He declares that “democracy will be refashioned from within the realms of dissent, if it is to be rescued at all.”
Night falls in the valley, Deborah Kelly
image courtesy Contemporary Art Society of SA
Night falls in the valley, Deborah Kelly
Planning for Tomorrow
Exhibited at the Contemporary Art Centre of SA, Planning for Tomorrow is also curated around the idea of the collapse of ideological and political systems that characterise recent decades. To explore this theme, curator Logan Macdonald has selected works by local and international artists and, in his persuasive introductory essay, discusses art theorist Boris Groys’ view of aestheticisation as an agent of change. The exhibition title is ironic, the principal message being that there is no such effective planning.
Viewers first encounter a selection of Damiano Bertoli’s posters of 2014-15 in which he has rendered texts by the 1960s Italian activist group Autonomia using the graphic design styles of Italy’s Memphis Group to create a postmodern blend of ideas that seems to trivialise both Autonomia’s calls to action and Memphis’s colourful and sometimes outlandish designs, suggesting that both movements were ephemeral. Cleverly counterpointing Bertoli’s posters is Deborah Kelly’s ironic take on unionist and activist banners, Night Falls in the Valley (2014), a huge version printed with the words “The billionaires united will never be defeated.”
Keg De Souza’s If There’s Something Strange in Your Neighbourhood… (2014), is a documentary video in which squatters, about to be evicted from a Yogyakarta district built over two cemeteries, talk about their experiences of ghosts and ghost removal—which becomes a metaphor for the squatters’ impending displacement. De Souza’s camera shows each interviewee reflected in a mirror rather than facing us directly—superstitions about mirror images imply that the speakers are already ghosts. The mirrors used in the video are separately displayed in the exhibition, inviting viewers too to look for ghosts.
Destroyed World, Santiago Sierra, Planning for Tomorrow
split-screen video still courtesy Contemporary Art Society of SA
Destroyed World, Santiago Sierra, Planning for Tomorrow
The central element in Planning for Tomorrow is Santiago Sierra’s video Destroyed Word (2010), a split-screen image of 10 elements, each showing one letter of the word KAPITALISM in monumental physical form being systematically destroyed by labourers. The letter K, constructed from brush fencing, is incinerated; P is timber systematically sawn into pieces; and M concrete, demolished like a building. Here, Sierra employs ‘proletarian’ labour to symbolically destroy the ideology that oppresses labour.
Macdonald’s exhibition demonstrates a variety of formal, conceptual and strategic approaches to activist art within an overall theme of the failure of government. Bertoli’s reference to the Autonomia movement in 1970s Italy begs us to consider the effectiveness of more recent movements, such as Occupy. De Souza involves a community in her video production, potentially sensitising that community and positioning it as an opposition and making us aware of its cultural traditions which may soon be lost. By contrast, Sierra’s artwork frequently involves paid labourers undertaking demeaning activity. Implicitly positioning himself as entrepreneur and overseer, he both enacts and critiques the capital-labour power structure.
The generation of an aesthetic response to human-induced crises is central to both Planning for Tomorrow and Giving Voice. In confronting us with the issues that preoccupy these artists, the curators provide insightful meta-narratives on the nature of activist, political art. They introduce us to artists who, to a greater or lesser degree, are themselves political activists. Art is now often seen as an alternative mouthpiece to the political left, filling a vacuum in post-socialist dialogue, and we’re reminded that the right to express dissent is hard-won.
The Photographs Story, 2004-16, 3 channel video and sound installation, Peter Kennedy
video still courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane
The Photographs Story, 2004-16, 3 channel video and sound installation, Peter Kennedy
Resistance: Peter Kennedy
At the Australian Experimental Art Foundation is a survey of Peter Kennedy’s pioneering video work since 1971. In the 1970s, video was a new medium that defied traditional commodity art-forms and enabled exploration of wider subject matter and the inclusion of sound. Kennedy was not only a pioneer of video as a medium but of politically and socially engaged art, concerned with the way in which communications media structure our perception. This landmark exhibition includes Kennedy’s video Introductions (1974-1976), a record of his initiation of interaction between four diverse social clubs—an embroiderers’ guild, a bushwalking club, a hot rod club and a marching girls club. Bringing them together emphasised women’s art in the burgeoning feminist era, raised environmental issues and challenged gender-based social barriers. In working outside the gallery to connect communities engaged in cultural activities, Kennedy prefigured work that would today be described as relational art.
Resistance: Peter Kennedy also includes the artist’s On Sacred Ground (1983-84) concerning Aboriginal land rights and self-determination, and November Eleven (1979), a collaborative work analysing the dismissal of the Whitlam Government in 1975. Also included is a new work, The Photographs Story (2004-16), involving Kennedy, his wife and son as subjects in a moving response to media coverage of the apparent death of a small boy caught in crossfire in Palestine in 2000.
Exhibition curator Matthew Perkins notes in his catalogue essay that “Socially engaged practices have returned to the contemporary art agenda with great force in recent years, encouraging a critical reflection of avant-garde practices that emerged from the counter-culture period of the late 1960s.” In his talk at the exhibition opening, Kennedy made clear that aesthetics and politics are closely intertwined, as his work over 45 years amply demonstrates. Peter Kennedy’s ground-breaking approach to the forms, the subject matter and the role of art helped set the stage for the kinds of work we now see in exhibitions such as Giving Voice and Planning for Tomorrow.
Viewers looking at activist art simultaneously occupy two positions: as engaged citizens, potentially encouraged by the artwork to protest, and as a detached audience, appreciating the work as art. While placing activist art in a gallery has been seen to commodify and neutralise it, such art has the potential to provoke viewers into deeper thought and possible action, and to sow seeds in the wider community. The art in these exhibitions is a crucial component of the continuum between artistic apprehension and activity on one hand and collective, public action on the other.
–
Planning for Tomorrow, Contemporary Art Centre of SA, 9 April-15 May; Giving Voice: The Art of Dissent, Flinders University Art Museum, 23 April-26 June; Resistance: Peter Kennedy, Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, 3 June-9 July
A sharply observed, wickedly satirical ABC TV series about bungling and corruption in the lead-up to the 2000 Sydney Olympics, The Games is a mockumentary classic featuring performances by John Clarke, Bryan Dawe, Gina Riley and Nicholas Bell.
For development-mad Australian cities, The Games is more relevant than ever.
If you enjoyed ABC TV’s Utopia, The Games is the perfect complement.
The Games DVD boxset comprises both the 1998 and 2000 series with a total of 26 episodes. Also now available for digital download.
3 boxsets courtesy of ABC Video Entertainment and Distribution.
Email us at giveaways [at] realtimearts.net with your name, postal address and phone number. Include ‘Giveaway’ and the name of the item in the subject line.
Offer closes 15 June.
RealTime issue #133 June-July 2016
Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Monster Maker, 2016, painted wood, image courtesy the artist and This Is No Fantasy + Dianne Tanzer Gallery, The Fraud Complex, Next Wave 2016
Four Next Wave Festival exhibitions keenly illustrate contemporary preoccupations with identity, both cultural and sexual. It is exciting to witness both issues squarely at the forefront of artists’ and curators’ creative concerns with individual artists questioning the past and present and making propositions about the future. With a commitment to a new generation of artists who explore diversity and inclusion, these exhibitions are solid examples of the festival’s concerns.
Something Less exhibition
photo Kieren Seymour
Something Less exhibition
Alasdair Doyle & Liam James, Something Less
In Something Less at The Stables, part of the Meat Market complex, Liam James personalises his quest for cultural and sexual identity using performative strategies with lens-based media to create an intimacy that is both compelling and unnerving. Through still and moving images we see James foregrounded, pale-skinned and blonde, staring straight at the camera. In the series of still photographs we see a young man holding flowers and in the video James is a red-eyed young man in a dress. In a detailed replication of the setting of Tracey Moffatt’s seminal photographic image Something More #1 (1989) James places himself in the foreground. The video—and the title of the exhibition—is something of an homage. Unfortunately, the sound is played too loud, the hard acoustics of the room making this a tough, if not impossible, listening experience. In both works, Liam James presents a sensitive questioning of self, yet an insistent and unabashed one. By demanding our attention in this way, associations with our narcissistic selfie era are hard to avoid.
James’ works are installed in two gallery spaces, separated by a third connecting space which is the setting for the book Where Contradictions Collide by Alasdair Doyle. This gallery contains two videos and a hard copy of the book. One video documents Skype discussions concerning the content and, in the second, the book is silently leafed through with white-gloved hands, suggesting a preciousness towards the material. Full of information and critique concerning Tasmanian Indigenous experience from writers and artists of various generations, the text is a rich resource.
Something Less exhibition
photo Zan Wimberley
Something Less exhibition
Sharing the physical space rather than collaborating as such, Doyle’s text operates as a conduit between his own and James’ works and places an emphasis on the textual component over the visual works. The mixing of the visual art works with text and publication is topical given the large number of practice-led PhDs that artists are undertaking these days, but achieving an equality between the two forms requires a delicate balance.
The Fraud Complex, curators Johnson+Thwaites
Fraud, fake, fake it till you make it, deceit, imitation, feeling like a fake in our lives; the imposter syndrome is a common experience for many of us these days. The title of The Fraud Complex can be read as both a psychological state and a pun on Freud’s name, particularly as the Westspace opening was held on Sigmund’s birthday (6 May). On entering the gallery the viewer is faced with a large mirror by Hany Armanious (Body Swap). With psychoanalysis in mind it is hard not to read this literally as Lacan’s mirror stage, which initiates a world of perception rather than of imagination. A fitting start to a curatorial premise that questions what appears to be one thing but could easily be another.
Perception is what is at play in this exhibition and Técha Noble, Casey Legler and Jordan Graham’s captivating video That Self is a good example of how gender can seem to be in flux, an immersive embodiment of Judith Butler’s concept of gender as performativity. What amounts to an accusation of cultural fraud is the raison d’être of Bindi Cole’s chillingly witty series of digital prints, Not Really Aboriginal, portraits of herself and her fair-skinned family wearing blackface, while Megan Cope’s ironic Discover your Aboriginality offers a counter to Cole’s series by giving visitors the chance to experience something of how it feels to be Aboriginal. The artwork is presented as a written test that can be taken and submitted on the spot to see if visitors have been, as Cope puts it, “touched with the tar brush.”
The Fraud Complex exhibition
photo Alan Weedon
The Fraud Complex exhibition
Johnson+Thwaites’ curatorial choices are mostly effective with a robust mix of established and emerging artists. The works explore a number of possible frauds including sexual (Tyza Stewart’s Self-Portrait), cultural (Yoshua Okón’s The Indian Project) and art (Artsheaven.com’s painting-8598 Guernica and painting-9752 Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue) with varying degrees of success. Humour, at times very dark, is put to good use in most of the works, easing the show’s unevenness. Guided by the trickster, the wag, the Australian larrikin, the viewer wonders what is real and what is not, what is fiction and what is fact. Nothing is clear as boundaries blur and reference points vanish. With the impossibility of perceiving a single truth, the curators seem to be concurring with historian Hayden White’s assertion that fiction is more real than fact (“Historical Fiction, Fictional History and Historical Reality,” in Rethinking History 9, vol 2-3, 2005).
Katie West, Decolonist
Katie West’s Decolonist, also at Westspace, is a meditation exercise where the visitor is guided through a process through which to unlearn the impact of colonisation or, as the narrator describes it, to decolonise. “When we meditate we decolonise our bodies,” suggests a female voice gently and persuasively. I hesitate at first but as I sit on the wide Westspace window sill covered in crushed eucalyptus leaves the pungency is seductive and I stay put. The narrator continues: “this is a space to sit still” and I do as I am told.
The video is of a eucalypt forest rendered in purple-ish monochrome. In the centre are two overlapping circles with the overlap shaded in. West describes this intersection as “a space where both western and indigenous philosophical traditions inform our social norms and values” (“My art is a personal antidote for the effects of colonisation,” The Guardian). Ephemeral in its realisation, with the room dim, the video is projected on thin muslin which moves with the passage of air through the gallery, echoing the natural cycles that the meditation exercise promotes.
As a young Yindjibarndi woman based in Perth, Katie West is offering non-Aboriginal Australians a means to recognise our collective responsibility through this meditative process. This gesture, generous in intent and representative of her people, is the core strength of the exhibition. As an installation it seems to be a work in development, but it engages with a refreshing lightness of touch with an issue that bears heavily on contemporary Australian society.
Ua numi le fau exhibition
photo Zan Wimberley
Ua numi le fau exhibition
Ua Numi Le Fau, curated by Léuli Eshraghi
At Gertrude Contemporary, a range of disciplines and media are represented in Ua Numi Le Fau that identify the wider setting as Narrm, the great bay, where the settler colonial city of Melbourne is built. The curation of the exhibition by Léuli Eshraghi emphasises indigeneity as the way of knowing that links artists, artworks and site, “binding time and space for brighter days to come.” The curation is well handled and tight, using the two gallery spaces thoughtfully, allowing well-chosen works space to breathe individually but also to make connections.
The exhibition is entered through Megan Cope and Robbie Thorpe’s Makin’ Waves, a transparent mapping work on the gallery window that turns the bay of Narrm literally upside down. In the front gallery Mandy Nicholson’s abstract painting honours Wurundjeri artist and 19th century cultural spokesman William Barak. A bright sunny Saturday afternoon almost completely bleaches out Frédéric Nauczyciel’s experimental videos that blend dance with cinematic interests, and makes for difficult viewing. So too Carlos Motta’s two videos of unknown stories of the colonisation of Colombia in the main gallery are surprisingly washed out and make immersion in the content a struggle.
Ua numi le fau exhibition
photo Zan Wimberley
Ua numi le fau exhibition
Yuki Kihara’s monochromatic photographs address issues that face contemporary S?moa. The images are of an anonymous female character in a hooped Victorian dress, back turned to the camera, in nuanced settings that range from the more covert construction of nature to the overt construction of culture. The anonymity of this woman contrasts with Atong Atem’s brightly coloured and highly patterned photographic portraits of groups of women from the African diaspora of Melbourne staring confidently out of the picture’s frame.
Three embroidered works by Bidjara, Ghungalu and Garingbal peoples artist Dale Harding explore the untold histories of his communities. Including stereotypical symbols of Australian identity such as the kangaroo, cockatoo and xanthorrhoea, known pejoratively as ‘the black boy,’ and visually referencing a pixelating retro online game with his technique, Harding embraces a form historically considered a domestic craft for women. Humble in their realisation the works are full of a wicked and sassy humour around identity and the body.
Léuli Eshraghi, Ua numi le fau curator
photo Lisa White
Léuli Eshraghi, Ua numi le fau curator
Next Wave Festival 2016: Something Less, Alasdair Doyle and Liam James, The Stables, Meat Market, 13-22 May; The Fraud Complex, curated by Johnson+Thwaites, Westspace, 6 May-4 June; Decolonist, Katie West, Westspace, 6 May- 4 June; Ua numi le fau, curator Léuli Eshraghi, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, 6 May-25 June
At the end of a two-week investigative process, Strange Attractor, a choreographic platform now in its fourth year in Canberra at Gorman Arts Centre, presented showings by eight choreographers gathered nationwide. On the eve of the 2016 federal election, this year’s mentor/facilitator David Pledger set the tone of provocations by insisting each artist address their role as an agent of political and social force who can make/think/speak in and to the world.
Pledger called in CSIRO ecologist Brian Walker and University of Canberra designer Susan Boden to cut edges into the frame of this dialogue from their respective disciplines. Boden discussed the relation between stability (of practice, of context) and moments of disturbance and unknowing. Walker talked about the difference between brittle, overstretched systems that will fail and resilient systems that can transform. Both prompted the artists to each consider and challenge their practice ecologies.
Alice Dixon felt provoked to “embrace mess, free radicals, not knowing.” Her performance involved a ladder, a screen, a captive tree, the sawing off of its limbs from astride the ladder and, once she was back on the floor, mischievous pliés and jetés. There were satisfying disjunctures in this work, hinting at a relation between human obsessions to cut things down—ecological disasters when nothing is left—and the fantasies people concoct to try to stabilise shifting ground. Dixon ended with a wink: her lightness of touch suggested it could all be performed again, differently.
Liz Lea showed an excerpt from her richly delicate film Red, which enters the territory of sickness, wounding and healing. Lea’s provocation became, “How much do I really want to share?”—which is also a question around our expectations of others’ empathy. Over two nights, she both danced in, to and out of a ‘show and tell’ model. One night we saw the film, the other night we did not—a rare opportunity for such a seasoned performer to experiment with incompleteness.
Ella Rose Trew, Strange Attractor
Shona Erskine choreographed to her research on 18th century ‘scarlet’ women, unjustly hanged or wrongly freed, depending on social status. Among dancer Ella Rose Trew’s nerve-electrified shakings were more literal enactions of being hung, shot or decapitated. She slid one leg in a deep curtsey: the woman as scapegoat for a culture that can’t accommodate her sexuality or mendacity. It is a bow the grace of which transcends prejudice and the finality of sentencing.
Erskine remained unresolved in her initial intention to include narrated text. Which of dance or narration better represents personal emotion versus social injustice? In the end, her choice for silence rather than text or constant musical overlay allowed for a finer interplay of ironies.
William McBride explored a fine calibration of shifting awarenesses in relation to his audience. His eyes and body rolled away from and then directly towards spectators’ bodies and fields of vision. He whispered an intimate exchange—does it matter no-one else heard?—as he rolled up into the stalls and between legs before hanging from the aircon duct, like a lost bat. Disappearing over the rails, he reappeared again, only to reverse the roll into blackout. He had worried into crevices, melted as into a stream: a survival instinct. There was much his beautiful work hinted at but did not fully reveal.
Daisy Sanders found herself questioning her complicity with social/political/environmental forces. Federal polling booths had shut one hour before her second night’s performance, providing a direct context for her questioning. She inhabited the Canberra Contemporary Arts Space foyer over 10 days as a quietly restrained yet occasionally volatile presence. Her work played with paper, balloting, voting, inscriptions—on walls—and boundaries between public and private life and emotions. The walls were both fragile and resilient—any moment’s marking or decision-making could also be its undoing as she occasionally unscrolled or shredded paper.
Loren Kronemyer created two short films. In one, in a low-angle shot, we see a woman through a window repeatedly leaping from her bed, grabbing a knife, heading to a door just out of frame. Frame cut: the motion is obsessive and paranoid, repeated again and again. We are on the outside, as if physically part of the deafening cicada chorus that constitutes the sound track. Are we animal, vegetable, mineral or human? Friend or foe?
Her second film shows close-ups of Kronemyer peeling skin from belly, ribs and face. The ’skin’ is a layer of glue, but by golly it’s convincing, like an animal shedding in the wild. In extreme close-up, she removes the ‘skin’ (contact lenses) of her eyes. Empathy sits in an uncertain state between self and other, discomfort and revulsion.
Alison Plevey gathered courage in her plan to start an Australian Dance Party, a performative arts advocacy group working towards a public launch. Her action to illustrate the word ‘artist’—upper torso forward, arms outstretched, a leg stretched behind—was both a joke on supplication, an awkward yeti in distress and a demand to be seen. Her work captured the tension between vulnerability and force that all the dancers feel. With Trew and Fyfe, she practised almost daemonically over the two weeks. “The Art of Conversation,” she realised, “needs practising.”
David Pledger
Mid-week, facilitator David Pledger had delivered a public “launch” of his projected role as Minister for Empathy. How can empathy survive and answer to ‘policy’? He seemed fighting-fit for both immediate successes and possible failures in that role, triggering a spirited discussion among the gathered audience.
Pledger asserted that “artists are the canaries in the coalmine of democracy” and therefore (presumably) necessary to the foundation and operations of any social organisation—otherwise who would be aware of the health or toxicity of a system? Somehow, in the scrum of this shared residency, Pledger’s positive demeanour overrode any ‘lamb to the slaughter’ connotations implicit in the canary metaphor.
The ‘last say’ in this event came from Matt Shilcock, in the venue’s central courtyard, dancing the intersection between everyone’s investigations as spectators moved from one presentation space to another. An almost selfless act of generosity—the still point of a seven–pointed star, performing a subtly reflective commentary that needed no words.
–
Strange Attractor 2016, Make-Think-Speak: artistic director, curator Adelina Larsson, facilitator, mentor, David Pledger, writer-in-residence Zsuzsi Soboslay, participants Liz Lea, Alison Plevey [ACT]; Shona Erskine, Loren Kronemyer, Daisy Sanders [WA]; Matt Shilcock [SA]; Alice Dixon, William McBride [VIC], additional dancers Ella-Rose Trew, Olivia Fyfe; David Pledger is running for office, June 22; supported by ArtsACT, Ainslie Arts Centre, Gorman Arts Centre, QL2 Dance, Canberra Contemporary Art Space; Gorman Arts Centre, Canberra, 19 June-3 July
Over the last decade and a half, life has changed considerably for people living with HIV. Consider this passage from John Foster’s celebrated memoir, Take Me to Paris, Johnny, first published in 1993 but recently re-released, about the death of his lover Juan Céspedes:
“The virus makes you obsessive. It settles in your head. It distorts your vision. In the first flood of knowing—or believing—it can make you regard your own body with horror. The blood that is in you is lethal. It could drive you crazy if you dwelt on that knowledge, if you said to yourself, ‘I am the embodiment of death.'”
Now picture Jacob Boehme, an HIV-positive Melbourne-based artist, glamming it up in a billowy turquoise kimono jacket with deep sleeves, smoking a cigarette, teasing the audience and reminiscing about life and death at the height of the AIDS crisis in Sydney.
It’s a prologue to the main event, and the humour is very camp and more than a little facetious, with exaggerated descriptions of doomed drag queens lingering over their final bows.
Apart from lightening the mood, what is Boehme doing with this brief introduction? Is he really parodying narratives of emaciation and death? In any case, it’s clear he has a different story to tell.
Boehme, 24 in 1998 when he contracted the disease, is part of a generation for whom ‘positive’ is not a death sentence. Today, life expectancies for young people living with HIV are almost normal. For a man like Boehme, the struggle is not so much with the enemy in his blood—which can be managed with pills—but with the persistent stigma associated with infection, particularly in the male gay community.
Jacob Boehme, Blood on the Dance Floor
And so—Blood on the Dance Floor, a moving and highly polished one-man show presented by Ilbijerri Theatre. Deftly directed by Isaac Drandic, the piece combines dance interludes choreographed by Mariaa Randall with a well-composed series of autobiographical vignettes by Boehme.
The show’s central conceit is simple enough: Boehme has a date. Wearing singlet and slacks, he paces nervously from one end of the stage to the other. He tells us that he’s terrified. He’s been seeing this man for a while, and everything is going well, but now it’s time to have the conversation. Boehme plans to reveal his most intimate secret—and it’s not that he buys his washing detergent at Aldi.
A second narrative strand engages Boehme’s Aboriginal heritage. He acts out a series of touching conversations with his dying father about the importance of family and the perils of loneliness. In both stories, with father and with lover, the fear of rejection looms large.
Throughout, Randall’s choreography emphasises Boehme’s compact, muscular build. During one passage Boehme—who attended NAISDA with Randall—performs in silhouette against a white background, moving slowly but nimbly through a succession of athletic poses. Later he appears to be performing against a video recording of blood viewed under a microscope. He moves in smooth almost languorous phrases, bending, crouching and extending, as if turned by the gentle current.
Some of the more delicate passages—for instance, repeated gestures where Boehme strokes the veins in his arm or flutters his fingers—can seem a bit awkward. But, overall, what we get is a visible index of his apparent health. This is not a man who regards his body with horror.
Jacob Boehme, Blood on the Dance Floor
The idea that potential lovers expect him to look sick is a recurring anxiety. In one scene, he describes a nightmare orgy in which everyone gets what he wants, except Boehme. A handsome stranger emerges from the shadows and they start making out. Boehme can smell the sex: he wants it raw. Everyone always wants it raw. But then, the inevitable question, “Are you clean?”
Behind him, projected onto the screen at the back of the stage, we see—in devastating high-definition–a close-up video of naked flesh. It’s as if Boehme is haunted by these night-time yearnings for the intimacy of skin on skin.
There are many large issues at play in Blood on the Dance Floor, but the work’s emotional pulse is in the ordinariness of Boehme’s need for love and for a sense of belonging. Thanks to modern regimens, he has a future against which he can balance the present: he can dream, and his dreams might one day be reality. And yet he remains understandably sensitive to the attitudes of those around him. The history—and the myth—of the “gay plague” is a constant burden.
But it’s history that makes Blood on the Dance Floor such an affecting piece of theatre; and it’s the implicit contrast with Juan Céspedes, who was also a dancer and who died in 1987, that gives poignant substance to Boehme’s story, and to the apparent banality of his desires.
At last, Boehme is ready to meet his lover. He faces the audience and somehow seems to step out of the performance. Here we feel the full effect of his sincerity. “My name is Jacob Boehme,” he says. “I’m Aboriginal. I’m HIV-positive. I buy my laundry detergent from Aldi. And I’m in love.”
–
Ilbijerri Theatre Company & Jacob Boehme, Blood on the Dance Floor, writer, performer Jacob Boehme, director Isaac Drandic, choreographer Mariaa Randall, video artist Keith Deverell, sound designer James Henry; Arts House, North Melbourne, 1-5 June
Neither the future of Australia’s Indigenous peoples nor the environment yet figure in the election campaign. In this E-dition reviews of political visual arts exhibitions and documentary filmmaking (image above from Kelrick Martin’s Prison Songs) keep us mindful of this, but art is busy now protecting itself too from government.
Today, 12.45-3.00pm, the streaming of an Artspeak National Arts Election Debate between Labor Shadow Arts Minister Mark Dreyfus, the Greens’ Adam Bandt and Government Arts Minister Senator Mitch Fifield effectively marks the beginning of the public campaign to rectify the appalling damage done to the arts by the Australian Government. The Greens and Labor have announced their arts policies, reinstating all or a large part of funds removed from the Australia Council, abolishing the Catalyst program and offering additional funds. There will be a return to a highly productive status quo if the government loses the election or has an unlikely change of heart.
Artists and organisations large and small are uniting to change the Government’s mind, if not its heart. The Confederation of Australian State Theatre Companies (CAST) and Live Performance Australia (if pro a “reformed and transparent Catalyst”) have welcomed the Labor and Greens policies, especially for their support of the embattled small to medium arts sector.
Watch the National Arts Election Debate streamed here and ready yourself for the 17 June Arts Action Day, which you’ll being hearing about very soon. With an unprecedentedly united arts industry and sense of community, we might effect change, but need to add to our own the voices of our audiences. Keith and Virginia
RealTime issue #133 June-July 2016
Robert Spano conducts Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Metropolis New Music Festival
photo Daniel Aulsebrook
Robert Spano conducts Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Metropolis New Music Festival
The 2016 Metropolis New Music Festival explored the city’s problems and to a lesser extent their solutions. For the first time in the world’s history over half of the world’s population lives in cities. If ancient settlements arose to solve problems such as the need for safety and trade, cities now pose their own problems to which we must adapt as a species. Addressing these problems is not only the realm of civic planners and concerned citizens. The musicians of Homo Urbanus also face the economic, environmental and sexual situations of the modern city.
With a larger local population comes anonymity and the sexual deviance that anonymity affords. Or at least this was the old Subcultural Studies line. While there is no denying the continued conservatism of some quarters, the late capitalist city resembles more of an open marketplace of sexual desires than a Victorian den of iniquity. This was the take-away message of the bold opening to Forest Collective’s Sensuality in the City program. “I wanna fuck Chris Hemsworth,” proclaimed Christian Gillett in the darkened Melbourne Recital Centre salon, “I wanna fuck Chris Hemsworth forever.” Philip Venables’ F**k Forever suggests there is nothing closeted about sexuality in the contemporary city.
The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s guest conductor Robert Spano painted the city on a grand scale in three concerts. How could a music festival dedicated to the city not include works like Michael Daugherty’s Sunset Strip, Steve Reich’s City Life, Jennifer Higdon’s City Scape or Aaron Copland’s Music for a Great City? Each of these pieces depicts a city bustling with construction and economic activity. They are clearly pieces of the late 20th century, composed during a period of unprecedented economic growth and general obliviousness to the environmental effects of greenhouse gases. They present the city as a place of opportunity tempered only by the social inequalities that arise in free markets.
These works also address social stratification by evoking local places, quoting popular music and incorporating speech patterns recorded on the street. In doing this they participate in a centuries-old tradition. The Song Company highlighted this historical continuity with a series of “street cry” pieces from the Renaissance to the 20th century as part of the MSO’s City Scapes program. The company’s superb performance of Luciano Berio’s Cries of London, including the refrain “These are the cries of London town, some go up street some go down,” brought the economic subtext of these pieces to the foreground.
Street-level details were also found in stunning orchestral works by Unsuk Chin and Michael Kurth. Chin’s supposedly non-programmatic (though to my ears extremely evocative) Graffiti begins with ‘scratching’ strings like the furtive carvings on the walls of ancient cities. The audience is then taken through an eerie “Notturno Urbano” and an uproarious “Urban Passacaglia.” Graffiti was an epiphany. We don’t get enough opportunities in Australia to cheer Chin’s work performed live. The composer Michael Kurth also takes the streets as his inspiration in Everything Lasts Forever, which includes three movements inspired by Atlanta street art. The cartoon feet of the street artist Toes are represented by swaggering slap bass. The pathos of a bird singing on a boarded-up door is conjured in a sadly lyrical movement. A loping movement in an additive meter presents an ironic commentary on the message “We Have All the Time in the World.”
If 20th-century composers saw the city as a place of opportunity and social inequality, two pieces presented as part of the Cybec 21st Century Australian Composers Program paint the city as an existential threat. Alex Turley’s finely atmospheric City of Ghosts considers a city without people. Modal melodies arise from a subtly thunderous bed of pianissimo tuba and double bass. The melodies move wraith-like across the ensemble, describing towering buildings and arches. With its profound palette, City of Ghosts is testament to Turley’s musical imagination and honed talents as an orchestrator. Chillingly, the piece presents us with a world without humans, leaving us guessing at where all the people have gone.
Michael Bakrncev’s Sky Jammer considers urban problems of the future. Will the environment be able to support Melbourne’s projected population of 10 million by 2050? What about the social ramifications of urban expansion fuelled by property speculation? With median house prices at or near one million dollars in Melbourne and Sydney, young people can’t afford to buy property near their families or where they grew up. Tax breaks intended to increase the supply of housing fuel intergenerational inequality instead.
Complex subject matter requires a complex sound world and Sky Jammer so clearly draws on Bakrncev’s musical influences. In its dense, rapidly changing textures one can hear the influence of Australian complexist composers. The instrumental timbres have the grit of a piece by Anthony Pateras. With its attention to instrumental colour and formal cohesion one can hear the influence of Bakrncev’s teacher Elliott Gyger. Though this description might make him sound like the love-child of dour modernists, Bakrncev brings his own crowd-pleasing style to the piece, in particular during a virtuosic violin solo for Sophie Rowell, who needs to be congratulated for several incredible solo passages throughout the festival.
Lina Andonovska (flute), Sonya Lifschitz (piano), Crashing Through Fences, Press, Play program
photos courtesy Metropolis New Music Festival
Lina Andonovska (flute), Sonya Lifschitz (piano), Crashing Through Fences, Press, Play program
Sure, they may be totemic tributes to property speculation, but I am not so down on Melbourne’s skyscrapers as Bakrncev. As Le Corbusier told us in Robert Davidson’s City Portraits (as part of Press, Play’s program), in order for everyone to have access to “sun, space, and green,” 2000 people must live in a building connected by a “vertical road.” Sure, many of Le Corbusier’s brutalist apartment blocks were barely habitable, but when his words are set to Davidson’s bitter-sweet piano part and performed by Sonya Lifschitz I am almost ready to believe again. More importantly, enlightened high-density development in the spirit of Le Corbusier will be necessary if 10 million people are to minimise their impact on the environment. The bustling, free-market, “Cries of London” urban model is not sustainable. Through varied and thought-provoking programs Metropolis starkly captured the liminal time in which we live.
photo Joan Cameron-Smith courtesy National Association for the Visual Arts
A musical proto-brain, an Alzheimer Symphony and the rise and rise of conceptualism in dance constitute food for vigorous thought in this e-dition. But a real no-brainer is the necessity to rigorously protest the Turnbull Government’s brutal depredation of Australia’s complex, highly effective but extremely vulnerable arts ecology.
Artists and supporters are now mobilising to demand the return of Catalyst funds to the Australia Council and a return to the status quo—a single federal arts funding body insulated from ministerial interference. Labor (yet to announce its election arts policy) has promised to return unspent Catalyst funds, the Greens all of them. The big challenge for artists is how to convince voters of any persuasion of the extremity of the crisis and how it will sooner than later affect them too. We can endlessly recite figures that prove what this government ignores—the substantial jobs’n’growth and innovation which art generates. For all that, the arts and, unbelievably, creativity have not figured in Turnbull’s policy announcements.
The issue is principally ethical: the Government and Arts Minister Fifield’s treatment of the arts has been dictatorial, disrespectful, divisive, non-consultative, secretive and opportunist—in a word, un-democratic, not least in its plundering and diminishing of an independent statutory authority, the Australia Council. The moral case has to be put, that a government that does not believe in the integrity and creativity of artists cannot be trusted by Australians as valuing art. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull can only gain the trust of voters by returning to the funding status quo. Beyond protest we all need to think big about the place of the arts in this country.
Signs of strength & unanimity
At a “town hall” meeting, titled Let’s Talk and presented at The Gunnery in Sydney by NAVA and Artspace on 30 May, anxious and angry artists and artworkers bristled with strategies for convincing the electorate of the need to return Catalyst funding to the Australia Council. There was an unfortunate degree of self-laceration, that the arts has not strongly represented itself to governments over recent years. However, it had to be acknowledged that the enormous collective energy expended in 2015 in protesting the Brandis-Fifield depredations, the writing of a remarkable 2,500 or so submissions to a Senate Enquiry on the subject and extensive media coverage of the Free the Arts campaign revealed the potential strength of the united front presented by Artspeak, Feral Arts, Theatre Network (VIC) and other organisations and thousands of artists from across the country.
Not so long before, the arts community had advocated for and contributed significantly to both the Australia Council review (2012) and the Labor Government’s Creative Australia: National Cultural Policy (2013), both of which laid foundations for continuity and development, if within the limits of vulnerability to changes of government, ideological fixations and absence of bipartisanship.
The decline of art’s dialogue with government
Perhaps we believed that tinkering with the structure of the Australia Council and urging the implementation of a cultural policy—with art at its core, alongside generalities about the value of culture—would be our salvation. Meanwhile peer assessment and contribution to Australia Council policy-making was steadily being eroded, transformed into a mysterious three to four level hierarchical assessment model applied to four-year funding applications. If artists cannot dialogue with and contribute to policy with the Australia Council, how can they even begin to engage with government? The Australia Council Charter requires peer assessment, but it has been weakened and ignored and needs to be seriously re-visited. But within what larger context? If the arts indeed do constitute an ‘industry,’ then we need to be treated like one and consulted by government as they do other industries.
Thinking big, thinking culture
This is where we need, from the bottom up, to think big so that, instead of waiting for a Whitlam or a Keating or even an arts-championing Crean to come along, we embed a safe but progressive place in government for culture. It could take a while, but the notion has been strongly argued for.
David Pledger, in his Platform Paper “Re-valuing the Artist in the New World Order” (No 26, Aug 2013; Currency House) and Julianne Schultz in her paper “Where to from here…after the National Cultural Policy”(Currency House Art and Public Life Breakfast, 14 08 2013) cite the successes of cultural ministries in a range of countries. An Australian Ministry for Culture would, according to Schultz, position the arts alongside “sport, heritage, national collecting and training institutions, broadcasting, screen, tourism, science as its core elements. It would need to have strong links to education, industry, trade, foreign affairs, Indigenous, communities, immigration, regional affairs, digital economy, defence and health. It would need a Cabinet level minister and a skilled and effective head of department with deep connections across the bureaucracy.”
Of course, such a Ministry of Culture would only work if it was a cogent assemblage of independent statutory authorities championed by their Minister.
Were it not for examples of such ministries in other countries—with South Korea an exemplar and regional inspiration—you might think Pledger and Schultz naïve utopians. You might object that art could get lost in such a ministry. You might also baulk at the inclusion of sport, but perhaps not science given the ideological thrashing dealt its facticity and creativity by a neo-liberal government. But sport is integral in how many Australians imagine themselves, white and Indigenous. And we make art about sport. Not explicitly on Schultz’ list but worthy of inclusion are the creative industries.
Art & the creative industries: a shared plight
To understand the relationship between the arts and the creative industries, you should read Justin O’Connor’s impassioned, nigh apocalyptic “After the Creative Industries: Why we need a Cultural Economy” (Platform Paper, No 47, May 2016). If Pledger delineates Neoliberalism’s radical devaluing of the artist, O’Connor targets its role in eroding the notion of public value (in health, education, the arts…) and of the citizen. He describes the failure of UK and Australian governments to run with the creative industries they so keenly adopted but in the end expected to be entirely self-monetising, in the process making a travesty of ‘creativity.’ At the same time, Neoliberalism’s managerial virus invaded the arts ecosystem, infecting creativity and risk-taking with numbing degrees of accountability. The virus has been injected into the CSIRO, another independent statutory authority being run down, this time by a former venture capitalist and physicist, Larry Marshall, eager to abandon data collection-based research for money-making applications of previous research.
As O’Connor sees it, culture, the arts and creative industries are all under threat when creativity “can easily be translated into no more than a production input” and then culture loses its meaning. The cultural and creative industries divide, he argues, “is a false distinction and divisive,” “sneak[ing] in all sorts of old hierarchies.” Both are prey to Neoliberalism and giant content-capturing techno-corporations.
“…the vision of a new creative economy in which anyone could sell to anyone, and creative labour was self-fulling and abundantly rewarded, was as far from the truth as it was possible to get. Monopoly control now happens on a global scale. It favours those companies who do not actually produce its aggregated content and so have little interest in cultural production…While our publicly funded arts sector remains committed to openness, participation and engaging the diverse experience of its audiences, the large cultural corporations have become more commercial, more centralised and less committed to anything other than the maximisation of profit. States have little inclination and less power to make change. This is the reality the term ‘creative industries’ masks.”
Alarmingly, O’Connor worries that “if the creative industries sink they will take down the arts with them,” presumably because the arts are increasingly technologies and also content-ripe for technological and “fair use” copyright exploitation (about to accelerate if Productivity Commission recommendations are adopted by the Government). The arts increasingly appear on and are made for the everyday technological devices that deliver what is experienced and understood as culture—private rather than shared. O’Connor fears “the wholesale privatisation of culture with government acting as an infrastructure provider and or consumer protection regulator.” Is it then an ironic blessing that Turnbull left the arts out of his innovation and jobs’n’growth policies?
Resurrecting Public Value, raising the Public Voice
We need to argue passionately for the value of culture, but Neoliberalism’s reduction of all things to economic metrics, “the ‘real cost’—early school leaving, work days lost to depression, the value of a university degree or investment in a museum—have made it hard to talk of value in a way that does not sound soft, wishy-washy, and so very chattering class.”
The denial of serious debate (for example the one we didn’t get to have about taxation reform) is, writes O’Connor, “an erosion of a shared language of public value, one that has had a more direct impact on culture than on almost anything else.” What we need, he argues, is a robust public discussion towards “an understanding not just of the ‘market’ but of the social, political and cultural underpinnings of this market that I prefer to call cultural economy, and it is only with this knowledge that the cultural values that are central to the economy can be secured.” In a climate of fear, this discussion of public policy must take place, he writes, “before the very space for such an argument is shut down.”
O’Connor does not indicate how this discussion might take place nor the political or structural outcomes he has in mind. How would he feel about a Ministry for Culture argued for and shaped through public debate and consultation between culture makers and government? Will we be comfortable with the term “cultural economy” in such a discussion, given the evils done in the name of economics?
Justin O’Connor’s Platform Paper is an exhilaratingly angry if often depressing read, offering insights into the tectonically shifting semantics of culture, art and creativity across some five decades and their ramifactions. Read it now, while it’s hot and utterly timely.
Art in the short-term
When the art community came together in a show of strength in 2015, the promise of a mostly united arts community bloomed; now that many major performing arts companies and galleries have emphatically joined the protest there is a sense of communality, of shared responsibility to a complex ecosystem. In coming weeks, ArtsPeak and others will announce a range of strategies you can engage with beyond your own letter writing, emailing and tweeting. We’ll keep you posted.
Culture in the long-term
The fight to protect the arts is part of a larger battle against Neoliberalism’s pervasive devaluing of artists, culture and the public good, all of which have been reduced to economic outputs and consumer preferences. We need a vision that is not merely a rear-guard defence against ministerial incursions and funding cuts, but one which creates an enduring space in government and the minds of all Australians for culture.
Director Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s engrossing 2015 feature-length documentary account of the life of Peggy Guggenheim conjures an empathetic portrait of a wealthy woman whose aesthetic tastes were ahead of the times and whose support for male artists in particular (especially Jackson Pollock) was significant if sometimes reciprocated with insults and romantic betrayal (Max Ernst). Excellent documentary footage, including of Guggenheim herself—frank, droll—and much of it unfamiliar (Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Paul Bowles, Salvador Dali, Yves Tanguy), finely rounds out the film’s sense of an era. Art Addict screened for months in Sydney as word spread of its finely tuned account of a troubled but sympathetic nurturer of great 20th century art.
3 copies courtesy of Madman Entertainment
Email us at giveaways [at] realtimearts.net with your name, postal address and phone number. Include ‘Giveaway’ and the name of the item in the subject line.
CLOSING DATE: 8 June, 2016
RealTime issue #133 June-July 2016
Justus Neumann, Alzheimer Symphony
photo Wolfgang Kalal
Justus Neumann, Alzheimer Symphony
“Who is it that can tell me who I am?” The Tragedy of King Lear, Act I, iv
“Amidst his daily routines, a famous actor tries to recall the lines to Shakespeare’s King Lear, but they are starting to escape him. He develops tricks to fight his forgetfulness as it follows him into every corner of his private life. He forgets the name of his sons, cannot recognise a picture of his mother, and when he finds a sock in his soup he eats it without questioning. As his memory increasingly eludes him, he obstinately fights with all his might but is gradually left with no choice but to embrace his new reality. Important things become unimportant, feelings become stronger than thoughts and his inner child is revived” [program note].
So there you have it, reader: the full story of what Alzheimer Symphony is ‘about.’ I probably can’t do better than this.
Except, I can report that I cried for the whole 70 minutes of it. I can report that what I saw was a work by a former denizen of the Austrian Schauspielhaus who now lives and devises in Tasmania and performs mostly in Europe. That this is the work of a man who does not perform much in his adopted homeland, but has initiated a business teaching others confidence and presentation skills (not theatre), because theatre translates into life in this way. Art is life is love is life is art. Is this why I am crying?
This one-man show cuts to the heart of what we fear as we emigrate from one part of our lives to another. For what is the value of a man, when his mind slips, his memory sags, his world becomes a delimiting cage?
Justus Neumann’s demented actor now lives in one cubic metre squared. The cube—his house, his stage, throne and prison–both restricts and enables a little life around him. Within that fantastical square, he conducts his ablutions, cooks his toast and eggs and recites. But then the phone rings. He has forgotten something. What is it? He receives an instruction, something logical, simple, everyday.
The protagonist of Alzheimer Symphony is both King Lear, mad on the moors, and Vladimir [or is that Estragon?] from Waiting for Godot, but he is also, brilliantly and painfully, Neumann himself contemplating inevitable decline, as we do ours—every one of us—in watching. Neumann’s eyes are both haunted and eager, looking to the past he can’t quite remember and to the future he still hopes for.
Waiting for Godot is a play of containment in time, where ‘nothing happens’ and ‘nobody comes.’ The characters are mad enough to stay, but not maddened enough to leave. In truth, what choice have they?—that terrifying question, forever lurking from just off-stage. Maybe there is nowhere else to go: in the midst of the great architecture of their world, little progresses and nothing arrives. There is perhaps nothing else.
Justus Neumann, Alzheimer Symphony
photo Wolfgang Kalal
Justus Neumann, Alzheimer Symphony
Lear, however, is a personage who can make things appear and disappear at will—divide land, execute bodies, drown kingdoms. Nonetheless, Shakespeare’s tragedy shows greatness losing the architecture that supports a great man’s power. On the wind-blown heath, Lear loses his mind.
Neumann’s “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks” is electrifying, despite the residual smell of toast and eggs, and the grasping for mnemonic objects such as a hairdryer and balloons to represent ‘wind’ and ‘cheeks’ respectively. He crows, “I can do it; I can still do it,” with desperate bravado.
But as the piece progresses, mnemonics fail. This Lear is left with the objects themselves, synecdoches of their own plastic worlds and nothing more. Yet, named and celebrated, they become a concrete poem of spatulae, eggs, ballons and photographs, which constitute an alternative virtuosity. The sweet beauty here is that Neumann takes pleasure in the forgetting, in constructing a narrative that falls apart in order to restructure, that reminds us that we are homo ludens—creatures that play. As we begin, speaking in the tongues of babes, so perhaps do we end.
The work’s title refers to Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, excerpts of which we hear throughout the show. Musicologists disagree as to whether Schubert failed to complete a great work or whether it is ‘perfect’ outside of expectations of classical form. The tension between ‘Here am I’ and ‘Where have I now wandered to’ is central to the greatest of all performances. In Neuman’s small and brilliant work, ‘imperfection’ resounds as tribute to the beauties which stab at the heart even when we cannot contain them in what we expect and already know.
A post-show forum with members from Alzheimer’s Australia generated a moving discussion on the effects of dementia on sufferers and their families. Members of the discussion panel—including doctors and spouses—spoke of the liberations that come from accepting one’s condition. The great challenge to our society, and how we identify ourselves within it, is not just about what we know and remember, but what is valued.
Justus Neumann’s work is vigorous, subversive and tragically funny. Even while watching it, I knew I would never forget its impact on my body and mind. I stand on the heath of my own ageing vulnerability, feeling and watching.
You can see excerpts from Alzheimer Symphony here and an interview with the artist here.
The Street Theatres’ Segue festival: Alzheimer Symphony, performer, co-writer Justus Neumann, co-writer Hans Peter Horner, director Hans Peter Horner, designer Greg Methe, original music Julius Schwing; Street Theatre, Canberra, 5-8 May
For the last two years I’ve been pondering what art will sound like in the future. One of my wilder speculations suggests that we will choose to dispense with the corporeal and upload ourselves into a hive mind. Because a hive mind shares hopes and dreams, and everyone’s secret dream is to be a rock star, I conclude that at the end of time we will manifest as a band—The Omega Point Band—transmitting to infinite space.
As I was working on this scenario I came across cellF, a recent project by bio-artist Guy Ben-Ary, in which he grows neural networks (a proto-brain) developed from his own cellular material. And what does this brain want to be when it grows up? A rock star of course—well, an improvising musician really.
CellF has been in development for over four years, initiated when Ben-Ary received a 2012 Creative Australia Fellowship. It had its debut performance in Perth in October 2015, presented by SymbioticA, and will soon have a second iteration in Sydney as part of The Patient, the upcoming bio-art exhibition curated by Bec Dean at UNSW Galleries. I talked with Ben-Ary last year when cellF was still in development and followed up recently to see how his other “brain” took to its debut performance and their combined feelings around the upcoming tour.
To grow a brain
Ben-Ary has been a key member of the SymbioticA team, along with Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, since 1999. His particular interest is in growing neural networks outside of the body “because of the uneasiness—the idea that masses of them, when organised in a particular way, create consciousness or intelligence…I was interested in their erratic existence—how do they communicate and what do they do outside the body? Can they learn or would they be able to demonstrate emergent behaviour in the future?”
What Ben-Ary terms his “Eureka moment” occurred in the early 2000s when he discovered the work of scientist Steve Potter who has developed an interface to work with Multi-Electrode Array dishes. “It’s a Petri dish that you can grow neural networks in and it has 60 electrodes fitted on the base. You can record what the neural network is doing in 60 areas of the dish but at the same time you can stimulate the neurons in 60 areas of the dish. The stimulations can be variable from weak to very strong. So, symbolically, we can inform [the neurons] about events that are happening in the outside world and we can ask them to respond.”
For this project, which Ben-Ary refers to as “self-portrait,” he was determined to grow a neural network from his own tissue. “I had a biopsy done and skin cells taken off my arm [and then] took this piece of flesh back to the lab, chopped it, processed it and grew my own fibroblasts—connective tissue. Then I shipped those cells and myself to Barcelona to work with an Australian scientist, Dr Mike Edel, where we reprogrammed them to stem cells. Once we were sure that the clones were pluripotent [viable stem cells], we started to push them towards the neuronal lineage. When they reached the neural stem cell phase, we froze them and sent them back to Perth [where we] started to look at how to differentiate them from neurons. It’s quite complicated and it did take me about 18 months. I mashed up maybe 12 or 15 protocols [biological techniques]. I grew billions, and I’m not exaggerating, billions of cells and hundreds of cultures.”
The final result is a neuronal network grown onto the Multi-Electrode Array Interface ready to be stimulated. Which is where the aesthetic decisions—the life choices perhaps—began.
cellF, Guy Ben-Ary & collaborators
photo Yvonne Doherty
cellF, Guy Ben-Ary & collaborators
To find a body
While Ben-Ary’s intention is to make a self-portrait, he wanted to avoid a predominantly visual representation. “I look at myself in the mirror enough, and I kept looking at the cells for 18 months—every single day—so I just couldn’t think about humanistic portraiture, or describing myself in these terms.” In previous works like MEART and Silent Barrage Ben-Ary has used robotics to physically manifest the work, but for cellF he wanted to go in a different direction.
He talks of his long-held fascination with music—“when I was 12 I’d put David Bowie’s make-up on my face.” In particular he developed a passion for experimental music and jazz—“John Zorn changed my life”—but he just never developed the skills to be a musician. So he decided that this self-portrait—this auxiliary Ben-Ary brain—could live this dream for him. Finally he could become a rock star.
In reality cellF might be a bit too experimental to be a mainstream rock star; rather it’s aiming to be respected in the underground experimental scene. In discussions with his artistic collaborators, musician Darren Moore, analogue synthesiser specialist Andrew Fitch (Non-Linear Circuits) and artist/machine maker Nathan Thompson it was decided that the ultimate sonic manifestation—the sound body—would involve analogue synthesisers. Ben-Ary explains that the neuronal mass “is wetware but it’s analogue: micro-voltages are passing between components. It’s oversimplifying how neural networks work in the brain but modular synthesisers work the same way with control voltage.”
The actual physical body of the neurons has been designed by Thompson to fulfil both practical and aesthetic needs. The system not only has to house the spaghetti monster that is a modular synthesiser system, but it also has to be a functioning bio-lab with a fridge, incubator, the neural interface as the “head” and a class 2 sterile hood because of the use of modified human cells. Drawing inspiration from Futurist Luigi Russolo’s intonarumori noise machines, 1950s-60s giant gramophone speakers and the spiral structure of the cochlear, the neuronal network’s body is quite a magnificent sculptural object.
To play with others
As the whole point of cellF is that it is an improvising musician that wants to play with other musicians, the primary presentation mode is as a performance in which a human musician improvises with Ben-Ary’s “mind.” The musical output from the human is sent to the FriGate circuit, developed by Thompson, which converts certain frequencies into voltage information which is then passed on to the neurons. The neurons respond to this by outputting voltage information to the synthesisers and the two begin to ‘play together.’
In the Perth manifestation the drummer Darren Moore went head to head with cellF. Ben-Ary was extremely happy with how this went, saying there was “a clear sense of responsiveness, of communication between Darren and the neurons. [It was] a jam session or improv scenario where it wasn’t Darren playing with a programmed machine or the neurons doing something really chaotic—there was a sense of improvisation between them. It was just incredible to see.”
Darren Moore playing with cellF, Guy Ben-Ary & collaborators
photo Yvonne Doherty
Darren Moore playing with cellF, Guy Ben-Ary & collaborators
For the upcoming Sydney manifestation there will be three performances featuring different musicians each night— Chris Abrahams (10 June), Claire Edwardes and Jason Noble of Ensemble Offspring (11 June) and a trio comprising Clayton Thomas, Jon Rose and Darren Moore (12 June). The plan is to allow the performers to have a little more time than previously to rehearse with the system, to get to know each other. Ben-Ary is curious as to how the neurons will respond and develop over the performance series. He is also planning to use the same culture—the same neuronal mass—across the series: “Cultures like to be stimulated and the more you stimulate them the more chance for them to change their functional plasticity and produce more activity.”
When the neurons are not performing, sleeping off their rock star hangovers in their fancy multi-electrode array hotel beds, the project can be experienced via image and video documentation and prototype displays. Hoping to tour the work further, Ben-Ary also sees the opportunity for developing an installation version where the neurons can be allowed to spend their days composing—singing to themselves.
While cellF has a very playful presentation mode, it is a serious exploration of posthuman futures and our sense of ‘self.’ It probes fundamental questions: what makes a mind, what is consciousness and how are we connected to flesh and physicality? Guy Ben-Ary’s approach illustrates the idea of art as a tool for speculative dreaming. He says, “Art can help us with imagining the future. We don’t need to do it, we need to suggest. Symbolic gestures are sometimes enough, and pushing the technology to the limits, the nowadays limits, is enough to look at contestable futures.” I look forward to checking out cellF’s chops, and then I’ll decide if this is a sonic future I want to come true.
cellF, Guy Ben-Ary in collaboration with artists Nathan Thompson, Andrew Fitch and Darren Moore, and scientists Douglas Bakkum, Stuart Hodgetts and Mike Edel, presented by SymbioticA
Performances as part of The Patient: Chris Abrahams, 10 June; Claire Edwards, 11 June; Clayton Thomas, Jon Rose, Darren Moore, 12 June; The Cellblock Theatre, National Art School, Darlinghurst, Sydney
The Patient, The medical subject in contemporary art, curator Bec Dean, artists Ingrid Bachmann (CAN), Guy Ben-Ary (AUS), John A Douglas (AUS), Bob Flanagan & Sheree Rose (USA), Brenton Heath-Kerr (AUS), Carol Jerrems (AUS), Eugenie Lee (AUS), ORLAN (FRA), Helen Pynor (AUS), David McDiarmid (AUS), Jo Spence (UK), John Wynne & Tim Wainwright (UK); UNSW Galleries, 3 June-6 August
Parts of this interview also appear in audio format in the installation by Gail Priest, Sounding the Future, exhibited in ISEA2016.
Lizzie Thomson, TACET: Rhythmic Composition (after Roy De Maistre’s Rhythmic Composition in Yellow Green Minor, 1919)
photo Document Photography
Lizzie Thomson, TACET: Rhythmic Composition (after Roy De Maistre’s Rhythmic Composition in Yellow Green Minor, 1919)
Since the 1990s conceptual choreography (and its antecedents since the 1960s) has expanded and mutated dance. At their humblest, choreographers now declare themselves directors of idea-driven works in which there will be varying degrees of dance among other things; at their most elevated, choreographers label themselves artists who make objects (dance, dance-related) for art museums. The latter works sometimes enter permanent collections and when re-exhibited display traces of the originals but will become, in turn, newly ephemeral—but objects nonetheless.
The notion of dance as object (let alone dancers as objects) can be unsettling, as has been the move away from ‘steps’ in conceptual choreography and associated Non-dance. There are fears that dance will lose its primal distinctiveness, that it is being rendered invisible—indistinguishable from the current mergings of contemporary performance, performance art and live art.
There’s been some mocking of audiences who love dance for its ‘steps,’ its anti-gravitational magic, fluidity, radical angularity and non-verbal expressiveness, for its felt pleasure and tensions. While we watch in stillness, our neural system vibrates in synch with dancers’ bodies—with any bodies, as it has from our earliest years and, indeed, in utero. For many, this is what compels us to dance and to watch dance. Other observers feel that it’s not just dance that’s disappearing in conceptual choreography, but the body.
Feelings run high over the challenge of conceptual choreography to dance. At the end of his impassioned essay “America without tears” in the current Dancehouse Diary, American cultural critic Andy Horowitz writes, “that strand of conceptualism in contemporary choreography that seeks to remove the body from the consideration of dance, when favoured by elite American arts programmers, curators and institutions, has real consequences. ‘Disembodiment is a kind of terrorism,’ and when the labouring body is erased by (white, male, of European origin) philosophical constructs, we are complicit in devaluing human lives even as we are destroying the democratic American body.”
But instead of being co-opted by galleries for “experience economy” ends, is dance simply seeking new niches in the arts ecosystem, making itself more visible and regenerating? The emergence of the term “the choreographic,” however, has further complicated a sense of dance’s place and its viability.
The Choreographic
The adjective “choreographic” has lately been definitely articled and noun-ed. Choreography, as in the making of dance, has been appropriated, metaphorised and newly theorised in order to liberate art museums and biennales from a sense of stasis, to provide expanded sensory and cerebral engagement for gallery-goers in the era of “the experience economy.” Of course there is a long 20th century history of the ‘authentic’ body from time to time intruding ‘disruptively’ into the gallery and reinvigorating our sense of art. The choreographic is the latest of these moments, enveloping and activating the bodies of those who were once viewers and, ideally, bringing into greater play a fluid relationship between artist, curator, gallery space and audience,
“The choreographic” covers dance performed in galleries (or, in biennales, on the streets and elsewhere), dance and other performances that engage with artworks, and the physical movement of gallery-goers—whether of their own volition or shaped by curators (the compelling placement of images) or by artists (choreographers or not) who create ‘walks’ or ‘journeys’ or even encourage all too willing gallery-goers to dance en masse, as was the case with Biennale of Sydney keynote speaker and conceptual choreographer Boris Charmatz’ Musée de la danse at Tate Modern and other galleries and in squares and parks.
Jenn Joy’s The Choreographic (2014) is publicised as “mov[ing] between the corporeal and cerebral to tell the stories of encounters as dance trespasses into the discourse and disciplines of visual art and philosophy through a series of stutters, steps, trembles, and spasms.” For Joy, choreography—conceptual and postmodern—becomes a role model and an infiltrating agent (it “trespasses”) for expanding notions of movement within and across disciplines and genres and is exemplified in contemporary works which in their ineffability elude categorisation.
Meryl Tankard performs Nina Beier’s The Complete Works
photo Ben Symons
Meryl Tankard performs Nina Beier’s The Complete Works
Jess Wilcox in The Brookyln Rail writes, “Joy relates this thinking to the choreographic nature of the artistic endeavor as it highlights the unfixed relationship among the maker, the image and the viewer…In this, movement, language, writing, composition and articulation emerge as tangled manifold concerns.” She adds,”…the tension of the age-old binary of mind/body dualism lies below the surface. Embodied thought seems to be what Joy is seeking.” And choreography, actual and metaphorical, offers, it seems, a way into this embodiment.
However, adds Wilcox, “Joy’s silence on performance and dance in the museum is curious considering the topic’s currency and how she emphasises visual arts in the first chapter. No doubt a great deal of recent museum performance treads the line of spectacle and is not worth spilled ink. Yet, her astute understanding of the triangular relationship between artist, performer, and audience is valuable as the prevalence of performance in the museum increases. As more museums embrace the experience economy model, they claim an authenticity for visitors.”
Choreography & the Biennale
Artistic Director Stephanie Rosenthal has placed choreography of many kinds, actual and theoretical, front and centre in her Biennale of Sydney program, yielding much discussion. In a number of forums she’s declared that she’s not attempting to institutionalise dance in galleries and is wary, for example, of the notion that dance can interpret visual artworks (“an old-fashioned art-plus-performance idea”), although performances by Chrysa Parkinson (whom I didn’t see, but who impressed watchers) and Lizzie Thomson engaged intriguingly with paintings at AGNSW. Rosenthal described bringing performance into the gallery as “interesting but painful” and “very different in theory from reality.” But she is clearly fascinated, intellectually and experientially, by possibilities for the ephemeral arts in otherwise materially oriented galleries. Her doubts aside, Rosenthal’s program and previous work represent the encroachment of “the choreographic” into the gallery if, it would seem, experimentally and with the freedom, as she mentioned, that a biennale budget and resources allow.
Where does “the choreographic” sit in the world of dance? In the form of conceptual choreography it accommodates and rationalises the radical expansion and transformation of the dance palette across recent decades—not only with dance’s increasing diversity of forms but also in its hybridising mergers with performance art, contemporary performance, live art, digital media and, emphatically, in its romance with the academy, sharing, alongside visual art, some of the most esoteric of writing and theorising. The latter was in full sway in the Biennale’s six-hour Choreography in the Gallery Salon, a mix of talk and performance at AGNSW facilitated by UNSW’s Erin Brannigan. The language of academics and curators who spoke was highly coded, sometimes obscuring insights and conjectures, while dancers spoke lyrically but also quite abstractly. Other speakers addressed the issues with a blunt pragmatism.
Xavier Le Roy, Temporary Title Open Rehearsals. Commissioned by Kaldor Public Art Projects and Carriageworks
photo Zan Wimberley
Xavier Le Roy, Temporary Title Open Rehearsals. Commissioned by Kaldor Public Art Projects and Carriageworks
Time, the gallery & the object
AGNSW curator Anneke Jaspers’ focus on time detailed museums’ “multiple templates”—their set hours, calendars, seasons, cycles, loops—and how artists working in performance are adapting to and exploiting these “temporalities.” A year at the Stedelijk: Tino Sehgal (2015), for example, comprised a 12-month cycle drawn from Sehgal’s opus with 12 live works of varying scale programmed to respond to seasonal change and varied gallery spaces. For audiences, said Jaspers, there was “no possibility of a total reading” across the year; a situation akin to showing of multiple long films and videos in exhibitions. Nonetheless, the work’s unfolding attracted a strong audience according to its curator and has been acquired for the museum’s collection, a move, says Jaspers, that is still rare. French conceptual choreographer Xavier Le Roy has also, she said, created a program of works 1994-2010 in which “a retrospective becomes a mode of production” for creating new work from old.
In these ways choreography grants itself a greater degree of materiality for dance as object with which to justify its place in the gallery—with the gallery’s archival criteria—while at the same time creating new ephemera. But it does mean that if dance steps outside of theatre time into gallery time and space, it possibly becomes something else, certainly from an audience perspective where privileged scheduling, viewing and optimal attentiveness are not guaranteed. If they are, then the evils of ‘spectacle’ are severely invoked.
Curator as dramaturg
Hannah Mathews, senior curator at Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), introduced another perspective on the choreographic in which she attempted to find equivalence for herself not between choreographer and curator but rather curator and dramaturg—a “co-imaginer” working with artists. It’s a good match and a telling one although the analogy is not a simple one: the hierarchy in performance is still largely headed by a choreographer or a director over and above a dramaturg. In a fascinating aside Mathews suggested that text (written, spoken, performed to, danced about) was more central to Biennale performance than choreography—an indicator of even higher conceptualisation or more diversification and cross-over?
Avoiding & Invading the gallery
Phillip Adams, choreographer and artistic director of the Melbourne-based BalletLab dance company described his strategies for inserting works into galleries without losing integrity and audience attentiveness and Tang Fu Kuen, a Bangkok-based, Singaporean curator and producer, sounded alarms about live performance’s potential loss of authenticity when presented in galleries.
Tang spoke of “the performance turn” in which “exhausted” museums and galleries aim “to produce subjectivity, so that individual (gallery-goers) feel spoken to.” He sees the phenomenon as a part of a Neo-liberalised culture which reduces art to well-being and lifestyle. He wonders precisely what these strategies say about art to audiences. Tang expressed concern about performance in galleries without committed audience attentiveness and in a context of competing visual artworks already rich in associations. He also highlighted a lack of care for artists performing without the usual professional safety nets and requisite budgets. Care was an issue that the Biennale curators spoke to in this forum. I witnessed the admirable Meryl Tankard performance for Nina Beier’s The Complete Works at the MCA where there was no strategy in evidence for dealing with an at times far too crowded gallery space in which staff vigorously protected the installed and hung artworks but not the dancer.
Phillip Adams, After, Proximity Festival 2015
photo Matt Sav
Phillip Adams, After, Proximity Festival 2015
Phillip Adams drolly explained how he “graduated to the gallery,” having long been averse to dancers suddenly appearing like aliens in gallery spaces in their T-shirts and whites only to be avoided by audiences. He opined that “dance in the gallery has not evolved much since the 1960s” and entails “a truckload of problems.” Adams described After (Proximity, AGWA; Sarah Scout Presents, 2015), a work he created for exhibition in which a sole visitor enters a structure and stretches out for a 15-minute encounter with Adams’ “naked mature body” (too much art has been about youth and beauty, he declared). So that the work maintains its integrity, timing is fixed and manageable, there’s a $20 ticket price, a guide and a white walkway to the installation’s black curtain. It’s better, says Adams, than offering the gallery-goer “the freedom to watch three minutes of a 30-minute video work.”
Ephemeral objects
In the first of three works presented in the AGNSW Central Court, “spatial practice” specialist Helen Grogan quietly created OBSTRUCTION DRIFT, a “performative and sculptural situation” in which gallery staff delivered stacks of chrome angle barriers used to demark function spaces. Grogan and an assistant arranged them about the court and left. Save for those in the know, viewers perhaps suspected that the activity was preparation for a work that never happened. The artist’s claim to test, in galleries, “the potentiality for obstructions, parameters and demarcations—both spatial and conceptual—to destabilise, shift, drift” was barely felt.
Melbourne choreographer-dancers Shelly Lasica, Jo Lloyd and Deanne Butterworth danced through the Wednesday night gallery crowd in their How Choreography Works, an iteration and extension of “the discussion” that comprised the 2015 original which “included original and archival performance.” With Lasica as a kind of grande dame and Lloyd and Butterworth as sometimes aberrant acolytes (displaying some exhilaratingly precise twinning of movement), the trio carved up the space and generated diverse patterns of cause-and-effect with energy, subtlety and wit, un-fazed by the casual movement of the audience. At close quarters and great distances—as Lasica opened out the length of the space—we witnessed not a totality, but fragments as we moved to gain sight or shift perspective or surrendered to the dancers’ disappearance into the crowd. Making aesthetic sense of How Choreography Works as it shape-shifted over a long duration, let alone understanding it as some kind of archive (unless perhaps we’d been committed Melbourne dance followers), proved challenging, recalling comments in the forum about the pitfalls of uncontextualised dancing in galleries.
Roy De Maistre, Rhythmic composition in yellow green minor (1919)
Sydney dancer Lizzie Thomson similarly created a space in which she danced amid the audience, engagingly, fluidly and passionately as ever. It looked like another dance in a gallery. However it was the coda to TACET that made sense of the performance for those who had not read the program notes. Catching her breath, Thomson read aloud a letter addressed to Virginia Woolf about her encounter with both the novelist’s The Waves (she’d learnt part of it to recite to single visitors to Biennale artist Mette Edvardsen’s Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine, presented at Newtown Library) and artist Roy De Maistre’s Rhythmic Composition in Yellow Green Minor, 1919, located in an adjoining gallery room.
In her letter to Woolf, Thomson recalled standing in front of the painting and finding herself “thinking about the rhythmic composition of The Waves, and how the intensity produced by reading it over and over again out loud would sometimes make me feel seasick. I had to train myself to read it without rocking backwards and forwards in time with your words. For a few years now I have been working intermittently with a score of rocking, a kind of rocking between the past and present, shifting my attention between working with embodied memories and also generating new, or renewed, movement material.” [The complete letter will be published as part of the Time has fallen asleep… project.] Thomson’s performance moved beyond apparently abstract dance into the conceptual when spoken, revealing the artist’s musing over dance, words, darkness and silence.
As Andrew Fuhrmann wrote, contestably, in RealTime about the prevalence of conceptual choreography in the Keir Choreographic Award works, “we risk falling into repetitive and needlessly divisive debates about whether this is really dance or not. Simply put: there is conceptual choreography that works, and there is conceptual choreography that doesn’t. And this is what we should be talking about.” There are many exciting, conceptually driven works, including those that with devices—and without dancers—mobilise the bodies of the public, like William Forsythe’s Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time, no 2, 2013, in which the audience move amid swinging pendula. It’s exhibited on Cockatoo Island as part of the Biennale of Sydney until 5 June.
Likewise, “the choreographic” might inspire a greater awareness of the creative fluidity of artist-artwork-audience relationships across and between all forms. Or it might amplify the challenges highly theorised art dance has set itself in a gallery economy hungry for commodifying audience experience, possibly at the expense of the dancing body in—as one dance loving observer put it to me—“a visual arts takeover.” At the same time, beyond the conceptual choreography prominent in the Keir Choreographic Award performance and this year’s Next Wave Festival there is a plenitude of exactingly choreographed works being created and performed across Australia without surrendering dance, let alone the body, some of it enriched by conceptualism and the far-reaching concept of “the choreographic.”
My thanks to Lizzie Thomson for permission to produce an excerpt from the text accompanying TACET: Rhythmic Composition (After Roy De Maistre’s Rhythmic Composition in Yellow Green Minor, 1919).
–
20th Sydney Biennale, Choreography and the Gallery, a one-day salon, facilitator Erin Brannigan; Centenary Auditorium and Central Court, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, 27 April
.jpg)
,_Tale_of_Tales.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
