There’s a lot of dust in Ivan Sen’s Goldstone: literal dust in the desert terrain of the film’s titular town, as well as the metaphorical variety, heard from characters who talk about “cleaning the dust away.” This accretion brings to mind an image of historical detritus that cannot be brushed off, a cultural legacy that’s foregrounded during the film’s opening credits that feature a series of photographs from Australia’s Gold Rush era. Over a sweeping instrumental score, shackled Indigenous men appear with shocking clarity, followed by images of the Chinese community at work, and white Australians at afternoon tea.
The music ceases and historical pictures are replaced by a shot of a car driving through a yellow landscape, heralding the return to the screen and the arrival in Goldstone of Detective Jay Swan (Aaron Pedersen), last seen in Sen’s 2013 thriller Mystery Road. Notably the worse for wear, he’s arrested by the makeshift town’s fresh-faced policeman, Josh (Alex Russell), for drink-driving, before being grudgingly released to begin investigating the disappearance of a young Chinese woman. Here as in Mystery Road, Swan’s inquiries start to expose something poisonous within the entire community. Goldstone might be small and relatively isolated, but the problems Swan must tackle, of exploitation and corruption stemming from postcolonialist greed and racism, are enormous and all too familiar in reality.
Goldstone
Sen is a versatile director who can move from the most meditative ‘art’ cinema (Beneath Clouds, 2002) through naturalism (Toomelah, 2011) to the skilled employment of suspense and action in his genre pieces featuring Jay Swan. But in all these films there’s a common socio-political thread of characters caught between worlds: a questioning of what it means to belong and whether it’s possible to escape your allotted place. In Goldstone, Sen takes Swan’s outsider status, as flawed but principled Indigenous lawman, and pushes it into mythic territory, intensified by his most explicit exploration of spirituality yet, centred on local elder Jimmy, played by David Gulpilil.
Perhaps this mythologising—though not a flaw in itself—and the number of problems Goldstone seeks to encompass makes the film’s approach to real victimisation seem at times superficial. For all the talk of dust, the film doesn’t feel viscerally dirty enough. The horror of sex trafficking is skirted around, while characters like David Wenham’s mine foreman and Jacki Weaver’s mayor, who with a penchant for baking and corruption is a cruder version of her truly frightening matriarch in Animal Kingdom (David Michôt, 2010), are too broadly drawn to be deeply menacing. Sen doesn’t utilise the intense close-ups of Mystery Road: that portrait-like scrutiny of faces behind which lurk potentially devastating secrets. The secrets in this mining town are fairly open ones. Swan and Josh know how the land lies; it’s largely a question of whether they can shift a few monoliths.
While Goldstone’s mythic quality might simplify some of its themes, it doesn’t reduce the impact of Jay Swan, whom Pedersen renders as layered and believable as he is archetypal. Along with ABC TV series Cleverman (2016), the Jay Swan films mark the long-overdue arrival of Indigenous (super) heroes, as well as narratives that grapple with contemporary injustices via the myth genre. Cleverman has been approved for a second series; I’m hoping Jay Swan will surface in another troubled town a few years hence.
Goldstone
Goldstone, writer-director Ivan Sen, cinematography, editing Ivan Sen, score Ivan Sen, Damien Lane, production design Matthew Putland; distributor Transmission Films, 2016
When we willingly give ourselves to a work of art, we form a relationship with it, a loop of ongoing recall, enduring emotional and sensory responsiveness and reinterpretation. It’s little different from the way we love and befriend and constantly re-estimate relationships. The special pleasure offered by Urban Theatre Projects’ Simple Infinity is that it reveals the difficulty of connecting, especially for those ‘on the spectrum,’ by evoking the loop of social engagement, literally and metaphorically, in all of its complexity: a not so simple infinity.
Writer-director Rosie Dennis writes in her program note that “at the core of Simple Infinity is a desire to spark a deeper conversation in relation to mental health.” In the play, the metaphor “on the spectrum,” a descriptor for degrees of autism, is expanded, in several ways, into its colour components and used informally to suggest a range of emotional states of being rather than specific psychological conditions.
Despite initial resistance, Simple Infinity grew on me as I watched; grew into me as I reflected on and wrote about it. This writing is the translation into words of my experience of the work; my speaking back to it; my sustaining the loop generated by our coming together. I’m replying at length, in order to make sense of the experience—and to bring you into the loop—regardless of uncertain recollection and notes scribbled in dim light. In an era of diminishing critical returns for artists, I make no excuse for the number of words that follow.
Even if I hadn’t heard that the set design for Simple Infinity is premised on an infinity loop, the work’s recursiveness—a series of scenes that commence with “A man walks into a bar…”—its motif-driven dialogue and the characters’ shifting estimations of themselves and each other clearly welcomed me into an interpersonal phenomenological loop—if an emergent, delicate and unstable one.
First, we enter a narrow gap in a white high-walled, circular structure in the Carriageworks foyer and sit cocooned within one half of it facing a semi-circular, convex interior wall that pushes out towards us. After a signed welcome by one of the performers, Cheng Moy Yeow, she and another, Vicki Van Hout, slowly pull open the two large doors that constitute the wall, revealing the full extent of the space, curtained in a deep blue and home to a humble bar, table and chair…and a string quartet. What we then witness is a seemingly whimsical fabulation about how we engage with others.
The weather’s always a good starting point for a conversation (“phatic” or ritual communication as linguists call it). Van Hout chats amiably to us about the weather, then eating, then travelling, but with a looping compulsiveness, recursively posing what I/you/we might be experiencing: “Very nice weather we’re having. Very pleasant weather I am having. Very nice weather everybody is having. Very nice weather you are having.” And so on and on, but voiced charmingly rather than anxiously or manically. It’s a closed circuit. The opening of the set’s inner wall suggested perhaps that we were being invited into a world otherwise closed to us. But who speaks like this? Can the circuit be broken?
Tone (relaxed, warm, funny), style (poetic, minimalist, the music too) and theme (otherness, looping obsessiveness) have been established. The words, from Bon Marche Weather (1911), are Gertrude Stein’s (made her own by Van Hout), as are those at the end of Simple Infinity. But in between, the rest belong, in the Stein spirit (if lighter and more conversational) to the work’s makers.
Vicki Van Hout, Simple Infinity
Ultraviolet (Van Hout) runs the bar. The barmaid is Olive Green (Cheng Moy Yeow). They have a recurrent customer, a man of the sea, Midnight Blue (Luke Waterlow) who always arrives as if for the first time, striking coconut shells, as if horse-riding, and prefaced by the announcement, “A man walks into a bar…” This allows for some amusing advice from Violet: “Make it believable.” “Just be authentic. You don’t get a second chance.” When he arrives the same way later on, Violet quips, “Haven’t you got any new material?” The running gag lightly underlines the lack of progress in their barely initiated relationship and reminds us that humour is frequently repetitive and its use can appear sociable while remaining evasive.
Blue is initially regarded with wariness by the women. Violet asks him why he’s in the bar; his worrying response is, “I’m not prepared to be broken.” Making the link between the colour names for the characters and their mental states, Violet asks him, “What part of the spectrum are you?” He answers, “I’m emotional.” She responds, “That you are. Cue violins.” They play. Of herself she says, “I veer if the topic is uncomfortable. I can be a different person.” He declares, “I’m Midnight,” and exits, his discomfort about opening up evident, but he returns, and returns, if only to exit each time: “Some days are so heavy, it’s hard to breathe.”
These are people functioning at fundamental levels. Discussions about colour, cocktail making and conversation all deal with how to cope in the world and how to categorise experience. Violet: “Be attentive…check for fascination, look for anecdote.., never let your guard down.” Blue: “Listen empathically…use human rapport…abort if necessary.” Drink-mixing mirrors relationship combinations. The subject of Violet’s 50s Beat-like meditation on colour (“turquoise sits on the fence of blue/green”), inter-colour coupling and colourism is intoned to a fast, cool double bass brightened with pizzicato plucking. Of her own name, she says, “Violet, she’s beyond,” a reference to her full name, Ultraviolet, a colour that is off the spectrum.
As the characters deepen their exchanges, in words, with movement and music, we appreciate more concretely their sense of ephemerality, of an infinity “that lurks in the shadows,” or “in a rainbow.” To a high bass melody, Violet’s slow movement casts soft shadows on the stage. Sweet high notes, whisperings and raw chords parallel Blue’s waverings. Olive performs gesturally with great delicacy to a fine arrangement by the quartet’s bassist, Hamish Gullick, of The Platters’ hit “Only You (And You Alone)” (1955). I wonder if she can feel the vibrations from the instruments, like the brilliant, deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie, or if the musicians play to her timing. It’s a little bit of magic, as if her not-hearing has been transcended.
There are signs that despite Blue’s cyclical comings and goings, this trio might be able to loop with the greater world. As if sensing some kinship between Violet and Blue, Olive urges them “to play.” Belief enters the picture as the relative open- and closedness of religion and science are debated. Blue declares himself to be “in a state of openness,” but is okay only “if I stand still.” For Violet, “if I stand still my inside and outside merge.” Swaying, body arching softly back, she “feels weightless” as the strings define a beautiful descent. Olive taps Violet, bringing her back to reality and signing. “She still wants us to play,” explains Violet. Whether or not that will happen is left open. It is clear that “before, he was on a precipice” but now Blue “has found peace” and “it’s time to go.”
The climax is gentle, but the string quartet provides a sense of catharsis with passionate playing, giving voice to the extremes of feeling that the work’s characters might not feel safe expressing, if even able to. To long, soft complex chording, the doors are slowly swung closed to the intoning of Stein’s Play, in word and gesture, “to play, make what you play, play everyday…” Simple Infinity ends with a quiet sense of optimism. The loop that binds Violet and Olive has been enlarged by their encounter with Blue who has become part of it, even if temporarily.
Vicki Van Hout is a magnetic performer with a great feeling for language (she contributed to the writing) and an embracing ease of delivery and fine movement that suggests Violet can drop her defences. Chen Moy Yeow, in her first stage role, graces us with a welcoming if sometimes enigmatic smile, an enticing playfulness and supple gesturing. Her Olive is wonderfully outgoing. The cards that translate her Auslan for us suggest a desire for acknowledgment and belonging, and, in “only You,” love. But where is she “on the spectrum” compared with her defensive companions? Luke Waterlow embodies the enigmatic man of the sea with a reserved, sometimes tense stillness and a dark vocal sonority that brightens as Blue begins to engage with the world, speaking of light that comes off the sea at midnight, as if he’s liberated by that image.
Alastair Duff-Forbes, Eleanore Vuong, Liberty Kerr, Simple Infinity
Liberty Kerr’s excellent score transcends its minimalist pulse atmospherically and melodically to produce a great range of feeling. David Hawkes’ set is a work of art in itself (and was available to be experienced in non-performance times), the wall around us lit internally with subtle hues softly reflecting the swathe of deep blue that wraps about the performers. The loop conceit of continuous exchange is embodied in the design and the impressive manner in which it opens out. But with audience on one side and performers on the other, the fourth wall still ruled such that we were almost in the loop, but not quite.
Initially, I resisted Simple Infinity for its rarefied scenario that might have come out of a European novel or film, its quaintly schematic character names, its string quartet and how little, beyond poetic evocation, we learned about the problems faced by the characters. As well, the work’s structure immediately called to mind Minimalist composer Gavin Bryar’s A Man in a Room, Gambling (1992); but Simple Infinity revealed itself to be something very different, not least musically. Gradually the work’s fine weave of motifs, its humour, multiple means of expression and caring attention towards fragile beings took hold as I began to identify with these strange strangers.
Will Simple Infinity be greeted with unanimous acceptance and understanding? Its whimsy, its engagingly casual performances and immersive score might well loop audiences (we’re all ‘on the spectrum’ to some degree) into the rewarding complexities underlying all of the work’s apparent simplicity.
Cheng Moy Yeow, Luke Waterlow, Simple Infinity
Carriageworks & Urban Theatre Projects: Simple Infinity, director, writer Rosie Dennis, with texts by Gertrude Stein and Vicki Van Hout, devisors, performers Vicki Van Hout, Luke Waterlow, Cheng Moy Yeow, designer David Hawkes, composer Liberty Kerr, musicians Liberty Kerr, Hamish Gullick, Eleanore Vuong, Alastair Duff-Forbes; Carriageworks, Sydney,13-16 July
The program for the 2016 OzAsia Festival reveals director Joseph Mitchell to be in an even more adventurous and expansive mood than for his groundbreaking first in 2015. Contemporary performance, theatre and dance are again central, digital screen art is deservedly prominent and freely accessible live music gets a major boost. Political alertness is evident in a number of performance works and exhibitions and there are intriguing cross-cultural collaborations that bring together Asian and Australian artists. OzAsia 2016 is deeply enticing.
Joseph Mitchell’s engaging smile confirms a joyful sense of purpose. He’s emphatic: he has not programmed OzAsia to display what’s new from Asia. His passion is for the best of contemporary practices, wherever they take place. His vision is about “a fertile belt of creativity in Asia at this point in time.” It might be inspired by innovative Western performance of the 20th century “but also draws on different cultures that have hundreds or thousands of years of history as well as new rules that are being written in places like China, Japan and Korea. The responsibility for an arts festival director is to think about where the arts are going. Personally, much of what is coming out of Asia keeps me interested and excited and always feeling like I’m seeing something new. That’s the thinking behind OzAsia rather than ‘Asia’ as such.”
Phare Circus
PHARE CIRCUS (CAMBODIA)
From Cambodia, you’ve programmed a circus, superficially Western in appearance but transformed by the culture that’s adopted it.
There are a couple of things that interest me about Phare Circus. First is the founding principle of the organisation to use art as a means to provide opportunities for young people in a Cambodia that had been decimated by the Khmer Rouge and to embed the value of art, ensuring that another generation doesn’t suffer the same problems. Secondly, these artists are rough and ready. They come from broken, poverty-stricken families and they’ve walked into a school and really given themselves over to education in the arts as a lifestyle choice. You see that in this edge-of-your-seat theatre. It’s not just a series of circus tricks; the company uses circus as a medium to tell important stories about Cambodian culture and particularly what happened under the Khmer Rouge. This 60-minute performance has narratives that draw on the individual experiences of the performers or those of their families or villages but told with minimal text. It brings a lot of gravitas to the circus form.
DIGITAL ART (JAPAN, HONG KONG)
Asian artists have contributed significantly to contemporary culture in the realm of digital media. From Japan you have Hiroaki Umeda and teamLab and from Hong Kong Kingsley Ng. How important is this strand of the festival?
I’ve heard this century referred to as “the Asian century” and “the digital century.” Multimedia has been around in the performing arts since Piscator and Brecht but there’s a sense that in this century there’s a deeper level of immersion in ideas around the body in performance, space and technology. I don’t take lightly decisions on works that are highly visual. There has to be some fundamental artistic dialogue with the technology in really interesting ways.
Umeda didn’t create a choreographic style and then project digital material onto it. He created a 360-degree visual environment with sound broken down to a very basic level. He then put his body in as blank canvas. Those elements are integrated without one preferred over another. He’s created a choreographic language which is unlike any other around the world. I think it takes really bold and innovative artist who can work in their own way to find a language as opposed to being bound by a traditional dance ensemble. Umeda works outside of that system and is breaking ground and that’s no different from Ryoji Ikeda or teamLab or Kingsely Ng.
Split Flow Holistic Strata
You have two works by Umeda in the program—Split Flow and Holistic Strata. He’s also involved with another Japanese choreographer in the program, Mikuni Yanaihara in a work titled Sequential Movement. What’s that work about?
I became aware that Hiroaki had started to create visual art installations in response to his choreographic pieces. I had also been looking at the work of Mikuni Yanaihara, a very influential choreographer and director in Japan and, weirdly enough, stumbled across the fact that she was doing the same sort of thing—digital video artworks created from the perspective of choreography. So we asked them very politely—because they don’t know each other or work together—how they’d feel if we curated some of their digital artworks in the same gallery space. We came up with the title Sequential Movement as an umbrella term to showcase the selection of works by those two artists.
One installation is almost like a 360-degree set; almost like being in a Umeda world. It’s called Holistic Strata, taking the dance work [which is one of the artist’s live performances in the festival] and, rather than you watching it, you’re inside it. There’s another work which involves you as a participant with your eyes closed and Umeda playing with the way light can work across you.
Participation and immersion are spiking now in many different ways. Tell me about your inclusion of teamLab who are well-known for creating immersive spaces.
It’s our 10th anniversary this year and I thought, let’s get some of the big contemporary artists who are making waves around the world. It turned out that Nick Mitzevitch, Director of the Art Gallery of SA, also really likes teamLab as does Erica Green, Director of Adelaide’s Samstag Museum. No-one can do teamLab on their own without many years’ lead-in. So the AGSA were in the process of acquiring a new teamLab work, we picked up another on loan and Erica secured a work via another exhibition. So we’re able to collaborate to present teamLab in Adelaide.
All teamLab works are ever-evolving so that no person will ever see one in the same way. Now, the variation that happens in the five minutes between when I see it and when you see it may not be drastically different but from a philosophical idea around what [constitutes] visual art, teamLab’s perspective is very much about it being a personal experience and everyone interpreting things in a different way and beyond that, everything is evolving and moving anyway. So this adds an extra dimension to the way we subjectively interpret visual art and in this case, a digital art experience. There’s a nice dialogue to enter when you explore these three works.
SK!N
TERRYANDTHECRUZ, SK!N (MALAYSIA)
Cross-cultural collaborations also figure in your program, in Bunny (read the RealTime review), a participatory work about bondage by Luke George (Australia) and Daniel Kok (Singapore) and in SK!N by Malaysia’s TerryandTheCuz with Australian artists Ashley Dyer and Govin Ruben. What attracted you to this latter work?
Ashley Dyer is an exciting choreographer and Govin Ruben is a successful lighting designer. They shifted into performance-making, drawing on choreography and production experience to create their own worlds. And they do it so well. I saw this work in development last year and came on board as co-commissioner to help them realise it. They’ll premiere the work in August in Kuala Lumpur and then come straight to OzAsia and then, hopefully, they’ll tour.
How did they make the connection with their Malaysian collaborators?
TerryandTheCuz is based in Kuala Lumpur, as is Govin, and Ashley comes in and out as a close collaborator. They’re a pretty tight-knit group.
The work is about people smuggling and trafficking; tough themes.
The thing about topical and political ideas in the arts [is] you’re generally preaching to the converted; you’re not going to change anyone’s views about migration. But what interests me about this work is more that the artists are putting us through a directly physical experience, using shipping containers. On arrival the audience will be asked to hand over their phones and valuables, be put into holding pens and then have completely different experiences—be given a drink, sung to, blind-folded or find themselves abandoned. I just don’t know how they are going to respond—and that’s a good thing.
Rianto, Softmachine
RIANTO, SOFTMACHINE (INDONESIA)
There are other challenges and border crossings to be found in OzAsia, as in the work of Indonesian dance artist Rianto.
He’s a stunning artist; a real internationalist. He’s a traditionally trained dancer from Central Java but has branched out to write his own rules around what constitutes dance. He draws on the classical, erotic, cross-gender Lengger dance form and has travelled around the world exploring different types of contemporary dance and working with exciting and boundary-pushing, non-conventional choreographers like Singapore’s Choy Ka Fai. He is now creating work that’s unlike anything else. Softmachine is very interesting; I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s dance or theatre or even verbatim documentary theatre—it’s all of those combined and it’s autobiographical. This one piece with Rianto fits into a larger series of four works by Choy Ka Fei called Softmachine Series, with which he’s mapped contemporary dance in Indonesia, Japan, China and India. It’s a huge visual art installation that demonstrates the depth and breadth of the mapping which is bigger than those four countries. It was exhibited in TPAM (Tokyo Performing Arts Market) in Japan but I’m hoping contemporary art spaces, festivals or galleries will pick it up.
600 HIGHWAYMEN, THE RECORD (US)
The Record, by much-lauded Brooklyn company 600 Highwaymen, is another participatory work—for 45 South Australians. How does it fit within your curatorial brief?
I wanted to ensure that our 10th anniversary is built into the curatorial framework of the festival with a work that reflects both the contemporary performance identity that OzAsia has established and captures the multicultural identity of South Australia right now. Two very highly regarded contemporary performance makers auditioned nearly 200 people from across Adelaide, whittling that number down to 45 people, who essentially make up a record of the society that we live in right now, [covering] multicultural background, age and gender range, occupational experience and postcode. We’ve got schoolchildren, taxi drivers, dentists, doctors, students, construction workers. They’re rehearsed over six weeks to present a contemporary movement piece. It’s a really powerful experience to sit in the audience and watch ‘the society that you live in’ onstage performing an abstract movement piece to a beautiful score. For me it evokes a whole series of emotional responses about Adelaide and our community.
God Bless Baseball
TOSHIKI OKADA, GOD BLESS BASEBALL (JAPAN)
I’m intrigued by God Bless Baseball. I like the idea that a former baseball champion’s onstage performance aligns with Butoh, in the relationship between bat and ball. It seems it’s linguistically interesting as well.
It’s always hard to talk about a favourite in a festival but I have to say that this beautiful, emotionally resonant performance reminds you that theatre doesn’t have to be complex. Here, one of the world’s most prolific contemporary theatre directors, Toshiki Okada, plays to the idea of the perceived and unresolved tension between Korea and Japan while pointing the finger towards the Western influence of America and this strange triumvirate between siblings and parent played out through the metaphor of baseball. That sounds a little heavy-handed but at the same time, it’s weirdly light and dense.
Toshiki Okada wondered if we would understand the work: “Australians don’t know baseball and it’s so particular to Japan and Korea and America.” I said, “No, the metaphor of sport is extremely clear and Australia’s relationship to America post-World War II is not dissimilar. It’s almost like we’re only reflecting on it now, the way America penetrated our countries and so successfully changed our cultures. Australians will completely understand this.”
MENG JINGHUI, TWO DOGS (CHINA)
From mainland China you’ve programmed a two-hander comedy, Two Dogs.
This is our third presentation of work by Meng Jinghui; last year it was Amber. He is the great theatre director in China. Two Dogs is an outright comedy, one of the most performed ‘small theatre’—they call it in China—plays. I think they’ve done over 3,000 performances and the two guys in the lead, Han Pengyi and Liu Xiaoye are real stars. Liu Xiaoye is trained in the Chinese comedy art of ‘cross-talking’— very improvisational, fast-paced, like the Hollywood screwball comedy of the 1930s. Two Dogs really goes to town on many of the challenging aspects of living in contemporary China. It’s about two dogs who leave their home in provincial, rural China and happily trot off to the city to make it big and, of course, they encounter [problems with] the medical system, the penal system, dodgy employment and horrible living arrangements. It really pokes fun at the challenges that everybody in modern China faces.
Cosmic Cambodia
OUTDOOR MUSIC CONCERT SERIES
A new dimension of the festival is an outdoor music program, with a great range of idiosyncratic artists and popular music from across the region.
Traditionally we’ve presented community events outdoors, like the Moon Lantern Festival. But I really wanted to bring contemporary culture to the wider audience. So we have 10 nights of free music programming with 23 major international acts. There’s quirky pop rock from Taiwan, underground music from Korea, the fantastic Cosmic Cambodia, the exciting Tenderfist techno duo from Kuala Lumpur and Jabin Law, who’s a big star from Hong Kong. It’s a real mix of very modern musical styles from across the region.
How and where will these concerts be staged?
As part of a huge outdoor environment we’ve called The Good Fortune Market. We’ll take over Elder Park for around 10,000 people to come any night during the festival. There’ll be food stalls and trinket markets, little DJ areas, community stages and roving performances. There’s also a performance tent for Phare Circus and Twelfth Night and other family shows. Right down the bottom of the park we’ll have a big stage for the international acts every night. Someone said, “This is like WOMADelaide,” but I said, “No, this isn’t a world music festival, this isn’t blues and roots, this is contemporary Asia.”
What’s one of the most important dimensions of the festival for you?
Asian performance directors are trying to engage in a deep dialogue with what’s happening in their countries right now—Japan and its tensions with Korea and the influence of the US; Two Dogs cutting into the challenges of living in modern China; and in Company Theatre Mumbai’s Twelfth Night, there’s a real sense of, ‘We were colonised and we’ve taken to Shakespeare, but now we’re gonna completely rip it up, rewrite it in Hindi and tell you our version of the story in a crazy, fast-paced Mumbai way that doesn’t obey the iambic pentameter.’ This is India’s Twelfth Night. Phare Circus is very much about young Cambodian artists re-telling their country’s history through physical performance. SK!N addresses human trafficking which is happening throughout Malaysia and the government doesn’t acknowledge it. Outside our key Indigenous artists, who do it extremely well, are we in Australia making cutting insights into who we are?
MORE HIGHLIGHTS
Also featured in Joseph Mitchell’s program is a retrospective of powerful films by leading Hong Kong filmmaker Johnnie To at the Mercury Cinema. To will also conduct a masterclass. For fans of the great Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray, there’s a rare screening of Goopy Gayen Bagha Bayen (1959), a fantastical, funny adventure film with music and dancing and quite unlike anything else the master made. The score will be played live on traditional Indian instruments with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra.
Adelaide’s disability-led Tutti Arts is collaborating with internationally renowned Indonesian artist Andres Busrianto to create an interactive street art installation and, also on the Riverside Precinct, “a secret underground wonderland of temples. Inside each, you’ll discover performance art based around the theme of animals and iconography from South East Asia” (program).
From far western Asia comes Israel’s Vertigo Dance Company and from Hong Kong City Contemporary Dance Company, which combines contemporary Western choreography and Chinese tradition within a multimedia framework.
At the Adelaide Festival Centre, Damien Shen, a Ngarrindjeri man with Chinese bloodlines, and Chinese artist and political cartoonist Badiucao will collaborate on matters of identity and culture.
OzAsia calls
As other international arts festivals swell beyond a sense of community, Adelaide’s OzAsia stands out for its manageable scale, its cultural and regional specificity, its timeliness and its insightful engagement with issues and artforms. It demands our attention. RealTime will be there.
I meet Andrea James—playwright, director and Artistic Associate at Carriageworks—early evening at the end of rehearsal: the room is littered with props, the desk with scripts, design plans, empty cups and intriguing signs of traditional Aboriginal craft. It’s only a few weeks til bump-in and I’m wondering how James, who looks calm enough, is feeling about what she immediately describes as “a really big beastly new work.” Clearly, she’s still at work on the final shaping of the play.
In Winyanboga Yurringa (Yorta Yorta for Women Under the Sun), six Aboriginal women gather at a campsite in Yorta Yorta country in regional Victoria, hoping to connect with the land. But the fun of being together and their bickering about identity, love and appearance get in the way of spiritual communion until an ancient cultural practice provides a way through.
How long has Winyanboga Yurringa been brewing?
It started with a commission from Belvoir for a large-scale stage adaptation of the four-part TV mini-series Women of the Sun (1981), co-written by Hyllus Maris and Sonia Borg. There were five writers in the team. Four were to adapt a story each, and my job was to write a new episode, asking ‘who is our Woman of the Sun today and what are her major concerns?’ So, I set about interviewing lots of women I knew. I was working at the Koori Heritage Trust at the time, doing community arts work. It was a really inspiring place actually because it’s one of the very few community-controlled, fully accredited museums and they had an incredible collection. Also, I was visiting the 38 Aboriginal nations of Victoria coordinating weaving workshops and [encouraging] the revitalisation of culture. This was around 2012-13 when we started it.
The script was workshopped and pitched to the Major Festivals Initiative, but didn’t make it, so I had this little play in my back pocket. I put it in the drawer and didn’t really think about it. Then an opportunity came up to workshop it with Playwriting Australia. So I built it up from 20-30 minutes to a full-length work. It went to the National Play Festival in Perth in 2013 and, after that, I came back here and did another development.
Has it retained its relationship to Women of the Sun?
It’s influenced by that work in that Women of the Sun was the initial spark.
The Belvoir project never came to fruition?
No, unfortunately it didn’t. It was big and ambitious but it didn’t make it.
But the impulse remained, to say something about Aboriginal women now?
Definitely. The first port of call was just to have conversations with lots of women in Melbourne and also up in my Yorta Yorta country.
Was the weaving initially a focus for the play?
No, that was separate, but kind of fed into it. I was just really interested in watching our mob engage with cultural objects.
In your own country?
Everywhere. The Koori Heritage Trust collection is fascinating. One of its founders was Jim Berg, an incredible man who was working in a department of the Australian Museum. He really struggled with Aboriginal artefacts being kept in an institution and how difficult it was for him to get a hold of them, even to exhibit them himself. Also, because he was working in the museum sector, people kept coming to him with important objects that they were finding on land, like stone-heads from axes and digging sticks. He was thinking that he didn’t want to put them in a museum. Jim Berg was one of the driving forces behind the Koori Heritage Trust plan to put cultural objects into the trust of the community, rather than in non-Aboriginal institutions.
What they collect is really interesting: things we might think of as everyday objects—leatherwork stubby-holders and aunties’ woven rugs made in Koori colours—are included. These things have meaning for the community. Other people might think, ‘Oh yeah, it’s just a stubby-holder and a rug,’ but for us, we knew the people who who made them. So it’s a really important collection.
Andrea James
How did the weaving workshops relate to the Trust collection?
The women would come to the Trust and we’d go down into the Archives and show them the baskets that were made by the aunties who were no longer living. Oh, it will stick with me forever, the energy of that. But also as a theatre-maker, [I thought about] how interesting it would be to put those objects in a performance setting, and the weaving too. Here’s an incredible practice that’s been on this country for so, so long, that connects us to country. So, there’s now a place within the play which is just about weaving and the dance that relates to it. And the actors actually do it. [James shows me a small weaving].
What is it made of?
I can show you. [She reaches behind to select a strand from a large bundle of long, inch-wide strips of grass.] We got this from La Perouse with permission from the mob there. Look at the colour of it! When you strip it, you can smell it but it also does something to your body. So, in performance this will be so beautiful.
How did you go about selecting the objects which will feature in the production?
It’s hard to talk about it without giving it away. Part of me as a theatre-maker asks, “What if…?” So, what if all of the objects that are in this play are the ones that I saw as ‘trapped’ in a museum.
You’ve liberated them?
As part of my research, I sought out all of the objects at the Australian Museum that were from my country and they let me take photographs. I’ve put them in the play. So I’ve asked, what if the women in the play stole those artefacts and brought them to country to repatriate them? Identity and repatriation and evolving cultural practice are some of the really strong themes in the work. That’s a case of taking a story and running with it.
It’s a change from the dramatising of historical events which has been strong in Aboriginal playwriting.
I thought, well, if you’re going to make a political statement well let’s push it to its nth degree. There’s often an assumption that we’ll just rock on to country and know what to do. Actually, sometimes you don’t know what to do. I was interested in that awkward place, that place of re-connection which can sometimes be difficult and painful.
It’s great that we’ve got Pamela Young with us who’s making a comeback for the project. She was in the new wave of black theatre in the 1970s. She performed with Justine Saunders and at Belvoir in the early days. What’s fantastic is that she’s now working in Parks NSW and is involved in repatriation of bones and objects. So, we’re like, “Hello, come and be in our play!”
Things fall into place. What have you learned about the contemporary Aboriginal woman? Is that still central or has repatriation become more a focus?
To be honest, I haven’t discovered anything that I didn’t already know. If anything it’s reaffirmed things. I was interested in just seeing six Aboriginal women on stage—something we haven’t seen for a long time. A lot of women I interviewed talked about lateral violence and what it means in our communities.
What’s lateral violence?
Where community members turn on each other. It’s like internal violence, when we turn our struggle in on each other and where people get into positions of power. This affects both women and men, of course, but when I spoke to the women, there was a sense of a real struggle around that power and what people can sometimes do to try and cut you down for it.
Winyanboga Yurringa
So this has become part of your scenario?
It has. The last episode of Women of the Sun was about the Stolen Generation and how you bring yourself back into community. I think the community struggles with what to do with people who want to return. So, I’ve picked up on that theme. I’ve also used [photographic, video and installation artist] Bindi Cole’s story about people from the community questioning her Aboriginality and her work—that classic portrait of her family with black-painted faces—and how she was one of nine Aboriginal people who successfully sued Andrew Bolt for questioning their identities and breaching the Racial Discrimination Act. In the redrafting I didn’t want to give Bolt any more air, that’s done, but I was interested in what Bindi described, so her story comes into the play—the other women don’t know who she is and she has to kind of prove herself.
What kind of theatrical structure have you developed for the play? Has it emerged from your investigations and speculations?
It definitely has, from all the interviews I was doing. When I finished it I thought, ‘Oh I’ve written a naturalistic comedy. Where did that come from?’ But that’s just how the story wanted to be told. I’m in more of a magic realism sort of space, so it surprised me.
You’ve written a heist comedy?
Ha! It kind of is and there’s a lot of banter. It’s a comedy, which it sort of has to be. The biggest thing when you hang out with a group of women or you go out bush, it’s the laughter. That just poured out, given that they’re dealing with some really difficult issues like poverty and violence, difficult relationships with men. The massive thing that you just can’t ignore, particularly up around my home town, is drugs. It’s rife. You don’t want to fuel stereotypes but, at the same time, it’s such a force. How can we not think and talk about it? And in actual fact, women are so at the front line.
Managing it or involved in it themselves?
Both, and looking after the children who are the casualties. A lot of the removals of children that are taking place now are the result of drug and alcohol abuse. So it’s pretty big.
I feel it as an aunty with a little niece who’s just turned 13. In the play, there’s a young girl who is at risk. The central character, Neecy, has brought everybody back on to country because they’re straying off the path and need to regroup and re-empower themselves, particularly for the character Chantelle, who is kind of based on my sister and my niece. We want to watch for her and hold her and make sure she’s going to be alright, because our teenagers are so vulnerable and they could go either way.
Tell me about the design that contains these complex issues and feelings.
I’ve got a beautiful designer, Danielle Hrome, who is studying at UTS. This will be her first big design for theatre. It’s really abstract: a big round campfire and forms that hang in space that could be trees, they could be shell middens. In my country, river country, on the River Murray, middens are really important. They could be spirits, they could be female energy—Bindi Cole has photographed the actors and their images will be embedded in the design. The idea is that people have come to this place for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. It’s pretty simple really.
Phil Downing is doing the soundscape for us and the AV, with Bindi. Karen Norris will do the lighting. As with the design, we’re trying to cut against the naturalism, which is why we wanted something more sculptural in the design.
It’s a comfortable space for the audience too. We’re inviting you onto our land. Just come and sit with us for an hour and a half and we’ll share some stuff with you. Hopefully, through that you’ll come to understand your own relationship with this land and the people in it. If I can get to that, I’ll be very very pleased.
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Carriageworks & Moogahlin Performing Arts: Winyanboga Yurringa, writer-director Andrea James; Carriageworks, Sydney, 3-6 August; Geelong Performing Arts Centre, 17-20 Aug
RealTime issue #133 June-July 2016
Every Point of View, 2015, Matthew Ngui
Visit Fremantle Arts Centre and you’ll find yourself in a forest of 300 PVC pipes on which are inscribed words that will only add up from certain fleeting perspectives. Your exploration will be surveilled in real time and projected onto large screens. In the context of a work about democracy—the words come from 10 Singaporean citizens’ thoughts on the subject—this is possibly ironic, as is the way in which the statements form and dissolve without allowing certainty. Such is the nature of democracy today, threatened by a widespread rise of demagoguery and intolerance.
But irony is incidental to Matthew Ngui’s Every Point of View; rather it’s a celebration of co-existence and tolerance, a purpose underlined by the work’s singular beauty as glimpsed in images from its appearance as one of five major works commissioned by Singapore Art Museum to mark 50 years of the nation’s independence.
Sonic elements lend the work an even greater immersiveness: the voices of the 10 subjects can be heard and the audience can have their own thoughts about democracy broadcast through the space by speaking into the pipes.
Quoted in a press release, Ngui makes it clear that Every Point of View is about complexities of perception rather than making definitive observations: “[it’s] an exercise in seeing, but not necessarily understanding. You have to be at a particular point to understand each perspective.’
Also showing is Ngui’s Swimming; at least 8 points of view (2008) “a 15-metre wide projection, which follows the artist swimming up and down a pool; [it] will fill the main gallery” (press release).
Matthew Ngui works in both Singapore and Fremantle. His creations—in sculpture, photography, installation and performance—have been exhibited internationally and widely in Australia. He was Artistic Director for Singapore Biennale 2011. RT
Every Point of View, 2015, Matthew Ngui
Matthew Ngui, Every Point of View; Fremantle Arts Centre, 30 July-17 Sept
RealTime issue #133 June-July 2016
Enfold
The arts have always provided a mirror on our relationship with the environment. The epic poems of the ancient world in which heroes sailed forth to do battle with terrifying monsters in unmapped regions register culturally specific ways of thinking about nature, its concealed resources and potential transformations. This is also true of the cave paintings at Lascaux and Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, for the landscape paintings of Li Cheng and Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake.
But is the ancient role of sensitive and receptive observer enough in an age when we are beginning to feel the impacts of anthropogenic climate change? For many artists, the answer is no. Today’s issues are too important. There is a feeling in the air that now more than ever the artist must make a conscious effort to be useful, to be the hammer and not the glass, to advocate for collective global action on emissions management and to warn of the dangers of failing to act.
And so artists—with plenty of support from arts and other organisations around the world—are increasingly looking to new methods of performance that prioritise community participation and aim to shift cultural attitudes.
Best Festival Ever
The Best Festival Ever
This seems to be the motivating impulse behind a short program of events curated by Arts House and presented as part of the 2016 Performance Studies International Conference at the University of Melbourne.
In an attempt to convince audiences of the everyday utility of the interdisciplinary field of systems science, David Finnigan, Nathan Harrison, Nikki Kennedy, Rachel Roberts and David Shaw (going under the name Boho Interactive) have created a participatory performance event based on a series of tabletop games.
In Best Festival Ever, audience members play the role of music festival organiser, following a kind of choose-your-own-adventure storyline inspired by some of the great music festival disasters, including the floods at the infamous 2005 Glastonbury Festival. All the while Boho Interactive cannily sneaks in quick lessons on the basic principles of systemology.
The set-up is very attractive. We sit at a long table covered in green cloth with a model stage at one end and a serpentine strip of blue running down the centre representing a creek at the festival location. The games involve coloured building blocks, dice, toy quadbikes and lots of negotiations. There’s a charming homemade quality to the props, but it all works smoothly and the evening hums along. The apt use of Captain Planet figurines gives me a special sentimental thrill.
It is hard to judge the pedagogical value of the show. If it’s any measure of success or failure, I’m not sure that I gleaned enough to go out myself and preach the importance of tipping points or hysteresis or whatever. However, as a social event, it is brilliant fun and consistently involving. It’s no surprise that Best Festival Ever has had success as a team-building exercise with corporate clients both in Australia and in England.
The show has an optimistic spirit and an ultimately comforting message, reassuring us that science provides the conceptual tools needed to manage environmental disasters, even those of immense complexity, as long as there are enough people at the table.
Enfold
In Enfold, a meditative installation and dance piece by Ria Soemardjo, Jade Dewi Tyas Tunggal and Paula Van Beek, we shift to a different model of participation. If there is a sort of creeping philistinism about Best Festival Ever in the way it reduces art to mere communication, Enfold heads in the other direction, insisting on the connection between art and the sacred.
Enfold attempts to engineer a sense of participation and flow by moving the audience around the space as the performance shifts from one corner to another, using a few small props to indicate a shifting shoreline. At different points we are given small cup-like structures made from a kind of crude felt, about the size and shape of an oyster shell. With these we are invited to carry water with us while we watch.
Vocalist Soemardjo sings a brief but haunting arietta that sounds like a disappearing lullaby while Tyas Tunggal improvises from fragments of traditional Javanese dance, undulant and slowly vibrating. The two performers, who previously collaborated on the very impressive and highly atmospheric Opal Vapour (2012), often touch throughout early parts of the performance, resting on one another, as if connected by a shared breath. Later, Soemardjo accompanies herself with a single-string Brazilian percussion instrument called a berimbau while Tyas Tunggal cruises around the space wearing a small square of plastic tarpaulin as a wrap. Much of this work feels like the eroded remnant of some larger symbolism.
The show is performed in a small room upstairs at the North Melbourne Town Hall. It’s such a stripped down presentation that I had a strong feeling that we really were in an out-of-the-way place, caught on the inside of a fold. The narrow dimensions, hard walls and the absence of furnishings in the room give Soemardjo’s voice a pleasing fullness and depth.
The idea is to create a mobile ceremony that can be adapted to different kinds of venue. Rituals require that participants understand the steps, or are initiated; here there always seemed to be some confusion about where to stand and when to move, which prevented our complete immersion in the experience. There were lots of nods and puzzled smiles and misunderstandings as Janette Hoe, a dance artist in her own right but here playing a kind of usher, attempted to shepherd audience members around the space.
And the earth sighed, Josephine Starrs, Leon Cmielewski
and the earth sighed
A large video installation, titled and the earth sighed, represents a more confrontational and in many ways problematic approach to the performance of climate. It features footage of Australian landscapes and seascapes recorded by drones and underwater cameras projected onto the floor of the main performance space at the North Melbourne Town Hall. Entering the space from above, via a scaffold platform, we stare down as the land is subjected to post-production manipulations, showing encroaching sea water and desertification.
And there is text, too, digitally scrawled across the land, erasing the kangaroo tracks and wild flowers. In a brief catalogue essay, Fiona McGregor asks how one can empathise with an environment. Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski seem to suggest that the way to do this is to subject the environment to a recognisably human torture. Their defacement of the desert echoes the punishment described by Kafka in a short story, “In the Penal Colony,” in which prisoners’ sentences are carved onto their bodies. It’s as if humanity is a machine with which to judge and then destroy the Earth.
Even without these dynamic manipulations, the work manages to create an atmosphere of menace. With the camera looking down, the shadow of the quadcopter drone is always visible, gliding over the landscape. It looks like crosshairs and feels like the artists are targeting the Earth. The projections are arranged so that the audience can wander across the images, as if traversing the land; but when I visited, no one seemed game, preferring to observe from a safe distance. Who would willingly place themselves in the crosshairs, especially when the pilot seems so callow and unstable?
In contrast to other pieces in the Performing Climates program, which includes Marrugeku’s Cut the Sky, this is a work that seems to encourage a kind of inhibitory fear of the new climatic regime. And the earth sighed suggests that the threat is ineluctable and that action is pointless: all that we can do is record our doom-struck fascination with the planet’s coming transformation.
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Performing Climates, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall; 6-10 July
“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” says TS Eliot’s J Alfred Prufrock. In The Astronaut, Samantha Chester measures her protagonist’s withdrawal from the world in cups of tea, jigsaw puzzles and weather reports, punctuated by Elvis Presley movies and replays of the 1969 moon landing.
Gently mesmerising, the absence of narrative movement emphasises the sense of life passing by Gwen, a composite of women from Chester’s family. She rises with smooth confidence from her armchair by the television, makes a cup of tea, carries it about the room and nestles it in its allocated place in the mounds of jigsaw puzzle pieces strewn across her table. The careful progressive arrangement of tea cups sends puzzle pieces tumbling to the floor in a clatter as Gwen takes the next unperturbed steps of her ritual, sorting through cassette tapes. Inserting the chosen tape in the machine and listening as she picks over puzzle pieces, we hear Chester’s voice reminiscing about her childhood, from the minutiae of the movement of doors to a description of mandarin trees growing along a fence. The work is built from repetition of these rituals, along with delicately interspersed memories of the moon landing and politely declined invitations to social events.
The mundane takes centre stage, the kitsch of Elvis Presley movies attaining hallowed status in the shrine of memory. The shock of Presley’s death echoes some unspecified trauma that hides at the centre of the performance, with distorted sound and tortured movements suddenly marking the pivotal moment without revealing details. Chester shares her own memory complete with childhood confusion, shock and betrayal; someone has left and Gwen subsequently isolates herself.
Chester is a constantly engaging presence, a small smile attracting and holding the eye both as she moves and as she embodies stillness. She constructs regular patterns to structure Gwen’s rituals, fixing attention in each moment. Her total absorption in a mandarin is compelling, as she loses herself in the smell, examines the texture and then gobbles the segments down in a citrus orgy of consumption. The choreography is stylised and restrained, echoing the constraints of Gwen’s housebound life.
Samantha Chester, The Astronaut
Director Frances Barbe resists the temptation to use the moon landing motif as a metaphor, Gwen’s interest in space exploration instead leading her to find the cracks in her existence. Matthew Osborne’s tight lighting design—featuring whimsical video projections of a bicycle moving across the surface of a lampshade and evoking the course of a rainy afternoon and evening—drives proceedings. Patterned cracks craze their ways along the wall, tempting Gwen to trace their sharp edges before they fade into troubling mysterious reminders. Composer Ekrem Mulayim’s beautiful soundscape evokes detached, timeless calm throughout.
Samantha Chester’s biographical inspiration and choreographed movement produce an engagingly atmospheric work, her stylised stillnesses creating moments that flow together to suggest the life of someone stepping out of the rhythm of the world on long, timeless afternoons.
Read a review of Samantha Chester’s 2014 work Safety in Numbers.
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The Blue Room Theatre and Samantha Chester: The Astronaut, creator, performer Samantha Chester, director Frances Barbe, dramaturgy Julie-Anne Long, design Isabel O’Neill, composer Ekrem Mulayim, lighting, sound design Matthew Osborne, collaborator/operator Timothy Green; The Blue Room Theatre, Perth, 21 June-9 July
Many images cross our screens at the RealTime office each week but something about this one suggests more than meets the eye.
Curiosity takes me to Paddington’s Barometer Gallery where photo-media artist Julie Williams ushers me into a darkened annex to view her 13-minute video The Tears. It opens with richly coloured images of the natural landscape near the artist’s home on the western edge of the Blue Mountains, gradually zoning in on a sharply defined tear-shaped hole in smooth red granite. This womb-like waterhole is regarded as sacred by the local Wiradjuri people: “It sits at the head of the east/west flow and is a site for women to tell their stories” (room notes). It is also significant for the non-indigenous Williams.
The woman in the video turns out to be the artist herself. From a bed, as if actively conjuring her own dreamscape, she observes and sometimes generates via a switch on the wall the myriad properties of a flowing river. Light breaks across the surface forming patterns, fleeting figures and eventually a sort of liquid calligraphy. Watery sounds meld with the movement of air, birdcalls and finally a strange, pulsing animal cry. At times, Williams, in what looks like an attempt at psychological immersion, rearranges the elements of her small world and attempts to enter the waterhole projected above her bed.
In the gallery, a series of seven subtly coloured still images capture moments from the video. Williams tells me that when she was offered the possibility of this exhibition she was in the throes of a long convalescence from surgery. Returning to water, the source of much of her imagery for the past decade, she decided she would make the work from her sickbed. In this idiosyncratic multi-layered series, Julie Williams, visits a familiar place as a spiritual “point of departure into the landscape” to find her way out of confinement and back into the world.
Julie Williams, The Tears, 2016, an ARTHERE Exhibition, Barometer Gallery, Paddington, Sydney, 13-17 July
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.
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 New South Wales. 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.
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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.
Raoul Craemer, Pigman’s Lament
“My fascist grandfather is coming to kill me, and I only have a pen to defend myself.” Pigman’s Lament.
Raoul Craemer plays Craemer, a stay-at-home dad, soccer player and actor; a haunted man, putting finishing touches to a play that may not make it to opening night. Life and its ghosts interfere. The spectre of Alfred—his fascist German grandfather—berates him, steals his script, challenges his virility and indeed his right to be alive. His Indian mamaji’s songs—how Alfred hated mamaji!—require practice. Craemer’s soccer and porcelain bathtub seem his only solace and shelter—neutral zones in a cultural battle. But even here, anxious, hyperactive Craemer finds no rest.
From this white vessel, he Skypes his strangely absent children, urging the girls to get dressed for their soccer games. Why is he not with them? He prompts, prods and unnerves them, burdening them with expectations of prowess while hinting that his grandfather might soon do him in. Soon. With a gun. Has this man no boundaries? He spends a few minutes appeasing a frightened daughter. We have no idea if he succeeds.
Craemer is a “pig” and a “man.” His life is a mess, his morals unsteady. For home life he folds socks. He can recite poems by Rilke with real heart but comes closest to his children only via a table soccer game in which Leila and Tara are little more than plastic players on swinging metal pins. Craemer is attached to the girls via headphones, but we never hear what they say. They could after all be figments of his imagination. But his anxiety when he suspects Grandfather Alfred has absconded with them is real, and perhaps the most emotionally virile moment of the play.
Raoul Craemer, Pigman’s Lament
Canberra playwright and performer Raoul Craemer has been working in this difficult territory—family secrets, tormented pasts, cultural rivalries—for the past three years. He has paired up with celebrated Adelaide-based Portuguese theatre-maker Paulo Castro for this final stage, the director capturing the restless uncertainty of the narrative, keeping Craemer moving, unnerving himself, constantly switching roles. Seven characters have been resolved into two, with the actor playing grandfather and grandson: a shared ancestry. The conceit is successful—after all, one’s nagging ancestors are like the blood coursing in one’s veins— but the staging is cumbersome. There are awkward transitions where the actor has to disappear behind the set’s back wall to become the grandfather, and vice versa. More significant, however, is how this device interrupts the work’s key psychic symbolism, where characters merge, living, breathing, arguing and threatening one another within the tent of one skin.
The staging elements suggest an amalgam of realism—a living room, the bath, an iPad, soccer shoes, a shed—and hyper-realism: an enormous lighting grid, balanced on an angle like the aftermath of a bombing raid, but shiny and hung with theatre lanterns. Each element carries symbolic meaning, but I find it distracting that the bath is empty (Craemer retrieves a mobile phone from its depths and speaks into it) and the lanterns illuminate nothing. It is as if their potential symbolisms are unrealised.
There are moments of gleaming poetry, translated by the playwright from Kabir and Rilke, which provide touchstones—places of value, or rest, where language gets to the bones—but I miss a certain tenderness, such as one sometimes experiences in the mundane acts of folding laundry. Sometimes. These are the socks worn by our children. Our fingers remember what we value. Sometimes.
That said, recklessness, restlessness and sharpness are right in a play about a “reckoning between generations.” Alfred turns the gun on himself and Craemer lays his head on his writing table, reciting Rilke. Unresolved and unabsolved. Life. Is. Sometimes. This.
Raoul Craemer, Pigman’s Lament
Pigman’s Lament, Street Theatre, writer, performer Raoul Craemer, director Paulo Castro, designer Christiane Nowak, lighting design Gillian Schwab, composers Lara Soulio, Sianna Lee; Street Theatre, Canberra, 24 June-3 July
Too few non-indigenous Australians have an understanding of the lives and beliefs of the descendants of the original owners of this land. This needs to change as we approach amending the constitution in order to further reconciliation.
Nicole Ma’s feature-length documentary, a great labour of love, takes us into the life of one man, Tom ‘Putuparri’ Lawford, who grows over an exacting 10 years to understand the cultural life of his people—“the traditional rainmakers of Australia’s Great Sandy Desert who have fought a 20-year battle to win back their traditional homeland.”
Read more about the film on the Putuparri and the Rainmakers website.
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RealTime issue #133 June-July 2016
Rapid Response Team, 2016 PACT
In his performance-lecture This Filthy World, filmmaker John Waters suggests an exercise for film students. He recommends reading a newspaper in the morning and making a film inspired by an article that very day. He imagines the joy this would bring to people when driving home from work when they see a poster on a billboard for a film that only entered their consciousness that very morning. He cites his own movie, based on a death, as an example. Waters was screening The Diane Linkletter Story before the funeral had even taken place.
Rapid Response Team
This form of instantaneous making is the starting point for Rapid Response Team, one of the projects at the core of PACT Director Katrina Douglas’ current programming for PACT Centre for Emerging Artists in Sydney. Inspired by the ways that journalists were responding to the incarceration of colleague Peter Greste in Egypt, Douglas devised a program in which a cohort of young artists came together to present performative monthly “bulletins” in response to a news story—after a mere 48-hour devising process together.
The program began in 2015 and has continued with a new team in 2016. In this time the Rapid Response Team has staged theatre events including a tutorial in piracy, a town-planning meeting in relation to the Baird government’s lock-out laws and a premature funeral for corruption in the wake of the Panama Papers. These and others have taken place in theatres, town halls and at art fairs. Not that the outcomes are paramount. The project privileges process and the product is there to facilitate the development of resilience under pressure, as well as critical and creative thinking and collaborative modes of working, skill sharing and cross-pollination. With this in mind, the outcomes always have a fun sense of risk at play, in a supportive environment.
Talking survival
Earlier this year the members of the 2016 Rapid Response Team found themselves having to respond to news of the defunding of PACT by the Australia Council, which means the loss of operational funding for the company for four years. They organised a gathering at 107 Projects in Redfern for members of the PACT community past and present to discuss what the defunding meant and what could be done about it.
Conversations triggered by this event have carried on ever since. The recent launch of the Save PACT campaign, with a barbecue at the PACT theatre in Erskineville, included speeches from alumni including entertainer Graham Bond, writer-performer-comedian Zoe Coombs Marr and Greens parliamentary member for Newtown Jenny Leong. Coombs Marr talked of the formation of her performance group post (with Mish Grigor and Natalie Rose) through their involvement with PACT over 10 years ago, and regaled those present with hilarious anecdotes of some of the worst performances of her life—made in this theatre. This pointed to the importance of a space in which young artists can work on process, leading them towards future success. Such a space persists at PACT in the Rapid Response Team and other programs.
Other PACT programs
Vacant Room, in which artists are paired with mentors in short-term residencies, has long been central to PACT’s programming and will continue says Katrina Douglas. Longer-term investment comes with a three-year residency; the inaugural recipient is interdisciplinary artist James Nguyen. Then there’s the PACT COLLECTIVE, formerly ImPact Ensemble, which in 2016 comprises an ensemble of 16 emerging artists, half of whom will be Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander.
Not all of PACT’s program is process-based. There are also presentation avenues for work that is ready to go. AFTERGLOW is an annual season of curated productions in which the space is free for the artists and they receive a cut of the box office. The AXIS scheme provides a subsidised rental fee for PACT alumni. As well, PACT also offers its theatre for hire to independent and experimental theatre artists at accessible prices; it’s already booked out for the year, indicating demand for this humble space and also highlighting how access to performance space continues to decrease across the sector.
Lachlan Philpott & Katrina Douglas during rehearsals for Listen I’m Telling You Stories, 2015
Communal strength
As Douglas puts it, “everyone should have access to make and experience art.” Her resilience in the face of the defunding of PACT is testament to what is at the core of the company: advocacy and community. She recognises that “a company like PACT is only as strong as its community” and points to the audience numbers who return to each Rapid Response Team event as demonstrative of that strength, as was the incredibly well attended AFTERGLOW season, comprising dance works from the 2016 Next Wave Festival. Douglas sees the engagement of dance artists with PACT as a trend, noting that in recent years Caroline Garcia, Natalie Abbott and Rebecca Jensen have all passed through the organisation’s programs and gone on to present work nationally and internationally to much acclaim.
Furthering the sense of community and advocacy around PACT, Douglas now invites artists to return to curate and assess programs, keeping them part of an ongoing conversation in a peer review-type process.
The breadth of PACT alumni is vast and includes artists such as Agatha Gothe-Snape, who was commissioned to create the 2016 Biennale of Sydney and City of Sydney Legacy Artwork. But Douglas is quick to stress that PACT should not be assessed solely on the achievements and profile of alumni in the art world. There are many in the Sydney community and beyond who may not practise as artists but who carry with them the impact of the programs facilitated by PACT over the past 50 years. Jenny Leong at the Save PACT campaign launch said, “It is not just the incredible artistic practice and skills and experience it offers to emerging artists; it’s that the community involved in PACT understands the intersection between this artistic work and the broader society around it.”
Douglas has created her current program with what she describes as careful consideration of the needs of emerging artists for support and for opportunities, for a sense of process and its outcomes for both themselves and their audiences. Despite the funding loss, the plan is for the current program to continue, which also includes hosting the Stephen Cummins Bequest residencies for queer performance practitioners (facilitated by Performance Space) and a resident photographer residency with mentor Heidrun Löhr.
Powering on
Douglas feels that “great things emerge in times of crisis; they make us stronger. PACT has always been ambitious, always doing a lot with nothing.” Nevertheless, when comparatively little money means so much to PACT, the sense of her frustration is evident. The defunding of this company, and others like Next Wave, is a shortsighted dismantling of the training grounds for the artists of the future.
Katrina Douglas remains ambitious, even cooking up international collaborations for the 2017 Rapid Response Team. Above all, emerging artists need advocacy like this and the will to fight to save communal spaces like PACT where training in process and production are finely balanced.
Walking into a solo artist’s rehearsal room is an intimate act and I was lucky enough to be welcomed by Brisbane circus icon Emma Serjeant, as she prepares for her upcoming show Grace, at the Judith Wright Centre.
Serjeant has had a long career in Australian circus, including a stint as an ensemble member with Circa and in 2011 as a founding member of international circus smash Casus, whose debut work Knee Deep is still touring and whose follow-up work, Finding the Silence, was reviewed in RealTime124.
Serjeant’s latest venture is ESP: Emma Serjeant Performance. The company is a platform for her solo work and an opportunity to challenge the boundaries of circus by exploring inter-disciplinary collaboration, including circus in conjunction with forms ranging from dance and hip-hop to clowning.
The backstory to this new chapter is heartbreaking. Serjeant injured her hand while on tour and with the customary stoicism of circus folk continued to perform for months with what turned out to be a broken wrist. While in the throes of navigating this bad news (three months to recover) she discovered that the real trouble was actually her shoulder. The surgery required to ameliorate this would require 18 months away from circus, unimaginable pain and a period of enforced self-reflection. She emerged from this winter of discontent with her trademark fortitude and strength and a determination to re-evaluate her practice.
Serjeant decided to rework her award-winning 2014 solo show Jerk, which investigates the hypnic jerk that we experience as we go to sleep, a phenomenon exacerbated in those who are highly physically active. Jerk had won her the Star of the Festival at the Brighton Festival and was a collaboration with experimental physical theatre and ensemble writer-director John Britton from UK-based DUENDE, who had taught her many years ago when she was a student at NICA (National Institute of Circus Arts, Melbourne).
Emma Serjeant, promotional image, Jerk
Jerk diverged strongly from her work with Casus in its use of pre-recorded voice-over and its emphasis on character, as the mise-en-scène is built on the idea that we are witnessing a real woman experiencing/remembering and then forgetting a series of extreme physical traumas. This story contextualises virtuosic routines within the perimeters of an authentic character and her emotional journey. Serjeant miked herself to enable the audience to experience what it is like ‘inside’ the body—the heartbeat, blood flow and breathing—that creates these marvellous feats. In sympathy with this vérité agenda, Jerk was performed in a Speigeltent under natural light.
After her injury, Serjeant could no longer perform and was forced to consider other options for generating work, including directing and writing. She loved directing, but found herself intrigued by the idea of exploring what had been simply a context for Jerk as an actual path for herself as an artist. What if she really committed to the idea of ‘the woman’ as a character and worked to understand and create her not just physically but also through a writerly process?
And so Grace was born. Serjeant worked lockstep with Britton, sending him fragments of text, ideas and footage. He sent back pieces of dialogue, suggestions and thoughts. Slowly, they built a theatrical world for the circus to sit comfortably within. Having found a composer, Ben Ely, and a lighting and AV-designer, Penny Cunningham, Serjeant is fully embracing the potential for a mimetic world. Grace is now staged in a black box format and, she says, will be lit and proceed like a theatre show, but with circus form and projection as the main storytelling devices.
The clearest evidence of this was the snapshot of the rehearsal room as I entered. The pages of the script had been precisely placed along the edge of the mat that sat underneath the show’s circus apparatus, highlighting how the text will cue physical action in the world of Grace.
The show will debut at the Judy and go straight on to the Edinburgh Fringe and if previous form is a guide, probably on to other exotic international locales. Serjeant is known for her tenacity and energy and Grace is only one of a number of fascinating new projects from ESP, including a collaboration with Chicago-based dance company Winifred Haun & dancers called Trashed, a world away from the tender dreamlike tone of Grace but a sign of Emma Serjeant’s desire to push to the very edges of circus form.
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Grace, Emma Serjeant, Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, 27-30 July
What is the nature of transformation? Is it sudden or incremental, a battle or a consummation? These questions about shape-shifting, both physical and cultural, lie at the heart of Raghav Handa’s highly anticipated new work, Mens rea: The Shifter’s Intent at the Judith Wright Centre.
Handa’s sinuous grace is on display from the first moment of his explosive choreography: a remarkable combination of athleticism and fluidity, where his body rolls, ripples and flows, a river of movement that is only stilled by the full extension of his expressive hands. The detail marked by the angle and rotation of those hands was one of the true pleasures of the three disparate choreographic vocabularies developed within the show.
In some sequences Handa evokes the whisper of animal or ritual, perhaps echoing the vocabulary of the contemporary Aboriginal choreographers whose works he has danced across the last 10 years. In other parts, there are hints of the seemingly arrhythmic Kathak dance form or the voluptuous invitation of Sita, one of the three characters from the Sanskrit epic The Ramayana from which the show draws its loose narrative.
The design echoes this sense of separate worlds by demarcating zones that showcase the contrasting choreographic vocabularies and the individual ‘characters’ that Handa inhabits. Dominating the stage is a large, rectangular screen. On one side of the screen is a waterfall of white material in a honeycomb pattern that drapes gently and asymmetrically like a willow tree, shivering at Handa’s touch as he crawls underneath, through and then climactically behind, to form a shadow in silhouette.
Periodically a long, rectangular spotlight cleaves the stage in two. Handa dances along and within this light, only occasionally darting across. Even when not visible that emphatic division haunts the stage.
Darren Blinkhorn’s soundscape is pulsing, thrumming, bass-braced electronica with percussive elements that move irregularly within the soundscape, lightly evoking both traditional Indian instruments and Indigenous motifs.
Raghav Handa, Mens rea; The Shifter’s Intent
Handa moves like a dream and there is much to savour in each of the sections of the unfolding work. However, the very characteristic that makes the choreography so pleasurable—its fluidity and dreamlike atmosphere—is lost in the transitions between each zone. Most of these occur in black-out and this sometimes adds a sense of intrigue—where will he emerge now? But at times if feels clunky, pulling you from your reverie as you glimpse a hurried figure in the dark moving across the stage. This seems the big dramaturgical dilemma for Mens rea: The Shifter’s Intent. How do we shift from one state or atmosphere to another? How do we hold one culture when we are working within the shape of another? Perhaps the full liminality of the work would be to light and showcase these transitions, to slow them down and explore opportunities for slippage or confusion?
This work’s rectilinear quality was further emphasised by the dominance of the screen as the vehicle for the 3D animation built by Deakin Motion Lab with Handa as one of the mythical shape-shifters, Ravana. A long sequence in the final part of the show portrays the climactic battle where Jatayu, who rescues Sita, is devoured by Ravana. Handa duels with his own animation and we are cued to put on our 3D glasses to receive the full impact of this arresting animated creature when a small wheel of fire appears at the bottom of the screen. While the skill of both performer and animators is evident, there is none of the trans-media wow factor of Deakin’s more large-scale work like The Crack-Up (2015) where a digital landscape is projected around dancers suspended in the air, or the intricate traditional scenography of their collaboration with Opera Victoria on the Flying Dutchman (2015). I found the intractability of the screen at the back of the stage hard to reconcile, despite the quality of both the digital and live content.
Raghav Handa’s bravery in trialling this new technology is to be commended and his talent as performer and choreographer is evident throughout the work. As Mens rea heads to the UK I am sure that delineations will soften and new discoveries will arise about the space between the shifting body and the atmospheres of this compelling new dance work.
Raghav Handa, Mens rea; The Shifter’s Intent
Mens rea: The Shifter’s Intent, creator, performer Raghav Handa, lighting designer Karen Norris, sound designer Daniel Blinkhorn, animation Deakin Motion Lab; Judith Wright Centre, Brisbane, 8-9 July
The smell of coffee, the taste of chocolate—things that move around us, through us, between us that we may not give pause to recognise. Lauren Simmonds shares these sensations with her audience in the opening moments of Unseen, passing around shards of dark chocolate on a silver platter and wafting a plunger of freshly brewed coffee under the nose of every audience member.
A small performance space is rendered cosy by this initial act of hospitality. Hard metallic surfaces seem to soften and glint with promise. In one corner there is a picnic spread of goblets and ornate silver vessels. In another, a mass of gold foil is surrounded by cosmetic mirrors. On the back wall, collaged coloured yoga mats are arranged shrine-like, peeling back from their mounting. Over the course of the performance Simmonds uses sound, light and her own body to activate each station, unleashing the concealed potential of the seemingly inert in a fascinating, playfully fragmented examination of the invisible forces that conjoin to form our perception.
Lauren Simmonds, Unseen
This fragmentation is both a strength and a weakness. While phrases such as one likening the postures of browsing Facebook and taking selfies to yoga poses sits clumsily amid more visually stimulating sequences, the work itself is unified by the overarching sense of curiosity and exploration that its episodic structure evokes.
Midway through the performance, Simmonds pours sugar onto the floor. With tender intent, she pushes a circular magnet through it until its pull exposes other magnets concealed beneath the grainy white mess. The process of making authentic connections amid the chaotically saccharine may be analogous to Simmonds’ favoured mode of expression, but she navigates the borders of sentimentality with quiet assurance.
This assurance must come in part from her knowing that the work’s final act will be utterly and ecstatically mesmerising. While Simmonds drapes herself in a string of party-lights, audience members are directed towards what appear to be 3D glasses, hidden beneath their seats. The lighting dims, The Flaming Lips’ anthemic indie-pop spills questions of the universe from the sound system, and Simmonds begins to spin and sway. There are audible gasps as the glasses render the space kaleidoscopic, the lights around the artist splitting into intricate parallel patterns of pure colour. It’s like magic, except that there is no deception; just a glorious revelation of the otherwise unseen.
Through her use of objects and techniques typically associated with illusion, Simmonds manages to penetrate the everyday and shatter the assumption that our perception of it is in any way complete. Yet her practice does not conform to cynical post-structuralist rhetoric. Rather, she achieves something rare with Unseen. Here is a work, full of joy, that uses deconstruction as a lens through which to ascertain a sense of unity. The warmth and genuine sense of wonder that Lauren Simmonds projects is not accidental. It is integral to the audience’s understanding of her thesis that we are part of something bigger, brighter, more mysterious: all of us, together.
Lauren Simmonds, Unseen
Metanoia: Unseen, Lauren Simmonds, Metanoia Theatre, Mechanics Institute Brunswick, Melbourne, 9-10 July
Come Away with Me to the End of the World, Ranters Theatre
Ranters, Come Away with Me to the End of the World
There’s a sequence early in Ranters Theatre’s Come Away with Me to the End of the World in which an actor describes an unsettling meal she shared with a casual acquaintance. She finds her dining partner ordering stupid amounts of food, far too much for two people, and as the plates pile up they seem to suggest a crack, a glimpse into the dark interior of someone who is much more of a stranger than first thought. A fellow actor takes the story in, and then caps it off by stating that the teller sounds “eccentric.”
It’s a jarring moment, if typically played down by the company that could itself rank as one of the country’s most eccentric. The term—usually used affectionately—literally connotes being out of the centre, and Ranters has developed a singular theatre practice that eschews not just plot and character but conflict itself, which even the most avant garde theatre-makers generally still consider essential to works for the stage.
Come Away with Me to the End of the World will feel familiar to anyone with previous experience of the company’s work. Three performers occupy a fairly empty space, talking to each other in brief grabs about mundane experiences—anecdotes, memories, things they’ve read or heard, things they like or dislike. Occasionally they will launch into shared song or do some dancing, but these aren’t the transcendent moments of release you might find in musical theatre. No narrative as such is served up, and each audience member is left to decide individually what, if anything, ties any of this together, or why they should care. Despite the company’s lofty profile both locally and abroad, none of this can be said to position Ranters at the ‘centre’ of contemporary theatre practice.
Come Away with Me to the End of the World, Ranters Theatre
What is the centre through which Come Away with Me invokes the term ‘eccentric’, then? There’s a perhaps accidental motif of geographical distance that recurs throughout the work. Grottos and mountains and volcanos are referenced, as are real and imaginative flights to Iceland, Japan, Greece, France, Italy and Everest. Goats and wine crop up, perhaps hinting at the ecstatic realm of Pan, while the compulsive frenzies that have been associated with Tarantella dancers hover around the margins too.
Perhaps it is the self that is the problem here, and running throughout the work is the at times desperate desire to escape the oppressive confines of what in quainter times was called the ego. Though nearly everything here is delivered with the faintly beatific and at times almost smug half-smile that the company’s performers tend to project, there are tiny moments in which the facade seems like a death mask, as the words that emerge conjure instances of human frailty, mortality, paranoia and a sense of existential anxiety.
The people on stage here are profoundly incapable of exceeding themselves, and while they frequently speak of far-off places and extremes of living, it is almost always in relation to themselves. We are, of course, all bound by the same limitations, but this is a work that steadfastly refuses to offer promise of escape, even painting a depressing picture of theatre as just so many cruddy props to distract and allay our fears.
The most common and most kitsch resolution would be if Ranters implied that the one chance of escaping the self could be through sharing moments with others, finding some more authentic mode of communication that could aspire beyond the individual. That’s denied here, too. There’s no synthesis, in the end, no barriers hurdled or crisis averted. It just sort of ends. Because as nice as it might be to believe we’re all in this difficult existence together, what could be a real moment of human connection is just as likely to end with someone written off as eccentric.
Maude & Anni Davey, Retro Futurismus
Anni & Maude Davey, Retro Futurismus
Anni and Maude Davey’s Retro Futurismus is a work that inverts the notion of eccentricity by abolishing any sense of the normal. It’s the second incarnation of the project, bringing together a range of artists from various disciplines to produce a new kind of variety show based around the future as it was imagined by people in the past. Think Grace Jones, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 50s SF movies and 80s fashion.
It could be mere nostalgia or empty spectacle, so the most remarkable thing about Retro Futurismus is how often it produces genuine emotional responses. Physical performer Teresa Blake, in particular, produces a suite of acts both visually arresting and strangely impactful. Clad in a bikini made of real bricks, she plays a cello like an electric guitar. Appearing enmeshed in a wooden chair, as if a teleport has gone wrong, she attempts to dress herself as if life can go on as usual. Animating a tiny, infant-like ghost, she tries to find audience members able to provide it solace.
There are many equally compelling moments elsewhere in the piece but it’s often hard, if not impossible, to determine who is performing. A tentacle creature made from flexible air-conditioning ducting telescopes and contracts across the stage; rabbit-headed hula dancers refuse to hula dance; a blob-thing strains and groans its way across the space while shitting yet more bricks.
By looking backwards to see how others once looked forward, Retro Futurismus produces a kind of double vision in which hope and regret overlap. There’s great glee and energy in the romance of science fictions gone by, but also a painful realisation that this hope was let down by the reality in which we now find ourselves. Retro Futurismus doesn’t treat the past as merely eccentric, a dress-up box or playlist to get misty-eyed over, but it does act as a reminder that we can never go back, even to those who directed their dreams forward.
Teresa Blake, Retro Futurismus
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Come Away With Me to the End of the World, director Adriano Cortese, text Heather Bolton, Beth Buchanan, Adriano Cortese, Raimondo Cortese, Patrick Moffatt, design Callum Morton, sound design David Franzke, lighting Govin Ruben, costumes Belinda Hellier, choreography Jo Lloyd, musical direction Evan Lawson, performers Heather Bolton, Beth Buchanan, Patrick Moffatt, Rosa Voto, Alessandra Barone, Natasha Colangelo, Tania Dionisio, Lucia Gareffa, Vincenzo De Simone, Joseph Sirianni, Ourania Vassis; Malthouse Theatre, 7-24 July; Retro Futurismus: New World, creators Anni and Maude Davey, performers Anna Lumb, Gabi Barton,Teresa Blake, guests Azaria Universe, Kira Puru, Yana Alana, The Huxleys; 45 Downstairs, Melbourne, 7-31 July
Invitation. Open yourself to pain, to the suffering of others and understand and possibly control your own. Subject yourself to chronic pain-like symptoms in a purpose-built anechoic chamber, part of experimental artist Eugenie Lee’s virtual reality installation Seeing is Believing, a work in the Bec Dean-curated exhibition The Patient, currently showing at UNSW Galleries until 4 August. You can book in now.
Lee welcomes you, explains the nature of her project and that she has worked with neuroscientists who study pain, asks a set of questions and takes you to a device into which you insert a hand. You don’t want to believe what you see happening to a finger that Lee gently tugs. You’re told about the sensory and perceptual distortions that are part of and which further chronic pain, long after the initial cause has passed and even when, in some cases, damaged tissue has been repaired. This is because the signals of pain remain active.
You are led into the utter silence of the padded anechoic chamber, fitted with VR goggles and one hand placed inside two gloves. A small stimulator is attached to your wrist. As an enveloping soundscore surges from speakers embedded in the walls, Lee disappears (though you know she’s still there with you) and walls, floor and ceiling become a red void but one in which slow twirling black lines gradually take threatening shape. Navigating with the gloved hand, you can see it and your lower arm, now naked.
I won’t tell you what happens next, save to say that it is disturbing—at an emotional and perceptual level if not as actual pain. However, some of you might experience discomfort depending on sensitivity to the work’s disorienting effects and finding yourselves believing what you are seeing. These effects simulate the misdirections generated by chronic pain and its psychological impacts which loop together to form long-term conditions. Afterwards, Lee talks you through your recollection of the experience. It’s interesting to listen to yourself attempting to put it into words.
Lee writes that Seeing is Believing “conveys a type of chronic pain called Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS)” by creating a “metaphorical experience” of the condition—and what a metaphor it is, familiar but unnerving in its explicitness and full of associations. Lee explains that “the project is based on neuroscience research showing that pain is integrated with a person’s environment. It can be influenced by many factors, including vision, touch, hearing, expectations and/or previous experiences.” This understanding of the complex and very personal nature of pain along with a capacity to share our experience of it through metaphor (as in “pulsing, shooting, stabbing”) and via art as metaphor (externalising the agony as object) allows for the development of pain management strategies and a considerable growth in empathy in non-sufferers. Much of the work in The Patient can be understood in these terms, taking us beyond what Elaine Scarry, in her seminal work The Body in Pain (1985), identified as the existential “unsharability” of pain.
Seeing is Believing is the latest of Lee’s works that investigate our relationship with pain. She adopted the name of a test, the McGill Pain Questionnaire, as the title of her previous work. The questionnaire uses metaphor and other dimensions of language to enable patients to describe, objectify and manage their pain. While pain might seem unsharable, Lee reveals that “McGill studies of data show an astonishing consistency in the chosen adjectives that sufferers of similar disorders have used to describe their pain.” Metaphor not only “gives pain material features, like shape, weight and colour” but also provides the beginnings of a common, empathic language.
In this earlier work she adopted two metaphors for herself in attempting to understand her own chronic pain. The first was seaweed: “Sensitive to the quality of the ocean environment, seaweed absorbs everything from the water’s mineral contents, also including toxic chemicals leaked into the ocean. As my illness is closely contributed to by environmental factors such as dioxin, I chose to employ seaweed as a metaphor for my affected organs.” The other was milk, in terms of possible genetic inheritance and environmental damage done to babies. Lee also drew on Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, in particular the role of cupboards as means of compartmentalisation with which she could manage physical and psychological pain. The work comprised two large filing cabinets closely facing each other. Positioned tightly between them, the viewer opened drawers to find vivid metaphors for the artist’s condition.
The artist
Eugenie Lee writes of herself, “I am an emerging interdisciplinary artist with a focus on medical science relating to chronic pain disease. I work with sculptures, installations, performance and paintings to communicate its complexities. Seeing is Believing is the direct result of an ANAT Synapse Residency in 2015. Thanks to a 2014 Amplify Your Art grant (a NSW Arts and Disability partnership through Accessible Arts), during an 8-month period of research, I began working with neuroscientists specialising in chronic pain research at Body in Mind (BIM) at UniSA and the McAuley Group at Neuroscience Research Australia (NeuRA) in Sydney.” Like George Khut, whose work with biofeedback addresses “the potential of [his] heart rate-controlled artworks for managing the pain and anxiety experienced by children undergoing painful procedures”, Eugenie Lee, still early in her career, makes art and science one in order to value individual subjectivity and find common ground on which pain can be understood and managed.
The Patient is a demanding experience with its plethora of illnesses and actual mortalities and varied attempts to make sense of them. Seeing is Believing is another such work, but it explicitly invites you to take a step further—into the estimation of your own pain, imagined or actual, and that suffered by others.
Also at UNSW Galleries: Deborah Kelly; John Lethbridge
In Scenes from the Death Books, Deborah Kelly uses collage in paper and animation in a witty critique of art and publishing’s ongoing erotic standardisation of the female body; and in John Lethbridge’s Imaging The Void: Making The Invisible Visible, Performative Photographs and Drawings, 2011–2016, one series of intriguing images merges the body with richly coloured and textured abstractions and the other displays exquisitely detailed large scale photographs of an Australian landscape in which appear ephemeral naked figures who evoke the Eden myth, replete with serpent. Both exhibitions open until 23 July.
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Eugenie Lee, Seeing is Believing, in The Patient, The Medical Subject in Contemporary Art, UNSW Galleries, Sydney, 3 June-4 Aug
EGG, Terrapin Puppet Theatre & MTC
It’s become commonplace to preface any review of mainstage children’s theatre by noting how in recent years the quality of such work has come to rival its grown-up counterparts, but in most cases it’s not necessarily the place you turn for experiment or formal inventiveness. There are exceptions—Melbourne’s Polyglot, for instance, now produces conceptual playspaces rather than theatre—but the kinds of programming you’ll find in a state theatre company’s education season still tends towards conventional narratives done pretty straight. It’s a bit of a shock then to find children’s theatre drawing on Samuel Beckett for inspiration.
Terrapin Puppet Theatre’s Egg, co-produced with MTC, makes no secret of its debt to Beckett, centring on a pair of tramps inhabiting a post-human landscape with no knowledge of how they got there. The nearly-dead planet is named Meridia, the same name humans have given to a series of planets they have occupied and bled dry, one by one, learning nothing from each collapsed conquest.
In a slightly more Huxley-ish mode, the populace has become dependent on “forget-me-yes,” an aerosol spray that erases memories. The frequent application of the drug by our two wandering tinkers threatens to keep them in a permanent state of presentness.
Playwright Angela Betzien’s commitment to the Godotian implications of her setup isn’t complete, however. Egg’s absurdism is mostly mined for humour—and in this regard has a position in a long history of children’s entertainment that deploys absurdism—while allegorical and fable-like elements eventually reveal themselves in opposition to existential doubt or dread.
EGG, Terrapin Puppet Theatre & MTC
The tinkers adopt Ovo, a strange infant they find in the wasteland, seemingly part-bird, part-insect, and as it grows they learn it is a mythical creature who emerges above ground only when the planet is in danger of imminent collapse. The themes of anthropocentric climate destruction aren’t worn lightly, but the comedy of the work is such that proceedings don’t get too heavy-handed either.
There’s a more ambiguous and ultimately interesting handling of economic systems: our would-be heroes are rugged capitalists whose livelihood is based on the theory that anything they can get their hands on can eventually be sold for a profit, and even the adoption of their feathered charge is initially seen as a way to get rich. After auctioning the creature off to the evil plutocrats behind the mining company annihilating Meridia, they’re hired as its nanny and soon find themselves protecting the being they’ve just delivered thence. This establishes a curious dynamic between the folksy, small-c capitalism of the tinkers and the corporate big-C Capitalism of their 1% bosses, and this dynamic is never resolved into something comfortable.
Egg’s mise-en-scène sometimes tends towards the static, though this is partly due to the entire work being carried by a tiny cast, and the minimalist design seems an odd choice for a work aimed at eight to 12-year-olds. All live roles are played by Genevieve Morris and Jim Russell and it’s hard to think of a sharper pairing on a Melbourne stage lately. Puppeteer Michelle Robin Anderson brings Ovo to life and the thing is so adorable that it requires actors of Morris and Russell’s level to prevent it from upstaging them at all times.
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MTC and Terrapin Puppet Theatre, Egg, writer Angela Betzien, director Leticia Cáceres, puppetry director Sam Routledge, performers Genevieve Morris, Jim Russell, Michelle Robin Anderson, lighting Andy Turner, set, costume design Owen Phillips, choreography Andrew Hallsworth, composition, sound THE SWEATS; Southbank Theatre, Melbourne, 29 June-19 July
“We know that art is not a matter of taste. We believe there should be more than one chance. We think working conditions can always be better. We experienced that, if there is a problem, it is usually with the system.”
This is the manifesto of Perforations, a festival of small, intimate, politically charged works from the Balkans. Over almost a decade, Perforations has grown and shrunk geographically, with seasons presented as far afield as New York and with artists coming from as far as Bulgaria and Macedonia. At its core, though, are independent performance makers from Croatia. Widely considered one of Europe's best small theatre festivals, it is astutely curated by Zvonimir Dobrovic to emphasise the intersection of individual and collective identity: political, social, sexual or gender. This year, two works left an impression.
Speed-dating as art: Dragana Bulut's Market of Love
Berlin-based Serbian choreographer and dancer Dragana Bulut was inspired by her family's concerns about her status as a single woman to devise Market of Love, a performance based on the structure of speed-dating. The show—which comes with free wine and runs until very late—initially simply consists of 10-minute speed dates with other audience members. Halfway through, Bulut, who participates in the dating, stops the proceedings to introduce written scripts that she forces upon participants. Then speeches, long dialogues, film scenes and dances gradually emerge; a series of romance clichés and popular culture offcuts.
The audience was mostly a select, interconnected group of artists and friends, but this precisely lent poignancy to the work. In the preliminary assessment interview—of what, one wonders: attractiveness, goodness, long-term compatibility?—the mating ritual of dating is distanciated and made strange by conducting it on friends, friends of friends, straight and queer, partnered and single. The fatigue of choice, of decision-making, sets in quickly. Participants are gradually revealed to be performers: wonderfully enacted scripts of love, longing and reticence emerge in this community of daters. And yet, interestingly, many performers—quick to join in the scripted dialogues—are revealed to be general audience members. They simply remember that film, that song. What emerges in Market of Love is a surprising understanding of just how scripted our gestures of love are, a source text we all know by heart.
I found myself accidentally speed-dating highly respected artist, theorist and pedagogue Goran Sergej Pristaš, co-founder of BADCo performance collective. It is to Bulut's credit that we ended the night dancing together, though he claimed not to be a good dancer. Ultimately it did not matter: alongside its surface cynicism and pop-cultural critique, Market of Love maintained a levity and joyousness.
Denuded, Bruno Isakovic
Evocative nudity: Bruno Isakovic's Necastive
Necastive (Denuded) is something else entirely. Choreographer Bruno Isakovic commenced it as a solo project [which was seen in Hobart at the Salamanca Arts Centre in February this year. Eds], a formal exploration of the relationship between breathing and physical tension. At Perforations, the work had grown to 11 performers, all dancers, all performing nude. Not having seen other versions, I found Denuded flawless, and unimaginable in any other version. Whereas a solo piece would have emphasised the texture of the body—its breathing rhythm and moving rhythm, the space it demarcates and centres—the mass of bodies, of different sexes, ages and training, gives volume to that same texture, but adds tension, emotion, narrative and the unavoidable weight of visual references. The most remarkable choreography I have seen in years, Denuded is rigorous in concept and execution, yet immensely open to interpretation.
It opens simply, with 11 bodies standing still, breathing. With a slowness that makes changes in posture at first imperceptible, the performers start sliding into a series of tableaux. A lot occurs behind this simple description. The shifting images resonate with one's own visual library, activating memories of iconic paintings, yet somehow reduced to their cultural archetypes. The sharp lighting accentuates anatomy. There is Michelangelo in here, as well as Caravaggio. There are final judgements, falling angels, hells and heavens; there are bodies walking to their execution; and bodies blown away by natural or spiritual calamities. There are gardens of Eden, languidly erotic afternoons, mourning mothers of Christ; there is grief and salvation.
It is all so slow, so focused, yet one gradually becomes finely attuned to the rhythm of the performance, noticing that the tension is not flat, but ebbs and flows with an organic unpredictability. For a long time, the performers keep in uncomfortable balance, one foot always slightly lifted, torso always slightly contorted. It breaks, though: sometimes bodies collapse like dominoes, pulling each other apart with the slow inevitability of an avalanche or crumbling iceberg. At other times, a performer will simply change posture, or begin a series of movements that reverbrate through other bodies. Performers may all lean onto one another, hold, drop, break off. Somewhere along the line, you realise that breathing is the soundtrack to the work: the exaggerated, deep breathing of the performers. Like deep bass, it dictates the quality of the movement. And like deep bass, the audience can feel it viscerally: 11 deep breathers make one hell of a sound.
Necastive begins macabre and tense; it ends joyous and relaxed. Images of bodies flung by great forces, holding onto each other as if for dear life, transform into images of salvation, celebration and relaxation. It is simultaneously profane and profoundly religious, like the paintings it references. The uneasy relationship that Christianity has with the body—something to control, but never ignore—is constantly on one's mind.
And finally, in the very last minutes of performance, when the bodies break into laughter (a radical shift in breathing) and a comparatively unbound movement of rolls and skips, it is a momentous gesture of freedom. Of humanism.
See Bruno Isakovic speak about Necastive with excerpts from the performance below:
“The reason we selected those rooms is because the audiences were so hip. We could just play what we wanted to play and everybody dug it, you see.” With its book-lined walls, high ceilings and brightly coloured carp swimming in a pond set in the floor, the People’s Republic in Sydney’s Camperdown might not be the kind of venue Cannonball Adderley had in mind when he spoke of “being hip.” But for pianist-composer Colin Bright and his Syzygy Band—performing a quirky set of improvised works—the receptiveness of an audience eager to embrace the unusual and experimental is no doubt an important part of the venue’s charm.
Adderley’s On Being Hip, recorded at a 1962 performance in New York’s Village Vanguard, forms the basis of Bright’s piece Hip. Snatches of Adderley’s speech underpin the music: the phrase “the real jazz audience” recurs. The word “hipness” becomes a motif, set to a descending semitone that spreads from Bright’s piano to Noam Jaffe’s violin as Jim Piesse’s jittering high-hat drives the rhythm. Bass clarinet arcs become dirty blues, electronics throwing Paul Cutlan’s sound into an ethereal distance. The jagged “hipness” motif is suddenly inverted as a now ascending semitone coupled with “to be hip.” Nick Polovineo’s trombone takes up the blues solo, the electronics leaving smears of far-off big band in his wake. Elegiac piano and violin—a pastoral gypsy melody with gritty slides—sing over Dave Ellis’ bass drone. Violin harmonics and mechanical piano fragments disintegrate before Adderley’s address is left to play unaccompanied, unbroken and from the beginning: “We made a lot of records in nightclubs… ”
The band now accompanies the syllables, pauses and inflections of Adderley’s voice with a robust precision. The synchronicity of recording and musicians creates the uncomfortable feeling that Adderley is following Syzygy rather than vice versa. The unison ensemble speaks the final “thank you very much.”
Colin Bright Syzygy Band
Bright and Syzygy had opened this concert of shaped improvisations—lightly supplemented with electronics—with the colourfully evocative Bird of Sticks. Repeated piano notes become Messiaen-like figures, Bright’s reverb generating beating dissonances. Piesse’s drumsticks clack against each other before his palette expands to encompass rims and frames. Noam Jaffe’s violin joins piano and kit in a driving rhythmic groove, but the balance is uneven and he’s swallowed by the other instruments. Piesse switches to brushes, caressing cymbals and skins, the electronics a smokey haze. One hand on the piano keys, Bright leans over to control effects on his laptop. Polovineo’s gravelly trombone punctuates the mist before a bass clarinet line emerges in a warbling, avian solo. Cutlan’s didjeridu-like bass clarinet screams and cackles the throaty laugh of a kookaburra. Bird of Sticks fades to a gentle acoustic finish, a sheen of delicate harmonics.
Earthly Tones is a tribute to the late jazz bass player and band-leader Charlie Haden—the title a critic’s description of the jazz legend’s playing. Ellis’ bass yields soft harmonics. His sound has an earthy richness as he draws primal, animalistic moans from the bass while Piesse’s fingernails tap over skins. The bass cries like a dolphin, the texture thickening as Jaffe adds sliding harmonics and Piesse switches once more to brushes. Guttural, repeated notes and chords add layered harmonics before Ellis settles into a walking bass-line. The bass clarinet growls and buzzes, the music a relaxed swing, a crisp tap of percussion against gurgling electronics. Ellis’ fingers dance nimbly in the high register, before a sliding descent into muddy tremolos marks a return to the ambient harmonics of the opening.
Dave Ellis, Nick Polovineo, Syzygy
Experimental violinist Jon Rose joins the ensemble for The Threepenny Violin. Bright introduces the piece: “I like fences and shapes but Jon just wants to be free.” This tension plays out in a furious improvisation bound together by samples of playwright Bertolt Brecht giving evidence in 1947-48 before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Rose propels the music forward with a flourish of crunching pizzicato, his bow bouncing radio static on the strings. “Bertolt Brecht” repeats over and over again. The music is a devilish hoedown, flecked with slapstick comedy and frenzied energy, the voice of the interrogator needling: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist party of any country?” Chaos splinters into moments of lyricism with quiet impressionistic piano from Bright. Rose declaims loudly in German. A militant snare drum heightens the sense of anxiety and the bass clarinet lends a cabaret festivity. Rose’s bow shredding reaches a fiery climax: the band cuts off, leaving the violinist alone to play a blistering cadenza. Light taps from the drum-kit gradually bring the other instruments back in for a lighter, swinging conclusion.
The encore, however, is contemplative. Moon Over Long Reef —originally for piano—sees Jaffe trace a plaintive violin melody, ambient with vibrato, before Cutlan sweeps his bass clarinet from the instrument’s rumbling depths to a high register with the honeyed tone of an alto saxophone.
Colin Bright and Syzygy’s set burst with high-energy, high-intensity play, resurrecting the sounds of history in a quirky romp, under the surface of which lay a deeper exploration of music-making and politics. Whether or not the experience could be defined in terms as nebulous as “hip” and “the real jazz audience,” the listeners at the People’s Republic were clearly eager to play their part.
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Colin Bright Syzygy Band, People’s Republic of Australasia, Sydney, 26 June
Experiencing Ireland’s Liz Roche Company’s Time Over Distance Over Time, my thoughts vacillate between the conceit of the work—“the physical and emotional distance” that the cast of six dancers from Ireland, Britain and Australia “encounter while living at opposite ends of the planet”—and the fragility of Europe in the immediate wake of Britain’s exit from the EU. This convoluted movement of disparate thoughts echoes the dramaturgy of the work: saturated points of entangled connection between bodies, considered and sincere, that suddenly splinter into individuated isles, adrift, but no less poignant.
The dance explores the realities of geographical distances between people and the means by which they attempt through distal technologies and memories to reconnect their dispersed lives. Roche draws on historical facts of mobility within Ireland’s history (“the Irish who left for Australia in the 1850s and 1860s”) and comments on more recent movement as a result of harsh austerity measures faced by a number of Irish people who have left their homeland to find work. Meanwhile both the political left and right confusedly either welcome or shudder at the first fallen domino in the EU structure. Stories of leaving home and family that are directly narrated and expressed through the movement vocabulary, bring me back to the debilitating economic precarity and social reality of growing homelessness in Ireland (and other parts of Europe), and the importance of being at and maintaining one’s sense of home in the dislocation of global mobility.
Six movers, like flotsam, hook and grab passing limbs under a grid of naked light bulbs that hang long on their cords. They push, pull and yield into each other to close and widen gaps of intimacy, both symbolic and real. Their unity is flesh-bound, playful. Bodies mature and deeply experienced lean, fold, tumble and prop each other in conversations of two or three. They wait with patience to give and receive a multitude of surface areas for contact—inalienable territories of skin ranging in shape and size. The ‘touching-touched’ is temporalised as past, passing and possibility.
Time Over Distance Over Time, Liz Roche Company
The performers witness each other from different positions in the room as a carousel of meaningful vignettes turns seamlessly from one to the next. A solo by Kevin Coquelard explodes in stark contrast to the ease and flow of the relational sequences. His turning inside-out contorts the singular: upper body arches back beyond comfortable extension, torqueing and squeezing out the slack; he is left quivering alone on the tarkett.
Watchful from two medium-sized LCD screens cross-bracing the space with televisual gazes from above, the performers’ faces appear like portraits, circumspect in their quasi-telematic appearance; the when and where of their presence not clear. Other devices that bridge distances light up the stage with vibrations and buzzes: smart phones connecting two performers in the ‘here and now,’ not the ‘here and elsewhere.’ Text, movement and sound further enact the universal frustration of a poor Skype connection. These moments with, or about, technology are less compelling in their obviousness than the subtlety and intricacy of physical gestures that fill the gaps and eddies between dancers, and the arrangement of music as a fragmentary collage of conjoined electronic sounds harmoniously spliced with the occasional twang of a deep-fried Southern American roots guitar and the lilt of a fiddle. When recorded sound is absent, sneakers drag and squeak, sonically mapping out the motion. Distance and time are contemplated in these moments beyond any need for technology.
A camera captures the dancers in a still portrait, the real time image projected onto a wall with a temporal delay. As each dancer leaves the frozen tableau, the distributed image slowly disappears, lingering like a fading memory. In another section the dancers assemble a modular sculpture of a man’s image on a turning platform, slotting pieces of wood and mirror into right angles—its surfaces reflecting the revolving activity and light of the world in which it is immersed. The fractured figure looks to be frozen somewhere in between his geographical distribution. In a final scene, the sculpture is disassembled and laid out haphazardly like scattered bread crumbs to be followed home. Jenny Roche delicately drifts against this migratory flow in a moving coda: will she stay or will she go?
Time Over Distance Over Time is a somatically stirring meditation on the difficulties of negotiating distances of place and time, and what and where we call home.
Form Dance Projects and Riverside Theatres: Liz Roche Company, Time Over Distance Over Time, choreographer Liz Roche in collaboration with performers Simone Litchfield, Grant McLay, Henry Montes, Jenny Roche, Rahel Vonmoos, interactive digital media Jared Donovan, film Luca Truffarelli; Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, 22-25 June
Calling itself the “roving European Biennial of Contemporary Art,” Manifesta was originally created in the early 1990s with a view to building bridges between eastern and western European art scenes that had hitherto been kept apart by the divisions of the Cold War. While this task seems today less urgent, Manifesta continues as a ‘Europeans only’ biennial that moves from city to city with each new iteration. Compared with other, larger European events of this kind, such as Documenta and the Venice Biennale, Manifesta is distinguished by a more experimental curatorial approach, a tendency to include emerging artists alongside more established figures and a stronger commitment to engage with the social fabric of the host city.
Titled What People Do for Money, Manifesta 11 was curated by Berlin-based artist Christian Jankowski who focused on the ethics and aesthetics of paid employment. At first blush this theme seems surprising because it’s fundamentally the same as that chosen by Cuauhtémoc Medina for Manifesta 9. But on closer inspection the differences between the two events are clear. While Medina’s exhibition had a strong historical flavour, reflecting as it did on the mining heritage of Genk and Limburg, the Belgian towns that hosted the event, Manifesta 11 focuses very much on the here and now and has at its core over 30 new works commissioned specifically for the event.
The World is a Cuckoo (Clock), 2016
Jankowski’s main curatorial conceit was to pair the selected artists with Zurich residents representative of different professions. Artists and residents were asked to engage in a dialogue about the nature of work and to create artworks in two parts, one to be exhibited in a group show hosted in a mainstream art venue, the other installed in workplaces specific to the project. As a result, works were scattered across the city and in sites as diverse as police stations, pet shops, hospitals, exclusive jewellers, banks, tourist offices, fire stations, schools, churches and a sewage treatment plant. These commissioned projects were complemented by Site Under Construction, a show curated by Francesca Gavin, displaying historical artworks alongside those created specifically for this Manifesta.
I am very partial to this curatorial format because it mirrors very closely the structure of spaced, the program I run in Western Australia, which is also based on the idea of commissioning works that have multiple and inter-related outcomes, some of which are participatory/site-responsive, others conceived for mainstream group exhibition. This approach responds to what Peter Osborne in Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (Verso, 2013) calls the “distributive” character of post-conceptual art, a tendency to create works in which the same core concept spawns a number of different but interconnected public outcomes in different places, at different times and using different mediums and techniques.
Untitled, Teresa Margolles, 2016
Even though most of the commissioned works in Manifesta eschew the spectacular, there are exceptions, the most remarkable of which is undoubtedly Mike Bouchet’s extraordinary The Zurich Load. The work consists of 80,000 kg of treated human waste—Zurich’s typical output over the course of 24 hours—which the artist turned into a huge, regular grid of brown cubes. The work would be superficially reminiscent of a classic Minimalist piece if it weren’t for the fact that instead of looking at polished industrial surfaces one is confronted with the dried-up, odorous product of very familiar organic processes. The work’s topicality is unmistakable if one bears in mind that ‘money is shit’ and Zurich is the world capital of banking. Like the other commissioned works, The Zurich Load also included a second component that was located in a work site, in this case Zurich’s wastewater treatment plant.
Other artists opted for more restrained but equally impactful solutions. Teresa Margolles’ offering was especially moving. The artist was working with transgender Mexican and Swiss sex workers when one of her collaborators was murdered. Her simple but poignant installation in a suburban hotel room pays tribute to the slain colleague and reminds the onlooker of the violence that so often affects the lives of transgender people. Jon Kessler’s work addresses the opposite end of the socio-economic spectrum. The artist worked with a celebrated local watchmaker to create an amusing mechanical contraption that pays ironic homage to this most Swiss of commodities.
The Pavilion of Reflections, Tom Emerson
It’s unlikely that many visitors, even dedicated ones, would have the stamina and time to travel back and forth across the city to reach each of the satellite sites. But this is not a major drawback; as is often the case with these types of exhibitions, one can experience the work vicariously through audio-visual documentation and text descriptions. This also explains why this Manifesta’s most popular work is Tom Emerson’s Pavilion of Reflections, a striking timber structure floating on Lake Zurich. The pavilion comprises theatre, café, meeting point, a lookout tower and a swimming pool filled with rather unenticing lake water (I doubt many people, especially those who have already been exposed to Bouchet’s work, would be eager to take the plunge). In its function as Manifesta’s main hub, the pavilion makes it possible for visitors to experience many hard-to-find site-specific works indirectly through video features, talks and discussions.
Jankowski did a great job in creating an intelligent, open and dynamic curatorial framework for the event. His decision to base the core of the exhibition on commissioned works and his emphasis on site-responsiveness and participation are to be applauded. In the end, the strengths and weaknesses of this Manifesta are those inherent in any event featuring site-responsive works commissioned in the absence of a detailed project plan. For example, on this occasion some of the more established artists did not bother to comply with the participatory component of the curatorial brief. Younger and lesser known artists however, responded well to Jankowski’s challenge, creating works that reflect the time, place and social interaction from which they have emerged. And this is of course what one expects from an event so committed to engaging with the social fabric of the cities in which it is held.
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Manifesta 11, Zurich, Switzerland, 11 June-18 September
Marco Marcon is Artistic Director and Co-Founder (1998) of International Art Space (IAS, formerly known as IASKA). In 2009 he created spaced, an international event of socially engaged art involving the participation of regional and rural communities throughout Western Australia. Spaced 2: future recall will tour nationally 2016-2019. Spaced 3: north by southeast will feature 12 residencies centred on an exchange between Nordic and Australian visual artists in 2016-18.
Thinking twice about seeing Manifesto? Just another time-devouring video work? I think it’s a should-see, not just for Cate Blanchett’s virtuosic rendition of multiple roles in multiple guises; not just for its deeply ironic juxtaposition of 20th century art idealism and deep-seated 21st century cynicism; but also for Julian Rosefeldt and collaborators’ dexterous filmmaking, from intimate scenarios to the vast sweep of the camera work, synthesising a photographic and cinematographic vision while realising an effective, syncopated screen installation.
Experience tells you that, attracted to a screen work shown in a gallery space, you might stay with it for a while, possibly engrossed, but eventually wonder just how long it will play. The back tires, there’s no seating. You lean against a wall. You squat. You drift to the information plaque, one eye still on the screen, and sigh as you read “30 minutes” or gasp at “70.” And where are you anyway—at the halfway mark, near the end? Can you afford to wait for the beginning in order to make sense of the whole, knowing that non-narrative works have other kinds of organic cohesion. If you encounter a series of short works—10, 15, 20 minutes—how many can you attend to and jockey for space to see clearly amid the casual comings and goings of those not immediately seduced?
If you commit to Manifesto at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, knowing in advance (I’m telling you now) that you’ll need some two hours to take it in, you might just be convinced that the showing of video art and film in gallery spaces can work. Here, with 13 large screens spread across four spacious rooms, the length of each film, at 10 minutes, feels just right and the interplay of sound magical at certain key junctures. There are benches and well-illuminated, concise information panels. Few gallery-goers dash through; most seem to slow to the pulse of the films.
Blanchett realises her characters with incredible specificity, for example her exquisite manipulating of a puppet made in her own image—to her voiceover of Andre Breton’s First Surrealist Manifesto of 1924—in a room full of beautifully crafted puppets (puppet master Suse Wächter) of many of the world’s most famous people. Elsewhere she appears to drive the machinery in a massive indoor waste facility with convincing ease. There’s also humour when Blanchett doubles as newscaster and weather reporter or plays an elegantly obnoxious old-school 20th century choreographer to a 21st century dance work featuring a Busby Berkely-ish cast of glittering female aliens. Most chilling is her portrayal of a dictatorial middle class mother reining in her family over the dinner table while transforming a light-hearted 1961 manifesto from Claes Oldenburg into dogma.
Manifesto’s cinematography is special. In vast locations—the garbage tip, a stock market, an industrial wasteland—fixed shots, slow pans and tilts recall the breadth of vision of photographer Andreas Gursky. A huge, golden anechoic chamber and a vertiginous, pastel-tinted circular ramp feature in settings with an ominous futuristic feel. Others are banal—a bourgeois home, a humble worker’s apartment, tellingly no different from their 20th century incarnations.
Initially, competition between the soundtracks is distracting but the spatial design is such that proximity to each screen provides clear focus while allowing the mass of manifestos to burble in the background like a 20th century art crowd. There’s a wonderful moment in each room when—often with Blanchett directly facing viewers—three or four voices fall into synch with their own words but beating together like a song from a Robert Ashley opera. It’s as if there’s a sudden choral unanimity of passion, belief and intention, summing up an era before each manifesto returns to its idiosyncratic preoccupations.
Manifesto
Recalling Manifesto is like having seen a movie, its episodes coalescing into an affecting totality. Like many a feature film it has scale and a huge number of credited artists, collaborators and co-producers (largely European plus ACMI and AGNSW). Some of you might find it sleek, overblown, more cinema than video art and politically vague. You can read Andrew Fuhrmann’s ultimately disapproving review for RealTime or the many others available online including Christopher Allen’s response for The Australian which pinpoints the way in which the power of 20th century art manifestos (some wonderful, some bizarre) is undercut by scenarios of 21st century sterility and danger. At the end of an interview (with excerpts from Manifesto), Julian Rosefeldt declares that artists need once again to be politically active. Presumably he sees Manifesto as a call to action, revealing passions that have been lost or, if barely still with us, unlikely to survive environmental and financial disasters and cultural dumbing down. Clearly, Manifesto is not intended to be simply a celebration of braver times than our own; rather it stands as witness to substantial differences in attitude to the arts between the centuries and to the challenges that now confront the making of pervasively political art.
”…not just relevant, but also visionary. Art history is a derivation of history and we learn from history. Artists, as well as writers, philosophers and scientists, have always been the ones who have dared to formulate thoughts and visions whose consistency had yet to be proven. The John Reed Club of New York—named after the American communist and journalist John Reed—of which many artists and writers were members, published a Draft Manifesto in 1932, in which a scenario of a capitalist world order run out of control is described. It reads as if it were written yesterday. We’re well advised, therefore, to read artist manifestos as seismographs of their age.”
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Manifesto, artist Julian Rosefeldt, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 28 May-13 Nov
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