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October 2016

Goldstone

In Goldstone, a tense sequel to writer-director Ivan Sen’s widely admired thriller Mystery Road, Indigenous detective Jay Swan is sent to the mining town of Goldstone when a Chinese tourist is reported missing. For a surreally small town of scattered buildings it’s bursting with local government and corporate corruption, Chinese workers forced into prostitution and tense Aboriginal clan politics over land ownership. Though weary and reticent, Swan doggedly investigates, traverses vast landscapes, finds himself in a beautiful sacred waterway and, eventually, unravels the web that connects the town’s plentiful evils. Aaron Pedersen as Swan gives a powerful, largely wordless and richly expressive performance that conveys the weight of personal problems and the limits faced by an Aboriginal detective dealing with police bureaucracy and a young local white cop who could turn bad. RT

5 DVDs courtesy of Transmission Films.

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RealTime issue #135 Oct-Nov 2016

Gosia Wlodarczak, A Room Without A View (Extended)

Standing amid the aftermath of Gosia Wlodarczak’s A Room Without A View (Extended), a three-week marathon of drawing that utterly transformed Fremantle Arts Centre’s Kathleen O’Connor Gallery, I couldn’t help but be reminded of a passage from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus in which they linger on the figure of a child lost in the dark. They write:

“…a child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilising, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos.”

Printed on the reverse side of this very page is a reproduction of Paul Klee’s Twittering Machine (1922), another sketchy composition, perhaps not unlike the one sung by the boy lost in the dark, taking place in a similarly lugubrious void and depicting a disconcerting bird-machine hybrid that sings some unknown alien song to a sky that both welcomes and threatens the viewer.

Gosia Wlodarczak, A Room Without A View (Extended)

The reason I was struck by a memory of Deleuze, Guattari and Klee when walking around Wlodarczak’s transformed space of manifold lines, fragments and partial figures was perhaps because her work reminded me of art’s capacity to function as a refrain—and, in a twofold sense, as a refusal and as a repeated line (as with a song). Against the void of sensory deprivation in which Wlodarczak has entombed herself—a space that was once synonymous with the isolation and deprivation of the mentally ill—a refrain has emerged, a repetition of lines that orient the viewer through a nexus of association and partial meaning, and that acts as a complaint against the stark impositions of institutions and their often bleak formality.

Wlodarczak’s work is a timely reminder of the sheer power of the most simple mark-making, as a means of situating oneself while traversing unfathomable silence or depth. Indeed, A Room Without A View (Extended) functions as a form of refusal opposing the injunction to be silent or to make sense in a manner policed and codified in advance. To draw out such a refrain might help one refrain from going mad—a strategy commodified today in the form of colouring books for the understandably anxious and disconcerted. Gosia Wlodarczak reminds us that, just as one can draw forth a song to mutate space, so too can mark-making serve to simply, and humbly, open up a calm centre in the midst of chaos.

See videos of the artist creating and discussing her work here.

Gosia Wlodarczak, A Room Without A View (Extended), in Many Happy Landings, a survey exhibition of the artist’s works; Fremantle Arts Centre, 23 Sept-12 Nov; endurance performance, 23 Sept-16 Oct

RealTime issue #135 Oct-Nov 2016

Joe Cinque’s Consolation

The only pulse in Sotiris Dounoukos’ feature film debut, Joe Cinque’s Consolation, is the blue vein of freeway that courses through Canberra’s suburbs. Cinque was killed by his girlfriend, Anu Singh, in October 1997. Based around events brought to dramatic life in Helen Garner’s brilliant true-crime-memoir of the same title, the film depicts Canberra as a cultural and moral wasteland, a monstrosity of suburban ordinariness, where the streets are empty, heroin deals are done over the front fence with a neighbour and the best way to suicide is popular dinner party conversation for the law students at ANU.

Writer-director Dounoukos was a law student at the same time as Singh and he has chosen to fictionalise not the court case or the dramatic aftermath of the killing, but the lead-up to Cinque’s death. In the book, Garner wrestles with this period too, the seeming disinterest of all involved, the ambivalence of engagement: with a girl who would make a suicide pact, talk incessantly about bringing her boyfriend with her and buy heroin and Rohypnol to kill him. Others look on, trapped by—what exactly? Inertia? Disbelief? An inability to take an ethical position?

Joe Cinque’s Consolation

Much has been written about the bystander effect described by social psychologists Bibb Latané and John Darley who observed the reluctance of onlookers to become involved in a serious crime, with “the perceived diffusion of responsibility (onlookers are more likely to intervene if there are few or no other witnesses) and social influence (individuals in a group monitor the behaviour of those around them to determine how to act).” Although, in this case, the young people aren’t at the scene of Cinque’s death, there is still a sense of them as witnessing the immediate lead-up to it, while at the same time absolving themselves. Dounoukos brings us in to question our own ethical role as observers by framing things at a distance. The filmmaking is austere and removed with little access to the characters (a space Helen Garner had to fill) and the conversations are dull, everyday; there is no emotional depth or connection.

Garner is brutally honest in her analysis of Anu Singh. She reacts to her as a ‘type’: one many women know at a glance. Aggressive, sexual, predatory, impulsive, narcissistic, needy. Garner never really changes her initial view, despite the years of evidence she encounters in court. But she also sees that women fall in and out of that role, depending on their state of mind, their other relationships, especially friendships. And, then again, she hopes desperately for a conversation, some insight, that never comes— Singh won’t speak to her. Given this, Dounoukos has taken some risks with Singh’s characterisation. I kept waiting for that initial reaction to ‘type,’ that turning-away, but it didn’t happen.

Joe Cinque’s Consolation

Maggie Naouri’s portrayal of Anu Singh is surprising in its subtlety. She depicts a woman whose self-image is disintegrating as she fails at the things around her (study, lovers, friendship) in a blurry blend of drug use, body-loathing and mental illness, a woman desperately clinging to a notion of being ill in order to garner support; a woman whose loneliness is exemplified in a farewell party to people she barely knows. Above all, this is a woman who injects her boyfriend and watches him die slowly, over a weekend. Her friend, Madhavi Rao (also charged with murder and acquitted) is conspicuous only in her passivity, and actor Sacha Joseph and the writers seem to work around her to the point where she disappears (Garner says that even in the court room she seemed barely there). The film at no point tries to elicit sympathy for any of its characters. While Joe Cinque is portrayed by Jerome Meyer as guileless, the centre of a spinning compass, there is little tension in the build-up, perhaps because we all know the ending before the film begins.

The book was groundbreaking in Australian literature because, like Truman Capote and Janet Malcolm before her in the US, Garner dared challenge the negatives around writing nonfiction while exploring the symbiotic relationship between the writer and her subjects. The book’s release started a spate of exciting literary-true-crime by Chloe Hooper, Anna Krien, John Safran and Martin McKenzie-Murray, among others. Helen Garner had questions that couldn’t be answered. She wrote of the enormous gaps between the law and ethical decision-making, and the challenging spaces between the book she wanted to write and the one she had to accept. She wanted to be friends with Joe Cinque’s family. She had emotional needs that overrode her ability to make conclusions. And, in the end, all of that made the book a better one: all she could do was give Joe Cinque’s mother a voice, one denied in the courts.

Joe Cinque’s Consolation

It seems wrongheaded to call the film by the same title as the book. While Garner’s narrative has an immediacy and intimacy that makes it hard to forget, its stated aim to keep Joe Cinque’s memory alive, the film’s effect is the opposite: to push the characters away to somewhere out of reach, where lives are wasted and no-one seems to notice, or really care. Singh only got four years for killing her boyfriend (manslaughter, due to diminished responsibility), hardly a consolation. She is out and about, armed with a PhD —Offending Women: Towards a Greater Understanding of Female Criminality in Australia. Out of a perverse curiosity and need for closure of some sort, any sort, I searched for her on Facebook, imagining she’d like to be there. Her name came straight up with a poorly scanned profile pic, and her most recent post an image of a figure in fog at the far end of a bridge, with the lines, “Never be defined by your past. It was just a lesson, not a life sentence.” Something tells me this profile is too neat a fit, a fiction.

Like Garner, I’d like to pin Singh down, come to a greater understanding. The film seems content to sit with the lack of resolution, to settle for enervation and, perhaps, this is the only option left open. In recent interviews with Anu Singh, it appears clear, that despite it all, she—along with the friends who surrounded her at the time and the writers who’ve examined her in forensic detail since—can ultimately provide no answers.

–

Joe Cinque’s Consolation, director Sotiris Dounoukos, writers Sotiris Dounoukos, Matt Rubinstein, director of photography Simon Chapman, producers Sotiris Dounoukos, Matt Reader, Consolation Productions, 2016, 110mins

RealTime issue #135 Oct-Nov 2016

Daisy Coyle, Project Xan

“1981, Australia. A young girl goes to a party. She drinks enough alcohol to render herself unconscious. Throughout the night she is sexually violated by three young men. A year later at the subsequent trial, the judge accentuates her culpability, essentially laying the blame for the assault on her. The perpetrators receive little more than a ‘slap on the wrist’” (press release). Thirty-five years later, the adult Xan Fraser is to appear in Project Xan, a documentary performance which tells her story of trauma, “rape culture and victim blaming.” RealTime spoke with the production’s writer-director Hellie Turner about the outcome of her five-year collaboration with Xan.

Why did you initiate the project?

Purely as an exercise to try to investigate what would allow such a thing to occur in our society. I never wanted us to re-enact it. We treat Xan’s story through her own testimony, court transcripts, reportage on similar incidents at the time and very much embedded in current pop culture in articles and on social media. There’s a plethora [of material], a mosaic, I guess, to do with rape culture versus safe culture, ‘entitlement,’ lack of consent, victim blaming and ‘slut shaming.’ The list goes on. We touch on a lot but we’re not hammering the issue. We didn’t want it to come across as educational so much as getting people to be more mindful of their own contribution to this culture.

It was Xan’s treatment by the court that was additionally traumatic?

Hugely traumatic. She still cries. We’re tackling the way at the age of 12 she was treated by the judicial system and then by her community—well, by everyone in her world really. The court system really let her down very, very badly. We use the device of having her 12-year-old self appear as well. The testimony oscillates between the two—‘little Xan,’ as we call her, and Xan herself. She talks to herself, basically. Together they unpick what was going on in the courtroom.

How young is the actress who plays the 12-year-old Xan?

A 19-year-old, Daisy Coyle, who looks 12. We decided we’d use someone who was over 15 because there’s a lot of difficulty around working with younger performers, especially with this material, which is heavy.

Will the emotional weight of Xan’s suffering be felt?

I would think very heavily. I try not to call the rape an ‘incident’ by the way. We try to name it for what it is. Xan’s testimony describes strongly what she knows and feels about what happened that night. Then we’ve totally unpicked all the reasons this happened, how it was enabled.

How have you gone about the writing?

Xan has written her testimony. She’s an incredible woman who’s had a very successful life once she got across the detritus of the rape and the treatment [she received]. She’s very articulate and also very stage savvy. I’ve nipped-and-tucked her testimony just for stage-ease. I’ve touched very little and none of the facts except where it’s repetitive. It’s the same with the court transcripts. We’ve had to pick through those.

You’ve been working with David Williams. How would you describe your roles?

David is obviously the documentary theatre expert. I linked up with him back in 2012 when I did a residency with version 1.0. which is where this whole project was ignited. I asked David if he would be the consultant and he agreed. Then I wrote a script based on what we discovered in workshops—David and Xan would fly in to WA from Sydney. Then I took it all away to Varuna [The National Writers’ House, Blue Mountains, NSW] where I sat in a very dark room for two weeks and put the first draft together. We’re now at the 12th draft and, after being in rehearsal for the last two weeks, the script has become much more malleable and really enhanced by the work of the actors.

Why have you adopted a skating rink setting?

The night Xan was sexually assaulted, she should have gone skating. That decision changed her life. So we have the 12-year-old on roller skates for the entire play and we make use of the circular skating rink format.

I guess there’s a sense of freedom and fun in the skating?

Yes, it works well. It’s not a fun play by any means but we’re trying not to be heavy-handed, except where we absolutely need to be. Xan’s own testimony is very simply told. There’s no drama to it. She just tells her story. It still upsets her, you know, when she spends a whole day working towards delivering it.

Are there other performers?

Yes, two males [Marko Jovanovic and Nick Maclaine] and one other female actor [Siobhan Dow-Hall]. We needed a male perspective. I think if we did it with an all-female cast, people wouldn’t look at what we’re talking about—“Oh, it’s just new wave feminism.” We really got the men to come at it from a male perspective. There’s been a lot of discussion which has been really helpful.

Are they playing the villains in the narrative?

Neither gets to play a baddie all the time. In fact, we try not to be too black and white about good and bad. We’re just saying, this is what it was.

Let’s talk about the design.

We’re doing a minimalist documentary theatre thing using linoleum for the rink. It looks like granite so the whole effect is quite grey, like a courtroom, and with lovely old wooden chairs and a couple of boxes, and that’s it. We do have a jury comprising wig heads. Xan’s profession now is hairdressing, so, in probably one of the lighter moments of the play, the jury members have their hair done by a bunch of hairdressers.

Will you discuss the play and the issues it raises with the audience? People who see Project Xan might make disturbing connections between what’s portrayed in it and their own lives.

We are providing warnings about the content and contacts for people who need help. Within our group, working on Project Xan, everyone has been touched by it in some way.

……

The Royal Commission into institutional sexual abuse has prompted many victims to bravely testify against those who broke the trust of care. The justice system is also an institution—a complex one comprising police, lawyers, magistrates, judges and juries—which exercises its powers unevenly, sometimes abetting and perpetuating abuse and is even harder to challenge. As Hellie Turner says, arguing against public inertia, “Like war, assault has become wallpaper in our lives. It’s just there, it just happens, it’s inevitable. We become immune and that’s part of the problem” (press release).

–

PICA & jedda Productions: Project Xan, scriptwriter, director Hellie Turner; consultant, dramaturg: David Williams, performers Daisy Coyle, Siobhan Dow-Hall, Xan Fraser, Marko Jovanovic, Nick Maclaine, composer, sound design Ash Gibson Greig, lighting design Chris Donnelly, AV design, construction Nancy Jones; PICA, Perth, 8-19 Nov

RealTime issue #135 Oct-Nov 2016

Presented as part of the Melbourne Festival and now in its third year, Dance Territories aims to emphasise the existence of an international contemporary dance neighbourhood. Curated by Dancehouse Artistic Director Angela Conquet, the double bill pairs an Australian artist with an international artist, and invites audiences to explore the possible correspondences and connections between them—whether aesthetic, ethical, philosophical or political.

This year the two artists are French-Algerian choreographer Nacera Belaza, currently based in Paris, and Berlin-based Indigenous Australian and British cross-disciplinary artist Sarah-Jane Norman. And the connection between them is a political one.

On the one hand we have Belaza’s The Shout (Le Cri), an enchanting piece of abstract minimalism that binds the audience in a series of gestural incantations. This is in many ways comparable to the work of other Francophone guests at Dancehouse in recent years: Eleonore Didier, Cindy Van Acker, Myriam Gourfink and Perrine Valli. All share a similar commitment to ritualistic repetition and the slow, often imperceptible development of a movement theme.

On the other hand, the work of Norman is slightly unusual programming for Dancehouse. Here we have three durational performance and installation pieces excerpted from a larger work, Unsettling Suite (2013), originally commissioned by Performance Space.

In The River’s Children (2013), Norman hand washes white items of clothing contributed by audience members in water sourced from the Murray River while a projector flashes fragmentary details of various documented massacres of Aboriginal people. In Take This, For It Is My Body (2010), audience members are offered a batch of scones containing a small amount of Norman’s blood. And in Heirloom (2013) a number of oriental Wedgwood Willow Pattern plates are appropriated for a new porcelain collection, again using Norman’s blood as a medium.

The blood scones are particularly effective. I came to the event thinking that the work might be over-determined. Isn’t this, I asked myself, one of those conceptual live art pieces where the actual performance is redundant? Won’t everyone’s response be more or less the same?

I was therefore surprised to discover, sitting at a table with a small group of other participants, how open the work is to multiple interpretations. A scenario, which had at first seemed like blunt symbolism, proved, in the presence of the scones, to be a radically ambivalent invitation.

Take This, For It Is My Body, Unsettling Suite, Sarah Jane Norman, Dance Territories

Two audience members straightaway jumped on the scones, liberally applying jam and cream and eating with enthusiasm. Another explained that she thought the ensanguined bread was like a kind of Uluru: something to be respectfully observed from a distance. A fourth pleaded vegetarianism, and a fifth, perhaps taking the work’s messianic title literally, treated the proffered scone as if it were a communal wafer, placing only a small fragment on his tongue and declining the condiments. It was fascinating theatre.

Both artists offer strategies by which a history of resistance to colonialism can be evoked and extended through the body. Belaza says in her program notes that the shout represents the moment when the anchor does not let go. Her work is grounded in the rhythms of Gnawa, a kind of ancient African spiritual music based on the chant-like repetition of refrains and phrases. This is the tradition which disciplines—or anchors—her experience of an increasingly fragmented postmodern world.

In this sense, Norman’s work, too, is a kind of shout or scream: an attachment to specific places and specific rituals, and the ambiguous cry of the blood.

Melbourne International Arts Festival & Dancehouse, Dance Territories: Border Lines: The River’s Children, Take This For It Is My Body and Heirloom, artist, performer Sarah-Jane Norman, performed with Carly Sheppard; The Shout, Nacera Belaza, performed with Dalila Belaza; Dancehouse, Melbourne, 14-16 Oct

Kleine Dada Soirée, Theo Van Doesburg + Kurt Schwitters, 1922, lithograph, MoMA, New York

RealTime’s Found Reading feature provides you with links to insightful articles about the performing and media arts and arts politics.

In The New York Review of Books, the great (now retired) classical pianist, Alfred Brendel reports seeing six recent exhibitions, including performances, in Europe that celebrate the centenary of Dada. His incisive personal response sketches the history of the movement and the lives of its protagonists, paying tribute to artists, male and female, who challenged every kind of authority, above all, he argues, with laughter of a kind much needed now, in a period with a similarly pervasive sense of crisis.

We live in a time of crisis: economic, environmental, humanitarian, political. As the conflict in Syria and the European migrant emergency remind us daily, the victims are more often than not ordinary folk—the children and politically disenfranchised women and men who have to live with the consequences of policy decisions over which they have little or no control. It’s these people who are the focus of Life is Short and Long, the latest and most sophisticated of performance-maker Emma Beech’s long-running series of works built around her theatricalised retelling of conversations with strangers in disparate parts of the world.

Beech’s practice is a sort of performative ethnography, although its signature is not the presentation of systematic data. Rather, it savours the randomness of everyday life, revealing the humanity of its subjects with a lightness of touch.

In her previous I Met… series, made in collaboration with the Adelaide-based Australian Bureau of Worthiness (see RealTime 115 and 119), Beech turned her attention to cities as distinct as Adelaide, Geelong and Viborg (Denmark), asking strangers, “What makes your day worth it?” In this new iteration, it’s the theme of crisis that informed Beech’s conversations with the residents of Barcelona, Port Adelaide and the precariously small mid-north South Australian town of Wirrabara. Though far apart and culturally dissimilar, each of these communities is facing some kind of upheaval. In Barcelona, the effects of 2008’s catastrophic market collapse are still being felt; in Wirrabara, the effects of major bushfires in the Bangor Forest in 2014 remain disfiguring and traumatising; and in Port Adelaide, where the work’s premiere showing took place, the struggle for rejuvenation after the collapse of once-thriving local industry goes on.

Each of these crises is seen through the eyes of various interview subjects whom Beech gently mimics in tone and gesture but never completely disappears into. There’s Jim, rendered with blokey insouciance, a Port Adelaide hairdresser whose descent from well-to-do salon-owner in the 1960s to destitute alcoholic a decade or so later mirrors the depressed fate of the suburb itself. And then there’s Marga, a Catalan performance-maker, whom Beech brings to vivid, acutely observed life with pitch-perfect accent and an almost balletic grace that—despite Marga’s financial hardship and her agonising over the prospect of bringing a child into the world—seems to seep into everything, even her chain-smoking. According to Beech, it was her friendship with Marga that, more than anything else, inspired the work’s creation. Her quiet dignity—as well as her barely contained rage at the forces responsible for the GFC, and the tourists who now flock to her country to exploit its low cost of living—sits at the core of the work.

Beech herself features in the narrative, as does her partner, comedian and performance-maker Steve Sheehan, especially in the Wirrabara segments. For example, they come third in the pumpkin competition held on the town’s market day by raiding their holiday accommodation’s vegetable garden. Another thread involves Beech’s pregnancy with triplets, which in itself develops into a crisis as her body is placed under enormous strain—at one point during her long hospital stay she is told by medical staff that her cervix is ‘melting’—and the babies are born prematurely and underweight.

The installation-like design, conceived by Meg Wilson and realised by Michelle Maddog Delaney, consists of a forest of variously sized PVC pipes, each rising to a different height out of a floor of blackened bark chips that evoke the Wirrabara bushfires. The audience is required to walk through this in groups of four to reach the performance space, an intimate, wood-floored rectangle with seating on three sides and overhung with long strings of multicoloured party lights. The eerily lit forest forms a slightly surreal backdrop and becomes both a sanctuary and a place of frightening isolation at different points in the performance.

Beech uses little in the way of props or set dressing to differentiate between places and people. A bench is occasionally brought on by co-performer and assistant stage manager Tim Overton (who also, somewhat unnecessarily, reels off various facts and figures about each of the work’s geographic locations) and a red flower Beech wears in her hair identifies Marga, but clarity is ensured by Beech’s virtuosic shifts of character. All of these elements cohere elegantly, with the exception of a puzzling series of short scenes in which Beech seems to be in a nightclub, drinking and dancing alone—a relic, perhaps, from the development process.

The work is humane and generous, rooted in stories of everyday resilience—in the face of crises of recession and change, of both the body and the world—which Beech dramatises with beguiling understatement. If it testifies to the devastating effects of failure on the part of of our political and economic institutions, it also offers hope in its many small but powerful displays of resistance.

Vitalstatistix with Country Arts SA: Life is Short and Long, concept, text, direction, performance Emma Beech, co-direction Tessa Leong, design (concept) Meg Wilson, design (realisation) Michelle Maddog Delaney, sound design Tristan Louth-Robins, co-performer, assistant stage manager Tim Overton; Waterside Workers Hall, Port Adeiaide,11-21 Oct; Wirrabara Town Hall, 28-29 Oct

A good fringe festival always encourages the difficult, the ambiguous and the very odd. For audiences, there should be the potential for every kind of confusion, from the merely frustrating to the darkly sublime. By this measure, the dance program of the 2016 Melbourne Fringe Festival was certainly a good one: often provoking and amusing but just as often baffling.

Emptying the Bucket

Nebahat Erpolat’s Emptying the Bucket is nothing if not enigmatic. It has the density and seriousness and mystery of a Zen koan. And, indeed, it could be that the title of the piece is a lateral reference to the 13th century Zen abbess Mugai Nyodai, who is said to have achieved enlightenment when the bottom fell out of an old bamboo bucket she was carrying.

In any case, this is a work which inspires doubt. Erpolat describes Emptying the Bucket as a meditation on love, and yet it’s shot through with images and rhythms suggesting disconnection and loneliness.

The four dancers seem to move in different spheres, and it is only with the greatest effort that they are able to force a connection. Harrison Ritchie-Jones, in skinny jeans and t-shirt, jives and bops as if listening to his own private mix tape. Josh Twee watches and broods and moves in sudden jerks and leaps. Eventually, he throws himself at Ritchie-Jones, pushing him to the ground, clinging to his legs in a paroxysm of desire. Ritchie-Jones barely seems to notice.

Emma Riches, improbably costumed as a cheerleader without the pompoms, performs lyrical fragments in isolation, only fleetingly joined in awkward duets. At one point, Ritchie-Jones holds Riches horizontally across his chest, using her leg like an implement to point at and push Twee.

Meanwhile, Sheridan Gerrard looks on mournfully; at intervals, she leaves the stage and jogs around the theatre space, including the audience within the rune-like scheme of the performance. The stage itself is bare, austerely lit in blue. The exposed stage rig looms like a skeleton in a museum. Moments of extreme stillness give way to heavy stamping and screaming. All the performers search for a new formula for the pas de deux of love, but it remains elusive.

The piece won the Fringe Award for Best Dance, and it’s clearly a work of great complexity and depth, with multiple layers and intersecting patterns. There is confusion in the restless shuffling of bodies and the energetic surges, and there’s plenty of theatricality, but there is also the rigorism of a choreographer who wants every shape to be just so.

As the contents of the metaphorical bucket pour forth we hear a string quartet by Schubert accompanied with swirls of dissonant noise. Perhaps what we’re seeing is a performance which empties all the false sentiments and images of romance and leaves us with a bare theatre and separately thrashing bodies. As the abbess Nyodai wrote: “No more water in the bucket; / No more moon in the water.”

HardQueer DeathPony (You’ve Had Worse Things In Your Mouth)

Another standout on the Fringe dance program was HardQueer DeathPony (You’ve Had Worse Things In Your Mouth), choreographed by Chad McLachlan. This work, too, is profoundly enigmatic, but in a more surreal and teasing way.

It’s a short piece, and the action is easy enough to describe. On entering the space, audience members are offered a slice of extra sugary chocolate cake. Once everyone is settled, the two performers—McLachlan and Matthew Hyde—don rubberised pony masks and, with a great air of ceremony, pour litres of cream over each other. As they pour, they entwine their limbs in an exaggerated but genuinely tender embrace. The cream, obviously, ends up everywhere.

As if to confirm their union, the two are then bound together with clingwrap. After freeing themselves from this tangle, there’s a brief envoi involving small piles of potting mix, the details of which are very difficult to make out amid all the shadows. Finally, McLachlan and Hyde tidy the space and exit abruptly, leaving the bewildered audience to guess at whether or not the show is really over.

Despite the queer eccentricity of the work and its sexualised overtones, HardQueer DeathPony has a meditative, almost devotional quality. There is something quite solemn about it. The two figures are lit throughout by a wash of bluish purple from an LED projector, and the key to the work’s unexpected fascination seems to be the well-defined shadows this creates on the wall.

The way the dancers come together in silhouette and the way their forms are flattened and transfigured is utterly absorbing. The silliness becomes something almost mythical in the shadow play: black forms cut out against the lurid colour. The tension between the graceful clean lines of the shadows and the sticky mess in front of us on the plastic tarpaulin resonates on multiple levels, including the spiritual.

There are many memorable visuals in this enthralling show. You could try to puzzle out their literal meanings, but I suspect it all works best as pure fantasy: as the movement from a dream world toward something even more abstract and ancient.

The Right Unravelling

Finally, Zac Jones’ The Right Unravelling explores the idea of contrasting rhythms and tempos inhabiting the one body. It’s a partly improvised performance with a highly distinctive movement vocabulary, one which shows off the influence of Jones’ Aikido training.

At its best, the work resembles a choreography of spasms, tracing different levels of intensity across the body. It’s a line of movement research which produces some striking images, particularly in the earlier parts of the work. This is what I imagine one of those partially blurred Francis Bacon portraits would look like if danced: a man madly whirling his right arm in circles while the left arm slowly noodles about.

At times martial arts training is directly referenced. The middle section, for instance, where Jones slaps and buffets himself, appears to be based on an Aikido warm-up exercise used to stimulate the muscles. At other times, it’s visible only in his focus on proper conscious breathing and in the way he sets himself and thrusts out his elbows.

The Right Unravelling also features live accompaniment from Melbourne sound artist Ziggy Zeitgeist, who creates a kind of aural bricolage of found sounds using a sampler. Dancer and musician are not always in harmony, with each at times pursuing different ideas; yet even this friction seems appropriate to the project.

Conceptually, the Right Unravelling is a more straightforward proposition than much of what was on offer at the Melbourne Fringe. And yet there is something undeniably strange about the way Zac Jones moves. He looks something like a spinning top which is starting to lose its spin. He remains centred, and his legs remain relatively still, but his arms and the upper part of his body describe graceful and ever widening circles. It’s mesmerising, but also faintly disturbing.

It’s worth noting that Zac Jones was, in the early 2000s, a dancer with Queensland Ballet, and his dance journey since then has been a complicated one. He certainly moves like no-one else.

Melbourne Fringe: Upswing Arts, Emptying the Bucket, choreographer Nebahat Erpolat, Meat Market, 28 Sept-1 Oct; HardQueer DeathPony (You’ve Had Worse Things In Your Mouth), creator, choreographer Chad McLachlan, Arts House Warehouse, 24 Sept-1 Oct; The Right Unravelling, creator, performer Zac Jones, Arts House Meeting Room, Melbourne, 24 Sept-1 Oct

Artist, documenter, provocateur and trickster Choy Ka Fai is fun to talk with. The Singaporean performance-maker, video artist and scientific experimenter tells me there’s plenty of humour in SoftMachine, his very serious four-part project about dance in Asia of which we, and many Asians too, may be unaware. Two of its performances are in this year’s Liveworks, one of them, SoftMachine: Rianto, appeared in the recent OzAsia Festival; the other is by Chinese artists XioaKe x ZiHan.

You can witness Choy’s enthusiasm in a TEDx demonstration of Prospectus for a Future Body in which he transfers movements from one body to another by means of electrical mapping of muscles, using himself to learn (or be conditioned) to reproduce a fragment of movement seen in a 1973 film of a performance by Butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata. From such experimentation he’d like to produce a library of dance movement data. And there are wilder ambitions. He calls this work “pseudo-scientific” but there’s some real science in it and, above all, it’s playful. It pays to attend to the trickster (see Lewis Hyde’s wonderful Trickster Makes His World, 1995).

SoftMachine is also about the transmission of cultural knowledge, but without the shocks. It too shifts between formal investigation, a survey of Asian dance in this case, and an intuitive, artistic response. I spoke by Skype with Choy who was in London with SoftMachine at Sadlers Wells just before coming to Liveworks, asking him about the motivation for and the scope of the work and with a focus on XioaKe x ZiHan.

SoftMachine: dance spy

On a search to find out more about dance in Asia, Choy says he “inserted” himself into cities, seeking out work he hadn’t previously seen, not “underground”—he doesn’t like the word—but “a little underground.” He interviewed 88 artists in four countries: India, Japan, Indonesia and China. “Now, I call myself a contemporary dance spy of Asia.” The idea was to find in each an artist with whom he could establish a deep relationship in order to work together and possibly collaborate in performance. The initial medium was the interview.

“Through conversation you understand how open or generous our communication might be. I might like someone a lot and think their work is fantastic but we can’t really communicate. So in that sense there’s a lot of coincidence. [Finding an artist] is like the Butterfly Effect. When you know someone, they’ll recommend someone else.”

The result is a set of four discrete performances that entail the interplay of dance and documentary film and do honour to the familial, social and cultural contexts in which each of these idiosyncratic artists make their work.

“In each place it began with me trying to understand the ecology of what’s happening in the city through talking with some 20 people. Of course, it’s actually quite intuitive. When I saw Rianto, I could immediately could see it was very possible we could work together. For the Chinese piece, I actually had another artist in mind, much more established and of an older generation. But Xioa Ke and Zihan (who perform as XioaKe x ZiHan) are my age; so is the Japanese choreographer in SoftMachine, Yuya Tsukahara. I thought, this time maybe the work is about my peers. I had met them through an interview in Shanghai in, I think, 2013 and then half a year later after completing all the interviews I decided Xiao Ke would be the best choreographer to work with.”

Shanghai-based Xaio Ke trained in traditional Chinese dance as a child. In 2005 she was co-founder of the Niao ZuHe Physical Theater Company, winner of the 2006 Zurich Theater Spectacle. In 2007 she founded the UGLY Performing Art Center in Beijing. In 2011, with Zhou Zihan and Zhang Yuan, she co-founded the Can not Help Artists’ Collective, focusing on transboundary artforms and social issues. Her collaborator Zhou ZiHan is a sound artist and performer who began his career as a photographer and founded, in 2008, the independent art centre Canart for which he curated contemporary art exhibitions and performances. He and Xiao Ke, as XiaoKe x ZiHan, combine dance, photography, video, live art and installation.

Choy tells me, “The Chinese work in SoftMachine is one of the most ‘insecure’ pieces I’ve made. We became very good friends quite fast whereas with Yuya Tsukahara we’d been working together since 2009 in a different capacity. With Surjit Nongmeikapam and Rianto, the Indian and Indonesian artists, we’d had a two-month residency in Bangalore. So we had already established our friendship before we started to become colleagues. Rianto had an interesting story to tell and he has a very clear dance form. But these Chinese artists are multi-disciplinary, they do a lot of different things: live art, multimedia, social theatre, site-specific and durational performance… When I first saw their work, I thought they were doing what [was being done in live art] five to 10 years ago in London, but in a different context.”

Another reason for insecurity occurred when one of the artist’s close friends, says Choy, “was invited to ‘have tea’ at the Cultural Bureau of China, meaning the cultural police were watching him.” Others received similar invitations. There was a growing suspicion that there was a spy in Xioa Ke and Zhou Zihan’s network of friends. It was, Choy Ka Fai says, an unsettling month for the collaboration. It became an issue about the “the boundary of freedom which I’ve experienced a little as a Singaporean artist as a sense of self-censorship. So we turned this whole Shanghai experience into a performance.”

“On another level I was insecure,” he adds, “because I think in the Chinese work I gave away a lot of control as a director because we trust each other a lot and there’s a lot of not-misunderstanding, a lot of give and take. With these artists if I say, ‘please do this,’ they might not agree. If you’re a very good friend, you can do that and it’s not personal. It’s a really true collaboration in that sense. Conceptually, they are very clear what they want to do and can be quite eccentric as well. They travel a lot to Europe now. They brought with them two 60-year-old Chinese grandmothers who did a public dance—because after dinner people in China dance in public squares. They taught German grannies to do it in a little bit of participatory work. So I think XiaoKe x ZiHan really are, you could say ‘not focused’ because they’re trying to do so much.” (LAUGHS).

The artist as performer

I ask Choy about how he arrived at his fascination with dance, such that he would create a work on the scale of SoftMachine with its blend of conversation, process, performance and documentation.

“I started as a physical theatre practitioner when I was 18 and then I saw the performance group Dumbtype from Japan and decided I wanted to make art. In a way I’m always looking at the different extensions of the body in performance. What Dumbtype did in the 80s and 90s was amazing; in a way it was like total theatre. Everything comes together. Then I went on to study video art but continued making performance [he was an Associate Artistic Director of Singapore’s Theatreworks 2007-09 and had worked with Ong Keng Sen since 2004] and performed myself a little bit. In SoftMachine I appear in two of the pieces, but sadly these are not showing in Sydney. In the Indian piece I’m the investigator and also a pseudo-academic (shown here) who’s trying to teach an Indian how to perform Indian dance for a European audience.

“The Japanese piece, because Yuya Tsukahara and I knew each other for a long time, is the most physically demanding piece I’ve made in the last decade. It [involves] a form of contact improvisation. The premise for the piece was that I wanted to put myself in the shoes of someone who wants to become a member of his group Gonzo from Osaka. I ask Yuya to teach me and I interview him at the same time. But with Rianto it’s very clear that it’s possible for me to do anything on stage, even take away attention from him (LAUGHS). So that’s why I’m not onstage.”

Nor is he onstage with ZioaKe x Zihan, “We had a part where the three of us dance together—but then the dramaturg said, ‘it’s quite messy.’”

At the point of origin

I ask if, as in the other works in SoftMachine, there is a focus with XioaKe x ZiHan on the places they’ve grown up in and the audiences they perform to. “With all of the pieces I try to have it performed in the place of origin, the city or country the artists live in, before touring, to get a response because the work is so closely related to the environment and the society. With the Chinese piece there’s a lot of material about their everyday life in Shanghai and a little bit from their personal history. For instance, I didn’t know that Xiao Ke was a member of the Chinese Communist Party when she was at university. She studied journalism and so she had to be a member to be a journalist. Things like that surprised me. We didn’t get a license to perform publicly so we had a closed door event at the Shanghai Dramatic Centre during a festival.

“Through the interviews, one of the surprising findings came when I asked Chinese artists, ‘Who do you think is the artist that best represents Chinese contemporary dance?’ And they would say it’s Cloudgate from Taiwan. Because they think the Taiwanese took all of China’s museum artefacts to Taiwan, they always look to Cloudgate because it has evolved from Chinese dance and martial art forms. That too was quite surprising for me.”

Having toured SoftMachine performances in Asia and to Europe and Australia and staged an accompanying exhibition (showing in Liveworks), Choy Ka Fai hopes to make all the material available online. He has no immediate plans to add to SoftMachine but is tempted by Central Asia. A significant challenge, he says, is language. “In Indonesia I had to rely on the translator, who is a close friend, to find information [about choreographers]. It’s a problem but also the beauty of Asia. You see, there are things that you can’t really understand. In Indonesia in the interviews everyone was talking about ‘Rasa’ in contemporary dance and I asked so many people, ‘How do you define it? Is it a spirit or a presence?’ That’s one of the things I thought SoftMachine can do, to share knowledge.”

The Dance Doctor

I ask Choy Ka Fai about his work on dance in the neuroscience domain. He tells me, “There’s a lot about technology that interests me. I’ve been working on and off on it for almost two years now. Next year I’ll finally be pushing out Dance Clinic. The idea is very simple. There’s often a gap between what a choreographer writes about their dance work and what an audience sees. I wonder if this can be understood by analyzing choreographers’ brainwaves. I’m trying to be a dance doctor, using neuroscience and a pseudo-scientific device to tell you what your brain is really thinking. I call it ‘a life consultation.’ My Dance Clinic will tour the world collecting data and building an algorithm with which to create an AI choreographer.” A two-year residency at Tanzhaus NRW, Dusseldorf will further the project.

“In analyzing brainwaves I’m also interested in looking at whether the performer or dancer is present or absent (read an interview about this)—I’m very much inspired by Marina Abramovic’s performance The Artist is Present.”

I comment that the project appears to be half-serious. Choy thinks it’s more serious than that, but says, “I think it’s the position I want to take because, in terms of an art/science collaborations, when a scientist takes the lead it becomes an academic paper—like, 400 pages that I don’t understand. But when an artist takes the lead, a lot of the interesting science is lost because, at the end of the day, they want to put something beautiful on stage. So I’m trying to be in-between; it’s common sense to me, in the sense of public science.

I ask if Choy will be in Sydney for Liveworks. “Yes, I’ll be here throughout and I’ll be working at Critical Path on a documentary project for 2017 in Japan about Butoh called Unbearable Darkness. Next year I’ll be at Campbelltown Arts Centre as well.” An ongoing exchange of ideas with Choy Ka Fai could be invaluable for futhering the hitherto slow growth of a relationship between Australian and Asian dance that is both culturally informative and experimentally minded.

In an era of art festivals as vehicles of economy and gentrification, there is something irresistibly likable about Ruhrtriennale. Though the festival was seemingly conceived in that Richard Florida spirit, it is as far removed from the thin-veneered bling of art-for-tourism as the Ruhr is removed from, say, Singapore. Located in the west of Germany, Ruhr is one of the oldest industrial regions in all of Europe, once synonymous with coal, steel and heavy industry. The impetus for the triennial, which commenced 2002-2004, was in part to repurpose Ruhr’s industrial architectural heritage.

It is impossible to talk about the art without talking about the region, because it is rare that the festival location frames the art as thoroughly as it does here. Ruhr today is simultaneously rural and urban, industrial and post-industrial, post-future and pre-present. Despite the de-industrialisation that started in the 1960s, it still has a significant manufacturing base. A conurbation of small cities linked by Deutsche Bahn, interspersed with villages, factories, shipping terminals, open fields and workers’ suburbs, it is a hard-hatted landscape, more function than form. To quote Gerard Mortier, the Triennale’s first Artistic Director, it was clear that the visitors would not come for the Vienna Philharmonic. Instead, the festival endeavours to establish a dialogue between its complex architectural and social heritage and art, and in doing so, shed light on our time. The art is everywhere: in nature parks built atop former factories, in still-operating loading docks and in abandoned factories sitting in a field, as imposing as temples of an ancient civilisation. It is as if the entire European civilisation, its heritage and its future possibilities, refracts through a contemplative lens. The result is almost impossibly grounded. It is strange that we no longer expect that from art.

Björn Bicker, Urban Prayers Ruhr

Take Urban Prayers Ruhr, an earnest meditation on religion and multiculturalism. Each of the six performances took place in a different place of worship across the region, from the Lutheran church in Dinslaken-Lohberg to the Sri Kamadchi Ampal Temple in Hamm, the largest Hindu temple in Europe. Between musical pieces ranging from Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli via The Battle of Jericho to traditional Jewish, Islamic and Serbian Orthodox liturgical songs, five diverse performers speak fragments of a post-dramatic text by German author Björn Bicker.

Bicker’s speakers form a chorus of concerned citizens, undifferentiated by dramatis personae, religious and moral positions, their voices washing indiscriminately over the singers’ bodies: a Babel situation. Topics covered: Praying, Helping, Paying, Marrying, but also Building, Dreaming, and that most faith-related everyday activity, Driving. “I dream of another world./ I don’t./ I don’t either./ We are not naïve. / We are political./ We’re not.” They list how they pray, how often, on a mat or sitting, what they wear, how big the shrine needs to be and whether someone will sell them the land for it. This cacophony of difference ranges from profound to trivial: “We’re thankful for satellite dishes.” Misunderstandings, conflict, hostility, acceptance, ignorance, fear, resistance, pacifism and evangelism, exist side by side without resolution, and yet the setting, the liturgical form of the delivery and its considerable length, have a cathartic effect of keeping diverse elements together until all tension collapses. Re-written by Bicker specifically for contemporary Ruhr, it is an ecumenical work of enormous sensitivity.

Toneelgroep Amsterdam, The things that pass

Ivo van Hove’s The things that pass is the second in the planned trilogy of dramatisations of novels by Dutch author Louis Couperus, a chronicler of the Hague middle class at the turn of the 20th century. A co-production between Toneelgroep Amsterdam and Toneelhuis, it premiered in the Maschinenhalle Zweckel, a castle-like edifice built in 1909 that used to supply the nearby mine with electricity and air. The imposing-cum-crumbling building serves to effectively highlight the themes of Couperus’ text: the weight of Protestant ethics, the weight of unexamined emotions, the weight of what we inherit.

The set is an enormous, dreamlike waiting room in which numerous members of two well-to-do Hague families sit and wait for older generations to die. A few things happen: the youngest two get married, visitors reveal past intrigues, there’s a honeymoon in Italy, money changes hands. But these are mere blips in the wait. Though the laws of inheritance divide them artificially into generations, apart from the newly-weds, everyone is already old, old and unhappy, lost in the kind of malaise that grows in insular families in which happiness is a skill forgotten many generations ago. The characters hold onto fantasies of salvation: inheritance to prop up their lives, Italian sunshine to restore their joie de vivre, revelations that will explain the subterranean tensions within the family, death as a release from guilt. Beneath the restraint of the Dutch middle class is a cauldron of inchoate, infantile, sexually charged emotion that can only find release by going berserk in the exotic South. There is, indeed, a murder in the family history, a crime of passion committed in the Dutch East Indies that has poisoned the bind between the two families. But neither its revelation, nor the eventual death of the cursed couple, offers escape.

Julian Rosefeldt, Manifesto

The stand-out work in Ruhrtriennale was Manifesto, a 13-channel video installation by Julian Rosefeldt, in which Cate Blanchett’s 13 personae deliver the most salient art manifestos of the 20th century. A news anchor explains conceptual art. An irritable punk musician voices The Strident Manifesto and calls for an electric chair for Chopin. A drunken hobo in the ruins of Berlin’s former US Cold War listening station rants against capitalism, as per the Situationist Manifesto. And a Wall Street broker, in a mellifluous voice, extols Futurism (“Our hearts know no tiredness!”).

Sometimes the setting reveals the historical urges beneath an art movement, such as with the Midwestern mid-century family that prays for pop art, a “political-erotic-mystical art.” Sometimes the tension is ironic: the worker in an industrial incinerator delivers praise to the functional aesthetic of Modernism. Sometimes, as when a primary school teacher delivers the Dogme Manifesto to her students (“Nothing is original.”) the effect is merely sardonic. Yet there is a larger purpose to the work: once every 10-minute cycle, 13 videos sync up in climactic, liturgically intoned unison, like a mass for all the hopes of art. As these quieten before the cycle restarts, a calm takes over: the news studio is cleaned, the homeless man walks away, the children play in the school playground without a worry in the world.

In its understated willingness to ask important questions, Ruhrtriennale is remarkable.

Urban Prayers Ruhr, concept, direction Björn Bicker, Malte Jelden, script Björn Bicker, direction Johan Simons, performers ChorWerk Ruhr, Bochum Synagoge, 14 Aug-18 Sept; The Things That Pass, direction Ivo van Hove, script Koen Tachelet after Louis Couperus, set design Jan Versweyveld, Maschinenhalle Zweckel, Gladbeck, 16 – 24 Sept; Manifesto, performer Cate Blanchett, director, production, author Julian Rosefeldt, Kraftzentrale, Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord, Germany 13 Aug–24 Sept

Stepping into the dimmed room it takes a while for your eyes to adjust to the details. At first there doessn’t seem to be much here: a simple stage set at the harbour’s edge of a small city by the sea. Turnton, an imaginary town from a possible future, is brought to life by Austria-based Time’s Up over a two-year process of futuring and scenario building. Only a fraction of that work is manifest here at the RIXC Gallery for the Open Fields festival, but lingering on this fictional harbourside slowly reveals incredibly detailed fragments of this extrapolated world, drawing you into the constraints and possibilities the work projects. The world outside the gallery is repositioned as an historical exhibit in the Turnton Museum, titled Europe 2006-2026.

The ‘energy descent’ future portrayed is one where we didn’t act in time. Current damage to the oceans is taken to some of its worst conclusions. But we also see resilience and new social formations that have sprung up in response. Outside the harbourmaster’s office, jobs are displayed offering opportunities to travel, by sail boat or overland. The bees are gone. Equipment belonging to a professional pollinator lies nearby, in the basket of a research balloon. Signposts point us towards the Radical Recycling Headquarters and the New Neighbours Integration Bureau which is celebrating 20 years of welcoming displaced people to the community.

Posters, signage and a local paper quietly weave together a back story of social formations and institutions that have emerged to support the changes that have been necessary. The algal toxicity of the water is registered on a sign reminiscent of a fire warning indicator. But there is remediation work afoot, just out of sight at a kelp farm, and the local bar (what harbourside would be complete without a shady watering hole?) serves snacks based mostly on seaweed and jellyfish. I was tempted by a plate of crispy seaweed on the menu but the gallery closed and I had to step back into the museum of the present where the decisions leading to that possible future were still being made.

Back in Riga in 2016 I head over to the Open Fields exhibition and conference in the Latvian National Library, where I find several more works that mix speculative fictions with scientific data and practices to reflect on the present and the possible.

In Open Care by Erich Berger (FI/AT) and Mari Keto (DK/FI), a display case of artifacts proposes a social thought experiment: what if nuclear waste were a very personal responsibility? It’s an imaginary system for distributed nuclear waste storage which implicates us intimately in a much longer swathe of the future than most of us can imagine easily. The waste is encapsulated in steel pellets mounted in a bronze disk. An electroscope, gold leaf, an electrostatic rod and fur to charge it are provided along with instructions for a ritual to be conducted periodically, generation to generation, to ascertain whether the waste of which you are custodian has become safe “or if you and your descendants need to continue to care about it.” Rendering the huge timescale of radioactive decay into more meaningful units of lifetimes opens the question of collective care from a fresh
perspective.

Shifting from these vast timescales to the fluctuations of the very tiny, Pond Battery by RIXC’s Directors, Latvians Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits, builds on a long period of working with bioelectricity and microbial fuel cells to bring the murky depths of electrogenic microbial pond life into our perceptual range using a mix of timelapse video, sonified electrical signal and an object that physically traces fluctuations in the microbes’ electrical output over seven months as a series of peaks and troughs. Through this indexing of the activity of these tiny organisms into a relief reminiscent of the varied rings of a tree, the microscopic is projected into a much more expansive timescale and the normally imperceptible activity in the pond seems to be both sped up and slowed down for us to see.

In a more conventional division of labour, scientists tend to produce data and artists are often involved in making meaning. One of the directions taken in this festival seems to be to stir up those delineations and explore overlaps, differences and collaborations in how art and science practitioners conduct research, produce knowledge and frame the stories data can tell.

Bio-scientist turned artist, Raphael Kim (UK) distinguishes the goals of artist biohackers from those of corporate bioscientists in several ways including a focus on implications versus applications, with an interest in better questions over answers and a process of enquiry driven by a hands-on approach. In his project Microbial Money, four classically composed and meticulously staged photographic scenarios draw us into a fiction combining the accoutrements of corporate finance with the apparatus of biotech to pose questions about a future of money in which microbes execute rapid decisions on the trading floor and cycles of boom and bust are tied to genetic markers in fluctuating microbial populations.

For his ultra low-voltage survival kit, Mindaugas Gapševi?ius (LT/DE) directly names bacteria as his collaborators in making paper out of dried Kombucha scoby (a mix of cultures of bacteria and yeast) in the kits laid out in his Introduction to Post-human Aesthetics.

If money and paper seem to be quite human-centred byproducts of microbial activity, Laura Beloff and Malena Klaus’s Fly Printer-Extended [Laura Beloff (FI/DK) in collaboration with Malena Klaus (DE/DK)] explores a grey area between living systems and informatic processes not controlled by, or purposed to, human agency. A community of fruit flies dining on a diet laced with printer ink gradually ‘print’ images around their enclosure and onto a square of paper under the gaze of a trained machine vision device. The flies can’t be controlled to print anything in particular and the vision machine’s algorithm can’t stop over-interpreting the ‘noise’ of their distributed dots as meaningful visual data. As I peer into the disarray of fine grainy speckling produced by a small colony of fruitfly over several hours, the AI is literally joining the dots to seek out an interpretation of these cross-hatched constellations. Unlike in the perception of human stargazers, images here are not formed in integers, but probabilities. At that moment what the machine sees is something that is “3.5% Space Shuttle” and I wonder if it is looking at a fruitfly.

PSX Consultancy, Cyclamen Pollinator, 2014, Pei-Yin Lin (TW), Špela Petri? (SI)

With a more tongue in cheek approach, PSX Consultancy [Pei-Ying Lin (TW), Špela Petri? (SI), Dimitrios Stamatis (GR), Jasmina Weiss (SI] takes a playful look at genuine reproductive challenges faced by several species of plants for various reasons (eg specialised breeding of them by humans or the extinction of pollinator species). PSX works with a user-centred design methodology to understand the needs of their vegetal clients. The aquired data is reworked as delicate printed objects, specialised sex toys for plants.

In Hue Dichotomies: Two Meadows, Ellie Irons (US), on the other hand, chooses to work with plants that are less domesticated and proposes that the urban weeds with which she makes paint pigments are a form of “vegetative resistance.” These contribute valuable greenery to marginal urban spaces through a process of rapid adaptation.

Like our personal microbial landscapes, many weeds have continually co-evolved with us. Perhaps it is these intimate relationships with the microbes, insects and plants near us that can bring some of the daunting data of our contemporary environmental challenges within our grasp through narratives that place human involvement in complex systems at a scale we can perceive.

Visit the festival site for artist biographies and information about other works exhibited.

Hobart’s inaugural Salamanca Moves dance festival demonstrates the ever-broadening definition of contemporary dance—a discipline that festival curator Kelly Drummond Cawthon describes as “suitable for any BODY and every BODY”. True to this philosophy, the ambitious and diverse 11-day program emphasises accessibility without sacrificing criticality, challenging traditional models through site-specific and participatory performances. Of the seven events I attended, only two took place wholly within a theatre; the rest shunned traditional performance spaces for the public realm, blurring the distinction between performer and audience.

Rite of Spring

Rite of Spring borrows the title of Igor Stravinsky’s famous 1913 ballet. While there are similar elements of ritual and pagan mysticism, this interpretation takes liberties with the narrative, score and performance style. The four-part performance—each part representing a season—starts off in the Peacock Theatre where we’re welcomed to our seats with requests to dance later. Although provided with a glass of wine on entry, none of us is quite ready to drop our inhibitions just yet. They then drop to the floor and weep when we say “no.” It’s a testament to the artists’ infectious enthusiasm that by the end of the performance (at 10pm on a cold Hobart night no less!), on instruction, the entire audience is jumping and spinning around St David’s Park.

Rite of Spring is a production by Second Echo Ensemble, an integrated performance group that includes people both with and without disability. Cawthon notes, “it’s not a service provider or a community project. It’s its own thing.” The performance itself is definitely “its own thing,” defying genres with its mix of seated, roaming and participatory moments for the audience. It includes a debaucherous feast of wine, fruit and chocolate in a fire-filled garden, giant insect-spotting through cardboard binoculars from a rotunda in St David’s Park, a procession up Salamanca Place with the company of giant insect-like performers on stilts, and a final celebratory shot of vodka (“nostrovia!”). Although we start in a theatre, the performance soon graduates to a nearby underground carpark where a winter wedding is celebrated with the firework-like popping of a bubblewrap wedding dress train echoing throughout. Now holding ceremonial sticks, we’re corralled into Salamanca Square on our journey to ‘Spring,’ tapping a steady beat to the sounds of the roaming double bass (much to the amusement of nearby restaurant patrons).

The music is largely provided by the group’s “musical provocateur,” Michael Fortescue on double bass with additional electronic tracks. It’s strongly rhythmic, capturing the energy and emotion of ritual celebrations and blind abandon. The Sage, played by Luke Campbell, brilliantly matches this energy, mesmerising in the way he almost convulses to the beat, recalling Alexei Sayle’s manic and infectious dance in his 1991 show ‘Itch.

The Stance

The Mature Artists Dance Experience (MADE) production of Brisbane artist Liesel Zink’s The Stance, also takes place in Salamanca Square, this time at its busiest, thanks to the Saturday market. The Stance is based on a poem about protest and politics by one of the group’s members, noting that protest is so often associated with young people (“being pushed and shoved is for the young”). It’s a subtle performance. The dancers are in everyday clothes and consequently blend into the crowds when not in formation. The ambient soundtrack is delivered through wireless headphones, and it’s the absence of surrounding sound—the cacophony of screaming children, squawking seagulls and coffee machines—that really narrows my focus on the dancers. That said, as with Rite of Spring, I’m hyperaware that the audience is as much the subject of the public’s gaze as the dancers.

Salamanca Square is an odd choice for a performance about possession, protest and justice when Parliament Lawns is only minutes away, particularly as the program claims The Stance is site-specific. The restaurant and bar-lined Salamanca Square is associated with tourists, consumption and drunken visits to the 24-hour bakery. It’s a largely uncontested space, a safe space. Parliament Lawns, on the other hand, is Hobart’s traditional location for protests. It represents democracy and power, and would surely better complement the struggle described in The Stance.

Liz Aggiss

Liz Aggiss’ two performances, Slap and Tickle and The English Channel, feature a frenetic melange of music hall, dance, performance art, film and stand up, delivered with a heavy dose of dark humour and absurdity. Each is a celebration of women, the female body and the ageing body, and the 63-year-old Aggiss (the headline act for Tasmania Performs’ Mature Moves program in the festival) is not afraid to flaunt hers. Of the two, Slap and Tickle is the more engaging show, and doesn’t seem forced. It’s unapologetically ‘dirty’ with a constant reel of gags about all things sexual and taboo. Aggiss produces coins and ping-pong balls from her undies and snakes from her bra, which sounds crass (and it is) but is delivered in such a way that the audience doesn’t even question why they’re laughing. Nor can her jokes be retold. At one point she exclaims, “I have things in my pants to be grateful for” before producing bunting printed with stylised penises. “Cocks plus bunting…I think that makes cunting! Lets party!” It’s a gag that made me writhe with laughter at the time, but cringe when recounting it. It’s all in the delivery. And that’s how Liz Aggiss manages to slip seamlessly from “Let’s party!” to dark observations about domestic abuse, cancer, ageism and gender inequality, and still have us laughing. The thematic whiplash is made deliberately uncomfortable.

In The English Channel, Aggiss plays medium to a number of figures from Kurt Joos (“and his Dance of Death”) to the first woman to swim the English Channel, Gertrude Ederle. The standout is Aggiss’ hammed-up evocation of Florence Foster Jenkins, the American socialite and notoriously bad amateur soprano. As with Slap and Tickle, her variety of cloaks and dresses are beautifully sculptural and constantly changing thanks to the various props hidden beneath the fabric (at one point a tall headdress is removed to reveal a human skull armature, at another a single antler is produced from beneath a cloak). Verbalising a common internal monologue, she repeatedly asks the audience, “Do I please you? Or do I please myself?” before stripping down to a pair of glittering bathers and gold heels, thereby defying the social conventions of modesty we expect of mature-aged women.

Deepspace

Deepspace is the result of a research project in the sub-Antarctic undertaken earlier this year. Choreographer and dancer James Batchelor and his artist collaborator Annalise Rees were part of an interdisciplinary team on the CSIRO Investigator, an Australian marine research boat. Deepspace takes place in one of Macquarie Point’s now empty industrial sheds. It’s a cavernous space that dwarfs the two performers. As if to make the point that everything’s relative, it’s divided by a line of tiny, model-like hanging sculptures. Batchelor and his fellow dancer, Amber McCartney, use this architecture strategically, deploying rope and other marine-related props as spatial mapping tools, ‘drawing’ with their bodies.

There are gestural allusions to Batchelor’s time on the ship: a flattened crawling along the ground to the sound of wind, the winding of rope and the manipulation of ball bearings over his back—as on a ship in rough water, the cargo shifts back and forth along his spine, threatening to spill over the edge. There’s an underlying theme of harmony to the entire performance, from the trust and balance demonstrated by the two dancers, to the hypnotic soundtrack designed by Morgan Hickinbotham.

Aeon

A couple of hours before Aeon commences, I’m texted the starting location of my “flock”—the play equipment situated on the Queen’s Domain. We’re handed a small portable speaker and a card, each with an image and phrase relating to birds, flight, evolution, dinosaurs, behaviour and/or breeding. My card has a picture of caged pigeons and a crooked sign reading “pigeons $2.00,” which is not as dismal as my neighbour’s picture of a used condom. “Everything is natural. Nothing is normal,” another participant reads out loud. We’re told that in a flock “everyone is a leader, everyone is a follower, so let’s stick together.” Cue collective awkwardness. Not moving, I look at the overhead birds for advice. They land on a nearby powerline before gracefully lifting off as a flock only seconds later. They’ve probably never heard the phrase ‘natural born leader.’ A few of our (human) flock edge towards overgrown railway lines. We follow. Someone starts balancing along one of the tracks, prompting five others to follow suit. Our flock already has leaders and followers.

There’s a distorted cooing from the speakers with a beat that’s gradually increasing in speed—a pace closer to a bird’s heartbeat than any human’s. We instinctively walk faster. As we near two other flocks near the Cenotaph, our group starts running in circles. One man takes his shirt off and a woman soon follows. Humans may demonstrate collective behaviour in many aspects of our lives, but we don’t flock like birds. In this instance, it’s evident that the awareness of social norms overrides any instinctual flocking, although it makes for an interesting social experiment. As we wander down to Macquarie Point to ‘roost’ in a shed, I can pick members of the Aeon performance. They’re the ones jumping around, hitting resonant objects, stepping off the footpaths and taking off their shirts. We almost need to be trained how to flock.

Salamanca Moves at 30,000 feet

The dance party finale reflects the festival’s dual focus. Salamanca Moves involves a number of international performers, but it is also very much rooted in the local community, as demonstrated by the small and low-key performances in this final event. It has a slightly twee airline theme with the male DJ dressed as a pilot and the female front of house staff designated as “air hostesses.” However, as one runs through pseudo-safety briefing, her movements robotic and familiar, it dawns on me how much dancing we inadvertently experience in everyday life. Everybody dances.

Read a RealTime interview with Salamanca Moves’ curator Kelly Drummond Cawthon.

“I was on a road trip. We’d gone the wrong way, and we righted our passage and got onto Highway 54 in Texas,” says Tina Havelock Stevens, telling the story behind the creation of her latest work, Thunderhead, soon to show at Performance Space’s Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art at Sydney’s Carriageworks. The work comprises large-scale video projections of a supercell storm moving across a wide plain, backdropped by low rolling mountains.

The storm—characterised by a mesocyclone: a deep, rotating updraft—is viewed from the safety of a moving car and accompanied by a spacious guitar and drum soundscape. The work concerns one of the most fundamental relationships: that between humans and natural spaces of awe and wonder.

“I’d been with some friends looking at land art [in the US]. I saw James Turrell’s Road and Crater and Charles Ross’ Star Axis, which are all about space and sky. They’re all about scale, so I was probably in that state of scale. It was pretty emotional. We went to Marfa as well and saw works by Donald Judd. The way Thunderhead is cut—the way the [spatial] planes are flying in and out of the frame—has those aspects of scale and repetition.”

There are a number of loops within the video work, cut to the soundtrack, which Havelock Stevens created with her friend and collaborator Liberty Kerr. All up, the video will play to a 17-minute sound recording, on a 13 x 7 metre screen. A number of live performances of the soundtrack with Kerr are scheduled, in addition to the daily exhibiting of Thunderhead.

Rural Texas is one of the best places to really see the night sky, but Thunderhead is also visited by the presence of the Australian countryside. “I grew up on a farm and spent a lot of time wandering around on my own at twilight, one of the spookiest times of the day,” says Havelock Stevens. “Something about the death of the day used to make me a bit anxious as a child.”

Having seen and heard the components of Thunderhead in the artist’s kitchen, I can say that the effect of the work is the feeling of being picked up and dropped off somewhere remote and strange. At the work’s presentation for Dark Mofo at Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art earlier this year, “one woman said it made her feel really safe.” Some stayed two hours, others stayed 45 minutes. “People responded to my reflection in the [car door] mirror. It’s my presence in the work, I’m in it, because I’m a self-shooter,” says Havelock Stevens, referring to her solo method of shooting video, as well as her other profession of documentary-making for SBS, ABC and commercial television. All of her work and process—from experimental documentaries to television work and immersive art experiences—are backgrounded by her studies in film and philosophy.

“The self-shooting is how I make all my docos. I love that intimacy. It’s about being inside of something, of making a spontaneous composition where you don’t know what the outcome will be. I landed on [the storm]. I stumbled on it. It’s not set-up at all.” This approach diverges from the land art Havelock Stevens encountered on her Texas trip. “I’m not digging into the landscape at all; I’m not fucking with it.” But she describes her work’s convergence with land art as slow art, something to spend a lot of time with, as a viewer.

The slow-unfolding experiential aspects of her work are as important to Havelock Stevens’ practice as the work’s final presentation and the audience’s encounters. “I never expect anything” from the artistic process, she says. “It’s about responding to your bodily and intellectual nous. The work is capturing a natural wonder. A particular time of day in a particular place that I just chanced upon.”

Rather than linking her work overtly to classic art-history themes like the sublime or contemporary issues of ecological preservation, what is on Havelock Stevens’ mind now is how to keep working between experimental documentary and a form of contemporary art that produces emotional responses: to keep opening up an affective space where an audience member can think and feel on their own terms.

“The longer you look at it, where your mind might go is to the destruction of nature. But my work is open to whatever people want to project onto it. It’s just creating a space that’s different from what you’ve just stepped out of. There’s an emotional space and an environmental space; the anthropocene is here—there’s no doubt you might wonder what type of storm you’re seeing.

“The storm is beautiful, it’s calm. It’s meditative isn’t it? I didn’t film this thinking of chaos and disturbance. I didn’t look at it and think ‘the end of the world is nigh,’ even though my work often, if you scratch it, has a very dark aspect. I just always shroud things in beauty.”

Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Arts, Thunderhead, artist Tina Havelock Stevens, with musician Liberty Kerr, Carriageworks, Sydney, 2-5 Nov: see exhibition and performance times here.

I’m wandering through a North Melbourne dusk with an envelope of cash, a phone number and a stranger. We’re off to meet a sex worker, and that’s about all we know. My companion is as clueless as I am and seems a little more trepidatious, but I can’t know that for sure. It’s an unusual experience to share with someone you’ve just met.

ménage

Ménage is a live art experience devised by the industrious UK/US performance maker Ryan Good, developed from interviews with sex workers in various countries. The work itself is startlingly brief—around 25 minutes in total—and site-specific. While the aura of secrecy that surrounds the actual content of the encounter should be preserved, it’s enough to say that the audience of two spend those minutes in conversation with a performer playing a female sex worker who is a composite of a number of women. The work doesn’t cohere to a single or continuous time-frame and the performance style is just as likely to leap into an unexpected place.

What surprised me most about this work wasn’t how much character and story manage to be packed into such a short time—an impressive volume, as it turns out. It wasn’t the particulars revealed about sex work as a career or the way they intersect with a worker’s private life, which are as mundane as most professions when examined without a moral posture. What left me most curious was how ineluctably gendered the encounter felt, in ways both provocative and troubling.

The early moments of the work present such an affable and empowered vision of sex work that I worried this was a romantic gloss about as textured as Pretty Woman. It immediately struck me that the fact that this work has been created by a man can’t be easily dismissed. Even though I came through the 90s era of education that laid waste to biological essentialism and deterministic models of gender, I can’t help but feel there is a necessary reading of ménage that takes sex into account.

Thankfully, the work does introduce greater nuance and variety of experience, also begging its witnesses to consider their own implication in the work. My positioning as one of two men, not known to each other, sharing this encounter will likely have provided a different unspooling of meaning than had we been mixed sex, or friends or related along any other set of axioms. The work’s grounding in real interviews might have afforded its maker more permission, too. But why then should I remain so unresolved about the fact that it is finally a man telling these stories?

Hyperspirit

Just as unexpected was the peculiar gendering of Marcus McKenzie’s masterful Hyperspirit, a work that a sizeable number of people I spoke to described as ‘masculine.’ It’s not that the work deals with masculinity per se, but that in so many ways it seems aligned with a range of particular aesthetic traditions that have been dominated by masculine voices. McKenzie plays the Hyperspiritualist, a riff on the familiar televisual spirit medium whose channelling of the afterlife is via a stream of constant talk. McKenzie doesn’t adhere to the performative style of John Edwards, however, instead adopting a delivery much closer to slam poetry and beat performance, spitting his unbroken rant and never missing an opportunity to rhyme or alliterate. The work is also firmly camped in the allusive maximalism of the postmodern author, sewing together genres including noir, the Gothic, Greek myth (Aristophanes’ The Frogs appears as a significant intertext) and fable. As much as his role communicates with the spirits of the dead, McKenzie here seems possessed by Ginsberg and Kerouac, the TV mentalists who cold-read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_reading mourners and a pantheon of dark and declarative authors running from William Blake to Cormac McCarthy.

The work is a serious achievement and its performance is at times virtuosic. It’s the kind of technical wonderment that often left me cold, but in a way that’s inarguably about my taste rather than its maker’s ability. McKenzie demands attention, here and in the future.

Between Two Lines

There’s no shortage of authors behind Anna Nalpantidis’ Between Two Lines. This live art experiment in ‘bibliotherapy’ deploys the words of great writers to attempt to soothe the soul of its sole audience member. Situated in the window of an operating bookshop, the attendee is dressed in a white bathrobe, settled into a tub full of soft materials and guided through a series of intimate moments appealing to each of the senses. Passages from enduring written works are whispered, but are also part of the materials from which the installation is constructed.

The work is clearly in ASMR territory, aiming for the tingling ‘auto-sensory meridian response’ some say they experience when given particular sense triggers. ASMR videos are all over YouTube, where softly-spoken women (there are almost no male ASMR-tists) guide viewers through gentle, nurturing sequences of hair-brushing or paper rustling or other unassuming actions. There’s often something parental about the level of close attention and calming behaviour featured in these videos, and it’s something Nalpantidis reproduces well through the rich environment she has created.

It all unfolds in public, too, which adds an extra frisson. I was hearing the words of Carl Sagan murmured to me while passersby dropped their jaws or began giggling at the man in the bath sipping tea in a bookshop window. Some people came back for a second look.

While I still don’t subscribe to any biological essentialism, these three works did suggest that the conceit of an unsexed perspective is often one dependent on a certain privilege. Hyperspirit may not deliberately make a statement about gender but it exists within a space conventionally defined by a masculine voice that denies its own genderedness; ménage, conversely, offers an uneasy slippage between the sexed bodies of its subjects, performers and audience and the absent body of its maker. The relationships conjured by Between Two Lines seem more evocative of those between parent and child, and are just as dense with the audience member’s own history and corporeality. All are generous reminders that there’s no performance without at least one meatbag to watch it.

Melbourne Fringe: Lucy Tafler Presents, ménage, devisor Ryan Good, performers Claire Maria Fox, Jessica Stanley, secret location, North Melbourne, 16 Sept-1 Oct; Hyperspirit, creator, producer Marcus McKenzie, performers Marcus McKenzie, Maria Moles, Ryan Forbes, Arts House, 24 Sept-1 Oct; Between Two Lines, by Anna Nalpantidis, performer Elizabeth Brennan, Embiggen Books, Melbourne, 17 Sept-1 Oct

Two dance theatre works at this year’s OzAsia Festival attested to the form’s remarkable elasticity and varied, if not always lucid, methods of making meaning from the everyday.

The Record

Properly speaking, the first, 600 Highwaymen’s The Record, ought not to have been in the festival at all. Its creator-directors are Americans Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone, and the work doesn’t otherwise explicitly engage with Asian culture or themes.

I was, nevertheless, grateful that OzAsia Artistic Director Joseph Mitchell’s enthusiasm for The Record overrode any parochialism that might otherwise have kept it out. It’s a deeply humane and affecting work, one that subtly bonds its non-professional performers and audience as it seeks to codify the complex rituals of human interactions between strangers by means of a stripped back, gestural aesthetic. In the process, our position as viewers is inverted as the performers—dressed much as we are in ordinary chinos, shirts, trainers and the like—stare expressionlessly out at us.

In The Empty Space, Peter Brook famously noted that all that is needed for an act of theatre to take place is for someone to walk across an empty space while being watched by another. So begins The Record. A single performer—in this case, a schoolgirl in uniform—walks to the centre of Chris Morris and Eric Southern’s austere set: a rectangular strip of unvarnished wood overhung with a long, white piece of cloth behind which a soft light rises and falls in intensity throughout the work’s 60 minutes. After what seems an interminable stretch of stillness and quiet, the girl strikes a series of classical poses—for example, back leg dipped, front leg powerfully jutting, one fist raised in the air—of a kind that will be repeated and extended by the rest of the performers.

The poses have the effect of heroicising the everyday, just as the work more broadly foregrounds the ordinary, throwing its performative aspects into sharp relief. As the poses are struck before dissolving into tableaux, cellist Emil Abramyan, placed to one side of the wingless stage, picks out pizzicato chords, later performing elements of Italian composer Carlo Alfredo Piatti’s Caprice No 2, his bow playing introducing a warming melodiousness. Brandon Wolcott’s electronic score, played live via a laptop and combining drones, crackles and machine- and speech-like disturbances, provides additional layers of ambient sound.

The performers who join the schoolgirl—gradually at first, singly and in pairs, then in long, dizzying files towards the finale—comprise a stunningly diverse group (perhaps this alone is justification enough for The Record’s inclusion in a cross-cultural arts festival) made up of 45 people selected from the community. Together, they form a sort of living document of the vastly differing ages, nationalities and body types represented here, at this time. There’s an Adelaide Airport worker in hi-vis shirt and dark pants; a young, heavily pierced woman in pale makeup and gothic dress; a slim Chinese-Australian in her 20s; and children of both sexes in casualwear or long, animal-patterned pyjamas. We often hear, and it’s true, that our stages fail to reflect the ethnic and cultural diversity with which our city streets teem; The Record spectacularly corrects this imbalance, and in a way that feels quietly revelatory.

The performers, each of whom rehearsed individually and had not met each other prior to the first performance (the one I attended), frequently watch us in a gently probing exchange that calls attention to our own heterogeneity and status as strangers to one another who are, nevertheless, intimately linked by time and place. Those close-quarters, sometimes long-held gazes, as well as the moments of physical connection between the performers—pugilistic fists compassionately drawn back, hands and falling bodies briefly held, as in a trust exercise—accrue a tremendous emotional force, especially as they counterpoint the increasing mass of bodies and activity on stage. (At various points, multiple performers jog around the perimeter of the space, a reminder perhaps of the frenetic pace of life outside the theatre.)

Eventually, most of the performers disperse, leaving a small group upstage that includes, at the last, the two musicians, a low wash of sound playing out as Wolcott leaves his computer. Finally, just one woman remains. She moves downstage in her plain clothes as far as the seating bank will allow, looking, somehow, less lonely than the schoolgirl had, at peace with herself and the world. I want to hug her, or for her to reach out and touch me. Only this final, longed-for gesture is withheld in a work that is exceptionally and movingly generous.

As If To Nothing

Not to be confused with Craig Armstrong’s 2002 ambient electronic album with the same title, City Contemporary Dance Company’s As If To Nothing proved an altogether more mixed experience. Founded in 1979 by longtime Artistic Director Willy Tsao, the company has toured extensively internationally, its more than 200 productions to date reflecting trends in Chinese contemporary dance as well as, latterly, the vibrancy of post-Handover Hong Kong, where the company is based. As If To Nothing has been around since 2009, and it’s tempting to suggest the production’s age accounts, at least in part, for its slight tiredness (Brook again: “about five years is the most a particular staging can live”).

Sang Jijia’s set is a vertiginous white box. Its floor is faux-marble, polished and smooth. Within it resides both a smaller, narrower box on wheels, like a caravan or food vending truck but reminiscent of a scaled-down modern apartment in its sharp, white minimalism, and a section of wall into which, at one end, a full-size table on casters has been embedded. Cut into the box and wall segment are doorways and glassless windows through which the 14 performers—both male and female, each physically powerful and drably attired in loose, grey slacks, dresses and t-shirts—variously protrude faces and limbs.

The choreography, again by Jijia, lightly reflects the influence of mentor William Forsythe (Jijia spent four years with Forsythe’s Dresden-based company, returning to China in 2006) in its—not always cohesive¬—melding of the abstract and representational and its incorporation of technology and the spoken word. As If To Nothing’s structure further recalls Forsythe’s work in that it’s broken into eight segments—delineated, sometimes untidily, by blackouts—which both repeat and subtly evolve the obsessively enacted, tic-like gestures of each previous vignette.

The constantly shifting set and relentless kineticism of the dancers, all framed by the projection onto the walls and box of Adrian Yeung’s live video capture—sometimes delayed to disorientating effect, often freakishly distorted or punctured by gaps—is intended to invoke the slippery unreliability of memory. But it was, for me, the work itself that remained fundamentally muddled. Without subtitles, little sense can be made of the dancers’ exhortations, and I was left puzzled by the frequent manipulation of a small section of the box, repeatedly slid out and back like a desk drawer.

For all its technological saturation, too, some of the vignettes, such as a duet between a male and female dancer, feel oddly conventional, even trite. The video projections, though competently handled by Yeung, are unimpressive in themselves and further suffer from the work’s dysfunctional logic, which reduces them to empty spectacle. Only Dickson Dee’s insistently percussive live score, featuring industrial noise, arpeggiated piano and nightmarishly altered everyday sounds like clock ticks and alarms, was able to sustain my curiosity.

2016 OzAsia Festival: 600 Highwaymen, The Record, creators, directors Abigail Browde, Michael Silverstone, music Emil Abramyan, Brandon Wolcott; Space Theatre, 21-24 Sept; City Contemporary Dance Company, As If To Nothing, set design, choreography Sang Jijia, video design Adrian Yeung, music Dickson Dee; Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre, 22-24 Sept

Top image credit: The Record: Adelaide, 600 Highwaymen, OzAsia 2016, photo Claudio Raschella

“Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature,” wrote Cicero. Japanese interdisciplinary collective teamLab has engineered a high-tech approach to the observation of the natural world, asking us to reconsider our modern way of seeing nature and ourselves within it, thus renewing the aesthetics of nature.

teamLab, Ever Blossoming Life II; Cold Life

The Art Gallery of SA’s exquisite exhibition Ever Blossoming Life locates teamLab’s Ever Blossoming Life II – A whole year per hour, Gold (2016) and Cold Life (2014) amid a selection from its extensive holdings of traditional Japanese art. TeamLab’s computer-based works, shown on large monitors, are surrounded by exquisite Japanese multi-panel screens from the 17th and 18th centuries, Ukiyo-e prints by Hiroshige, Hokusai and others, ceramics, fans and other pieces that exemplify the traditional Japanese concern with nature, particularly flowers. Ever Blossoming Life establishes an evolutionary relationship between the AGSA’s collection and current artistic developments, refreshing our appreciation of works which no longer appear as static artefacts from past eras but actively relevant to our lives.

Ever Blossoming Life II is a constantly evolving computer-generated image of paintings of blossoming plants. The time-lapse effect condenses a year of growth and flowering into an hour, the imagery never repeating, instead continually evolving to suggest that evolution is eternal. By collapsing the seasons into comprehensible moments, the work shows how regeneration follows decay. The imagery references traditional Japanese panels of the kind shown in the exhibition, including their gold background, so that the work resembles a Japanese screen bursting into life.

By contrast, Cold Life is a 7’15” loop that shows a rotating 3D graphic sequence of images depicting trees growing and metamorphosing, as birds fly about and snow falls, against a background of night-time darkness. This hypnotic work recalls an MRI scan rather than traditional art, as if the plants are being X-rayed and analysed as they grow. But Cold Life is also based on calligraphic imagery (its shape suggests the Japanese character for ‘life’). Both teamLab works are digitally generated, drawing on classical Japanese imagery.

Dissolving the boundary between art and technology, teamLab’s approach highlights our inability to control evolutionary change by shifting our perception of the passage of time. Describing themselves as ultra-technologists, they have generated a unique art form, referencing photography, video, engineering, computer-based 3D modelling as well as drawing, painting and animation. Their work reinterprets and thus pays homage to traditional Japanese high art. We’re even provoked to wonder whether such new art will come to replace nature in our consciousness. It certainly alters our awareness of it.

You can watch all 7’14” minutes of Cold Life on teamLab’s Vimeo channel and see excerpts from Blossoming Life II here and here.

teamLab, 100 Years Sea

Another teamLab work, 100 Years Sea (2009), part of the Experimenta Recharge exhibition touring to Australian galleries, is a 5-channel digital HD animation depicting the sea swirling around rocky outcrops. Programmed to run for 100 years, it will show sea levels gradually rising over that time, creating a confronting illustration of the problem of global warming and again employing imagery typical of traditional painting. Adjacent to 100 Years Sea is a counter showing the elapse of time in years, hours, minutes and seconds since it was activated nearly seven years ago. But, as if to emphasise our inability to control rising sea levels, the timescale in 100 Years Sea is not condensed. Our children may live long enough to see the rocks disappear beneath the waves.

100 Years Sea also demonstrates teamLab’s research into perception and the cultural origins of perceptual styles. The imagery in traditional Japanese screens is not based on one-point perspective but creates a linear effect that must be read from left to right. TeamLab postulates this as an alternative way of viewing the world, suggesting that the traditional Western way, based on a fixed viewing position, places the viewer outside the imagery and thus detached from it. This work explores the kind of spatial awareness triggered by traditional Japanese art to show how ways of seeing are culturally determined, inviting us to reconsider the way we understand visual imagery and relate to its subject matter.

While Japanese screens draw the viewer into the linear space, what is crucial with teamLab’s time-based imagery is that viewers sit with it for extended periods and allow their awareness of time as well as space to change. The narrative then becomes evolutionary and thus experiential. Ever Blossoming Life II’s accelerated pace makes us aware of processes that might otherwise not register in our consciousness. It also changes our understanding of painting as a form and a discipline.

In refreshing our way of looking at the world, teamLab facilitates our comprehension and appreciation of it. Seeing digital art raised to this highly accomplished level, we also realise that we cannot comprehend, let alone manage our world adequately without the aid of the kind of technological devices the collective employs.

Riel Hilario, They came from the sea, 2016, installation of carved wood, found objects, single channel video and sound, dimensions variable, Roundabout, OzAsia 2016,

Filipino art: Roundabout

The dialogue between old and new is also evident in the exhibition Roundabout at Adelaide Central School of Art Gallery, showing work by three Filipino artists, Riel Hilario, Wawi Navarroza and Mark Valenzeula. Riel Hilario is a fourth generation rebulto carver who continues the Catholic tradition of creating wooden statues of religious figures. His work They came from the sea (2016) comprises carvings of two saints, one of whom appears to be sprouting leaves and the other with a bird sitting on his head, who kneel before a 17th century map of the Philippines. Behind them is a video of the Straits of Malacca—the explorer Magellan’s intended destination, which is far from where he landed and established a Spanish colony—and the saints are positioned so that their shadows mask part of the projected image. We hear a recording of a song praising Christ but infused with local meanings. Hilario’s work shows how Spanish civilisation took root in the region and, despite being imbued with local culture, still casts a shadow over it.

The observation of nature is evident in Wawi Navarroza’s exquisitely produced photographs of glass display vessels containing plants, soil and debris taken from various locations in Manila. The images are selected from her project Hunt & Gather (Terraria) (2013), a collaboration that has resulted in an artist’s book which catalogues the locations of the specimens and the names of those who collected them. The book is an ecological map of Manila created by members of its community who explore their relationship to their city by collecting materials and plants from it. The photos are displayed with lists of each terrarium’s contents and their sources, transforming the weeds and detritus of the street into beautiful art works that also double as botanical illustrations.

Valenzuela’s installation, New Folk Heroes, establishes a surreal tableau that transforms a large area of the floor into a kind of micro-theatre. With ceramic figures embellished with drawings satirising gun culture and a set of coat-hangers woven into nooses, Valenzuela’s work responds to the disturbing reality of contemporary Filipino society, and perhaps society more broadly. Conceived at the request of ACSA by the artist, who is now an Adelaide resident, the Roundabout exhibition provides a small but highly illuminating window onto Filipino art and the culture it critiques.

The visual art program for this OzAsia Festival has been outstanding, with several art spaces making significant contributions and stimulating great interest in the art of the Asian region.

Ever Blossoming Life, Art Gallery of SA, 17 Sept 2016-15 Jan 2017; Experimenta Recharge, Samstag Museum of Art 19 Aug-23 Sept; Roundabout, Adelaide Central School of Art Gallery, Adelaide, 27 Sept–21 Oct

Unworldly Encounters “evidences four artists’ journeys of personal and artistic transformation that bridge cultures and generate a common spirituality.” Chris Reid (read his review of the exhibition)

One of OzAsia’s most powerful exhibitions was Unworldy Encounters at AEAF, featuring works by four Australian and Chinese artists who travelled through southern China, Tibet, Arnhem Land and the Kimberley and were in-residence in the Oratunga, north of the Flinders Ranges. Their journey and their art are documented in this magnificent large format book.

In “Dark Beauty,” the catalogue essay for the exhibition, Ashley Crawford writes:

“Over the last decade, Steve Eland, the Director of Australian Experimental Art Foundation, has investigated the potentials of physical interaction between artists from different cultures. Unworldly Encounters has emerged as the third chapter in a now epic project that was initiated in 2006 with First Life Residency Project in Landscape—a jab at ‘Second Life’ virtual or web-based, as opposed to ‘real’ life, experiences in art—that began with an artists’ journey to Arnhem Land. It has since involved artists from around Australia, Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines and China.

“In 2011 the First Life Residency Project in Landscape brought together contemporary visual artists from Australia and China—Sam Leach, Tony Lloyd, Ben Armstrong, Cang Xin, Shi Jinsong and Wu Daxin—to experience the landscapes and cultures of Northern Australia and regional China. Eland as organiser and myself as writer joined them. Designed to be an intensive ‘real life’ cultural and creative exchange, the project involved travelling by road through the landscapes of Northern Australia and visiting remote regions and Indigenous communities in Arnhem Land and the Kimberley and undertaking a hazardous road trip through the south-western provinces of China, from Lanzhou to Lhasa.”

We have one copy to give away, courtesy of the Australian Experimental Art Foundation.

Email us at giveaways [at] realtimearts.net with your name, postal address and phone number.

Include ‘Giveaway’ and the name of the item in the subject line.
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“Ozasia is on fire!,” we announced enthusiastically in our 28 September E-dition, unaware that within several hours South Australia would be hit by the massive storm that took out the state’s power and flooded suburbs and towns north of the city. Shows were postponed, the festival’s food fair closed, attendees of the AAPPC conference were turned out of their hotel rooms into safe places and given blankets. We flew smoothly into a fierce headwind the next day to find that State Premier Jay Weatherill, anticipating a repeat storm that evening, had effectively shut down the city. We settled for SA garfish and oysters at Paul’s (the last of Gouger Street’s once thriving fish café scene] and an early night, sustained by a robust McLaren Vale tempranillo as the weather raged. Against the odds, OzAsia did not disappoint over the next two days as skies cleared, nor on the third, when rain forced The King of Ghosts out of the park into the far more comfortable surrounds of the Festival Theatre.

King of Ghosts

It proved an ideal venue for this shortened version of Satyajit Ray’s 1969 black and white fantasy comedy Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (winner of the Adelaide Film Festival Silver Cross in the same year], screened to the lustrous live accompaniment provided by its composers—British sarod virtuoso Soumik Datta, Irish percussionist Cormac Byrne and Austrian conductor Johannes Berauer—and string and wind players from the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. The score replaces Ray’s original instrumentation (he wrote, directed and composed] but remains true to its spirit. It also supplants the soundtrack, rendering the film and its characters silent, giving them instead new voices alongside the film’s subtitles. In the opening forest scene where Goopy (Tapen Chatterjee) and Bagha (Rabi Ghosh) encounter a tiger, the rustling of strings and winds conjures breezes, leaves and a cricket. When Goopy sings (voiced by Anup Kumar Ghoshal in the original], we hear the sarod soar with sweet passion. Percussion provides not only propulsion but many of the effects—in synch with onscreen drumming, water dripping onto a drum skin, a spear repeatedly plunged into a dummy king.

Leaving aside the source film’s first 20 minutes (in which Goopy and Bagha are revealed to be very bad musicians), The King of Ghosts takes us almost immediately to the famed ghost dance sequence, an astonishing five minutes of swirling figures (warriors, 18th century Europeans, upper caste power brokers and commoners, all of whom turn on and kill each other) shot in intense black and white, negatives and calculated blurring. Sarod, drums and orchestra match the fury and the precision of the accelerating
dance. The King of Ghosts appears and grants the duo’s wishes for boundless food and clothing and slippers that will fly them wherever they want. The are also granted the ability to please with their music, which takes them to a music competition (in a superbly designed music room and with hilariously juxtaposed musical styles), which, with their unsophisticated fare, the pair win, becoming court musicians for a king and his brother—a king in another realm, whom they will eventually rescue from the designs of an evil courtier and (in a Technicolor burst) marry their respective daughters.

There can be no substitute for Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, here reduced to less than half its original length. At times, the volume and density of the score seemed too grand for an innocent comedy (Ray’s target audience was children, then all of India embraced it). But with the musicians foregrounded, The King of Ghosts proved to be fascinating, self-contained, virtuosic concert, a musically compelling and witty dialogue with a special film.

Phare Circus

Following some low key, playful routines built around a street painter, two musicians and two young men showing off with a little juggling to two girls who are warned by a policeman on monocycle to cover their arms and shoulders, Phare Circus swings into riveting action with the whole company dancing and tumbling over long poles pulled rapidly together and apart at floor level. There’s a tremendous sense of joyous communality as the performers negotiate the poles with increasingly difficult moves—on all fours, on hands (legs kicking back), in groups and carrying one another. A rush of lifting ensues, bodies stacked high into OzAsia’s tiny Ukiyo tent, including head to head balances. Next, even more bracing, mass rope skipping involves all kinds of groupings, lifts and somersaults, executed faultlessly within inches of the audience.

The sense of intimacy and community was bolstered by characterful performers. Tussling competitively with martial holds and lifts, two of the men stylishly flirt with a woman in the audience. One is offended when his gelled coiffure is repeatedly flattened by his partner’s handstanding on his head. The pair encounter a young child in the audience with whom they execute a rope trick, realise they have a talent on their hands and integrate her into the action as, among other things, she excitedly seeks out three hiding clowns.

Other routines involve tightrope walking, monocycling the wire and ambitious pin juggling. The two women appear in traditional dress, sculpting themselves into classical Khmer statuary, hands and feet sharply angled at wrists and ankles, and balancing on each other with contortionist dexterity. The clowns take standing on a board balanced on a pipe to the extreme with moments of mock accident, real suspense and bodies stacked three high. With another pipe, a box and plank added to the wobbling pile, one of the performers heroically mounts and victoriously dismounts, keeping the whole apparatus intact.

In the course of the show, largely to the side, but sometimes centre-stage, the artist paints a Buddha, a rural landscape with Angkor Watt in the background and, finally, a goddess (commenced when the two female performers invoke her). Curiously, as the whole company and audience focus on this final work, he gently blurs the image with handfuls of paint, rendering his goddess a mere impression. The performers applaud and toss the artist high in the air, a prelude to a mass dance into which are built numerous rapid lifts, a spectacular near-miss leap from one set of shoulders to another and countless drops from high into the safe hands of this impressive ensemble.

God Bless Baseball

Toshiki Okada’s God Bless Baseball was one of OzAsia’s stranger offerings, a laidback meditation on baseball in which a youngish man and two young women langorously discuss the workings of the sport. The women, one Korean, the other Japanese, don’t ‘get it.’ His rather abstract explanations are unconvincing and dispassionate. At the same time, true to the work’s gentle choreographic impulse, he sways and constantly repositions himself as if limbering up for a game, revealing an easy familiarity, if not expertise, with the bat. When frustrated, he stands it vertically on the floor, leaning into it and rocking. Holding mits and stretching legs, the girls, if not taken with his account of the curious history of fixed innings, like him move about the baseball diamond which is the ground-map for the production.

As an introduction to baseball, it’s basic. It feels like a Beckettian waiting game. Just as the young man has begun to open up about his complex relationship with his wife and his father (a coach for junior players], and his dislike of the game, enter Ichiro Suzuki, a famous Japanese baseballer who once played for an American team, the Miami Marlins—or is he an actor impersonating the YouTube Ichiro impersonator, Nichiro?

Suddenly the play opens out as Ichiro runs through a series of practice poses and mock hits complete with characterful hand to ear and finger to mouth gestures. He’s a philosopher: “Do you see that? Do you see how the bat has become one with my body?” In Butoh-trained Pijin Neji as Ichiro you indeed see it. While moving in a slow dance about the diamond, he describes baseball as an allegory for life, saying that once you’ve reached first base, the game becomes “a journey away from home so you can come back home.” But he soon becomes perhaps more dictator than guru, pushing the others into an exercise, which he first strikingly demonstrates, putting aside his bat, his anchor, and successively disempowering each part of his body. Once the other characters collapse into a spastic state, Ichiro cruelly declares, “You never belonged to your bodies.” Another dictatorial voice enters the frame. Suspended above the performers is a giant indeterminate shape—part inverted ball, part loudspeaker. From it issues a seemingly indifferent American voice reciting the history of the game in Asia and declarations of its significance: “The Major Leagues are a field of dreams. It’s a platform that brings hope into the world.”

The play itself becomes an allegory, for the complex relationship between America on the one hand and Japan and Korea on the other, baseball rivalry between the latter two, the corporatisation of the game and the influence of international finance. The three young people appear to be oppressed by both America and what the game has become in Asia. There are curious ambiguities, for example the American voice compels the young man to admit that he unfairly despised his baseball-loving father. But two climactic, heavily symbolic, segued scenes underline growing resistance. First, Ichiro lobs chalk bombs into the trio who shelter beneath an umbrella, until one of the women steps defiantly forward, despite the baseballer’s warning, “It’s dangerous here. Use your imagination. Go back.” He threatens them with a powerful water hose which they take over and aim at the oppressive object that hangs over them. It is already decomposing, their hosing speeding up the process. Great gobs of sodden chalk fall to the floor, revealing plain timber. The final line is, tellingly, “This is not reality, but maybe one day.”

God Bless Baseball is an often difficult work, slow moving and sometimes confusing—for example, the Japanese female character suddenly becomes the Korean daughter of a baseball fan. At times, the play requires little knowledge of the game and its Asian context, at others there’s a superfluity of information, at others it assumes too much. Of course, though internationally toured, it was written principally for audiences in Japan and Korea, countries that have shared cultural incorporation (of baseball and much else) and consequent subordination. The three young performers move convincingly from passivity to resistance; Pijin Neji’s presence lifts the production to another plane with his poetic movement and ambiguous characterisation of Ichiro. Tadasu Takamine’s symbolic object is a fascinating installation in itself. God Bless Baseball is a work that requires patience and surrender for it to do its work. Like its extrovert opposite, Two Dogs, it is both familiar and alien, not at all the kind of work that Australians are making, and we are all the better for experiencing the difference.

Image from Beastly by Tutti, Stepping Stone, Andres Busrianto; Adelaide Festival Centre Riverdeck

Tutti, Stepping Stone, Andres Busrianto, Beastly

Bad weather and a consequently heavily concentrated timetable meant that I caught Beastly in its final minutes, when a generous artist agreed to one more performance. On the Festival Centre’s Riverdeck, the walls of a gathering point installation were illustrated with wonderfully lively creatures, hybrid human-animals—platypus, kangaroo and an emu-man pulled by an umbrella. From their backs spring glorious, flowered wings, suggesting transcendence and a cross-cultural merging of our fauna with Indonesian iconography.

Downstairs is a series of dwellings. I enter one to find a hooded figure facing away from me, his fingers hovering over a glowing red pentagram. He turns, directs me to sit, stares, suspends his hands over a glowing table top, reaches low and draws up a series of jars. He’s The Collector, a convincingly spooky character who catches in the light animal and human [doll] parts preserved before finally passing me a slip of paper on which I read, “Will this be all that is left of nature? Beastly.”

Beastly, a collaboration between Indonesian artist Andres Busrianto, Adelaide’s Tutti and Malaysia’s Stepping Stone, engagingly realises the aspirations of mixed ability artists within a cross-cultural environmentally focused framework. You can read more about it here.

OzAsia Festival 2016: King of Ghosts, composer-performers Soumik Datta, Johannes Berauer, Cormac Byrne, Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, Festival Theatre, 2 Oct; Phare Circus, script, direction Sim Sophal, musicians Kheav Sothan, Touch Srey, Ukiyo Tent, 27 Sept-2 Oct; God Bless Baseball, writer, director, Toshiki Okada http://chelfitsch.net/en, performers Yoon Jae Lee, Pijin Neji, Sung Hee Wi, Aoi Nozu, designer Tadasu Takamine, Space Theatre, 30 Sept, 1 Oct; Tutti, Stepping Stone, Andres Busrianto, Beastly, Adelaide Festival Centre Riverdeck, 22 Sept-1 Oct

Two radically different works exemplified the spirit and high calibre of OzAsia 2016: Two Dogs from China and Ever Blossoming Life II by Japan’s teamLab, witnessed alongside other works in the festival’s weather-turbulent final days. Two Dogs’ exuberant Chinese crosstalk-cum-Le Coq-style clowning, replete with raw vaudevillian vigour, is scripted but frequently improvised. Ever Blossoming Life II—A whole year per hour, Gold (2016) and its companion digital screen work, Cold Life (2014), are sublimely contemplative creations in which worlds silently grow, flourish and pass in intricate seasonal detail.

teamLab, Ever Blossoming Life II and Cold Life

As Chris Reid writes in his response to teamLab at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Ever Blossoming Life II and Cold Life simultaneously evoke nature and its idiosyncratic representation in Japanese art, the latter generously represented in the AGSA’s contextual staging with its glorious folding screen and numerous exquisite prints, paintings and ceramics. As in ‘classical’ Chinese or Japanese painting or floral art, a tree [a gnarled root in Ever Blossoming Life II and pine branches in Cold Life] is both the artist’s subject and the foundation for growth.

In Cold Life the branch first appears as a floating tubular digital grid, waiting to be filled in. As it assumes texture, it multiplies in liquidy calligraphic swipes, forming a rotating three-dimensional shape that suggests the Japanese character for ‘life’ (a calligrapher, Sisyu, collaborated on the project]. A Moon materialises, small branches reach out, light snow falls, pink buds appear, butterflies and blossoms—white, pink, yellow, blue—pine needles and dense, furry fronds, the whole thick with teeming life. But this silent work is entirely ghostly, every branch and flower transparent and devoid of the buzz of Spring and Summer; it’s beautiful, but emphatically digital; it is “cold life,” but wonderful nonetheless; in its reductiveness, art intensifies our focus. [The room notes cite an ancient Chinese credo that inspired Japanese artists: “Painting is silent poetry.”]

The vertical screen, the hovering Moon, the calligraphic form, the acute observation of nature, link the work explicitly to several strands of Japanese art, to which are added contemporary graphic and comic book art and animation, which allow Cold Life a visual intensity that delightfully borders on kitsch without surrendering to it.

You can watch all seven minutes of Cold Life on teamLab’s Vimeo channel which alternates between showing full vertical images and welcome close-ups of the work’s detail.

The close-up is an issue when it comes to viewing Ever Blossoming Life II. Its four vertical columns make one, wide horizontal screen, evoking an actual room screen with its background of softly burnished, sometimes highlighted, gold leaf squares. A gnarled, bared root rests diagonally across it. Unlike its Cold Life counterpart, the root is already formed, but, similarly, it’s what springs from this still life which is transformative—from woody nooks tiny clusters of fungi tendril out into twigs, leaves and blossoms, their petals scattering oceanically. This and green growth altogether mask the root and then bare it as the seasons pass in an hour, and never in the same way—as in nature—thanks to a generative computer algorithm developed by teamLab. Surprisingly for a digital artwork, I found myself moving, as if before a painting, to and fro from the screen, eager to tell all too casual bypassers, “you should see this!” before slipping back into contemplation. Despite the busyness of its concentrated portrayal of emergent life (and, implicitly, digital intelligence), Ever Blossoming Life II yields a sense of the essence of nature which it shares with the works from past centuries that surround it.

You can see excerpts from Blossoming Life II full-screen and in close-up here and here. Better still, if you’re in Adelaide you can see Blossoming Life II and Cold Life and the kinds of classical works that inspired these digital creations until 15 January, 2017. The room notes, for the cost of a donation, are well worth purchasing.

Two Dogs

On a sparsely set stage—two musicians on our left. Upstage are two manipulable cloth drops (one expressionistically splattered with paint, the other depicting two large, abstracted, non-gendered dancing figures]. To our right are cardboard model houses and oil drums. Two chairs sit forestage. Heralded by heavy metal chord-slashing, Wang Cai (Liu Xiaoye) and Lai Fu (Yin Yang) erupt onto the stage, declaring themselves “two peas in a pod,” “two rising stars” and “both test tube babies.” These “dogs” of the play’s title are rural innocents, men with occasional, very funny canine-like characteristics, no skills, but with big egos and eager to work in the big smoke, just two of the millions moving to China’s proliferating big cities.

When they arrive, they’re improbably employed as security guards, part of the play’s satirical swipe at the building industry, specifically targeting the gap between the luxurious promise of advertised plans and the absence of actual product. Wang Cai ends up in prison where he is frequently beaten but works his way up to the status of “top dog.” The recurrent beatings reported in the play are re-enacted solo, virtuosically and at great length by the victim, much to audience’s unlimited delight.

In the play’s funniest scene, Wang Cai contracts appendicitis. Together with Lai Fu playing the surgeon, they hilariously re-enact the negotiations over fees which persist right through the mimed operation. There’s the $880 fee model and the $8,800 alternative. The former only works with frequent additions (anaesthetic etc) until the total is pretty much $8,800—which includes removal of a forgotten clamp and, finally, the appendix. “But what did you take out?” “The small intestine.” “Appendix and small intestine! What a bargain!” Clearly Chinese state capitalism is little different from our own when it comes to health.

There is little else indicative of political satire. Other targets are TV talent quests (the pair lose in one), popular singers (funny without ever having actually heard them) and possibly much else that non-Mandarin-speaking audiences cannot grasp. Although Two Dogs is scripted and surtitled (not always convincingly), a great deal of the play is improvised. Sometimes meaning is clear, often not, but you know the narrative will resume as Wang Cai and Lai Fu increasingly care for and recognise their need for each other (the play’s ‘brother’ theme is neatly woven throughout). This mutuality is strongly expressed through the Chinese “crosstalk” form, the improvisations which have the pair working at competitive white heat and sometimes undone by each other’s brilliance, stand-up passages and a mutual facility for mime and slapstick humour.

Playwright and director Meng Jinghui has created a hybrid work which at once displays the talents of his wonderful performers—often in excess of his script—and works as a standalone social document. Sharing it with a largely Chinese-Australian audience in Adelaide’s elderly Her Majesty’s, where I sat as a child in the gods in the 1950s giddily gazing down at the heads of the Tintookies’ puppets and wondering what on Earth I was seeing, a different kind of vertigo grabbed me, the not unpleasurable one of being swept up in an experience at once culturally familiar and yet quite alien, requiring patience and openness for which I felt deeply rewarded.

OzAsia Festival 2016: Ever Blossoming Life, Art Gallery of SA, 17 Sept 2016-15 Jan 2017; Two Dogs, writer, director Meng Jinghui, Her Majesty’s, 29 Sept-1 Oct

Through varied processes of deconstructing and ‘queering’ traditional forms of performance and recreation, two multidisciplinary works in this year’s OzAsia Festival, Bunny and SoftMachine: Rianto, challenged audiences, opening up questions of participation, spectatorship and authenticity. In doing so, they reflected well on Artistic Director Joseph Mitchell’s desire to reshape the Festival, now in its 10th year, as a showcase of the formal variety and conceptual daring of contemporary performance throughout the Asian region. A third work, the double bill Split Flow and Holistic Strata, confronted in a different way, intense displays of light and sound unsettlingly dissolving their lone human subjects and threatening audience members with sensory overload.

Bunny

In rope bondage, “rigger” is a name given to the person who does the tying; “bunny” refers to the one being tied. Conventionally, a submissive woman assumes the bunny role, a dominant heterosexual man that of the rigger. The conceit of Bunny, a collaboration between Melbourne-based choreographer and performer Luke George and Singaporean dancer and researcher Daniel Kok, hinges on the question of what happens when performers and audience members alike are all cast as potential bunnies.

The gendered nature of bondage’s traditional power relations has already been subverted by the time the audience enters the space, which has been configured in the round, like a luridly coloured boxing ring, with cushions and bar stools for us to sit on. A near-naked Kok, in rope harness and head cage, is horizontally suspended from the ceiling, several feet above the floor, while George, sporting long, rainbow-coloured braids and dressed in an open pink robe, ties a few supplementary knots and sets his partner slowly spinning. In his gentle way, George instructs us to keep Kok turning and, one by one, we dutifully comply, making us complicit from the outset, with no stated consent, in his domination.

The ropes have an aestheticising effect on Kok’s muscular body, but they also turn it into an object, uncannily recalling the sight of a hogtied animal awaiting transport or slaughter. Conversely, the rope-bound objects that litter the stage—a vacuum cleaner, a fire extinguisher, a pot plant—seem imbued with a kind of subjectivity that defies their inanimateness, emphasised when Kok, after his release with the assistance of a member of the audience, activates the fire extinguisher and, hilariously, slow wrestles the switched-on vacuum cleaner.

There are many changes of pace throughout the performance, moments when the work’s default meditativeness is violently interrupted by a loud burst of pop music or thrash metal. A tension is created between these two states and intensified by George regularly selecting random audience members who are prompted to tie him up with the futomomo leg binding tie common in Japanese rope bondage. It forces him to crawl around the floor for much of the time. Alternatively, participants are directed to hit Kok on the buttocks with a strap or submit themselves to an increasingly arduous regime of rope binding.

An elderly man has his legs and arms tied where he sits and is left like that for the remainder of the performance. To ripples of uncomfortable, thank-god-it’s-not-me laughter, a woman is made to lie down, her head propped up on a pillow, as she is bound at the wrists and ankles and has her purse riffled through, its contents carefully set out on the floor by Kok as though for forensic examination. In the work’s erotically charged climax, a blindfolded young man is tightly bound and strung up as Kok scales the lighting rig, sweat dripping onto the stage from head and body, an electrifying live recording of Jimi Hendrix’s Voodoo Chile reverberating around the space.

Bracingly transgressive, Bunny poses many questions around consent, privacy, trust, power and collective responsibility and moral agency. Nevertheless, its atmosphere is predominately a safe one that, even as the work slowly breaks down conventional social and theatrical boundaries, momentarily binds together everybody present—performer, participant, observer—in ways that can’t be seen.

SoftMachine: Rianto

Since 2012, Singaporean artist and performance maker Choy Ka Fai has travelled extensively throughout Asia to research and interview nearly 100 dancers and choreographers. The project, named after William Burroughs’ novel The Soft Machine (1961) which so christens the human body, is intended to convey the richness of contemporary dance practice in Asia through a series of documentary performance works. To date, the series has taken in India’s Surjit Nongmeikapam, China’s Xiao Ke x Zi Han (soon to appear in Performance Space’s Liveworks in Sydney), Japan’s Yuya Tsukahara, and Indonesia’s Rianto (also in Liveworks), whose practice spans folk and classical Javanese dance, the Lengger tradition of Banyumas, Central Java, in which men dance as women, and the contemporary styles of Rianto’s current home city, Tokyo. Each work provides an intimate portrait of its subject, deepening our understanding of their divergent lives and choreographic processes through the interspersing of live dance sequences with film excerpts featuring interviews and footage of places where the artists live or grew up.

In mask and traditional dress—hair bun, torso wrap, elaborate jewellery and makeup—Rianto begins his iteration of SoftMachine with a seductive Lengger dance, wrists and ankles astonishingly supple, neck loose and elongated. This, in East Javanese mythology, is Sekartaji, separated lover of the prince Panji. The dance is accompanied by recorded gamelan with its evocative palette of chiming metallophones and low, insistent hand drums.

Since this is a documentary work, however, the spell is promptly broken by Rianto stepping out of character to speak directly to the audience. He outlines the Lengger tradition and Panji story—though with a disarming irreverence that, I learn as the night progresses, typifies his personality—before completing the other half of the dance in which, having swapped masks, Rianto embodies the warlike prince.

The transformation is remarkable, and will happen again before the night is out as Rianto shifts from traditional to contemporary forms of dance, blurring feminine and masculine choreographic modes with hard-won ease. The work more broadly de-emphasises such dichotomies too, even suggesting that Rianto’s interpretation of Lengger is ‘impure,’ that folk dance, while it continues centuries-old performance traditions, is not fixed in time.

Split Flow and Holistic Strata

Like Japanese composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda’s Superposition, which featured in last year’s OzAsia Festival, Hiroaki Umeda’s Split Flow and Holistic Strata are rooted in installation practice and make the transition from art space to stage via a maximalised aural and visual design. Umeda’s two short works, which run together as a double bill with a brief intermission, are accompanied by Sequential Movement, an exhibition in the Adelaide Festival Centre’s Artspace Gallery. The exhibition, which also features three video works by Japanese director and choreographer Mikuni Yanaihara, includes two pieces that complement Umeda’s work in the main program: the multi-monitor video panel kinesis #1, and the room-sized installation which shares the name Holistic Strata and reproduces its dizzying choreography of free-moving high-speed pixels as an immersive experience for the audience.

Split Flow, derived from a 2011 light installation of the same name, deploys bursts of strobing and high luminescence lasers—in red, blue and green, shading the work in the manner of a movie seen through 3D glasses—to deconstruct the dancer’s body (Umeda confined to a small square of white light centre stage) into a rapidly shifting series of lines and abstract shapes. Each burst is accompanied by mixed-frequency digital sounds, some vexingly high, others locating themselves in our chests in big, bassy rumbles. Umeda’s choreographic vocabulary, meanwhile, is twitchy and violent, an accumulation of small, pointed gestures that hold our focus even as the work’s design elements assault his body, and ours.

In contrast, Holistic Strata frames the dancer’s presence as a still point. Here, Umeda’s body moves less frenziedly, almost sinuously, refracting the vast constellations of pixels—scrolling star fields and heaving galaxies, transient shapes like geysers and tornadoes—that ebb and flow around it. Eruptions of pink noise, precisely synchronised to the moving pixels, prove unsettling, as do the big data-like visualisations, impossibly dense with millions of individual points of light, that periodically fill the cyclorama. Even allowing for the distance lent by the size and shape of the Playhouse stage, Holistic Strata is a memorable sensory event both revealed and felt through the body.

2016 OzAsia Festival: Bunny, creation, performance Luke George, Daniel Kok, Nexus Arts, 23-24 Sept; SoftMachine: Rianto, concept, direction Choy Ka Fai, performance, choreography Rianto, Space Theatre, 24-25 Sept; Split Flow and Holistic Strata, choreographer, dancer Hiroaki Umeda, sound, lighting design S20, Dunstan Playhouse, 27-28 Sep; Sequential Movement, Hiroaki Umeda, Mikini Yanaihara, Artspace Gallery, Adelaide Festival Centre, 9 Sept-2 Oct.

If it is empty and quiet, a visit to one of the many community halls that dot the landscape in the Northern Rivers region of NSW can be an eerie, lonely experience. The silence, the echo of your footsteps, the feeling that the place is vaguely haunted, the freezing temperatures in the cooler months—these buildings, totems of white settlement in the area on the back of the logging and farming industries, are nothing if not atmospheric.

Today many of these halls suffer a kind of identity crisis. No longer the essential hubs of community they once were, they host all kinds of events, including concerts, film nights, lectures, yoga classes, exhibitions, pop-up restaurants and the real earner, weddings.

They remain, however, fascinating spaces rich with creative possibility, something Arts Northern Rivers has recognised with its If These Halls Could Talk program. A selection of local and international artists is transforming seven of these halls with site-specific events responding to their unique individual histories and architectural character. Among these are elaborate theatrical productions from major institutions, such as Dreamland at Eureka Hall from Northern Rivers Performing Arts (NORPA) and a musical produced by Opera Queensland at Tumbulgum Hall.

For other events, the halls are under the directorship of individual artists, and it is with these that a true sense of fellowship, of intimacy, is conjured in these buildings. Tweed Heads-based artist Craig Walsh, who has a background in working with regional communities to develop site-responsive pieces, was allocated The Channon Hall for his piece, With The Grain. On a moonlit Saturday night in September, a throng of delighted, dressed-up locals paraded through the village clutching lanterns on their way to the hall in which Walsh had installed a large video projection celebrating the town’s history accompanied by live music, acrobatics and dance. Walsh was inspired by The Channon’s history of collectivism, and specifically, how a town initially defined by the timber industry could develop a strong environmental conscience as the decades went by.

“My intention was to embrace what is a very significant history of collective action in response to environmental issues,” said Walsh. “My work explored the community’s relationship with timber over the course of the town’s history—what was once logged became treasured and protected. This defines the evolution of the town, as original settlers shared the space with the original environmentalists—these are the themes that emerged strongly from discussions with the community.”

Reflecting the philosophy of collectivism, Walsh invited the whole town to contribute, thus creating an occasion (or cause) towards which the entire populace could focus—a rare thing as communities become increasingly fragmented due to technology, economic change, gentrification and other factors.

“My role was to redefine this outpouring of creativity and knowledge into a live event which would express both the pride and core values guiding the town of The Channon. The work is not about an artist’s impression of the place but the artist reformatting what already exists into a new experience for all.”

The idea of re-creating a hall’s golden days through a live event is also explored by multimedia artist Grayson Cooke with the more isolated (and very large) Bonalbo Hall. His piece, Bonnywood Rising, which takes place on 10 December, is a live cinema performance that, Cooke says, “harks back to silent cinema, where films were presented with live music, live narrators and sound effects.”

Cooke will present film footage shot months previously and augment it with an array of performed accompaniments designed to create a “dream machine to tease out the stories of the hall and community.”

Such an event could come across as an exercise in nostalgia. But Cooke, like Walsh, is invested in reinvigorating the space as a social focal point for the town’s current residents. Aside from its artistic merit, Bonnywood Rising is an opportunity for communion; in its creation alone, the project has engaged 100 participants.

“From talking to community members about their experiences in the hall,” says Cooke, “I found there was a real sense that a lot of the ‘life’ of the hall was in the past, that it had had its heyday and wasn’t used today anywhere near as much as it once was. I wanted to use this project as a corrective to that, to propose collective art-making as a way of refusing to be bound by history.” In fact, the entire If These Halls Could Talk concept can be seen as drawing these unique spaces into a contemporary context, albeit in decidedly old-fashioned ways.

Arts Northern Rivers, If These Halls Could Talk: NORPA, Dreamland, Eureka Hall, 23-26 Nov, 28 Nov-3 Dec, 5-10 Dec; Grayson Cooke, SCU, Bonnywood Rising, Bonalbo Hall, 10 Dec; Opera Queensland, Tumbulgum and the Countdown to Midnight at the First Supper Between Now and Forever, Tumbulgum Hall, Northern New South Wales, 16-17 Dec