Comebacks in sport are often ill-advised. Muhammad Ali came back when he should have stayed retired; even Mike Tyson came back when he should have stayed at home looking after the pigeons. On second thought, comebacks in sport are ALWAYS ill-advised, with some very rare exceptions.
A great champion may be cut down in his prime, depriving the world of his best achievements — surely he should make a comeback, if he can? I was at the top of my game in the late 90s, but the architects of the neo-liberal conspiracy saw me as a threat and had me silenced. I was torn down and ploughed under. I was buried under tonnes of land-fill, comprising mulch, peat and old issues of New Idea.
I was left for dead and largely forgotten. Now, decades later, I’ve managed to claw my way back to the surface. Sure, there may be the whiff of decay about me, maybe mulch as well. I may not be as pretty as I once was. But I tell you this: I will not be silenced again. Let the dim corridors of power know this truth: Jack is back!
The recent expulsion of Frenchman Eric Cantona from English football has exposed a crisis in the contemporary world: the incompatibility of philosophy and sport. Cantona was well-known in Britain for his television appearances off the pitch: dressed in a black polo-neck skivvy, glass of red wine in hand, he extemporised on aesthetics, he held forth on ethics, pontificated on existentialism. “I am a philosopher,” he proudly told bewildered Brits, who were as ill-equipped to understand him as if he had zoomed in from Mars.
Contemptuous of the prosaic English game, with its plod and graft, Cantona was the complete continental footballer. Unfortunately, this poet of the pitch carried his mastery of 20th century thought into his midfield strategy. Annoyed by the persistence of an irritating off-side trap, he lashed out at his nearest opponent with a ferocity worthy of Bataille. Sent off one time too many by uncomprehending Anglo-Saxon referees, he responded to the barbaric goading of opposing fans the only way he knew: with a flying drop-kick to the head, followed by a series of robust jabs and uppercuts. This perfectly Artaudian performance was, need it be said, too profound for the English orthodoxy. The dour overseers of the game sent the brilliant Frenchman into exile.
In hindsight, Cantona’s final performance can be seen as the last act of his own Theatre of Cruelty. His savage onslaught on the crowd exploded the dialectic of performance in front of horrified spectators around the world. In one last heroic gesture, he hurled himself boots-first into the Nietzschean vortex — and as he well knew, there could only be one outcome. Footballing Dionysus, Cantona paid the ultimate sacrifice: himself. Farewell, Eric. This world was never meant for one as intellectual as you.
Garry Kasparov and Chung-Jen Tan, manager of Deep Blue project (1997), photo: Adam Nadel/Associated Press
Of all the no-hopers and deadbeats in the history of sport, the biggest loser of them all must be … Garry Kasparov. Sports stars have cracked up under pressure before, but nobody has disappointed more people than this so-called champion. Not only did Kasparov let down all chess players, and all Russians, but he let down the entire human race, over its four million years of evolution.
When he threw up his arms and ran off stage after a 19-move whipping from Deep Blue, Kasparov shamed us all. His tearful press conference only made it worse. If he was any kind of sportsman he would have retaliated, McEnroe-style, by smashing into that bloated box of circuitry with the nearest axe or sledgehammer. At least bad sportsmanship is something we can all respect.
What are we to do now? If we’re stuck with Kasparov for the re-match, we need to toughen him up. He should do what humans do best: cheat. He could soften up Deep Blue early by “accidentally” spilling his glass of water into its mainframe or while the minders aren’t looking, yank out a few circuits or sabotage its program. With Deep Blue reduced to the level of a dolt, even Kasparov could trounce it and give us back our self-respect. Only then will Garry Kasparov shake off his title as the greatest loser of all time.
Next in Tooth & Claw
Jack asks what are the career options beyond rugby union for ear-biting boxer Mike Tyson during his 12-month suspension; and what are we to make of Australian cricket captain Mark “Tubby” Taylor’s peculiar sport-speak in which he schizoidly refers to himself in the third person.
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Top image credit: Poster, Eric Cantona
As the deadline for this edition of RealTime loomed, I seized time enough to be absorbed by and write a few words about a new digital album from ever adventurous Australian composer Andrée Greenwell. Prompted by the debate around gendered violence, she has made Listen to Me with a host of largely female collaborators.
Very much of the moment but blessed with artistic and political durability, Listen to Me is an integrated, dramatic and poetic mix of many voices and instruments in a blend of art music, pop and music theatre of a kind that Greenwell has made distinctively her own over two decades with works like Laquiem, Dreaming Transportation, The Hanging of Jean Lee and Gothic, alongside the music for Bell Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis.
L-R: Ruth Wells, Andree Greenwell, Candy Royalle, recording session, Listen to Me, photo courtesy the artists
Greenwell alternates Listen to Me’s intensely lyrical, inherently dramatic songs (composed by her to words by Donna Abela, Eunice Andrada, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Alison Croggon and Candy Royalle) with readings of statements from a variety of women accompanied by treated instrumental improvisations. Autobiographical, political and theoretical, these provide the overall work with a documentary edge.
The songs above all warrant repeated listenings. A very welcome presence among the collaborators is visual artist, poet and performance artist Ania Walwicz with her unaccompanied, eerily voiced and grimly funny Doctor Proctor. The late Candy Royalle is heard reciting Fire to Ruth Well’s warbling tenor sax with words of pain but also of forgiveness.
Elana Stone, recording session, Listen to Me, photo courtesy the artist
The impressive singers are Melanie Horsnell, Elana Stone, Jessica O’Donohue, Louise Nutting and Greenwell herself; the accomplished musicians are Alana Blackburn, Louise Horwood, Rose Foster, Jessica Ling, Ruth Wells, Tristan Routh, Tonestar Leru, Novak Manojlovic, Jessica Dunn and Holly Conner. Playwright Hilary Bell was Listen to Me’s dramaturg.
Top image credit: album cover art, Katerina Stratos
Small to medium sector artists in NSW anxiously awaited Round 2 grant application results in April. Nothing. For months. They complained, despaired and now, en masse, are protesting not just the intolerable, art-wrecking delay but also the cruelly meagre 2.7% success rate outcome — six successful projects from 222 applications.
Given the grant outcomes, the Create NSW Assessment Meeting Report reads like a bad joke. Its panels were “impressed with the amount of high quality applications coming through in this round.” It observed that “[performing] artists either do not pay themselves appropriately, or the support networks available to artists do not have the capacity to include fees as part of the benefits that they achieve for their artists.” And, “the visual arts, literature and museums panel would encourage more experimental/creative applications and encourages applicants to take more artistic risk.”
Neoliberalised governments have long expected their arts “clients” to be business-like, but what of governments that can’t manage to be so themselves? In 2015 the small to medium arts sector fell victim to the federal government’s incoherent and utterly destructive Excellence in the Arts and subsequent Catalyst programs. Now NSW Arts Minister Don Harwin and Create NSW have disrupted timetables and imperilled or killed off projects altogether.
The Sydney Morning Herald revealed Create NSW’s rationale for the delay: “(it) had received a very high volume of applications which skewed the results and delayed assessment.” Rather than a confession of poor management, the excuse implicitly lays the blame on artists for daring to apply in large numbers. Like federal government Arts Ministers George Brandis and Mitch Fifield, Don Harwin has shown a profound disrespect for the artists of the small to medium sector. Much better is expected of Harwin, and Create NSW, beginning with an apology.
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Top image credit: Wrecking ball, Rhys A. via Flickr, CC-BY-2.0
Top image credit: War Sum Up, Hotel Pro Forma, artist image courtesy OzAsia 2018
This is Part 2 of a two-part look at RealTime’s visual arts coverage. Read Part 1 here.
In the second part of this overview of RealTime’s visual arts coverage during its first decade (1994-2004), I’m struck by how deeply the magazine’s writers engage with their material, keenly examining it from a range of angles. Here, they illuminate the complexities of cross-cultural exchange arising from new waves of contemporary Asian art; contextualise the millennial flourishing of photography, painting and video art; and bring linguistic playfulness to idiosyncratic installations.
For access to reviews in RealTimes 1-40 I’ve provided links to each edition and page numbers for you to scroll to. Reviews in editions 41 to 64 are directly linked.
Asia, Australia & cross-cultural complexities
A tendency towards glib globalisation is critiqued in several RealTime analyses of cross-cultural initiatives, particularly those involving Asian cultures.
“[T]o go beyond the simplistic essentialising of other cultures, a process of continual cultural contestation must take place,” writes Christopher Crouch in his report on the Symposium on Urban Dynamism in Asian Art, convened by the Art Gallery of WA to accompany the touring exhibition Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions and Tensions [RT 24, p 43]. Crouch recounts the conference’s unintentional – yet fortuitous – demonstration of the ways in which cross-cultural negotiations fall down, resisting attempts to unify via a “coherent cultural structure that could encompass the different contexts of production and consumption of the works in the show.”
In “Tran’s Emporium opens up” [RT 28, p 29], Jo Law incorporates her own experiences as a Hong Kong-born Australian artist in an excellent overview of the problems underlying ‘multiculturalism’ as it manifests in marketing campaigns, cultural exchange programs, appropriative art-making and showcase exhibitions. In the pursuit of superficial feel-good results, too many factors that should be inherent to the process of cross-cultural collaboration are neglected:
“Doubtless, cross-cultural activities are invaluable in many ways, but it is important to establish a structure that will allow us to benefit from interacting and learning from different ways of life. The process of cross-cultural reading and practice needs to be more autonomous, more democratic and less institutionalised; independent initiatives should be welcomed and supported. Furthermore, the very notion of cultural exchange should be interrogated and this process should be a central objective in such activities.”
From Sonamu, series B 1992-97, Bae Bien-u, The Slowness of Speed – Contemporary Korean Art, National Gallery of Victoria, 1998
In her review of the exhibition of Korean contemporary art at the NGV, The Slowness of Speed [Cultural pace and individual acceleration, RT 30, p 42], Lara Travis notes, “It is a relief to visit an exhibition of contemporary Korean art and not be bombarded with rhetoric about cultural exchange and the diaspora, which has surrounded so many Asian art exhibitions and has, through overuse, acquired a diplomatic tone too expedient to be fully credible.”
Li Ji Warrior Girl, Kate Beynon, 2000, courtesy the artist, Australian Perspecta 1999 featured on the cover of RT #32
On the same page, below Travis’ review, Hong Kong-born Australian artist Kate Beynon enacts a personal cross-cultural negotiation in a series of comics-style drawings of a pregnant action-heroine alter ego, depicted through a fusion of Chinese and Western iconography [Fluid significances, RT 30, p 42; see also cover image RT 32 above]. Reviewer Sandra Selig points out the simultaneous harmony and dissonance resulting from Beynon’s hybrid approach: “Beynon’s drawing finesse produces a seamless intersection of particular Eastern and Western graphic styles while retaining a stylistic incompatibility or difference.”
Semena Santa Cruxtations, 2001 (detail), Alwin Reamillo, courtesy the artist
In late 2001, another artist embraces hybridity as a means of expressing his own cross-cultural identity and experience. In a vivid review, Anne Ooms [Filipino high kitsch with crab creole and politics, RT 45] evokes Perth-based Manila-born Alwin Raemillo’s enjoyable multi-sensory installation Semena Santa Cruxtations, showing at 24HR Art, Darwin, a lurid performative mashup of food, Catholic iconography, fast food advertising and Australiana that lampoons the Catholic Church and globalised business. In responding to Raemillo’s work, Ooms underlines the difficulty that attends this collision of cultures: “In the modern world radical differences are clustered together, constructing irresolvable contradictions. An ethics embracing cultural diversity becomes a necessity.” (Note the shift away from the use of “multiculturalism.”) She identifies Tropical Darwin as the perfect location for the exhibition, being “on the edge, where the complex and brutal consequences of colonisation are daily confronted and a migrant sensibility seems the norm.”
Djon Mundine in 2002 is inspired to write about VietPOP, an exhibition of seven young Vietnamese-Australian artists at Liverpool Regional Museum [VietPOP: a new generation speaks, RT50]. The exhibition tackles a number of intercultural issues, including the core refugee experience that nonetheless leads to a range of disparate relationships with homeland, adoption into white families, critiques of globalisation and the differences between these artists and their parents’ generation. International Vietnamese-Japanese art star Jun Nguyen Hatsushiba, included in the exhibition as mentor and counterpoint, provides other sources of cross-cultural conversation, by virtue of his dual heritage and the subtle ways in which his background differs from his fellow exhibitors. In his review Mundine broadens the conversation to include comparisons with Aboriginal communities.
Banner, Kevin Vo, VietPOP exhibition
Photography: analogue, digital & the natural
RealTime’s extensive coverage of photography reveals the way this multivalent medium came into its own in the 1990s, with its importance and centrality to contemporary art cemented by the 2000s. Large-scale surveys of the form were mounted at state galleries while pioneering contemporary Australian photomedia artists rose to prominence. RealTime writers examined photography’s mutable identity, its tendency to complicate the relationship between the natural and the artificial, the ethics of representation, and the gradual shift from analogue to digital technology.
Responding to The Power to Move: Aspects of Australian Photography, an exhibition of photographs from the Queensland Art Gallery collection [The death of (the) art (of) photography, RT 12, p 41], Peter Anderson traces the relatively recent trajectory of photography as an artform in Australia. Quoting from curator Anne Kirker’s catalogue, he notes that the period of active collecting of photography in Australia, dating back to the early 70s, coincides with “the period when photography became recognised as an artform appropriate to a culture searching for a democratic alternative to the traditionalism of painting and sculpture.”
Anderson finds diverse iterations of ‘art photography’ in the exhibition: archetypal Modernism as practised by Max Dupain, Olive Cotton et al; the photographer as artist/anthropologist, slipping into photo-journalism (Sue Ford, Micky Allan, Ponch Hawkes); and more conceptually-based work (Tracy Moffatt, Julie Rrap, Anne Zahalka). While the dialogue around the exhibition positions photography as new kid on the Australian art scene, Anderson posits that conceptual photography “has been at the leading edge of contemporary art practice in recent times, rather than at the margins.”
Writing about a symposium on the history of photography held at the Art Gallery of NSW in May 1998 [Shadow pictures, words of light, RT 26, p 46], Cassi Plate considers photography’s plurality of discourses: “…one of the organisers, Helen Grace, pointed out that at the last event of this kind in the 80s, photography was discussed strictly within art discourse and that now it clearly exceeded this ‘connoisseurship of art history,’ drawing instead on a richer mix of anthropology, media and cultural studies.”
Weegee, At the movies – sleeping vendor (1940), The J Paul Getty Museum, LA
Continuing this theme of photography’s multifariousness, in 2001 Mireille Juchau addressed two major photographic exhibitions in Sydney — Veronica’s Revenge: Contemporary Perspectives, at the MCA, and World Without End: Photography and the 20th Century at the Art Gallery of NSW [Veronica’s revenge and Judy’s dream, RT 43]. Here more than ever, the many guises of the medium are displayed, from the extravagant postmodern roleplaying of Cindy Sherman and Yasumasa Morimura to the explicit, intimate — yet contrasting — photo essays of Nan Goldin and Larry Clark. “Goldin’s work has all the tender empathy that Larry Clark’s Tulsa (1968-71) lacks in its frank sequence on heroin addiction.”
Tulip, 1998, Robyn Stacey, UTS Art Collection, purchased 1999
The transformation of photography by digital technology is touched on in 1997 and 1999 reviews by Jacqueline Millner of two exhibitions by Robyn Stacey, an Australian photomedia artist who “pioneered some important trends in the field” [Lush life, RT 17, p 34]. In the 1997 article [Artificial blooms, animated stills, RT 32, p 40], Millner highlights the blurring of the artificial and the natural in Stacey’s botanically themed exhibition, Blue Narcissus: “Stacey’s images are digitally manipulated, abstracted from the ‘natural’ to varying but unspecifiable degrees. While recognisable as flowers, these images may well have been entirely generated by a computer program (although we are told in Stacey’s program notes that many derive from the scanning of actual flowers). The animation of her creations by means of lenticular screens further complicates the distinction between the natural and the artificial, the living and the dead.”
The digital takeover of the medium is specifically tackled in Mitchell Whitelaw’s review of Tekhne, the August 2000 edition of Photofile magazine exploring the transition to digital technologies in contemporary Australian photomedia [Post-photographic Photofile, RT 41], while the impact of rapidly changing technology on Australian photomedia schools is examined in Mireille Juchau’s interviews with Australian curators and teachers in RealTime’s 2003 education feature [The adaptable, ethical artist-technician, RT 56].
The ethics and the psychological power of photographic representation comes into reviews of portrait and body-focused exhibitions. Virginia Baxter is both impressed and discomforted by Ella Dreyfus’ Age and Consent [RT 30, p 43], an exhibition focusing on the naked bodies of women in their 70s and above, some taken in aged-care facilities. And following a night viewing of historic crime scene photographs curated by Ross Gibson and Kate Richards at Sydney’s Police and Justice Museum, as well as having seen Denis del Favero’s large-scale installations titled Yugoslavian War Trilogy [Did we dream this? RT 34, p 32], Baxter and RealTime co-editor Keith Gallasch find certain images seared into their subconscious: “the photographs, in their simplicity and their immediacy, are scanned onto your wetware and over the coming days they’re impossible to delete. An uneasy feeling follows you about, like the day after you dream that perhaps you’ve murdered someone, that somehow you’ve been implicated…you are complicit.”
The Frog, 1997, Pat Brassington, Stills Gallery
In her response to Telling Tales: the child in contemporary photography, a group show including work by Polixeni Papapetrou, Tracey Moffatt and Bill Henson among others [The child photographed, the child apart, RT 39, p 9], Zsuzsanna Soboslay picks up on the strange ambiguity that can result when children are captured behind the lens: “The camera, identified as anything from a tool of policing (Sontag, Foucault), to one of democracy (Bourdieu), is often laid open to accusations of veiling its interpretive manipulations under the guise of objectivity.”
Interfaces: painting and screen
Two significant trends in the early 2000s owed a debt to photography: the burgeoning of video art and the rise of postmodern figurative painting. Both movements were characterised by the influence of different media and the sense that the barriers between mediums were becoming less rigid and defining. As Darren Tofts noted in RT 63 [2004: unexpected innovations], “Screen-based media art and painting might not occupy the same physical space, but in 2004 they certainly occupy the same conceptual space, in conversation with, and informing, one another.”
In November 2000 [Against the wall: the art of Anne Wallace, RT 39, p 41], Maryanne Lynch interviews the painter about her somewhat lateral relationship to the precepts of figurative art and the very act of producing paintings, on the occasion of Wallace’s survey show at Brisbane City Gallery. Striving for the jewel-like colours of Hitchcock’s Vertigo and The Wizard of Oz, Wallace’s still, disquieting images draw heavily upon reference photos. Viewing oil painting as “the closest thing to a pure commodity these days and therefore totally kitsch,” she seeks to create “something that is almost like an alien infestation, an alien occupation, that takes over the painting.”
Interestingly, in 2002 both Maryanne Lynch and Anne Wallace appear together in a portmanteau exhibition at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art, also featuring mini-solo showings by Anne Zahalka and Annette Bezor [Film thematic at IMA, RT48]. Though the shows are ostensibly discrete, reviewer Barbara Bolt finds Lynch’s short film Pyjama Girl, in a nice example of the slippage between different art forms, “had escaped the confines of the projection room and implicated itself in the life of the other work.” Bolt recalls “Zahalka’s light box images of Sydney became more alienated and Wallace’s paintings attained a state of high anxiety.” She aligns Wallace’s work with film noir and sees in it an unfolding drama.
Trigger Happy II, Guo Jian, Private Collection, USA, courtesy Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney
Painting flourishes within RT 42, beginning with pieces by Linda Jaivin [Liberating the artist from the revolution] and Trevor Hay [Sex, drugs and revolutionary ballet] on the Chinese counter-revolutionary Pop art explosion as exemplified in the work of Chinese-Australian painter Guo Jian. Further on, Chris Reid looks at Painting, the Arcane Technology [Reinvigorating the arcane], an exhibition of 12 Australian artists, whose curators Natalie King and Bala Starr note a resurgence of painting “after the 1990s infatuation with installation art, object-making, photography and multimedia practices.” The exhibition offers further evidence of cross-pollination of artforms, with the catalogue acknowledging “the influence of new media — cinema in the case of Wallace and Louise Hearman, photography in the case of David Jolly.”
Lily Hibberd, Blinded by the Light, 2002, reproduced on the cover of RealTime #57 courtesy of the artist, Art+Film exhibition, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne
To round off the painting/screen culture nexus, the paintings of Lily Hibberd are singled out by Daniel Edwards in a review of the multidisciplinary exhibition Art + Film at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), examining cinema’s infiltration of contemporary Australian art [The art of in-between, RT 57]. “The oil and phosphorescent paintings captured the hypnotic illumination of the cinema screen, as well as cinema’s reliance on the ephemeral qualities of light to bring its images to life. More crucially, at the level of form and content, these two paintings illustrated the concerns running throughout Art + Film.”
Video art rising: the body, the everyday
RealTime’s documentation of a decade of flourishing video art evidences a form every bit as diverse as photography, ranging from grainy anti-aesthetic VCR pieces to the grandiose visions of Bill Viola and Lyndal Jones. In 2003 [Video goes big time: some crucial questions, RT 56], Blair French provides a terrific overview of the form, from its roots in experimental film to the great scope and variety of contemporary practices, and usefully wonders what critical approaches are best equipped to deal with such formal and conceptual diversity – something further complicated by video’s ubiquity outside of the art world. It’s a great reference for anyone seeking to grapple with what precisely constitutes video art.
In 1999, Edward Scheer is impressed by the power of work by four major women video artists in The 5th Guinness Contemporary Art Project, Voiceovers, at the Art Gallery of NSW [One day all headstones will be electronic, RT 34, p 13]. Works by Nalini Malani, Shirin Neshat, Mariko Mori and Lin Li produce an empathetic response that signals video’s potential to “effect the rescue of our tired media and our exhausted senses and re-humanise aesthetics as an experience of the body.”
(Detail) Aqua Profunda installation, Lyndal Jones, courtesy the artist
Bec Dean’s experience of Bill Viola’s installation The Messenger, viewed on this occasion at St George’s Cathedral, and The Interval, at John Curtin Gallery – both part of the 2000 Perth International Arts Festival – is of immersive work that knowingly deploys Renaissance pictorial conventions and the symbolism of religious architecture to “force the body into feeling” [Perth Festival: breaking surfaces, RT 36, p 7]. An interview with Lyndal Jones on her work Aqua Profunda, representing Australia at the Venice Biennale [Aqua Profunda: art in the deep end, RT 43], reveals a similar desire to immerse the viewer: “I work with video from a subjective, experiential position for the viewer. Consequently, a certain type of critic has difficulty with it because they can’t stand outside it and analyse it. But for a lot of people just watching it, it’s quite straightforward. They’re just in it.”
From Custom Made, David Rosetzky, courtesy the artist
At CCP’s installation of David Rosetzky’s standardised set of video confessionals playing with both banality and intimacy, Ned Rossiter is another RT writer prompted to assess the emotive power of video art [Custom made confessions at CCP, RT 38, p 35]. The simultaneous artifice and directness of Rosetzky’s work raises a question about what factors make a filmed confessional credible. Undercut by the instability of their display (fleeting projections on cheap wood veneer), the earnest monologues suggest “our sense of reality is constituted precisely in the refigurings we make of mediatised commercial culture.”
Writing in 2004 about video works “bridging the worlds of art and daily life” [Video, medium of the moment, RT 62], Rachel Kent unequivocally positions video bang in the centre of Australian contemporary art practice after a decade of significant employment – a decade that fortuitously coincides with RealTime’s own first 10 years. She considers two Sydney exhibitions: Mix-Ed: diverse practice and geography, at Sherman Galleries, and Interlace at The Performance Space. In Mix-Ed, she finds emerging Australian video artists (Emil Goh, Shaun Gladwell, Daniel Crooks, Daniel von Sturmer) making a kind of poetry from the everyday, urban environment, and in Interlace (featuring Goh, Gladwell and Kate Murphy), the “role of performance in daily life is a recurrent theme.”.
Kent also mentions video’s propensity to absorb other artforms: “Drawing upon conventions of documentary and portraiture, and referencing art history as much as cinema and pop culture, [these works] bring the city and its inhabitants to life in often unexpected ways.”
Time Slice, Daniel Crooks, image courtesy the artist and Centre for Contemporary Photography, 2002
The art experience captured in words
As I wind up this overview, having looked at broader trends and scholarly surveys, it would be remiss not to mention RealTime’s attention over the first decade to small, off-beat exhibitions, which it approached through a range of personal, equally idiosyncratic responses.
Virginia Baxter’s reviews are characterised by an elegant, experiential quality that’s wittily evocative. Her 1997 [RT 19, p 14] response to Incognito, an exhibition of women installation artists, is a sort of dance through the Performance Space Gallery, tracking the movement of her body, eyes, feet as she’s alternately drawn to one work before being distracted by another. “Suddenly someone else enters the room. Caught screen hogging, I scramble up from the floor. Is that the time? Easily an hour has passed. I scuttle backwards through the exhibition, nodding to the coloured messages, still pulsing a pink ‘Don’t’. Darting a parting glance at the still jumping girl with the fans, hair flying, I fall into the street.” The experience is indivisible from the artwork, and the review is richer for it.
Domus 1, Jonathan Dady, Construction Drawings (detail), photo Alan Cruikshank
Linda Marie Walker’s elaborations on Rick Martin’s Maria Ghost [RT 23, p 31] and Jonathan Dady’s Construction Drawings at CACSA [So close to the thing itself, and not], are little artworks in themselves; text-based analogues of the original installations. Her meditation on drawing in the latter review could apply equally to her reviewing: “Is drawing an after-effect in its own right? Does a drawing make its subject (overall) a completely different thing (?) — a thinking thought-of thing, a point of transition, from which it desires to be the effect of ‘afterwards’; after-the-fact of presence comes another presence (over and over) from which the thing cannot recover, it’s there ‘anew’, however slight the change might be —perhaps changed only by acts of thought.”
In a similarly inventive way, Russell Smith approaches Shaun Kirby’s installation Gasfitter [RT 39, p 43] as a list of clues through which one might decode the artist’s “minimal”, “signlike” objects. “Like words they’re empty, arbitrary, and meaningless as things-in-themselves, intelligible only through their relationships. But rather than the jokey challenge of the riddle, Kirby’s is the creepy syntax of the enigma.”
Demonstrating the stylistic possibilities of arts writing, these lively snapshots join RealTime’s bigger-picture analyses to form a considerable breadth of visual arts coverage, affording readers the opportunity to delve deeply, gaining an insight into movements, mediums and makers; and a vivid sense of the cultural landscape of the time.
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RealTime Assistant Editor Katerina Sakkas is a Sydney-based writer and visual artist. You can read about her here.
Top image credit: Springtime, 1999, Anne Wallace, courtesy the artist
Partway through my interview with Joseph Mitchell, now overseeing his fourth OzAsia Festival as Artistic Director, I observe that more and more dance, theatre and cross-artform work from Asia is being programmed by Australian festivals and flagship companies, often off the back of seasons at OzAsia. He seems genuinely pleased. “I’m glad you noticed that, Ben,” he says in his briskly efficient but always impassioned manner, “I really appreciate it.”
Since Mitchell took over from Jacinta Thompson as OzAsia Artistic Director in 2015, the landscape for Asian performance in Australia has undergone significant change. Before OzAsia, the only major celebration in Australia of Asian art was Brisbane’s Asia-Pacific Triennial, commenced in 1993 and principally a large-scale visual art exhibition but also including cultural performance and performance art. Commencing in 2007 and once the country’s sole festival focused principally on Asian performance, OzAsia now rubs shoulders with Melbourne’s Asia TOPA Triennial of Performing Arts, first staged in 2017, and, in Sydney, Performance Space’s annual Liveworks Festival. Meanwhile, organisations such as Contemporary Asian Australian Performance (CAAP, formerly Performance 4a) and Playwriting Australia, through its multi-year Lotus initiative, are fostering a new generation of Asian-Australian artists like Michelle Law and Katrina Irawati Graham.
This year’s OzAsia will be held a month later than usual but there’s an early program announcement to whet the appetite: three Australian premieres in dance, theatre and opera spanning South Korea, Japan and China, plus two major contemporary art exhibitions at the Adelaide Festival Centre and Art Gallery of South Australia. For the first time, the festival will also host the Jaipur Literature Festival, a South-Asian institution and purportedly the largest free literary festival in the world. The works announced so far attest to Mitchell’s adventurous programming and commitment to representing the formal and conceptual breadth of contemporary Asian performance. He explains that, unlike in previous years in which a geographical focus shaped his programming decisions, 2018’s festival has been more broadly conceived to showcase the global influence of Asia and its diasporas.
“In my first festival,” Mitchell tells me, “we had a country focus on Indonesia but for the last two I’ve tried to veer away from specific identities because I really think our message is solely that we’re a festival celebrating contemporary arts from across Asia. So this year our program, which we’ll release in about four weeks, is very broad. We’ve got work from East Asia, South Asia, South-East Asia and across the Middle East and the Arab world as well. So we’re looking at a broad continental perspective as well as works that are borderless or come from other regions of the world but that are driven or inspired by, or in some way taking consideration of, the impact of contemporary Asian art.”
Eun-Me Ahn,Dancing Grandmothers
I begin by asking Mitchell about Dancing Grandmothers by prolific South Korean choreographer Eun-Me Ahn. Watching clips online, I’m put in mind of other contemporary dance theatre works by the likes of Jérôme Bel (2015’s Gala) and 600 Highwaymen (2013’s The Record) that foreground and celebrate non-professional and mixed-ability performers. “Dancing Grandmothers definitely continues that narrative,” agrees Mitchell. “Eun-Me Ahn asked herself, how do I create an ode to the women who founded Korea? So she jumped in a car with a video camera and drove all around South Korea trying to capture a sense of how South Korean women express themselves through their bodies. She took that footage back to her company of 10 dancers who created a response to it, which forms the first part of the work — a fun, frantic 45-minute sequence on its own. But then you are shown some of the footage Eun-Me Ahn took and you see the grandmothers dancing in their small villages and the like.
“After that, the 10 grandmothers” — Mitchell explains that the group changes every time the show goes on tour — “and the 10 company dancers come out on stage and the 20 of them all dance together, fuelled by disco-inspired Western-Korean pop music. It’s a really quirky series of songs with crazy lights and projections, which reflects Eun-Me Ahn’s personality, but also the vibrancy and energy of these women. Finally, the audience is invited up on stage, and the work becomes a huge disco rave with the grandmothers in the middle of it all. The work is a wonderful celebration of these women, most of whom have never before had the chance to leave Korea and explore the globe.”
War Sum Up, Hotel Pro Forma, artist image courtesy OzAsia 2018
Hotel Pro Forma, War Sum Up
In addition to dance, this year’s program also continues Mitchell’s interest in presenting contemporary Asian opera via War Sum Up, a 75-minute electronic opera directed by the renowned Kirsten Dehlholm from Denmark-based company Hotel Pro Forma. Mitchell describes the work as a “powerful, short, sharp, visually striking and musically robust 21st century opera.” He explains, “It forms part of a bigger framework we kick-started last year (with Japanese composer Keiichiro Shibuya’s ‘vocaloid’ opera The End), where we’re thinking about opera not in the context of the traditional Chinese canon but from a global 21st century contemporary perspective. War Sum Up,” Mitchell continues, “is a good example of what I was saying before about moving beyond a geographical definition of Asia and thinking more about what is the influence of Asian contemporary culture globally in the 21st century. With this work, you’ve got a Danish director, a Latvian choir, Japanese Manga for the design, and the libretto, sung in Japanese, is based on traditional Noh texts.
“As a piece of staging,” Mitchell says, “it’s highly visual and the musical range is extremely dynamic. While it’s an opera, there’s no live orchestra, it’s all electronic music, and the actors have microphones, which are used for all kinds of effects and distortion. It’s a work that really pushes against and blurs the boundaries of opera as a form, one that should continue to be rethought and experimented with.”
Promotional image, Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land, Stan Lai and the Performance Workshop, image courtesy OzAsia 2018
Stan Lai, Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land
Relative to War Sum Up, Chinese playwright and director Stan Lai’s Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land looks decidedly traditionalist. 30 years old, the Mandarin-language play is now widely considered a canonical work of contemporary Chinese theatre (though it has not been seen in Australia before). “Stan Lai,” Mitchell tells me, “is a household name in China, much as someone like Baz Luhrmann is here, but for 1.2 billion people. And Secret Love is really the show that broke him and his long career trajectory when it was first staged in 1987.” Not unlike Michael Frayn’s 1982 play Noises Off —Mitchell endorses the comparison — Secret Love is a meta-theatrical comedy about two theatre companies booked by mistake into the same rehearsal space.
“What’s fascinating is that it’s surprisingly fresh and modern,” Mitchell says, “because it’s got a whole meta-theatre narrative running through it, a trend that Lai was way ahead of in my opinion. Part of the reason it looks a little bit traditional,” Mitchell explains, “is because you’re watching two companies stage very traditional shows. You end up watching three plays. One is a kind of memory play where the director is staging something that seems quite biographical around lost love and separation as a result of the Chinese Revolution. On the other hand, there’s a group of young actors, probably not far off graduating from university, who have found an old Chinese text and they’ve decided to reinterpret it as a farce with clowning and sexual innuendo. So, as these troupes try to navigate sharing the rehearsal space, you see their respective plays in the making but also see the backstage circumstances, which include the stage and theatre crews figuring out how to settle their tensions as opening night gets closer and everyone becomes more and more stressed. While it’s farcical, it’s also quite moving and resonant because it touches on themes such as family separation and displacement across borders.”
Mitchell is also promising a strong visual arts program this year, tantalisingly hinting at “some very strong links sitting across the various solo exhibitions so that audiences who love the visual arts will be able to look at a bigger emerging thematic picture.” Announced so far are solo exhibitions by two Japanese artists known for their large-scale installations, Ryoji Ikeda — making a welcome return to OzAsia after presenting the intriguing Superposition in 2015 — and Chiharu Shiota, from whom the Art Gallery of South Australia has commissioned a new work, to be exhibited alongside what Mitchell describes as “the first major retrospective of her work.” Ikeda’s data.tron, part of his datamatics series that renders raw data in spectacular 2- and 3D computer-generated patterns, will take up an entire wall of the Adelaide Festival Centre’s Artspace gallery. Shiota’s newly commissioned work, Mitchell explains, will “disrupt one of AGSA’s existing galleries and works by being a significant installation that traverses through the space and around other works in very unexpected ways. It will be very exciting.”
The overall scale of the festival promises to be impressive, reflected in the diversity and richness of work on offer — much of it boundary-pushing or engaged in revitalising conversation with inherited forms. “We’ve got 57 events this year,” Mitchell tells me, “Last year was 50, so it’s our biggest festival yet. 798 artists are coming.” There’s the prospect of another show being “squeezed into the program at the last minute, which I’m quite happy about because it means we’ll end up having over 800 artists. I think we’re in a really good place, particularly with the addition of the Jaipur Literature Festival, which ensures that literature becomes a more significant part of the program.”
While Joseph Mitchell anticipates a more robust conversation about the integration of Asian arts and culture in the Australian mainstream — a grappling with “the multicultural diversity of this country and the place of Australia geographically at the southern tip of Asia” — the OzAsia Festival, under his venturesome direction, continues to point the way forwards.
Top image credit: Eun-Me Ahn’s Dancing Grandmothers, photo Eunji Park
Great composers, transcendental music
Nineteen years ago, I heard Adelaide pianist, lecturer, critic and composer Stephen Whittington perform Morton Feldman’s For Bunita Marcus (1985), a work for solo piano of over an hour that takes you into another realm of musical and meditative experience. “Sounds do not commence but seem always to have existed…”, I wrote. “Awareness is heightened. The paradoxical notion of infinity in a moment is understood, even attained” [RT 32, p43]. For Bunita Marcus is gentle yet absorbing music, as is Feldman’s Triadic Memories [RT85] which Whittington performed nine years later at the only ever Melbourne International Biennial of Experimental Music, curated by the redoubtable duo of Anthony Pateras and Robin Fox.
Whittington’s performance of For Bunita Marcus changed my life by changing the way I listen. Feldman’s unique and wondrous music is a constellation that illuminates the night sky, and together with the keyboard music of Schubert, Beethoven, Liszt, Chopin, Shostakovich and of course the galaxy’s hub, Bach, Feldman’s music helps me navigate both the musical world and my own soul. There have been revolutionary compositional and technical developments in music throughout the 20th century, many of which I have been privileged to write about for Real Time, but the music that so often turns me into a rabbit-in-the-headlights is music for the solitary pianist — a high priest/ess who sits alone at the 88-note portal to the composer’s universe. I never learnt the piano, nor any other instrument. Wish I had.
Christopher Roberts, Stephen Whittington, John Cage Day, 2012, photo Justin Phelps
Whittington has been a champion of all kinds of contemporary music and is a pivotal figure in the Adelaide scene, bringing us many delights besides Feldman, for example his John Cage Day [RT111], his homage to experimental film-maker Stan Brakhage [RT102], and his performances of the music of Georgy Kurtag (RT40, p35), Erik Satie and other eccentric innovators. “Whittington’s solo performances typically take the audience, and himself, on a journey… Often, both performer and audience enter what Whittington suggests is ‘a certain mental space—you become attuned to a certain state to experience something unusual’” [RT111].
Daniel Matej and pianist Marianna Grynchuk, Daniel Matej in Perspective, Soundstream 2012, photo Keith Halden
Soundstream Ensemble’s Artistic Director, pianist Gabriella Smart [RT106], has also introduced audiences to some wonderful music by little-known modern composers through performances by the Ensemble [RT52] and through her Adelaide New Music Festivals of 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2012 [RT99], which brought much new music to Adelaide, for example the Spectralists [RT52], Sofia Gubaidulina and Hanna Kulenty [RT93] and Daniel Matej [RT112]. Smart curates programs of wonderful but rarely heard music that provide great insights into the evolution of composition and performance. Most importantly, Soundstream regularly commissions new work, and commissioning is vital to fostering development.
Alvin Curran, photo Marjorie Rose Butler
Smart undertook her own herculean solo piano performance in realising Alvin Curran’s five-hour work Inner Cities in 2013. “In rendering his own lifetime as composition, Alvin Curran shows how composition is inevitably an extension and exploration of personal experience” [RT 117].
In Melbourne composer and performer Anthony Pateras’ various performances, I’ve been seduced by a very different form of pianism. John Cage brought the prepared piano gently to prominence but Pateras’ elaborate piano preparations coupled with his high-energy approach elevate solo piano music to theatrical drama in his Continuums and Chasms (2005-6). In RT 76 I wrote, “Pateras’ modifications generate rather claustrophobic sonorities—the whole top octave of strings is heavily gaffer-taped to make a sound like closely miked marbles cascading onto a concrete slab. In the lower registers, Pateras employs the usual bolts and screws and also cardboard wedges and other soft material to damp the strings, producing overall the sound of a percussion orchestra.”
At MOFO in 2017, Pateras played an old upright piano with the front removed in an improvised performance with Erkki Veltheim (amplified violin) and Scott Tinkler (trumpet). Such was the ferocity of Pateras’s playing that he broke three piano hammers which went flying over his shoulder towards the open-mouthed audience standing behind him. Afterwards Tinkler photographed the hammers as they lay on the floor — a musical moment to remember.
Gabriella Smart has gone so far as to remove the frame from an old, disintegrating upright piano and play the strings with her hands and with mallets in several performances in her Unpiano series of group improvisations in 2017. In these performances, Smart also performs on prepared piano and keyboard synthesiser. The trio of Smart, together with visiting German performance artist Johannes Sistermanns, who generates resonances from the auditorium walls, the piano soundboard and other vibrating surfaces using iPad-controlled transducers, and saxophonist Derek Pascoe, might seem an unlikely grouping, but such music and such instrumental combinations no longer seem as far-fetched as they did 25 years ago.
Smart’s performance on the trashed piano frame isn’t only about capturing the fragile sound that rusty, out-of-tune piano wires make, it is about foregrounding the iconic status of the piano and its place in the history of western music since the 18th Century. The piano’s gutting is symbolic, and its innards are ceremonially probed like a saint’s vital organs removed from their reliquary. Conceptually, as well as musically, the Unpiano concerts were deeply involving.
Electronics: possibilities, more icon-busting & the apotheosis of the mixer
Over the last 25 years, the use of electronics, pioneered in the 1960s by the likes of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram and Tristram Cary, has become commonplace in all sorts of manifestations, such as pre-recorded and synthesised sounds, live sampling, combinations of electronic and acoustic instruments and spatialisation of the sound through multi-speaker arrays to create immersive experiences. Live performance has been transformed forever with the introduction of the laptop, which can be used alone or in partnership with other devices and instruments. Musicians using acoustic instruments have replaced the paper manuscripts on their music stands with iPads. And they might wear earbuds to hear click-tracks, dispensing with conductors.
The use of electronics to mediate the sound of an acoustic instrument has been pushed to extreme levels. At Tectonics in the 2016 Adelaide Festival of Arts, “The evening closed with legendary US minimalist composer Phill Niblock’s dramatic work Vlada [RT 131], performed by Eyvind Kang on viola with electronics. The sound gradually built polyphonically until it reached the proportions of a cathedral organ with all stops out, saturating us with harmonics and microtones.”
Speak Percussion’s Glass Percussion Project, in which two percussionists played on a vast array of glass instruments inside the wall cavity of Melbourne’s Federation Square atrium, was also highly conceptual and involved visual art and craft, the exploration of the architecture and electronic manipulation. “The sound the audience hears is at times heavily mediated through Myles Mumford’s live processing. The computer processor is an essential component of the instrumentation, and the performers are cued through click tracks to coordinate their playing with the processing. In effect, two people—the performer at the glasswork and the performer at the computer—are playing some of these instruments” [RT83].
Mimic Mass, photo Ben Mastwyk
In Mimic Mass’s performance of Split Radio at Conical Gallery in Melbourne in 2007, three singers each covered a sequence of well-known pop songs, all three singing different sequences simultaneously, so the experience was like listening to three radios tuned to different stations. You could listen to all three at once or to one or other individual through headphones. The voices were transmitted to a PA in a smaller room via a mixing desk through which the voices were morphed, fragments repeated and effects such as drum and bass accompaniment were added. “To transmit is to transmute,” I suggested in RT 78.
The mixer has long become a performer, and the re-conception of the mixer’s role has been enabled and encouraged by technological innovation.
Music as conceptual art — think while you listen
Electronic mediation shifts the performance into another realm of experience and ideas — music as conceptual art. “Mimic Mass’s Split Radio could be described as a performance-installation involving the rendition and electronic mediation of iconic musical and textual material within an overarching compositional structure that unfolds exponentially and that requires the listener to be a mobile, active interpreter. It references DJ-ing that melds musical fragments into a new whole, and mimics the cultural and mental saturation of contemporary life. It breaks the spell of pop music, offering an alternative, oblique aesthetic. It’s iconoclastic and demanding but ultimately it’s a fun event.”
Australian Art Orchestra, Miles Davis: Prince of Darkness, photo courtesy Adelaide Festival of the Arts, 2012
Perhaps the most overwhelming musical performance I have experienced was the Australian Art Orchestra’s Miles Davis Prince of Darkness concert in the 2012 Adelaide Festival of Arts. The concert’s second half featured Anthony Pateras’s composition Ontetradecagon. “Knowing that Davis’ late work, particularly his On the Corner album (1972) was influenced by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pateras pays homage to the experimentalism of both Davis and Stockhausen by exploring the conjunction of jazz improvisation and experimental music. AAO members were located in six groups around the auditorium — on stage, on either side, at the back and on the balcony — with Pateras strategically positioning himself in the centre aisle facing the stage. Pateras uses a Revox B77 to replay fragments of On the Corner and process elements of the live performance, while the AAO play from Pateras’ score which is orchestrated from On the Corner pitch elements and structured to allow improvisation. The spatialisation immerses the listener — I felt as if I were inside Davis’ and Stockhausen’s minds simultaneously” [RT 109].
Ontetradecagon was a consummate performance of great music by a great composer, Pateras, and great performers, the AAO. I was catapulted into an exponentially enlarged sonic, conceptual and compositional universe. I couldn’t have absorbed this music or appreciated its significance without the benefit of my expanded ears — you can’t navigate this universe just by sighting the old constellations.
Darren Moore playing with cellF, Guy Ben-Ary & collaborators, photo Yvonne Doherty
Human or inhuman music?
The synthesiser itself has been developed way beyond anything Stockhausen & Co might have wished for, as was evident at MOFO 2017: “The cutting edge of technical development in the field of electronic music currently seems to be Guy Ben-Ary’s cellF described as the world’s first neural synthesiser, which he developed in cooperation with a team of scientists, technicians and musicians. CellF comprises a small ‘brain’ —biological neural networks grown from Ben-Ary’s own stem cells in a Petri dish — that controls a series of analogue modular synthesisers. It functions autonomously and can perform solo or with other musicians to whom it responds” [RT 137].
Skeleton, Ishiguro Lab, Osaka University, Adelaide Festival of Arts, 2017, photo Steph Walker
Could an android perform? In the 2017 OzAsia Festival, composer-pianist Keiichiro Shibuya performed with a singing android named Skeleton and the Australian Art Orchestra. “Skeleton’s voice suggests some human characteristics…The android’s actions are driven by algorithms based on emergence theory and chaos theory giving it control over its limbs and facial expressions. Electronic sensors detect and process the pitch and amplitude of ambient sound, light and movement to generate autonomous and very realistic gestures and expressions.”
At a seminar during the OzAsia Festival, Skeleton’s Japanese designers considered whether “an android [could] go beyond autonomous physical and facial expression and develop emotional sensitivity, empathise with humans, demonstrate artistic ability and perhaps coexist with humans on equal terms? In short, could androids replace humans in a post-Anthropocene world?”
Zephyr Quartet, Music for Strings and Things, photo courtesy the artists
The audience — how to be a musician without really trying
The relationship between the traditionally passive audience and active performer has evolved into a partnership. Zephyr Quartet, another of Adelaide’s new music champions, experimented with direct involvement of the audience in their 2014 concert Music for Strings and iThings, which followed logically on the near universal uptake of that revolutionary device, the smart phone. They invited audience members to download and play loudly over their phones fragments of pre-recorded music to accompany the Quartet’s playing.
The concert encapsulated many emergent strategies for music-making: “Zephyr’s relentless quest for musical and compositional originality and their work with diverse collaborators continues to position them at the forefront of innovation, involving in this concert appropriation, field recording, live processing, pre-processed sound, visual art, aleatoric elements and directed and spontaneous audience participation. The concert is perhaps a wry commentary on the way in which new technologies have invaded our lives and come to dominate communication and thought processes, but it also demonstrates the way in which contemporary culture can condense so many sonic, musical and cultural traditions and ideas into a new paradigm” [RT125].
Stephen Whittington with a daruma illustration, Japan, photo courtesy the artist
Education — training musicians in an electronic world
For her Honours project in Sonic Arts at the University of Adelaide in 2015, composer, musician and sound engineer Iran Sanadzadeh revived and extended the work of Australian dancer Philippa Cullen, who, in the early 1970s, began experimenting with theremins to produce sound through dance movement. Sanadzadeh’s If/Then is an improvised work for several performers who dance on movement-sensitive panels to trigger shifts in pitch in a theremin-like drone that runs throughout the performance. Her work is, “about exploring a range of possible actions with indeterminate outcomes, suggesting the influence of John Cage. And as well as demonstrating and extending Cullen’s original idea of reversing the relationship between movement and sound, Sanadzadeh’s concept also inevitably speaks of the new era of electronic surveillance and prosthetic technology” [RT 129].
Laptop Orchestra, Electronic Music Unit, Elder Conservatorium of Music, Adelaide, Tectonics, photo Dr Sebastian Tomczak
Stephen Whittington’s work with his students in the Sonic Arts program at the University of Adelaide shows how musical training has not only accompanied but generated musical evolution. He and his students regularly conduct concerts such as the 2014 concert, Stockhausen, May 1968: Intuition and Liberation, where 47 Bachelor of Music (Sonic Arts) students realised Stockhausen’s Aus den Sieben Tagen (1968). “The students work in groups of four or five with an array of synthesisers, the ubiquitous laptops, a tape-loop, the occasional electric guitar and even voice…[The] script is almost a blank canvas for the performer, and can be seen both as a form of spiritual liberation and the ritual abandonment of conventional composition…That the performers can make such interesting music with so little direction indicates the depth of their creativity and their technical, improvisational and ensemble skills” [RT122].
And then, perhaps inevitably, came Whittington’s laptop orchestra of 2015 — the 65-member Electronic Noise Orchestra, piloted by two mixers and a master-mixer. “The resulting sound was characterised by dense musical layering that made full use of the eight loudspeakers placed around the perimeter of the auditorium to create a sense of swirling movement. Hearing it was an incredible experience as the complex sound patterns developed and intersected in kaleidoscopically fascinating ways” [RT128].
Whittington has a clear educational and musical philosophy: “I see sonic art as a category that is larger than music — though music is a part of it — a category that embraces every kind of art activity that uses or references sound… My approach is phenomenological — my students are forced to come to grips with ideas from Husserl and Merleau-Ponty at some time or other…” [RT128].
Club Sync, Unsound Adelaide, photo Andre Castellucci
Mainstreaming new music
It was also inevitable that the latest in musical developments would be showcased through mainstream arts festival programs. Sydney’s NOW Now, Perth’s Totally Huge New Music Festival and the almost national Liquid Architecture series (sadly, LA never reached Adelaide) have brought us the newest musical developments for some years, but the Tectonics programs of 2014 [RT120] and 2016 [RT131] and the Unsound programs (2013-2106) that David Sefton featured in the Adelaide Festival of Arts have extended contemporary music’s reach beyond its typical niche audience. From 2017, Unsound has become a separate festival, bringing to Adelaide world class performers, composers and cutting edge experimental music. “Unsound Adelaide was outstanding in its conception and delivery, adding a crucially important dimension to musical programming in Australia.”
In the quarter-century spanned by Real Time, we have witnessed a revolutionary transformation of musical composition, performance and reception. Additionally, you can now access almost any music through the internet, anywhere, anytime. One even wonders if some form of bio-electronic telepathy will soon replace the smart phone + earbuds. The pace of musical change parallels the evolution of technology and the way in which audiences apprehend and interact with the world around them. The future of music is already being encoded. Forget the stars and navigate with your cursor.
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Chris Reid is an Adelaide-based writer who has reviewed visual arts and music for RealTime since 1999. Read about him here.
Top image credit: Eugene Ughetti, Speak Percussion, The Glass Percussion Project, 2009, photo Andrew Barcham
I confess I was surprised to receive an invitation from the publishers to choose for you archival cave divers a couple of examples from my insanely popular sports column Tee Off with Vivienne Inch. Despite repeated attempts to convince the publishers of this trendy rag we deserved better placement, fellow sports writer Jack Rufus (Tooth & Claw) and I for many years (1994-99) languished at the scrag-end of the publication spinning sporty bon mots from the news of the day.
Why golf? Well as I answered in fielding a question from a young high flyer in 1996 about the popularity of the sport among artists and arts bureaucrats, “The etiquette of the game demands restraint. The desire to wallop your opponent with a nine iron is kept constantly in check. And despite the bunkers and the sand traps and the impossible holes, it’s a numbers game where you can still look your opponent in the eye, face the same hazards and expose your handicaps. Golf is the closest thing we have to the level playing field.”
Teeing off this week with Muffin Spencer-Devlin I was paged by the selectors to score at the State Opens for this year’s Shakespeare Competitions. I jumped at it, of course. I am a stickler for diction and pleased to be able to give an ‘Inch-along’ to an under-reported sporting activity. How widely known, for example, was the recent win at the Metropolitan East regional finals of the Globe Centre Shakespeare Festival, by two Year 11 Cranebrook lads who took out the dialogue section for their delivery of a scene from Julius Caesar, defeating 15 older competitors? These boys are now heading for the State Finals. Teachers report overwhelming demand for drama in the classroom since the introduction of the Competitive Shakespeare. State netball and hockey selectors report massive drop-offs as girls set their sights on outings such as the Desdemona Open and the Ophelia Handicap. In the latter category, players will be battling to better last year’s flamboyant display by Rosemary Wu, a young prefect from Wilberforce who hurled the bouquet a record 6.7 with a showy, “Here’s Rosemary for you!” before executing a perfect triple turn with pike. One troubling aspect of the sport, however, is the incursion of the corporate sector. Unconfirmed rumours of Bell Shakespeare’s young King Lear in hessian and Nike Airs and Viola sporting a prominent Libra Whispers logo are just scary enough to be true.
Wherever I have teed off this month, the unsettling matter of mergers has been on my mind and what we might be in for at the end of the path to total convergence. On the bright side, I suppose you’d have to count the hybrid art experience of the Rugby League grand final last month. There were the predictable pieces from Futurist sports writers but something Baroque in the photographs of naked footballers cradling infants, and matching commentary: “Little Logan Ainscough won’t remember the 1999 Rugby League but one day his dad will be able to tell him he was there when history was made” (Sunday Telegraph). Only an Expressionist could have brought together a football team and a weather pattern to create Melbourne Storm. On the day, averring Minimalism, Lazarus raised his whole team from the dead at half-time. Dadaists shouted “Ceci n’est pas une goal” from the Dragon camp at the penalty try and later we watched a Symbolist outburst of blubbing from the losers on the lawn. Lazarus, holding aloft the three-dimensional object, took a postmodern cut-up approach in his victory speech, referring to our boys in Timor while reserving the catch in the throat for the wife and kids. Dragons captain Paul McGregor called the loss “surreal.” Meanwhile, in another of his unconvincing ‘Man of the People’ performance pieces, John Howard on the winner’s dais, you’d have to say, was entirely Conceptual.
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Top image credit: US golfer Babe Didrikson, winner of 31 professional golf tournaments 1948-55
Hot off the press!! At long last RealTime print editions 1-40 are available in our online archive. PDFs of each edition preserve the look of RealTime and each is searchable — treasure chests of highly responsive reviewing, critical thinking and, yes, humour (we even had ‘sports’ columns in those days).
With today’s edition we proudly commence our series of Archive Overviews by RealTime writers. Virginia, addressing RealTime responses to Australian Indigenous performance 1994-2000, and Katerina, surveying our visual arts coverage 1994-2004, have invested many weeks delving into the magazine’s inky pages to produce comprehensive accounts detailing key emerging artists and forms and political, cultural and funding challenges. These provide excellent pathways into our archive.
Our archiving is in transition. We currently have two websites, 2001-2015 and 2016-present. The former is about to be incorporated into the latter, providing one access point. Until that happens, our Archive page includes all 1994-2000 and 2016-present editions while 2001-2015 editions can be accessed by going to RealTime’s original website.
Dive into the 1994-2000 archive and let us know what you think. Keith, Virginia, Katerina
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Top image credit: RealTime Promotional image, 2002, photo Heidrun Löhr
In 1994, the year we launched RealTime, I was Chair of Playworks, the national development organisation for theatre and performance works by female writers. That year Playworks’ Director Clare Grant and I attended the Third International Women Playwrights Conference in Adelaide. A range of works were showcased with a focus on the relationship between traditional ritual or storytelling and contemporary theatre created by women. One performance that left a strong impression was by a group of women from Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara Women’s Council in Central Australia.
The first part of the performance was for women only and required us to keep secret. What followed featured song, dance and what appeared to be impromptu commentary from a chorus stage left. There were soft ripples of laughter as the women encouraged one another to take centrestage. As some performed simple movements, others sang in unison and then casually returned to the sidelines, promptly dropping all sense of occasion and then repeating the pattern.
As casual as this performance appeared, I subsequently learned that it had a serious function, as “an expression of Jukurrpa, a term that can apply to individual ancestral beings, or to any manifestation of their power and nature, ie knowledge of their travels and activities, rituals, designs, songs, places, ceremonies. The Jukurrpa provides the ‘Law’ for all human and non-human activity and, because it is not fixed in any temporal sense, it is conceived as a continual living presence” (Women’s Intercultural Performance, Julie Holledge and Joanne Tompkins, Routledge, 2000).
At the time, I sensed in this performance with its easy synthesis of elements a certain resonance with much contemporary performance I’d been involved in making and observing throughout the 1980s and early 90s with its emphasis on the fluid combination of artforms (image and sound, movement and speech). This link, of course, has been explored by Performance Studies theorists since at least the 70s but I think this was the first time I’d actually felt the connection. I also sensed an affinity with its framing of time. The imaginary time inhabited by actors spinning narratives in conventional theatre had been replaced in much contemporary work by performers embodying or enacting states of being in real time.
So central was this latter idea to our thinking that we chose “RealTime” as the title for the publication in which we intended to expose to a wider audience the breadth of what came to be called ‘cross-art form’ and later ‘hybrid’ and thence ‘multi- or interdisciplinary’ practices and to dialogue with artists and their audiences through writing that conveyed a strong sense of the experience of the work. This brought us into contact with the innovative ways many Indigenous artists were dealing with ideas of tradition and contemporaneity in the creation of new works and how they reflected the changing politics of black and white Australia. We observed Indigenous artists drawing on and sustaining traditional cultures, integrating them with Western art forms in which many had been trained or finding ways to work when they were distanced or displaced from those cultures.
Indigenous writers published in RealTime in this era included Catriona McKenzie, Walter Saunders, Lester Bostock, Archie Weller on film, Terri Janke on multimedia rights, Djon Mundine on visual arts. Indigenous writers on theatre and performance were not prominent save for Wesley Enoch, then Artistic Director in Brisbane of Indigenous theatre company Kooemba Jdarra and who would become in this period an important contributor to RealTime, bringing his sharp intelligence to the discussion around definitions of form and indigeneity.
The Cherry Pickers
About his 1994 production of Kevin Gilbert’s classic play The Cherry Pickers (1971), Wesley wrote: “The further appropriation of [Western] performance form joined with Kevin Gilbert’s appropriation of English and conventional playwriting format basically facilitates the storytelling and in no way undermines its credibility as an Indigenous story. The script is used as a vehicle to publically discuss issues of traditional cultural appropriation, health and mortality, alcohol dependence and economic disempowerment” [RT4, p 15].
The Aboriginal Protestors…
Another bold experiment which, inexplicably, was only briefly previewed in our account of The Performance Space’s 1994 program was Mudrooroo’s The Aboriginal Protesters Confront the Proclamation of the Australian Republic with a production of The Commission by Heiner Muller, directed by Noel Tovey. A play within a play, it was heralded elsewhere as “one of the great landmarks of black theatre in Australia and performed to capacity houses throughout the Sydney Festival…an extraordinary confluence of texts of Aboriginal political activism and the grand master of avant-garde theatre, Heiner Müller. The Aboriginal Protesters… is set in Canberra on the eve of the declaration of the Australian Republic [AusStage].
Bindjareb Pinjara, Black Swan Theatre Company, photo Tracey Schramm
Bindjareb Pinjarra
Back then, and still, reconciliation was high on the agenda and a strong focus in much Indigenous work, even when the subject matter was genocide as in Bindjareb Pinjarra produced in Perth in 1995. Sarah Miller, our Perth correspondent at the time, wrote, “From the outset the performer/devisors of this work (Geoff Kelso, Trevor Parfitt, Kelton Pell, Phil Thomson with set paintings and graphics by Ron Gidgup) committed themselves to creating a work which gave Nyoongah (SW Aboriginal Australians) and Wedjella (European Australians) equal power and ownership over the product…[while] enacting racism’s fundamental absurdity” [RT8, p 4].
Deborah Mailman, The Seven Stages of Grieving, Kooemba Jdarra, photo Tracey Schramm
The Seven Stages of Grieving
In 1996 Wesley Enoch with co-writer and performer Deborah Mailman conceived, in collaboration with visual artist Leah King-Smith, their ground-breaking work The Seven Stages of Grieving, comprising text, image and movement integrated as in traditional Aboriginal performance and, importantly, as the creators described it, specifically devised with Aboriginal audiences in mind. Elaborating the grief of dispossession, Seven Stages also spoke to a wider audience though surprisingly, its radical model was largely not to be repeated. Josephine Wilson previewing the work in 1995 noted: “The Mabo decision and the agenda of reconciliation place the question of historical truth at the centre of Australian national identity. Seek[ing] to assert for Aboriginal people that it is not yet time to forgive and forget, the performance sets out to enact what has historically been denied Aboriginal and TS-Islanders: the right to public mourning and personal grief. This denial was explicitly under the doctrine of terra nullius…how can you mourn that which never was?” [RT#8, p5].
In 1997, the work toured to the UK as part of the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT). RealTime was also a guest of the festival, assembling a team of Australian (including Wesley Enoch) and British writers to cover much of the program. One of our British writers, performer Zahid Dar, described The Seven Stages… as “a hybrid of Indigenous oral and physical storytelling traditions mixed with the multi-layered textuality of current Western theatre practice. There are many stories entwined in its collage of visual, vocal and movement imagery. Deborah Mailman’s performance becomes a collective grieving: it explains the grieving stages of Australian Aborigines and at the same time, allows the audience to personally experience that process of pain, loss and sorrow, not as some kind of denial of history and oppression or even suppression, but as catharsis. It allows us to engage with history and the experience of a people and to believe that there is a recuperative dimension which enables reconciliation” [RT20, pp 45-46].
MIMI
Another significant work, this time involving Indigenous and non-indigenous artists and with a traditional creation story at its centre, first appeared in RealTime in 1996 [RT12, p 15] MIMI, a collaboration between two Sydney-based companies Stalker and Marrugeku featured five stilt dancers, three Kunwinjku musicians from Arnhem Land and was narrated by traditional storyman Thompson Yulidjirri. Performed under the stars at the 1996 Perth Festival, MIMI caught the imagination of many, touring extensively to Australia’s cities and Aboriginal communities to become one of our most successful cultural exports on the international festival circuit, as was the 2001 work Crying Baby (see image). Currently based in Broome and led by Artistic Co-Directors Dalisa Pigram and Rachael Swain, Marrugeku has expanded its intensely collaborative team to include composers and filmmakers and, reflecting the growing international interest in Australian Indigenous performance, European performance theoreticians and artists.
Festival of the Dreaming, 1997
MIMI also featured at the hugely influential Festival of the Dreaming in 1997 prominently covered in our pages. Curated by Rhoda Roberts this was the first of three major festivals in the lead-up to the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. Roberts’ program celebrated the considerable achievements of Indigenous artists in a wide range of theatre, performance, dance, film and the visual arts.
These were politically dark times. In the opening address of the Reconciliation Convention, John Howard deemed centuries of dispossession and violence insignificant. In protest Indigenous delegates in the audience turned their backs on the Prime Minister.
Box the Pony
Within the Festival of the Dreaming, the Wimmin’s Business program showcased a number of solo works that expanded on the autobiographical storytelling form. Reviewing Leah Purcell’s Box the Pony (co-written with Scott Rankin), I was taken with the way the performer “move(d) rapidly through personifications of character and self without the constraints of tight theatrical framing…from rural roughhouse to city savvy. ‘Bullshitting is basically what I’ll be doing here tonight,’ she confessed” [RT21, p 4]. Purcell’s style mixed pride and self-deprecation, at turns baiting, cajoling and charming her audience. Box the Pony marked the beginning of a stellar career for Leah Purcell.
Ningali Lawford, Yirra Yaakin Indigenous Theatre, photo Kevin O’Brien
Ningali
On the same program, Ningali Lawford excited us with her mix of English, Aboriginal English and Walmajari in her eponymous show, co-devised with Angela Chaplin and Robyn Archer and premiered in 1995 by Deckchair Theatre in WA. “These are not my stories, they are mine through my eyes, what I saw through my eyes but they are the stories of all the people that have lived the way I’ve lived: stations. People that got taken away, everything. They are stories for those people and worth being told. Aboriginal people have always been visual people, physical and oral people and that’s the way I wanted to present my story. Straight. Straight from the heart” [RT21, p4].
This form of direct-address performance including Deborah Cheetham’s White Baptist Abba Fan was soon taken up by other Indigenous artists sharing personal stories. These included Tammy Anderson (I Don’t Wanna Play House), Noel Tovey (Little Black Bastard), David Page (Page 8), Tom E Lewis (Thumbul), Jack Charles (Jack Charles vs The Crown, with John Romeril) and most recently, Jacob Boehme (Blood on the Dance Floor).
Critical dialogue: off with the kid gloves
“I think there’s a level at which a lot of Kooemba Jdarra’s work escapes the level of criticism that it really needs to survive. The biggest problems are those of being smothered with kindness. Some people put on their kid gloves to talk to us and any kind of discussion comes from a place of white guilt. I think the challenge is to say, ‘What questions does the work raise?’ and allow people to answer them. Often I find that opinions that are given come from assumptions we don’t share” Wesley Enoch, [RT18, p 27].
Non-indigenous RealTime writers responding to work by Indigenous artists have always done so with a heightened sense of responsibility but this has never prevented our publishing constructive criticism or the expression of misgivings about a performance. In a 1997 article headed “The history of our dancing bodies is becoming hot,” Eleanor Brickhill had reservations about Bangarra’s production, Fish: “On stage the negotiations seem formal, distant. But the traditional material, both dance and music, is totally compelling and the effect is quite unlike watching the predictable paces of the western trained dancers in the group. Fish features Djakapurra Munyarryun, a performer whose physical language gives purpose and weight to the work. His gestures are mercurial and his meanings seem rich and clear, sharpened perhaps by unfamiliarity, hiding no clichés” [RT22, p 33].
In a robust exchange in 1997, EC Brown questioned Wesley Enoch about the director’s production of Radiance in which he sensed “the cultural autobiography [of playwright Louis Nowra] writ so large upon the story that it rendered the core of the play impenetrable.” He put it to Enoch that the anthropological reality had been overshadowed by the author’s own cultural baggage. This prompted Wesley to argue, “I think the first point is to interrogate the assumptions with your reading of the piece, in terms of what is the Aboriginal experience. The argument comes down to authenticity and who holds the forms of representation and in this case we’ve allowed Louis Nowra to create these characters for us to play. One of my big arguments is that as Murri people we must control our forms of representation. But what makes an Aboriginal work? Is it the writer? The director? The actors? Is it something like Bran Nue Dae or Corrugation Road which are actually written by Aboriginal writer Jimmy Chi but directed and designed by non-Aboriginal artists? When is it a creative position and when is it an interpretive one?” [RT18, p 27].
Erin Hefferon, The Geography of Haunted Places, photo Stephen Smith courtesy Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts
A non-Indigenous voice: The Geography of Haunted Places
Works by non-indigenous artists also contributed to the debates concerning Australia’s reconciliation with its past. The 1997 national tour produced by PICA in Perth of Josephine Wilson’s The Geography of Haunted Places, a solo performance by Erin Hefferon about colonisation, domination and memory, coincided with the launch of Pauline Hanson into the world of federal politics. Writer Barbara Bolt commented, “Written in 1994, Wilson had imagined she was laying ghosts to rest, that in talking about the brutality of the events we could take stock of our past, in preparation for a ‘better’ future. But the hope for a talking cure has receded rapidly and The Geography of Haunted Places has become prophetic.” [RT19, p 3].
In 1997, the work was performed at the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) and among the surprising UK responses was one from The Independent’s Adrian Turpin who confessed that he “couldn’t give a monkey’s” for the work’s “attempts to tell a few home truths about colonialism and white bread Ozzie culture,” to which I responded, “…in restaging this work, LIFT 97 has given Britons a chance to share images of Australia that they might easily disown at this distance. Here for a brief visit is your wayward daughter, ours too, wanting you to see just what the racist impulses of our white forbears have fathered” [RT20, p 44].
Looking for respect, sharing pride
In 1998, a year in which the rapid rise of Indigenous filmmaking also vied for our attention, we consistently covered Indigenous issues. Jo Holder reported on creative responses to the government’s overturning of the High Court’s Wik decision, including the formation of Australian Artists Against Racism or AAAR! “pronounced as a pop-art roar” [RT25, p 3]. An article from leading visual arts curator and regular RealTime correspondent Djon Mundine vividly elaborated on the history of the struggle for land rights and identity in relation to Indigenous art, finally calling on all Australians to take pride in our Indigenous heritage: “We need to see the real contribution Indigenous people are making through their art, not only economically (which is considerable) but spiritually. The struggle of the Yirrkala people for land rights and the survival of Tiwi identity through their cultural expression enrich the lives of all of us” [RT25, p 3]. This idea is yet to be wholeheartedly embraced by white Australia.
In the same issue Georgina Clarsen reported on the Fullbright Symposium with its theme of Tolerance and Cultural Diversity, Pluralism and Human Rights: “Adelaide was a particularly poignant location, given that the High Court had ruled only days before against the Ngarridjeri challenge to the Federal Government’s Hindmarsh Island Bridge Act. To add to that the shameful scenes in Canberra as the Government’s 10 Point Wik Plan was debated and the haste with which it was conducted to fit in with the Easter break, left many of us feeling that the chance for reconciliation was slipping away perhaps for another generation. The mood was heightened by Cherie Watkins when she did more than welcome us to Kaurna country, but asked how reconciliation was possible without fundamental respect for Aboriginal knowledge and law. Ronald Wilson reminded us, we don’t have to wait for governments, we must do it as a people’s movement…Reconciliation, after all, is not an end (since what is considered reconciliation may change) but a continuing process which needs constant re-assessment and affirmation” [RT25, p 8].
Reconciliation action
In this period, a tremendous amount of the work of Reconciliation was taken on by artists. EC Brown spoke with Lafe Charlton, the new AD at Kooemba Jdarra about his 1998 program which was heavy on training, workshops and regional development. Charlton reported: “An ongoing component of the company’s work, the workshop and training program operates as an outreach facility to schools and community groups to promote cultural awareness through the arts. The aim of this self-funded component of the program is to promote that most nebulous of terms, reconciliation” [RT25, page 6].
In 1998 Melbourne company Not Yet It’s Difficult in collaboration with Theatreworks and academics from the Koori Research Centre at Monash University organised a Reconciliation & Theatre Forum, stressing the importance of consultation to avoid misrepresentation so commonly experienced by both whole communities and individuals [RT26 p16]. In 2002, the Australia Council was prompted to publish a detailed set of protocols for working with Indigenous artists.
Youth theatre companies across the country devised all manner of programs to encourage emerging Indigenous artists. Responding to an Australia Council program funding Aboriginal skills development, Port Youth in South Australia instigated a rigorous process of consultation in their work with young Nunga people. Director Ollie Black, interviewed by Anne Thompson, stressed “Employing Aboriginal workers (important it’s more than the token one) they found they needed to be open to the social networking which is a crucial part of life in a community. ‘What we might call ‘gossip’ works as a survival strategy. This networking and their kinship system are the traditional things that are extraordinarily strong, even in an urban Aboriginal community. Auntie Josie works here three afternoons a week, but a vital part of her job is going for a walk in the mall at lunchtime so she can hear what’s happening’” [RT27, p 32].
Stolen lives: King Hit, Stolen, A Life of Grace & Piety
In 1997 Perth’s Yirra Yaakin production of King Hit marked the maturation of the company after their first ‘professional’ production that same year when they ceased to be a strictly youth theatre company. Of King Hit (by David Milroy and Geoffrey Narkle) based on the life of Aboriginal tent boxer Geoffrey Narkle, a member of the Stolen Generations, Sarah Miller wrote, “Its extraordinary achievement was to build the narrative so transparently from beginning to middle to end so that there could be no mistaking the locus of the pain, but more importantly the anger, the rage and the seemingly incomprehensible self-destructiveness. No Pauline, No John, there are no neat clean white middle-class answers to this one but an apology might be a start down a different road” [RT22, p 16]. This would not come until 2008.
1998 marked the premiere production of Jane Harrison’s powerful play Stolen staged at Malthouse and directed by Wesley Enoch. Based on the lives of five Indigenous people dealing with issues stemming from forceful removal as children by the Australian government, the play has since toured extensively within Australia and internationally and is studied widely in schools. In 2016 we reviewed the National Theatre of Parramatta’s production of the play directed by the ever inventive Vicki Van Hout who expanded on the narrative by texturing the production with a meld of naturalism and the mythic. As in all of Van Hout’s work, design was an important element. She described designer Imogen Ross’s cardboard objects being used, “like we would dancing feathers which when finished with are tucked back into the folds of our skirts, to be replaced by leaves or small branches acting as spears or the beaks of cranes, perhaps the motion of the west wind or of the fog rolling off the mountains” [RT 133].
Lafe Charlton’s 1998 program opened with A Life of Grace & Piety by writer-director Wesley Enoch, a collaboration between Kooemba Jdarra and Cairns-based JUTE. Our writer Julie Goodall described the experience as “transcendental” and went on to say “Enoch touches on issues surrounding the Stolen Generations without attempting to play on our guilt or pity. It is as if life is too important for such negativity…The different kinds of writing in the play provoked strong opinions among the theatregoers on opening night at the Cairns Civic Theatre: its wordless scenes, its sparkling naturalism, its poetic monologues gave it a rich texture and for me it was a thrilling use of the theatrical medium, of space and movement and image. I particularly enjoyed John Kelly’s sound design which gave the production great subtlety and richness” [RT26, p 38].
United voices
Experimentation with form by Indigenous performance-makers continued throughout the 1990s as did the critical dialogue with RealTime. The 1998 New Narratives program at Performance Space included performance poet Romaine Moreton’s United Voices of which Keith Gallasch wrote: “It’s a simple website where you get complete poems performed with a percussion track. In My Genocide you can call up a word or phrase from one of Moreton’s poems and get information on, say, media responses to an event like the killings at Port Arthur and their implicit erasure of black history. It exploits existing formats on the net such as the 60-second rock clip and uses hypertext for good political ends. It will be interesting to see where it goes from here. What’s clear is that the technology of the net is not yet able to convey the power of the live performer. Romaine Moreton performed three of her poems at the launch with percussionist Jan Goldfedder. She’s a dynamic performer who needs technology to match” (RT25, p 13). She achieved this synthesis in 2016 with her show One Billion Beats at Campbelltown Arts Centre.
Cruel Wild Woman
“History threatens to repeat itself in Yirra Yaakin’s Cruel Wild Woman,” wrote Josephine Wilson in 1999. Ethel (Lynette Narkle) is worried about Wik, she’s worried about the 10-point plan and she’s worried about her husband Charlie (Kelton Pell) who can’t let go of the form guide, and whom she suspects of pawning the vacuum cleaner at Cash and Carry. And then there’s that Woman in Red, Pauline Hanson, who keeps popping up everywhere.” (Written by Sally Morgan and David Milroy) Cruel Wild Woman manages to parody both paranoid politics and complacent responses to contemporary Aboriginal-Australian relations in a situational comedy in which the ‘local situation’ counts for everything and in which politics is enmeshed in the domestic drama of everyday married life … In this lounge-room, history is the place of bad dreams, from which we wake, thankful” [RT30, pp 8-9].
King for This Place
Grisha Dolgopolov’s 1999 article “Beyond the Black and White,” hinted at some of the complexities of collaboration. Reviewing non-indigenous writer Neil Murray’s play King for This Place he comments on the strength of its well-rounded performances (Trevor Jamieson, Melodie Reynolds, Sher Williams-Hood, Phillip McInness, Kelton Pell, Stephen Baamba Albert). Of the play’s political ambitions, he cautions: “Murray wanted to show how Aboriginal people and their cultural heritage can enrich white Australians. Although there is nothing new in this message it is certainly worth repeating and exploring at length. His second claim that spiritual sensitivity and attachment to land are not exclusively the preserve of Aboriginal people, while refreshing, is somewhat at odds with his first and requires some elaboration” [RT31, p 32].
In his 1999 review of Kooemba Jdarra’s first musical production, Therese Collie’s Goin’ to the Island, a play that “peers deep into the troubled eyes of a young Murri hothead,” Brad Haseman was impressed with the versatility of the five performers “adroitly handling multiple roles and easily swapping naturalism for song and dance and then back again” but unconvinced by an ending that resisted resolution. “In the move to closure, the defiant struggle for survival and recognition dulls into a mere celebration of optimism…Hopes seem contrived, cosy but celebrating the end of the play rather than the ongoing complexities and ironies of victory and defeat. After five years of destructive, mean-spirited public policy and apology-less regret, this ending seems to belong to another age, one whose time is yet to come” [RT33, p 27].
Casting Doubts
Another regular commentator on Indigenous issues, Suzanne Spunner at the 1999 Indigenous Arts Festival, reports, “Issues of identity were a primary focus and [urban Aboriginal] artists tackled them in many different ways. Koori Aboriginality is fluid, multifaceted, negotiable and often problematic and this was reflected in the works presented.” Heralding an issue that would become critical in the noughties, Suzanne reported on a promising work by Maryanne Sam titled Casting Doubts in which five struggling Indigenous actors are caught between ‘no more lap lap and spear’ and not looking Aboriginal enough” [RT33, p 9].
Triple Alice
Among the collaborative ventures involving Indigenous and non-indigenous artists, the Triple Alice project was one of the more ambitious. Poet and teacher Martin Harrison participated in this unusual meeting of Body Weather methodology and Indigenous culture staged in the Central Desert, and wrote about it for RealTime [RT35, pp 8-9]. It involved a collaboration between Tess de Quincey, Desart, the peak body for Central Australian Aboriginal Arts and Crafts Centres, Sydney University’s Centre for Performance Studies and Sydney’s Performance Space. Spanning three years (1999-2000), it included a forum, three performance sites and laboratories staged over three weeks of each year accessible through an interactive website. Triple Alice 1 (1999) focused on contemporary arts practices of the Central Desert and brought together non-indigenous and Indigenous artists (among them Dorothy Napangardi and Polly Napangardi Watson) and local guest speakers to contextualise the site. In a three-week intensive Body Weather workshop participants made sensory and experiential mappings of space – in this case the landscape 100 kms north west of Alice Springs at Hamilton Downs in the MacDonnell Ranges.
The Sunshine Club, Queensland Theatre Company, photo Rob MacColl
The Sunshine Club
Excited at signs of a new Indigenous musical theatre, Keith Gallasch wrote of the 2000 production of The Sunshine Club, “Wesley Enoch and John Rodgers’ The Sunshine Club politicises the musical form with wit and subversive complexity, making marvellous demands on its singers and giving its musicians moments of the avant-garde abandon Rodgers is famous for…It’s another sign that the musical, so long denied to be a natural or indigenous Australian artform has proved itself in its Indigenous manifestation here and in a very different way in its precursors Jimmy Chi’s Bran Nue Dae (1990) and Corrugation Road (1996)…The Sunshine Club is political music theatre driven by a disturbing dialectic of hope and despair, of the fantasy that is the musical and the real that is the history it elaborates in such loving and telling detail” [RT35, p6].
When we were able to do it in RealTime, we paired reviews of a work. Eve Stafford in the same edition [RT 35, p26] saw The Sunshine Club as “tell[ing] a Murri story to a largely mainstream audience…the creative team proves that Murri stories can fit the genre like a glove. Through ironic laughter owing more to Murri sense of humour than Broadway, the audience digests the bitter pill, the unfolding injustices of barred entry, legislated discrimination in rights of access, passage, association and assembly.”
Nura Ward and Nelly Patterson, Ochre & Dust, photo Lisa Tomasetti
Ochre & Dust
At the end of this period, at the 2000 Adelaide Festival I saw Ochre & Dust, a moving performance by Nura Ward and Nellie Paterson directed by Aku Kadogo, and responded: “Within an installation by Fiona Foley, from a large central mound of red earth the women tell their stories. Alongside is a scatter of shiny white bone-like sculptures and behind, a set of five elliptical screens projecting Heidrun Löhr’s atmospheric projections of the desert (many in black and white subvert the postcard familiarity of locations like Uluru). The power of the story of enforced departure and fragmentation in the community of Maralinga holds in the spare telling in Pitjantjatjara language translated by Ruth Anangka. Two strong women speak quietly and seriously in turn (“I’ll let this lady speak now”) eyes downcast, tapping lightly on the earth with spindly sticks. They sing with sadness about a community disabled by one thieving act that saw families split, relocated in country for which they had no language” [RT36, p 23].
Six years of experiment, growth, despair & hope
So in a mere six years, a period of political heavy weather, amid signs of hope and despair, we saw the emergence of a courageous generation of Indigenous artists many of whom were to become key players throughout the succeeding decades. This was an era of boldness and experiment from Indigenous performance-makers working independently and in collaboration with non-indigenous artists, going solo or forming Indigenous companies, some of which survive to this day. Much of the impact of this work relied on powerful performances, strong integration of visual, musical and linguistic elements and fearlessness in making strong political statements. Above all, Indigenous artists displayed a deep generosity in sharing the experience of contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander life in all its complexity.
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Top image credit: Crying Baby, The Marrugeku Company, photo John Green
An email exchange with Hobart-based RealTime contributor Lucy Hawthorne incidentally revealed that she was in New York “doing a two-week performance art residency with an emphasis on social engagement” and that she’d “just seen Shaun Leonardo’s Primitive Games performed at the Guggenheim. It was pretty spectacular, transforming the Guggenheim’s massive atrium into an arena. This first iteration of the work focuses on gun violence, bringing together police officers, people affected by gun violence, recreational firearms users and veterans.”
The New York Times previewed Primitive Games revealing the work to be inspired by Calcio Storico (“historical football”), a violent community ‘sport’ — often a no holds barred physical fight — mixing soccer, rugby, wrestling and boxing. Held once a year in Florence, possibly from the 14th century on, when not occasionally banned, it was initially a game for aristocrats until becoming broadly communal with four teams representing the quarters of the city.
Primitive Games was commissioned by the Guggenheim’s Social Practice initiative and aims to defuse violent situations in various circumstances and escalated by the violent, un-nuanced use of language in current public and political discourse. In the ArtNet interview, Leonardo argues, “So if we can more carefully read how our bodies move during these times, during these experiences, these memories of conflict, how is it that we can use that skill to better read someone that we’re perceiving to be ‘other’?”
I’m intrigued by Leonardo’s phenomenological strategy at a time when protests against gun violence in the USA are increasing on the street and in the lobbying of politicians. I wonder what art, other than plays and television series, can bring to the issue, even on small and, optimistically, viral scale. Lucy’s response is not encouraging:
“The arena floor and participants’ clothes are the same white as the museum’s walls, and the result is visually slick but also somewhat sanitising. As with many such projects, the success of Primitive Games cannot be measured purely in terms of the end performance, but I do question whether performing the work for a relatively small art world audience at the Guggenheim can really effect cultural and political change. Addressing gun violence in the USA through socially engaged art while guns are so readily available seems akin to trying to fix a life-threatening wound with just a flimsy bandaid.”
Whatever its limits, the project is appealing as perhaps one of a number of potential strategies to engage creatively with violence in unexpected ways. I’m curious to see how it evolves.
This is Part 1 of a two-part look at RealTime’s visual arts coverage. Read Part 2 here.
As Assistant Editor this year for RealTime, I’ve had the enviable role of sifting through all 64 editions from the magazine’s first decade in order to survey visual arts coverage during this period. While RealTime is perhaps best known for its documentation of experimental performance and media arts, I found such an abundance of visual arts material that one of my biggest challenges was deciding which pieces to highlight in an overwhelmingly erudite and thought-provoking collection.
My own relationship to RealTime, and to visual arts, is a close one. I’ve proofread the magazine since 2010, started reviewing films for it shortly after and joined the in-house staff in 2012 as Advertising Sales Manager. As a reader, I first picked up a copy at a dance studio in the early 2000s. Before that, in the late 90s, I was a fine arts student at COFA (now UNSW Art and Design), a member of the generation of young artists that figures in RealTime’s often bleak coverage of the impact of economic rationalism on tertiary visual arts education and artist-run spaces in Australia at that time.
Being propelled through these articles back to the world of a younger self was disorienting yet illuminating; seeing the period encapsulated and analysed here gave a wider context to personal memories. Something that struck me particularly was how RealTime’s first decade coincided with a period of transformation in the arts: technically, with the rapid onset of digital technologies, politically, with economic rationalism, and culturally, with Indigenous and Asian-Australian artists gaining prominence.
In Part 1 of my two-part overview of the decade 1994-2004, I look at coverage of the structures and institutions that facilitated new developments in contemporary art — tertiary education, the alternative gallery scene, state-funded festivals of contemporary art, and, in a wide-ranging historical overview by Djon Mundine, the Aboriginal art “industry.” I then move on to discuss other surveys of Indigenous art.
Interconnectivity & emergence
RealTime’s Managing Co-Editor Keith Gallasch has described Sydney’s contemporary arts scene during the 1990s as a golden age of interconnectivity between art forms. From the magazine’s inception in 1994, RealTime reflected and promulgated this sense of hybridity in a national context, enticing readers to traverse artforms rather than sticking to their primary interest areas. Amid the vast array of practices reviewed, the visual arts were no exception, with works and exhibitions typically complex, multilayered and resistant to categorisation.
A selection of artist interviews is illustrative: UK-based Crow, whose grunge installations encompass performance, text, photography and site-specific histories related to mental health [RT 17, p 35]; the elegant sculptural installations and public artworks of Robyn Backen, exploring technologies of vision [RT 24, p 41]; multimedia artist and lecturer Leigh Hobba, with a background in video art, sound, photography, drawing and collage [RT 33, p 29]; Indigenous artist Fiona Foley whose diverse practice includes community projects, public art, set design, and traditional batik and dying techniques [Living the red desert, RT 35, p 34]; and Ruark Lewis, with work ranging across installation, performance, text, sound, public art and collaborative projects [RT 38, p 33].
RealTime’s editors and writers sought out the places where ground was being broken across both old and new media; the sense of the experimental and untried emanating from emerging artists, including fine arts graduates, new cross-cultural conversations, multidisciplinary approaches, new media and the transformative potential of more traditional forms.
Bolstered by funding from the Australia Council’s newly formed New Media Arts Board from 1996 on, the cutting edge field that included digital art, hypertext, gaming, web and bio-art received an enormous amount of coverage from RealTime from its first edition to the NMAB’s dismantling in 2004 and thereafter. A forthcoming overview will address this significant field and its influence on other practices.
From the mid-90s onwards, RealTime was committed to covering the trajectory of the emerging artist and the sorts of spaces and conditions that formed ‘laboratories’ for experimental contemporary art. Articles explored tertiary fine arts education, graduate exhibitions and artist-run spaces and initiatives which were gaining currency in the 90s as venues for contemporary artists to kick-start their careers, while also offering a more liberating alternative to the private gallery system. The writers who focused on these issues were frequently visual artists themselves, sometimes also working as university lecturers, bringing to light in their coverage a sympathetic picture of the predicament of both art institutions and emerging artists.
RealTime’s responses to the annual Hatched: Healthway National Graduate Show and Symposium at PICA (Perth Institute of Contemporary Art) reveals tertiary fine arts departments forced to perform a precarious balancing act following the newly elected Howard Government’s university funding cuts in 1996, between adopting an increasingly cautious managerial model and fostering risk-taking and adventurousness in new generations of contemporary artists. Dean Chan noted the negative impact of economic rationalism on the work produced by visual arts students in his report on Hatched 1997 [Panic (at) Hatched, RT 20, p 41], “when funding allocations more than ever before require qualification and quantification in terms of performance measurement criteria,” though a notable exception was a series of paintings of digitally manipulated imagery by SCA (Sydney College of the Arts) graduate Sean Gladwell.
The following year, in an article ominously titled “The brave and the brutalised,” [RT 26, p 11], Perth correspondent Sarah Miller puts the beleaguered state of visual arts education into context:
“…over the past decade, and particularly since the amalgamation of art schools into the university system, arts education (both creative and liberal) has been under increasing attack. Such attacks have been compounded by the restructuring (downsizing) of the university sector and the reintroduction of fees. It is argued that universities (including their poor art school cousins) have never suffered so much. They are ridiculed in the press, sneered at by politicians and dismissed by industry (the real world) and are under increasing pressure to perform in an economically rational climate (ie without any money).”
Despite these grim conditions, the 1998 Hatched exhibition and symposium leave Miller with a tentatively optimistic view on “the persistence and power of artmaking and the value – not simply fiscal – of an education in the arts.” In the same edition, her article is complemented by an eloquent overview by art and architectural lecturer at UWS, Philip Kent [Grading the making of art, RT 26, p 12], of the issues arising from the absorption of many art schools into Australian universities in the late 1980s – an initiative that had a clear impact on the way a new wave of fine arts graduates conceptualised the art they were making.
Jump ahead a couple of years to RealTime’s 2000 education feature, and artist and lecturer Barbara Bolt highlights the predicament of the “Art teacher as anxious manager,” [RT 38, p 12] in the lead-up to an ACUADS (Australian Council of Art and Design Schools) conference that year. The ACUADS newsletter prompts Bolt to analyse the use of corporatese in relation to visual arts education, and to consider its impact on lecturers and students alike:
“Like all university departments and faculties, art and design schools took on the language of managerialism in order to “get bums on seats,” to be accountable and satisfy the number crunchers. But has this effort led to greater self determination and leadership or to an increase in creative achievement and satisfaction? It seems not.”
Contrasting the “fearful anxiety” of art school administrations with the more positive “playful anxiety” required of art students, Bolt rallies art teachers to shake off “static and rigid representational concepts” that engender “fear and trembling.” She urges, “We should leap into the void and become chameleons for the day. Otherwise, what sort of leadership can art and design schools provide?”
The galleries: ARIs and alternatives
Subject too to the forces of surging neoliberalism were the artist-run spaces and alternative galleries that were often the first port of call for newly minted art school graduates, including Sydney’s First Draft, Hobart’s CAST (now CAT) and Adelaide’s CACSA (now closed). RealTime articles of the 90s and early 2000s chart the shifting fortunes of Australia’s vibrant alternative exhibition scene, providing a valuable snapshot of venues that prevail, and those that now exist only in documented form. A selection of Sydney-focused articles provides a good sense of the history. Jacqueline Millner begins a 1997 report on Sydney’s alternative gallery scene [New guard avant-garde: Sydney’s alternative gallery scene, RT 19, p 9] by noting the recent loss of spaces like Selenium, Airspace, Toast and Particle, before profiling the emergence of new ones. Of these galleries in their infancy, Gallery 4A (now 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art) still thrives, while 151 Regent St, Side-On Inc, Raw Nerve and Room 35 have fallen victim to the rising value of real estate.
In RT 23 [p 32], Millner visits First Draft’s last exhibition of 1997, at a perilous time when public funding for the 11-year-old gallery had been withdrawn. “Considering the vital role the gallery has played over the last 11 years to nurture a wide spectrum of emerging contemporary artists, this is very bad news for Sydney’s visual arts community,” writes Millner while noting that the incoming directors were determined to continue running First Draft, albeit with the added complications of having to secure sponsorship and raise exhibitors’ rents [The gallery survives to this day]. In an acute critique from 1998, Alex Gawronski examines the effects of neoliberalism and gentrification in the lead-up to the Olympics, on Sydney and Melbourne’s artist-run spaces as soaring rents forced gallery tenants out.
In an echo of the education article themes, Gawronski writes, “Beyond such prosaic issues lies evidence of a deeply rooted attitude to contemporary art at social and governmental levels. In certain ‘official’ contexts contemporary art is regarded with suspicion as a type of luxurious, irresponsible hobby, largely because of its apparent disregard for profit.”
He concludes, “Thankfully, artist-run spaces continue to emerge,” though this “is testimony more to the determination, commitment and faith of artists and gallery supporters than an informed cultural, social consciousness regarding contemporary art practice in Australia today.”
Post-Olympics, Gawronski returns to the alternative gallery theme to contrast two Sydney galleries exhibiting “distinctly hybrid tendencies,” but possessing markedly different management styles [Bridging the divide: gallery developments, RT 41, p 29]. Grey Matter, “located in the modest Glebe residence of its tenant, Ian Gerahty,” is a one-man operation, cosmopolitan in outlook (bringing in overseas as well as local artists); grassroots and exploratory in practice. Gallery 4A, five years on from Millner’s report on its early days, receives both corporate and Sydney City Council funding, offers art in exchange for patronage and fulfils an important role in promoting contemporary Asian art. Gawronski documents a moment when 4A was moving away from its smaller, communal beginnings towards a museum-like model. “The centre’s increasing success as a quasi-corporate entity has made its role vaguely ambiguous.”
Was the artist-run space/alternative gallery scene becoming too much a part of the system to generate truly experimental work? In 2001 Gawronski considers the suggestion, floated at a forum on artist-run spaces, that such venues have lost their radical potential and now merely mimic the commercial model [The outsider gallery, RT 45, p 26-27]. He presents a handful of alternatives that deliberately confound conventional exhibition structures, including the Glovebox series of temporary carpark exhibitions and Squatspace on Sydney’s Broadway. “Such efforts promise to render the exchange between artist, gallery and public venue and community more fluid and, at the same time, less definable.”
Say Ahh (detail), Sherre DeLys and Joan Grounds, Australian Perspecta 1997, cover RT#20
Bigger pictures: contemporary art festivals
As well as following the fortunes of small, grassroots projects and spaces, RealTime devoted significant attention to major festivals of contemporary art. Under the incisive visual arts editorship of Jacqueline Millner, the magazine ran features in partnership with Australian Perspecta, the NSW-based biennial festival of contemporary Australian art that ran from 1981-1999. RealTime writers tackled the grandiose themes of Perspecta 1997: Between Art and Nature [RT 20, p2-6], and Perspecta 1999: Living Here Now: Art and Politics [RT 32, p3-9] through a range of long-form theoretical responses considering aspects of Australian art.
Sue Best uses the Art and Nature theme to discuss why the work of Sydney women installation artists (Joan Brassil, Joan Grounds, Robyn Backen, Joyce Hinterding, Anne Graham, Simone Mangos, Janet Lawrence) has persuaded her “that installation is the artistic form or practice most suited to a reconsideration of our environment.” In “Artful protest,” Julia Jones explores the potential for art as activism through an examination of environmentalist actions in Australia and beyond.
The Man in White, Adam Cullen, 1999, image courtesy Yuill Crowley Gallery
Art and Politics elicited a number of disapproving responses to its theme, which was seen as tautological and a reflection of the lack of self-awareness characterising much Australian culture. Adam Geczy articulates the main concerns in “Art and politics: a tautology” [RT 32, p 4]:
“We forget that art is about giving recognition to a sensibility, that it is about ownership of a history – although Aboriginal art in general is highly cognisant of this. Art is about resistance, it salvages something that would otherwise have gone unnoticed or forgotten.”
“My real concern with the theme for this year’s Perspecta is that it reflects the torpid face of Australia’s arch-liberalism (attacks on the present government notwithstanding), for it turns politics into an option, instead of the epicentre of art’s vitality.”
Art and politics are intertwined in RealTime’s extensive onsite coverage of the third Asia-Pacific Triennial: “Beyond the Future” at Queensland Art Gallery in 1999 [Feature: RT @ APT3 & MAAP99, RT 34, p 20-24]. The collection of 15 reviews are a wonderful example of the way RealTime partnered with festivals to produce detailed, on-the-ground reporting that gave a sense of the character and shape of an event. Virginia Baxter’s review offers a window onto Small Worlds, the APT’s opening event – a panoply of spectacle, ritual and protest art, offering “another kind of geography” where installations from different regions are placed shoulder to shoulder, creating unexpected dialogues.
“Gordon Bennett’s powerful totems glance sidelong at Jun-Jieh Wang’s pink neon Urlaub. Within the sites of Katsushige Nakahashi’s crashed fighter plane made of 10,000 photographs, Xu Bing’s silkworms slowly spin.”
Baxter conjures an experience both exhilarating and troubling, given grim references in many artworks to oppressive conditions in their creators’ countries of origin.
In their assessment of APT3, Going Glocal, Jo Holder and Catriona Moore note various strands of political comment, though in some cases the message is minimised through poor placement, or “that curious re-separation of form and content, spectacle and information that characterises many contemporary art events.” There are critiques of globalisation and cultural commodification, a “cautious re-writing of the Universal Exhibition’s legacy of an idealist (though historically imperialist) space of communication across cultures,” and “Indonesian installations dealing with organised violence and militarism.”
At a critical moment when East Timorese were being massacred during the struggle for independence against Indonesian occupation, however, Holder and Moore feel the festival lost an opportunity to make a stronger statement in protest at Australia’s inaction: “This APT is long on artistic creativity but short on political imagination.”
As was evident in the APT coverage, RealTime was attuned to both celebratory aspects and complexities of the manifold cross-cultural conversations happening on the festival and exhibition circuit. Exhibitions and symposia on Indigenous Australian art (both traditional and contemporary) were documented, migrant experiences were shared, and the flourishing of Asian contemporary art was given serious attention.
Indigenous visual art vs the canon
RealTime’s coverage of Indigenous visual art in the 1990s reveals a dynamic, multifaceted body of work encompassing the increasing prominence of Indigenous contemporary artists and nuanced contextualisation of traditional forms. Exhibitions and articles looked at copyright issues, protocols, commercialisation, women’s artistic practices, political satire, appropriation and, of course, the impact of colonialism.
As part of the 1998 Festival of the Dreaming, Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art mounted two historically significant exhibitions: Bark Paintings from Yirrkala and Tiwi Prints: A Commemorative Exhibition 1969-1996. The June-July RealTime contains an edited transcript of a talk given by Djon Mundine (former Senior Curator at the MCA) in connection with the exhibitions [We are not useless, RT 25, p 4-5]. It’s a standout piece tracing the intertwined histories of bark painting at Yirrkala and the land rights struggle that culminated in the 1976 Land Rights Act in the Northern Territory. Mundine goes on to chart the impact of missionaries, the Australia Council and tourism on the Aboriginal art “industry” and Indigenous fine art, including pressure to produce saleable “suitcase art”. The Yirrkala and Tiwi exhibitions however signal a return to large-scale abstraction, in paintings and prints that Mundine presents as powerful evidence of Indigenous culture’s enrichment of Australian life.
No less vital, though less conciliatory, are the works in Black Humour, an exhibition of Indigenous satirical art reviewed by Cate Jones in the same year [Distinctly Black, RT 26, p 49]. Paintings by Gordon Hookey and Harold Wedge lampoon the Howard Government and Pauline Hanson, as does the Campfire Group’s installation representing a Pauline Hanson fish and chip shop with “crumbed aboriginal artefacts” on the menu.
In the wake of September 11, Suzanne Spunner reports on a week of Indigenous-focused visual arts events in Darwin, including the NATSIAA Aboriginal Art Award as well as a forum organised by 24HR Art at NTU on “Criticism and Indigenous Art, or Sacred Cows and Bulls at the Gate” [Darwin: Hot enough for ya? RT 46, p 10]. Here, speaker Djon Mundine problematises the very action of attempting to interpret Indigenous art through a Western critical lens, insisting that, “until Western art critics learnt Warlpiri as routinely as they might learn French, there can be no real progress in their understanding of Indigenous art.”
“Mundine raised the difficulties of situating the subject amid the territorial imperatives of the two great houses of academe, Anthropology and Fine Arts, and argued that most Indigenous art doesn’t fit the canons of Western art, and to talk in a colloquial style smacks of colonialism and simplification, and to be a Modernist or Post-Colonialist tends to lead to mere comparison viz Aboriginal Cubism and other nonsenses.”
From: Show Me the Way to Go Home, 2002, Christian Thompson, RT#48 cover art, Gail Priest
Post-2001, RealTime looked increasingly to emerging multidisciplinary and new media practitioners like r e a (whose work had appeared on the cover of RT 3 and on p 8 and in RT 52, p20], Christian Bumbarra Thompson [RT 52, p 20] and Brook Andrew [RT 54, p 28], recently appointed Artistic Director of the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, the first Indigenous Australian artist to assume the role.
The range of authoritative voices responding to visual art for RealTime gave a clear and compelling sense of the wider conditions influencing the scene in Australia around the turn of the millennium. Perhaps because writers generally worked within the visual arts community, as practising artists, academics and administrators, a strong current of advocacy comes through; a belief in the value of the visual arts ecology at an inimical time.
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Part 2 of this overview will expand on complex cross-cultural conversations that arose from the wide field of contemporary Asian art, and will look at three multifaceted mediums that captured the zeitgeist: photography, video art and painting.
Baz Luhrmann’s Australia premiered in 2008. In RealTime 95, Robyn Archer challenges director Baz Luhrmann’s use of music “deeply tied to an unreconstructed dependency on our colonisers,” while Philip Brophy in RT89 says blame the country, not the film.
Archer’s angry if often witty response, “The sound of some other Australia,” is an edited version of her Manning Clark Lecture, “The price of survival,” which she delivered in 2009. Archer opens with a provocation posed by the great historian, “Would the price of survival as a people be the shedding of that attempt to preserve a European society?” In 2018, the question still needs to be posed — vigorously and just as passionately. Dealing with the film’s music, which she felt that reviewers had neglected to warn her about, provides Archer with a springboard to addressing key cultural issues raised by this “queer and kitsch film.”
Brophy, in a departure from arguing via his usual analysis of a film’s music and sound design, urges that Luhrmann’s Australia should be addressed as symptomatic of the context that created it — the broader culture and, specifically, the Australian film industry: “The film is inevitably an easy target — but using a narrow-gauge shotgun is an ineffective critical strategy when aimed at the nationalist mirage within which Australian cinema’s self-image has shimmered for over quarter of a century.”
Like Archer, Brophy detects shadowy forces embedded in the present: “unexpectedly, I find the film to be addressed to the dead: to speak to the ghosts of this thing called ‘Australia,’ who haunt the psyche, the mediascape and the political forum…”
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Australia, director Baz Luhrmann, writers Stuart Beattie, Baz Luhrmann, Ronald Harwood, Richard Flannagan, cinematography Mandy Walker, editing Dody Dorn, Michael McCusker, production design Catherine Martin, 2008
Top image credit: ‘Australia’ promotional poster
We’ve scanned the 40 print editions of RealTime’s first six years, making available online a fascinating record of a period of wildly intensive creativity, new and fervent preoccupations, humour and angry arts politics. And lots of great writing.
The PDFs of editions 1-40 (1994-2000) are each searchable and, significantly, preserve the look of the magazine. For a long time, we were limited to one-spot colour throughout, black and white photographs and ink that imprinted itself on readers’ hands. A plan to provide a pair of white gloves with each copy never came to fruition. You can read an account of the early years of RealTime that we penned for our 10th birthday, describing how we worked and detailing the staff and contributing editors so significant to RealTime’s growing reach in this period.
In some ways the early RealTime was quite different from the magazine of 2001-2017. Art in the period 1994-2000 was very fluid with cross-artform practices that had evolved in the 1980s becoming more prevalent. This was one of the principal reasons we established the magazine, to draw public attention to innovative emerging and established artists, although our second edition revealed tensions between older performance artists and younger contemporary performance makers at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery and The Performance Space’s 25 Years of Performance Art (RT2, p9-11) held in May 1994.
In the spirit of the times RealTime content wasn’t initially divided into artform sections though we gradually succumbed under pressure from advertisers in particular, but without ever surrendering our focus on the interplay between practitioners and forms. In 1996 we formally brought film and media arts into the fold with our 12-page OnScreen supplement, though we had covered these regularly from our very first edition.
As well as previews and reviews there were epic editorials about contentious issues, copious listings and brief film, CD and book reviews. And there was humour from novelist Bernard Cohen and our back pages sports columns: Tee Off with the mysterious Vivienne Inch who viewed the world of arts politics through the eyes of a keen (alleged) golfer, and Tooth & Claw with Jack Rufus (a team of two arts scholars incisively applying art principles to football, soccer and cricket). We’ll soon run a selection of the best of Cohen, Tee Off and Tooth & Claw.
We hope you’ll enjoy browsing editions 1-40 whether you read them at the time or they’re a new experience of an era that seems to us now at RealTime even more diverse and spirited than we remembered.
First, an organ, a dark sacred warbling juxtaposed with an ominously modern buzzing. In the dark, a dazzling down-light illuminates a lone knight in shining armour refracting blues, flashing silver. The world brightens to grey, the colour sucked out. Her armour removed, a young woman, Joan of Arc (Sarah Snook), sits silent, expressionless in an abstracted evocation of the ground level interior of an intimidatingly huge mediaeval castle tower, its high semi-circling wall comprising long, seemingly soft, narrow strips of grey cloth, the hard floor lightened with the sheen of polished concrete, each aspect of this place a coherent melding of architectural past and present, hauntingly illuminated from a narrow palette of muted greys, blues and greens.
Likewise, the costuming of Joan’s male interrogators, all in black, evokes chic Edwardian elegance while appearing fashionably current, including French knight Bluebeard’s stylish folds, otherwise not out of place in a Velasquez painting. Joan’s attire however is markedly modern, soft, grey and white, as if exercise-ready. She’s at first glance a 21st century woman. She is anything but.
In director-writer Imara Savage’s shuffling of scenes from George Bernard Shaw’s St Joan (1923), she opens with his fourth, staged effectively as the first of a series of arraignment and trial scenes which provide the production’s core. Here Joan sits in silence while the English and French authorities engage in testy debate, with clever sparring between Bill Zappa as a sharp Jesuitical Bishop of the Holy Roman Empire and David Whitney as the blunt Earl of Warwick. The production’s other scenes are realised as interpolated flashbacks: edited key moments from Shaw and new scenes by Savage and playwright Emme Hoy in which Joan communicates with her voices — St Margaret, St Catherine and the Archangel Michael.
The English want Joan dead, the French clergy for her to repent and be saved. But they do find common ground for their prosecution — each has much to lose. Joan’s vision challenges the authority of the Holy Roman Empire with both heresy and nationalism, while for the British (nationalism they like) it eliminates the feudal aristocracy from the chain of command between God and King, on the one hand, and, on the other, Joan and the people. We sense already that Joan’s fate is sealed, with even the seeding of the final rationale for her execution — heresy. The positioning of the scene is a clever move by Savage, establishing a thematic framework and underlining Joan’s inevitable helplessness. The same group of men will appear in the end in a semi-circle around her, delivering to us as much as to Joan their pulsing litany of reckoning.
When it comes to the fraught mediaeval notion of the divine right of kings Joan is an absolutist; not for her the subtleties of power, hierarchy and religious law. These she can ignore with tunnel vision purpose that first wins the day — her successful lifting of the seige of Orléans and enabling the coronation of the Dauphin — but then loses the war with her failed siege of Paris and subsequent capture. In her unwavering support of the monarchy — absolute, masculine — Joan is no feminist (and in France a hero of the left and right), but nonetheless Shaw, an ardent feminist, and moreso Savage and Hoy see Joan’s life as the tragedy of a lone, powerful idealist destroyed by male pragmatists.
The ingredients are apt and plentiful, Shaw’s Inquisitor grumpily foreseeing the unfolding of a Greek tragedy. Joan’s rapid rise to power is countered with her equally rapid fall to defeat in war, her profound vulnerability in the face of torture and a sudden loss of faith when deserted by the voices of saints whose predictions were not realised. The latter is a wrenching, pivotal moment in Shaw’s play, as it is in this production, when Joan’s sheer aloneness (pinpointed by her accusers) and fear of pain compels her to sign a confession, only to tear it up when she is told she will be forgiven but imprisoned forever. Once more her spirit soars defiantly, but now with a rare, flowing poetry evoking all that she will lose:
“I could let the banners and the trumpets and the knights and soldiers pass me and leave me as they leave the other women, if only I could still hear the wind in the trees, the larks in the sunshine, the young lambs crying through the healthy frost, and the blessed church bells that send my angel voices floating to me on the wind. But without these things, I cannot live …”
Joan’s sudden shifts of mood and temper, from flailing depression to spirited anger, are realised by Sarah Snook with wrenching acuity and lucidity, revealing the complexities of Joan’s embrace of her fate — to die in fire, despite her voices having told her she would not, but maintaining her faith with fervour. The sense of tragedy is given even greater weight by Joan’s hubris; though ever denying vanity, she brooks no contradiction, however well-reasoned, for herself, her voices and her unwise military strategy.
Savage’s ambition is to transform Shaw’s St Joan into a full-blown tragedy in the great tradition. She senses one in Shaw, but his subject is often more argued about than seen and we sense little of Joan’s voices. Savage has felt compelled to grant herself and co-writer Emme Hoy licence to shear away great swathes of Shaw and run with the poet in Joan, drawing on a variety of historical and other sources. In these eerie moments, the dark closing in with an intense blue around an awed Joan, Max Lyandvert’s score elevates the sense of mystery, sadly beautiful with melodic harp and strings in a moment in which Joan expresses her great fear of pain, contrasting with the recurrent slow, grim bell-tolling that frames the interrogation scenes (ironically she tells her General —Brandon McClelland — that it’s in the sound of bells that she hears her voices).
Snook’s possessed Joan speaks in her own voice as both herself and her saints. With a cruel litany-like insistence, the voices demand she recall returning to her empty family home to find the footprints of enemy soldiers who might have even touched her bed. The sense of personal invasion is palpable. The enigmatic question the voices repeatedly pose, “Are you an empty house, or a burning house?” commences here and is iterated to the very end of the play. Elsewhere Joan argues anxiously with the voices, desperately doubting her capacity to lead, to fight, to succeed.
If Shaw deftly created a Joan who seems to be part divine fool — a logic-bending scourge of political and religious convention — and part plain-speaking, enthusiastic youngster, Savage and Hoy allow Snook to bracingly embody her possession, cross-legged, rocking, eyes closed, hands clapped to ears, or engaging wide-eyed with her saints, her voice lyrically transcendent. She is more complex, more believable if stranger than Shaw’s Joan and undeniably tragic.
Snook and fellow performers comprise a taut ensemble, the characters’ antagonisms contained for the most part by a quasi-formal courtliness in diction and movement. Any exception stands out — Joan in every respect, Gareth Davies’ pragmatic Dauphin with his run-on whingeing and slumped posture, and the English Priest’s (Sean O’Shea) rabid testing of decorum in debate and effective prosecution with his 56 ridiculous claims against Joan, reduced by John Gaden’s coolly practical Inquisitor to 12. There are frequent pointedly humorous moments like the Priest’s claim, “No Englishman is ever fairly beaten” and his irritation that Joan’s voices don’t speak in English.
As often with adaptations, the cut and pasting of original and additional material can at times lose a production its sense of cohesion. Those unfamiliar with Shaw’s play with its epic expositions and relatively straightforward narrative might be hard-pressed to clearly grasp Joan’s story in this version. Among other things, her defeat at Paris is glossed over and the merging of the General Dunois and Joan’s soldier ally (Jack in Shaw’s play) into one character results in his inexplicably abrupt turning against her. And I didn’t know what to make of Snook’s Joan seated clutching her side in the last trial scene, as if perhaps wounded. If performed in full, Shaw’s play can run to three hours; this version comes in at 110 minutes and could benefit from a little more detail from the original including what precisely enthralled her followers. At moments the production has a rather peremptory feel, for example when Joan shortens her hair, and even in the staging of the production’s final image, which — going into metaphorical overdrive — abruptly if strikingly declares that Joan’s fate is solely in her own hands. Despite these hesitations, overall the rhythm of the production’s alternation of three timelines — arraignment and trial; earlier events; Joan’s encounters with her voices — is deeply engaging and rich with further potential.
This Saint Joan is not Shaw’s, although advertised as such. It’s an insightful adaptation, a powerful convincing standalone work finely directed, written and designed and blessed with Sarah Snook’s account of a Joan who is by turns heroic, proud and truthful, doubting, confused and agonisingly distraught, and finally, defiantly tragic. Imara Savage writes in her program note, “We want to show a young woman who is flawed but filled with conviction to the very end, someone who insists on living on her own terms, no matter the cost.”
In the abstract this is fine, but as Savage asks earlier, “How is Joan a hero if we take both her religious fundamentalism and her nationalism seriously?” Which we have to. The advantage of the Savage-Hoy-Snook Joan is that she embodies more otherness than Shaw’s and is not simply reducible to 21st century individualism or idealised feminism. She is stranger than that, and better for it.
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Sydney Theatre Company, Saint Joan, writers George Bernard Shaw, Imara Savage, Emme Hoy, director Imara Savage, performers Gareth Davies, John Gaden, Brandon McClelland, Sean O’Shea, Socratis Otto, Sarah Snook, Anthony Taufa, David Whitney, William Zappa, set designer David Fleischer, costume designer Renée Mulder, lighting designer Nick Schlieper, composer, sound designer Max Lyandvert; Roslyn Packer Theatre, Sydney, 9-30 June
Our grand archiving project is well underway. For the first time online you’ll soon be able to browse RealTime editions 1 to 40, a telling record of 1994-2000, years of creative ferment when hybridity took root, new media technologies were embraced, the not-so Creative Nation cultural policy took effect and the Australia Council extensively supported innovation if at one point creating a storm by attempting to rid itself of funding allocation via peer assessment. Coming up shortly, we’ll overview the rise of Aboriginal theatre 1994-2000 and map visual arts trajectories 1994-2004.
In this edition we pay tribute to the late Tom E Lewis. We review Theatre Kantanka’s Obscene Madame D and reflect on the company’s idiosyncratic productions over its long history. The appointment of Fiona Winning, ex-Performance Space and Sydney Festival, as Head of Programming at Sydney Opera House, raises hopes that Sydney’s beleaguered independent dance and performance community might gain more visibility. The SOH’s new Unwrapped program prompted us to look back to 2002, to the beginnings of the halcyon days of SOH’s The Studio. Jon Rose and Chris Abrahams have released an adventurous new CD, titled Peggy and referencing both the violin’s tuning pegs and Rose’s residency at Peggy Glanville-Hicks’ home where the album was recorded. It proved an opportunity for us to update RealTime’s extensive Jon Rose archive. Much more from and about the archive in our next edition! Keith & Virginia
“Tom E Lewis as Lear first appears in white suit, black cowboy shirt and golden crown, playing straight to the audience like a club entertainer, charming, volatile, his anger really felt, the cracks in his composure rapidly widening, his movements increasingly manic… (Later, he) is wonderfully affecting when, with flowers in his hair, he recognises his failings.” RealTime 119, Feb-March, 2014
Returning to my review of The Shadow King upon hearing of the death of Tom E Lewis at 59 years of age on 10 May triggered vivid memories of the actor’s bracing account of Lear in this production at the 2014 Sydney Festival. Lewis co-created the production with then Malthouse Artistic Director Michael Kantor in English, Aboriginal languages and creoles, subtly varying Shakespeare’s plot to reflect tensions within an Aboriginal community in northern Australia internally conflicted over country and mineral wealth. Lewis and Kantor speak about the production here alongside brief excerpts from a performance. Lewis had also played Othello in a 2006 Darwin Theatre Company production.
Tom E Lewis, Frances Djuilbing, Damion Hunter, The Shadow King, Malthouse, photo Jeff Busby
I recalled too Lewis’ impressive film debut in the culturally challenging lead role in Fred Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) and his subsequent appearances in the miniseries A Town Like Alice (1981) and We of the Never Never (1985), and in the films The Proposition (2005) and Goldstone (2016), the latter directed by Indigenous filmmaker Ivan Sen.
Sen’s Yellow Fella (2005) incisively documented Lewis’ painful search for the grave of his white Welsh father who separated from the actor’s mother Angelina when his son was a baby. Angelina, a traditional Nunggubuyu woman of southern Arnhem Land, appears in the film, along with 16mm footage of the 1950s Roper River mission in Ngukurr in south-east Arnhem Land where Lewis grew up.
Sen’s cinematography dances between intense close-ups and the wide landscapes of Lewis’ country. A brief but representative excerpt from the film can be seen on YouTube.
Tom E Lewis was also a richly expressive singer and songwriter as heard on his solo albums Sunshine After Rain (2005) and Beneath the Sun (2013). Both were produced by Darwin-based Skinnyfish Music, so integral to the creative life of Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu (the must-see documentary Gurrumul by Paul Damien Williams is another example of culturally empathetic filmmaking).
As Artistic Director, Lewis also played a key role in establishing the Djilpin Arts Cultural Foundation an hour south of Katherine for Beswick and Arnhem Land communities. In 2006 he was presented with the Australia Council’s Red Ochre Award for lifetime achievement in Indigenous arts.
For over 40 years in diverse ways, Tom E Lewis significantly enriched the lives of many Australians with his art. Ours is a great loss, lightened a little by film, CD and recollection of a vivid stage presence.
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The family of Tom E Lewis (Balang T Lewis to his community) have granted the media permission for the use of images and the voice of the artist.
Top image credit: L-R: Jada Alberts, Rarriwuy Hick, Tom E Lewis, The Shadow King, photo Prudence Upton
Once again, Theatre Kantanka, led by Brazilian-Australian director-designer Carlos Gomes (he’s written about scenography and about Brazilian theatre for RealTime), has created an idiosyncratic work that entices its audience to brave an unfamiliar world, this one conjured from the writing of Hilda Hilst (1930-2004), a Brazilian whose work is only beginning to appear in English translation.
A poet, novelist and dramatist, Hilst was above all an experimenter who defied the formalism of the patriarchal literary order, writing from a distinctive female perspective: sensory, corporeal and aching to know “the sense of things.” All of this is evident in Hilst’s short novel Obscene Madame D and Kantanka’s account of it. The subject’s stream of consciousness engagement with the past is fused with intimations of mortality and an intense focus on the body and the world of the senses. Madame D (Katia Molino) obsessively relives her late husband Ehud’s repudiation of her urgent philosophical querying and his reduction of her to mere sexual being.
Aggressively reclusive, the ageing Madame D bares her bottom at the window to passersby, dons monstrous masks, frightening the locals, cruelly refuses the sympathies of a neighbour and immerses herself compulsively in recalled dialogues with her husband. The interior world of Madame D conjured in the book’s poetic prose is rendered vividly theatrical by Gomes and his team. Save for a few pieces of furniture, Madame D’s home is a spectral space; large painted drops hung at each end are screens onto which are projected images cast by her psyche, drawn and animated (Gomes and Sam James), sometimes abstract (geometric steps), sometimes concrete (a sketched stairway).
Eerily mutable, Madame’s home is ours, her eyes ours, our earphones her ears, open to the soundscapes of memory and curiosity: “What is a wing?” triggers the flap of wings, mention of the heart brings its beat. Ambiences are woven through with music (Gail Priest). As Madame recalls tender erotic times with Ehud, a soft organ melody underpinned with a slow pulsing is counterpointed with a clock ticking like dripping water. Elsewhere the sounds of sucking mud, insectile skitterings and a lava burst of noise conjure fear and primal states. Image and sound in Obscene Madame D come together to create a quasi-cinematic experience at the centre of which is an actual body (Katia Molino). Her hair wild and red, face obscured, private, she is a restless soul, fascinated with but taxed, as she ages, by a wealth of sensory recall and ever horrified by the banality of the everyday.
When Ehud (voiced by Arky Michael), sounding as ever gentle and reasonable, blocks Madame D’s existential probing and insists she make him coffee, her limbs turn rigid, arms full-stretched, the task long and tortuous, the accompanying sound like a compulsive scratching in a vast, humming emptiness. When Ehud, an animated silhouette at the top of the stairs, is caught in a loop as he’s about to enter his room, Madame’s imitation of his movement is like a little dance of perhaps empathy or short-lived longing. But when the voice of Ehud attempts seduction, Madame seated, masked like a bizarre fish, responds, her body arching, desire rippling through her until she rejects it. She “is not at service” to Ehud, dead or alive. Countering Ehud’s objectification of her, Madame reduces him to mere trousers in mocking play with his pants.
Madame D is also wracked with fear and explosive anger. Windows crack, the hands of a clock run backwards and then float freely; a herd of wild pigs thunders across the walls. She declares herself a pig sow and invokes a porcine god, an animist creator that inhabits everything. In her resistance and questing, Madame has created her own metaphysics, unconstrainedly natural, malleable (the creatures she becomes in her expressive mask-making), free of the culture represented by Ehud. She might not find the answers she seeks, nor happily face the abyss, but she makes a start at it, obscenely upending convention with a once constrained body and a once repressed imagination.
Blending tense stillness and violent release, Katia Molino realises Madame D as a volatile presence, extrovert when masked, regressive when hidden beneath a table or a lampshade, there and not there, resonating with the magical, sometimes nightmarish instability of the production’s finely crafted aural and visual imagery. To inhabit Madame D’s world with her is a mysterious and rewarding experience, an immersive sharing of the sensibility of a woman making a cosmological home of her own.
A long-remembered reviewing highlight for me is a Sidetrack Performance Group production, The Bookkeeper of Rua dos Dourados (RealTime 52, 2002), adapted from the writings of Fernando Pessoa by Don Mamouney and Carlos Gomes and directed and designed by Gomes. It brought me into contact with the great Portuguese writer, just as Obscene Madame D has introduced me to Hilda Hilst, the only Brazilian female writer I’ve encountered other than Clarice Lispector. I’m grateful for the cosmopolitan spirit of this production in an Australian theatre culture gradually becoming more diversely Australian, more female, more Aboriginal and connecting with Asia, but beyond the UK and occasionally the US, too rarely engaging with the rest of the world..
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Theatre Kantanka, Obscene Madame D, adapted from the novel by Hilda Hilst, director, designer Carlos Gomes, performer Katia Molino, composer, sound artist Gail Priest, video artist Sam James, lighting designer Fausto Brusamolino, producer Harley Stumm, Intimate Spectacle; 107 Projects, Redfern, Sydney, 23-27 May
A video interview with Carlos Gomes and Katia Molino about the 2014 production Club Singularity with excerpts from this cosmologically preoccupied performance.
Caroline Wake delights in Bargain Garden, Theatre Kantanka’s evocation of the seduction, repulsion and regret that come with our culture of excess. A collaboration with the contemporary music Ensemble Offspring.
Keith Gallasch on the PACT-Theatre Kantanka Crime Site, a show about the murder of babies with a cast that included young performers Mish Grigor and Zoe Coombs Marr.
Keith Gallasch is taken with Theatre Kantanka’s Innana’s Descent, an immersive psycho-cultural evocation of 5,000 year-old Sumerian culture played out deep below Sydney’s CBD in 2002.
RealTime issue #50 Aug-Sept 2002 p36
There was a time when Sydney Opera House’s The Studio under Executive Producer Philip Rolfe and with vigorous programming by Virginia Hyam working with Craig Donarski consistently featured local, national and independent performers. NSW Premier and Arts Minister Bob Carr (1995-2005) had been heavily lobbied to make The Studio a home for local artists and new music in particular. A couple of years after its opening its scope was widened. A 2002 RealTime interview with Hyam, a former Melbourne Fringe Festival Artistic Director, opened optimistically: “Hyam’s program for the first six months of 2002 is a strong one, filling a significant cultural gap in Sydney’s artistic life between the mainstream and the cutting edge of Performance Space.”
This and subsequent wide-ranging programs included hip hop, physical theatre, contemporary classical (Ensemble Offspring, Synergy, Taikoz) and experimental music (The Machine for Making Sense), cabaret (Paul Capsis, Christa Hughes), comedy, dance (local and Indigenous artists in Lisa Ffrench’s Dance Tracks series plus Phillip Adams’ BalletLab), contemporary performance and, significantly, the commissioning of new works. There were many good years in which popular (with a difference) and experimental artists shared a common space even if there was never enough room to meet escalating needs. But in the current decade few such opportunities have been consistently offered independent performers. That might be changing at Sydney Opera House.
Jodee Mundy, Personal, photo Anna Kucera
Fiona Winning, former Performance Space Artistic Director 1999-2008 and Sydney Festival Head of Programming 2012-17, has recently been appointed Head of Programming at the Sydney Opera House, overseeing some 700 productions and events annually but finding time and space for Unwrapped, a program of four works per season scheduled for May and August each year and presented in The Playhouse. On being appointed to her new role, Winning said “I especially look forward to collaborating with the vibrant local arts community —alongside Australian and international artists and partners — to engage our audiences with brilliant contemporary ideas and performances.”
The first Unwrapped featured two works from Melbourne, Jodee Mundy’s Personal and Two Jews Walk into a Theatre… created and performed by Gideon Obarzanek and Brian Lipson with choreography by Lucy Guerin and developed at the Sydney Theatre Company when Gideon Obarzanek was a resident artist there. Sydney choreographer Kristina Chan presented a new season of her solo performance A Faint Existence and cabaret artists Maeve Marsden and Libby Wood performed Mother’s Ruin: A Cabaret About Gin, much lauded here and overseas.
Brian Lipson, Gideon Obarzanek, Two Jews Walk into a Theatre, photo Anna Kucera
I caught two of the shows on one night of the season, each reflecting on their creators’ lives. Personal, an amiably played multimedia autobiographical account of growing up as the one hearing person in a deaf family engagingly revealed the perceptual tensions and ramifications of the experience. Mundy’s hyper-articulation and Auslan gesturing placed her hearing audience in the realm of her own experience as a youngster while communicating directly with her non-hearing audience who found themselves unusually advantaged with signed commentary just for them.
Two Jews… is laidback with the performance score spread across the floor before the seated artists, rare moments of ‘where are we?’ with recuperative improvisation, and a fascinating dynamic generated between Obarzanek’s simply spoken, careful delivery and actor Lipson’s slightly more theatrical inclinations. The pair become their fathers in an imagined encounter just prior to seeing their sons perform. Expectations about art, careers, onstage nudity — hilarious — and politics — disastrous — underline differences between cultures and generations. The work is bravely self-deprecating and touchingly revealing, ending with the fathers entering the theatre in which their sons perform a simple dance, uncompetitive, lyrical, melancholy in mood and gently funny in its innocence and the differences between the performers’ grasp of Lucy Guerin’s choreography. These men are very different beings, alone and together in a mutually shared emotional space. Two Jews Walk into a Theatre… is an engaging and memorable probing of masculinity with no need of a punchline.
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Sydney Opera House, Unwrapped: Personal, artistic director, writer-performer Jodee Mundy, director Merophie Carr, design Jen Hector, sound Madeleine Flynn & Tim Humphrey, video Rhian Hinkley, dramaturgy Sandra Fiona Long, movement Jo Dunbar; Two Jews Walk Into a Theatre, devisor-performers Brian Lipson, Gideon Obarzanek, director, choreographer Lucy Guerin, lighting designer Bosco Shaw, music Oren Ambarchi; Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, 9-13 May
Top image credit: Brian Lipson, Gideon Obarzanek, Two Jews Walk into a Theatre, photo Anna Kucera
In 2017 Jon Rose enjoyed a year-long residency at Peggy Glanville Hicks’ Paddington home in Sydney, programming highly regarded regular concerts and putting the last onto CD — keeping one 20-minute track from it — Peggy 6 — and recording the other performances, under better technical conditions, the next day.
I recently attended the launch at Foundry 616 of the CD, titled Peggy. Violinist Jon Rose and pianist Chris Abrahams improvised for an hour, very much in the form and spirit of the CD, yielding angular tonalities heightened by tuning differences, exhilaratingly taut asynchronous patternings and passages that transcendentally melded piano and violin into a bigger instrument.
For subsequent home CD listening I warmed up with a brace of Ornette Coleman tracks; there’s something quite propulsively sax-y about Rose’s way with a violin … or three — one violin, one tenor violin and “The Bird,” a darkly humming Hardanger tenor fiddle. Abrahams at a Steinway Grand elicits ripples, waves and thundering floods of notes, barely a discernible chord in ear-sight.
A first listening to the album reveals Peggy 1 (9’26”) opening spaciously with small independent musings moving gradually towards longer more expressive phrases in a performance that suggests exploratory co-existence in contrast with Peggy 2 which is a short, fast and dance-like, neatly formed duet kicked off with pizzicato and tapping on the violin over a rippling piano flowing into wild bowing and keyboard licks, trills and runs. Exhilarating.
From muted piano mutterings and briskly plucked and brushed strings and tapping Peggy 3 evolves magically in its first four minutes or so into a dense, buzzing hive, a pulsing ecosystem. On Peggy 5 (10’26”) the players are in tight, swirling sync, the full range of their instruments exploited, the violin siren-like, signalling, piano chugging, keyboard danced across, yielding moments of high intensity, especially around the five-minute mark, and ending in soaring flight, deep reverberation and then matching fast high-range forays on the way to delicately sweet final notes.
Peggy 6 (22’26”) opens with mezzo violin phrases against a deep, dark mass of piano murmurings recalling Abrahams’ playing with The Necks. The duetting breaks into discrete stuttering from which emerges a sustained stream of rapid multi-voiced violin bowing with bursts of song-like utterance alongside the piano’s restless questing. This subsides into a ruminative phase that in turn transmutes into a mysterious soundscape at the 10-minute mark, pulsing at 15 minutes into a wonderful deep-noted recurrent piano swagger with violin emerging low, buzzing then softly squeaking like an old wirescreen door in the wind. Darkness dissipates into discrete but simpatico utterances and silence. Recorded before a live audience, Peggy 6 is quite a sonic adventure.
The recording is lucid and immediate, equally capturing delicate exchanges and the drama of full-bodied passages with a well-weighted balance of piano and strings. In an interview in Cyclic Defrost, Rose expressed concern that the violin too often plays second fiddle in a piano-dominated Western musical culture: “we are always trying to get in tune with the piano.” The imbalance is nowhere evident on Peggy. He actually looked forward to “[playing] lots of open strings, which I do on two tracks, [then] the piano actually starts to sound out of tune, I get a great kick out of that.” Jon Rose and Chris Abrahams have made wonderful music out of such differences.
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Jon Rose, Chris Abrahams, Peggy, ReR CD, launch Foundry 616, Ultimo, Sydney, 7 May
Top image credit: Jon Rose, Chris Abrahams, photo courtesy the artists
Jim Denley speaks with Jon Rose, Don Banks Music Award Winner 2012
RealTime issue #108 April-May 2012, web
Post impressions
http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue82/8794
RealTime: Hollis Taylor’s book about an epic fence-playing journey
RealTime issue #82 Dec-Jan 2007 pg. 40
The sound of bicycles singing
http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue90/9432
Shannon O’Neill: Jon Rose & Robin Fox, Pursuit
RealTime issue #90 April-May 2009 pg. 48
Vigorous exercise & a well-balanced diet
http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue96/9829
Gail Priest: The now now festival 2010
RealTime issue #96 April-May 2010 pg. 39
http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue49/6759
Gail Priest surveys the issues and events of the REV Festival
RealTime issue #49 June-July 2002 online exclusive
In three gripping performances artists embodied strangely mutating personae, intriguing their audience in the intimate Readymade Works studio in Sydney’s inner city Ultimo. Curator Julie-Anne Long (and Co-director with Sam Chester of the space) programmed highly experienced artists, feeling, as many of us have, she’d been deprived of seeing them in performance of late: Martin del Amo and Anton, Kathy Cogill, and Nikki Heywood and Tony Osborne (read about the artists and their extensive careers here) .
Anton, performing a segment from ARENA, a collaboration-in-progress with choreographer Martin del Amo, conjures a series of disparate characters, at first largely verbally and then by building distinctive bodies with specific trajectories, each returned to in a whirlwind of exacting movement — including a wild horse ride. The next stage in the work’s evolution, said del Amo in his introduction, will unfold startling connections between the characters. In the meantime, Anton delivers superb comic timing and deft characterisations while del Amo’s shaping of the idiosyncratic movement recalls his own solos in which quite lateral dance springs out of walking. I long to see the completed work.
Kathy Cogill, The Levitation Act, Happy Hour, photo Martin Fox
In the delightfully perplexing The Levitation Act, Kathy Cogill traverses a variety of states of being, first quivering and glittering, folding deep down into herself, seemingly earth-bound, and subsequently manifesting as an agitated, declamatory French speaker, and then a mysterious trench-coated figure unloading a swathe of material and small objects. Somewhere in the mix is a lyrical passage of Strine and finally a brief sinuous duet in which, on her back, Cogill lifts her willowy daughter Clara Louw with elegant ease. It’s as if having progressed from the inability to leave the ground in the piece’s opening Cogill is now lovingly enabling the girl’s dancerly levitation. If fragmentary, the work has a kind of cogency wrought, like Anton’s, by charisma and felicitous movement.
Nikki Heywood, Tony Osborne, Sound & Its Double, Happy Hour, photo Martin Fox
In the engagingly enigmatic Sound & Its Double, “a spoken sound dance duet” performed in traverse, a Beckettian Nikki Heywood and Tony Osborne gather up and select from piles of seemingly identical books in bright red covers. The couple, close to but facing away from each other, angle the books as they bend towards limited light, muttering urgently and incoherently from the pages with a seemingly incidental musicality. When seated opposite each other, the books gradually set aside, it’s as if whatever was sought in the couple’s mouthings has not been found and a danced and raw vocalised hostility ensues, erupting against the self, against the other. Perhaps it’s cathartic: the couple find brighter light with which to read and, though seemingly oblivious to the other, their words make limited sense, the lyrical duet of alternations and overlaps suggesting a state of being at once together and apart. With further development Sound & Its Double could make a welcome return.
This showing was the first Happy Hour of three this year in a Sydney desperate for independent dance opportunities, for artists and audiences alike. The impressive list of artists who presented last year includes Timothy Ohl, Benjamin Hancock, Rosie Dennis, Raghav Handa, Sara Black, Lucky Lartey, Vicki Van Hout and Matt Cornell, and Heidrun Löhr and Hans Bildstein. Happy Hour is an admirable venture, bolstering a challenged Sydney dance ecology, remunerating artists and welcoming audiences with affordable ticket prices and access to artists. There should be more of it.
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Readymade Works, Happy Hour, curator Julie-Anne Long, artists Martin del Amo & Anton, Kathy Cogill, and Nikki Heywood & Tony Osborne; Readymade Works, Sydney, 21, 22 April
Top image credit: Anton, ARENA, Happy Hour, photo Martin Fox
An ironically irresistible Hugo Weaving stars in Kip Williams’ thrillingly propulsive, politically gripping production for the STC of Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, an unnervingly funny, relentlessly incisive parable of a thug-cum-demagogue rising to absolute power. He achieves it with the complicity of a corrupt politician in an all too familiar “infrastructure government” in league with a green grocery cartel. They quickly lose control of their gangster agent of change (whose initial goal is control of the vegetable market), then the courts, the press and ultimately the democracy they have hitherto expertly manipulated.
Though casually evoking 1930s Chicago and the gangster movies that inspired Brecht, director Kip Williams and translator Tom Wright infuse the production with a sense of our own troubled times via an artfully choreographed interplay of stage performance and live video feed with drolly deft deployment of the clichéd and distorting language of Australian and international politics and economics. The effect is to render contiguous the 30s rise of fascism and the current illiberal push to the right in modern democracies. Past and present become chillingly inseparable.
This world (designer Robert Cousins) is realised within a capacious studio with open dressing and green room spaces to either side and a huge upstage screen fed by a busy camera team working initially in movie-making mode and subsequently, as politics turns overtly criminal, delivering with television news urgency, intrusive vérité shooting and propagandistic pomposity. It’s not a simple trajectory: in a funeral scene late in the work there’s a highly effective return to an intimate cinematic vision, at once compelling but perhaps also mockingly arthouse.
Dressed and masked in black, the camera crew moves about unobtrusively, the numerous set-ups with actors seamlessly realised and the tracking trajectories marvellously patterned so that Kip Williams’ direction and Justine Kerrigan’s cinematography is realised as a swirling dance of cameras and actors. The director’s well-known choreographic-cum-cinematic facility is frequently evident, for example when Ui threatens the politician Dogsborough (Peter Carroll). The latter is seated downstage, back to us, facing Ui who delivers his intimidating spiel moving on and about an axis between his victim and the screen on which we see Dogsborough writ large in anxious profile. It’s a perfect fusion of stage and screen, heightened by Weaving’s cajoling ‘dance,’ exploiting oscillation between safe distance and threatening proximity. As ever, the actor moves with great verve, from an initial pugnacious, prowling swagger to the elegant, confident stride of the demagogue. When one of his gang earlier dares to suggest how he might present himself, Ui retorts, “What the hell is ‘natural’?” Unfortunately for his victims, Ui is, in another sense, a natural, and a quick learner.
True to Brecht’s wishes, the makers admirably avoid the literalising of Ui, whether as Hitler or any other demagogue, such as Donald Trump. There is however an hilarious lesson in Hitler-ish posturing — desultorily taught by a campy failed actor (Mitchell Butel) — and a brilliant one-off sight gag involving Ui toying with but dismissing the fascist leader’s moustache and hair style. Weaving’s Ui is utterly his own man, one with limited intelligence but blessed with tunnel vision and escalating narcissistic self-belief, incanting a narrative of heroic emergence melded with paranoia. This is realised brilliantly in Brecht’s echoing of Shakespeare’s Richard III in a confrontation between Ui and Betty Dullfeet (Anita Hegh), the combative wife of the newspaper publisher Ui has had murdered.
As rain falls steadily on the funeral gathering, Ui delivers a seemingly sincere self-account, impassioned and highly convincing, replete with cosmic metaphors, bewildering an angry but vulnerable woman suddenly confronted with the unexpected. As the staging reveals the scope of the gloomy, black umbrella-ed funeral, the screen close-ups of Ui and Dullfeet provide a cinematic intensity, yielding one of the few moments of heightened realism in the production if shot with a wry arthouse verve. Weaving invests all his considerable craft in the scene, the closest we get to empathising with Ui, momentarily understanding the depth of his self-belief, however fantastical, and in himself as a performer. When we next see Ui, he is a fully realised, coolly intimidating demagogue, terrorising a vast (cinematically multiplied) public into voting for him.
With Brecht’s hyperbolic text and a production excelling at the playwright’s notion of distanciation, the funeral scene is a thrilling disruption, as are the scenes in which Peter Carroll’s Dogsborough is granted a palpably intimate presence. In part driven to corruption by the need to support a son with a disability and by Ui’s thinly veiled threats directed at the child, the politician becomes increasingly guilt-ridden, creating a moral counterpoint to Ui’s career, strongly felt in a scene in which Dogsborough quietly ponders his crime and Ui’s rise while face to face with himself in a dressing room mirror, one of a number of mirror images in the production that query the nature of performance of the self.
Another scene tellingly focused on the face has Ui’s gang members spread about the stage bitterly challenging each other while a camera operator peers up between the boss’s knees. Weaving is slouched in a lounge chair, Ui’s usually hyper-animated features shut down, his heavy brow creased with introspection as he nibbles from a packet of Nobby’s Nuts. The close-up stillness exudes danger as much as comedy, indicative of a new stage in Ui’s rise, a contemplative prelude to murderously taking firm control of his own immediate realm.
Williams’ production busily fills the stage with evolving political ferment, first evident in a Senate-type enquiry scene (with Anita Hegh doing a Michaelia Cash microphone grab) overseen by Arturo Ui (think President Donald Trump’s destructive appointment of Scott Pruitt as Environmental Protection Agency Administrator). Later, a courtroom trial turns to farce as Ui’s thugs take control. Staged as a series of brief scenes punctuated with a repeated dance of pulsing spotlights as the performers reconfigure, it’s rich in comic detail, including Peter Carroll as an enthusiastic female courtroom stenographer rendered deliriously helpless as characters and cameras swirl about her.
Throughout, Brecht’s rich language is inflected with familiar contemporary utterances: “with respect, you’re not listening,” Joe Hockey’s “leaners, not lifters,” Ui’s plagiarising of the lyrics of John Farnham’s “You’re the Voice,” and much more — “slush funds,” “positive mindsets,” and a green grocery variation on John Howard’s “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances under which they come.” And then there’s the fun of invention: “Even the gravy train finds itself stopping at honest stations.” The apparent silliness in the recurrence of the names of vegetables — cabbage, cauliflower, kohlrabi — in a political scenario gets continued laughs but also underlines the banality of corruption and an everyday route to power, and profit — think Coles and Woolworths’ relentless manipulation of what they pay dairy, fruit and vegetable producers.
Williams’ performers, often in multiple roles, create strongly etched characters including Ui’s gang members: Roma (Colin Moody), Giri (Ivan Donato) and Givola (Ursula Yovich). Stefan Gregory’s bracing compositions, with recurrent driving drumming and a film-noirish gravitas sound gives over to Wagner at a critical moment and a melancholy wordless chorale at another. An affecting harp piece underlines the apparent idyll of Givola’s florist shop in which Betty Dullfleet’s husband’s throat is cut by the owner. This setting is one of the few instances in the production where spectacle, multiple long strands of flowers luxuriously filling the stage, supersedes distanciation, if meeting the challenge of Brecht’s construction of the scene with two pairs of characters, oblivious to each other, wandering the shop. Another superfluity is the use of projected animated drawings — a row of poplars, a burning market building, a woman in a street. Elsewhere the production, including its deft use of intertitles, is tightly conceived and executed.
Ui’s chilling speech to the masses at the play’s end recalls Donald Trump’s dark account of the state of America in his inauguration speech. Ui spells out a vision of human savagery against which he will defend the people (dissidents are meanwhile casually shot) while offering them freedom of choice. Ui’s cool, formulaic manner recalls Betty Dullflet’s earlier defiant charge that Ui is “a meat machine trying to believe it has a self.” Now she stands beside him, defeated. The chaotic dance that prefigured Ui’s ascension is over, resolved into fascist order, overseen by a man who had declared to Betty, “I am a fanatic – I have faith.”
Our own liberal democracy is under less corrosive threat than that depicted in Brecht’s parable, and is therefore easy to underestimate or ignore, while in Turkey and the newer democracies of Eastern Europe human rights are rapidly eroding. It’s surprising and fascinating that an emerging wing of the American Democrats is the defiantly titled Democratic Socialists of America. In Australia’s parliament, we have proliferating right wing party representatives, a conservative often reactionary Coalition government and a Labor Party largely driven by its right wing. How long will it be before a defiant assertion of democratic socialism emerges in Australia to defend and build on public utilities and rights? Better that than a slow dance to death. But it is resistible.
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Sydney Theatre Company, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, writer Bertolt Brecht, translator Tom Wright, director Kip Williams, performers Mitchell Butel, Peter Carroll, Tony Cogin, Ivan Donato, Anita Hegh, Brent Hill, Colin Moody, Monica Sayers, Hugo Weaving, Charles Wu, Ursula Yovich, set designer Robert Cousins, costume designer Marg Horwell, lighting designer Nick Schlieper, composer, sound designer Stefan Gregory, cinematographer Justine Kerrigan; Roslyn Packer Theatre, Sydney, 21 March-28 April
A dauntingly large, acutely white picture frame proscenium looms steeply before the audience. Within, a radiantly sheened black velvet curtain; behind, a depthless darkness populated from time to time with barely moving ghostly figures. From within this pictorial framing of director Adena Jacobs and composer Damien Ricketson’s The Howling Girls emerges a wordless reverie-cum-nightmare theatre of image, vocal and electronic sound staged by Sydney Chamber Opera at its boldest, probing trauma symptomatology and “female hysteria,” channelling the mysterious suffering of five New York girls in the wake of 9/11.
In an enduring initial blackout I hear breathing like my own on a still night bereft of moon and stars. Though sonically wrapped around me, it’s not mine, this slow, slightly urgent inhalation, a click in the throat and then exhalation, regular and insistent and subsequently textured with a whispering whistle and the light slap of saliva. I’m in the dark, inside another’s head, while before me the breather (soprano Jane Sheldon) is slowly revealed, reclining in the deep distance in a thin sliver of light, her breathing now voiced, possibly faster, possibly anxious, with a soft rasp.
An intense white light appears across one end of her body and repeatedly tracks down its length, like an MRI scanner, suddenly literalising Sheldon’s character as suffering a condition under investigation, increasing the sense of anxiety. At the same time, repetitive vowel series slowly take shape, evolving into soft chant-like sequences from which eventually comes a surprising, full-bodied, sharp-edged ‘naaaahh’ and the beginnings of a haunting emergent musicality.
Intermittent, otherworldly rumblings and dark glissandi hauntingly punctuate and weave into the increasingly reverberant, amplified voice, intensifying the drama of its evolution from low, tense respiration into seemingly unconscious ritualistic invocation. On the other side of the stage stands a barely perceptible cluster of shadowy figures, forming a piercing chorus of young female voices extending in substantially long notes Sheldon’s urgent utterances. What commenced as a single state of individual being now assumes a larger if mysterious import in which others give empathetic voice to the woman’s condition and perhaps express their own.
The Howling Girls, Sydney Chamber Opera, photo Zan Wimberley
Sheldon rises from her bed and moves forward onto the wide lower edge of the picture frame attired in a lightly furred, seemingly armless garment with a hint of straitjacket. Standing still, she is suddenly rendered breathless and voiceless, choking, gasping and coughing, raw, guttural and profoundly discomfiting for an interminable few minutes. The effort invested in trying to communicate in The Howling Girls’ first movement, Summoning, is devastatingly undone in this second one, Blockage. It simultaneously evokes the symptoms of the young women who inspired director Jacobs to make this work. In the wake of 9/11, five New Yorkers from different parts of the city and unknown to each other, but admitted to the same hospital, believed they had ingested flesh and debris from the explosions. They hadn’t. Their throats constricted, none could eat, seemingly suffering what once would have been labelled collective hysteria.
Emerging eerily from the dark, Jacobs’ howling girls are alien creatures, wrapped in long-stranded, shiny black fur, black hair flopping over faces, their hands clutching tiny skulls (Aztec death whistles), like a cult born of 9/11. Appearing to be naked beneath the fur, they are calm, neither overtly howling nor “hysterical,” but vocally mournful even though their presence is possibly playful, maybe dangerous. Whatever, they abet Sheldon in giving voice to trauma.
In the opera’s final scene, the girls appear in body stockings, simply themselves, constructing a language from scratch from seemingly random syllables in a collective, melodic warbling (bar some eerie, rhythmic stutterings), their choralling in sync with Sheldon, who in glorious melancholy voice (evoking multiple idioms and voice types) moves into the distance towards a thin vertical line of bright light and disappears. The title of this final movement, Broken Aria, suggests the defeat of an operatic “hysteric.” Even so she leaves us with a new generation who should no longer be clinically labelled. Amid their singing the girls play simple instruments evocative of communality and ritual while the overarching score utters frantic electronic signals and industrial growls, countering any too easy idealism.
Kittu Hoyne, The Howling Girls, Sydney Chamber Opera, photo Zan Wimberley
In a scene prior to this conclusion, Sheldon vocalises wordlessly into a large, long megaphone-cum-finely styled horn, duetting sublimely with a theremin player, their faces unseen in a passage of calm but short-lived transcendence erased by a monumental sound and light drama. The picture frame is bathed in deep pinks and reds; the theremin glides and swoops, electronics thunder, voices scream and a massive crash leaves us quivering in silence. It’s as if a trauma (the soprano’s or the New York girls’ 9/11 experience) has been unwillingly revisited as a cathartic prelude to the final scene of loss and new generation.
With strictly limited movement and an intense focus on sound, each scene in The Howling Girls is abstractly pictorial. But light and its absence, the emergence of bodies from darkness and their disappearance into it, limited but stark colouration and effects like the tight lighting of instruments (a drum in one scene, a theremin in another) suggesting suspension in a dream space, coalesce into an engaging visual dynamic that courses from claustrophobia to shock, to the bright, warm openness of the opera’s final moments with the girls in a welcoming semi-circle before us.
Despite a high level of abstraction, The Howling Girls is a bracingly cogent work (though the significance of the megaphone-cum-horn eluded me) with an implicit narrative trajectory as indicated by the titles of the work’s movements, the literalness of the scanning light in the first, the direct referencing of New Yorkers’ trauma symptoms in the second and third, the vocal symbiosis between Sheldon and the girls, the return of the traumatic experience, and the final image of the passing of a lone Everywoman and the emergence of a new generation of women functioning collectively to create an incipient lyrical language of free-floating vowels and syllables.
The production’s focus on listening is richly rewarding. Jane Sheldon’s virtuosic performance in unchartered territory and Damien Ricketson’s meticulous, fluent scoring reveal the voice in all its staggering dimensions, ranging from its origins in breath, from high soprano to deep mezzo, from head to chest and edging into throat singing. Stress, bordering on hyperventilation, is rendered musical and contemplatively resolved. Jack Symonds’ theremin, keyboard and electronics and Bob Scott’s sound design sustain the material viscerality of the voice while simultaneously enlarging it on an orchestral scale that speaks of its magnificent expressivity. The synthesis of Eugyeene Teh’s set design and Jenny Hector’s lighting evokes a world at once rigidly restraining, nightmarishly depthless and expansively open to possibility. The Howling Girls is a memorable opera without words, sparely physically animated, pictorially and sonically immersive, a remarkable celebration of the voice and, with a utopian aura, a continuation of the feminist project to de-pathologise and give voice to the extremes of women’s experiences.
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Carriageworks & Sydney Chamber Opera, The Howling Girls, composer Damien Ricketson, musical director Jack Symonds, director Adena Jacobs, set & costume design Eugyeene Teh, lighting design Jenny Hector, sound design Bob Scott, performers Jane Sheldon with members of The House that Dan Built: Grace Campbell, Kittu Hoyne, Kiri Jenssen, Emily Pincock, Jayden Selvakumaraswamy, Sylvie Woodhouse; Carriageworks, Sydney, 28 March-7 April
Top image credit: Jane Sheldon, The Howling Girls, Sydney Chamber Opera, photo Zan Wimberley
Happy May Day — International Workers’ Day! And welcome to our 2018 series of occasional reviews and, soon, copious surprising highlights from and reflections on 24 years of RealTime publishing, culminating later in the year in a number of open forums. We and our writers will be assaying what happened in the arts in Australia over the last quarter of a century, registering huge shifts in ideas, forms and engagement with audiences, science and new technological tools. To be able to look back in a society so preoccupied with the present is an all too rare opportunity to gauge in a considered way just what comprises ‘now’ and what might come next. We hope our reflections will encourage your own and that you’ll share them with us. Soon we’ll be posting searchable PDFs of the first 40 editions of RealTime, 1994-2000, on our website, providing an opportunity to browse a period of remarkable cultural ferment. In the meantime, in the first of our occasional reviews we applaud Sydney Theatre Company’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Sydney Chamber Opera’s The Howling Girls and Readymade Works’ Happy Hour. Keith & Virginia
A huge thank you for the multitude of phone calls, cards, emails and ever-escalating social media messages responding to the announcement that we’ve ceased regular publishing of RealTime. Some of you were “shocked,” “stunned,” even “gutted,” feelings we understand, but mostly, like us, you were sad but looking forward to the completion in 2018 of the enormous RealTime archive and a celebration of 25 years of freely accessible arts reportage.
The response — from arts audiences, artists, arts companies, organisations, publications and educational institutions — has been infinitely larger than anticipated and very rewarding, coming after years of never being sure how many of you were on track with us. Clearly more than we suspected.
It was especially gratifying to hear from non-artist readers for whom RealTime has provided awareness of works they would not otherwise have encountered from across Australia and beyond. Artists whose careers were supported or influenced by RealTime have expressed their gratitude.
Writers reflected on their years, in some cases decades, with us. Our special thanks to Ben Brooker and Matthew Lorenzon who posted affecting accounts on their blogs about working with RealTime, capturing some of the essence and joy of our collaborative venture. Former Assistant Editor and OnScreen Editor Kirsten Krauth who worked with us 1998-2002 posted a fond recollection on Facebook.
Very special thanks to our wonderful staff — writer and sales manager Katerina Sakkas, online producer Lucy Parakhina and writer and acting assistant editor (February-September) Lauren Carroll Harris — and our wise and compassionate Board of Management — Tony MacGregor, John Davis, Julie Robb, Urszula Dawkins, and Phillipa McGuinness. And to the Australia Council for the Arts its long-term support and understanding. We’ll be in touch in 2018.
Happy holidays, Keith & Virginia
From the Managing Editors and the Board of Management of Open City, publisher of RealTime.
RealTime is now ceasing regular publishing and will embark in 2018 on the task of completing its online archive and publicly celebrating its legacy of 25 years’ coverage of innovative Australian art.
“Reality check. This is the last edition of RealTime. It’s been an extremely difficult and a very sad decision to make to draw the magazine to a close — to cease weekly publishing at the end of 2017. In 2018, the magazine’s 25th year, we will complete the archiving of the deeply personal, totally consuming project that the magazine has been for us. It’ll be a year of reflection and celebration for RealTime’s many contributors, readers and supporters and, we hope, provide an enduring legacy — a unique record of a period in which the arts have radically transformed.” Virginia Baxter & Keith Gallasch, Managing Editors
RealTime, the national arts magazine uniquely focused on innovation and experimentation in the arts across Australia and beyond, is coming to an end. In 2018, its 25th year, the magazine will be published informally, but no longer on a weekly basis. Staff will focus on completing and making publicly accessible the enormous RealTime archive from 1994 to the present.
The decision: social media vs sustainability
This decision, made by the Board of Management of Open City and the Managing Editors and in close consultation with the Australia Council for the Arts, the association’s key funder since the magazine’s inception, was not an easy one. But it was a necessary one. Despite considerable creative and technical effort — and achievement — in 2016-17, it was clear the operation would soon become unsustainable, a result of the widely felt negative impact of social media on advertising sales.
2018: Archiving RealTime & celebrating an era
Across 2018, the Managing Editors will complete the magazine’s invaluable online archive, issue a number of special editions, commission historical overviews and conduct public forums surveying the period from the mid 1990s to the present of monumental change in the arts, much of it not easily accessed or otherwise on the public record. The archive, including digitised print editions of 1994-2000, will be freely available to artists, audiences, students and researchers with a plan to house it within a major arts institution.
A tribute toartists
Above all, the archive pays tribute to the work of the thousands of artists who inspired RealTime’s Managing Editors and writers with their bold reshaping of forms and genres, their experiments in hybridity, their embrace — and critiques — of new media technologies, cross-cultural exploration, art-science cross-pollination and the complexities of ethnic and gender identity.
…and to writers
The archive will equally pay tribute to the contribution of hundreds of writers, many of them artists and arts specialists, who have written generously for RealTime, some of them for over two decades, responding constructively in creatively turbulent times. We deeply regret we can no longer commission them to review new work by emerging and established innovators that warrants serious attention at a time when arts journalism is seriously threatened.
…and to readers, funders and supporters
The archive also represents a record of RealTime readers’ keen embrace of experimentation in Australian art. Our supportive advertising clients allowed us to commission extensively and our sponsor Vertel provided us with several years of superior network capacity.
The Australia Council for the Arts, from a seeding grant in 1994 for RealTime to its funding of Open City as an ongoing key organisation, has been a consistent and responsive funder of the magazine, its support allowing a significant breadth of national coverage and a focus on art that often defies categorisation and is ever enquiring.
…and our staff
The Board and Managing Editors pay particular tribute to the staff of RealTime who, across the decades, have been hard-working, generous, loyal and committed to supporting innovation in the arts.
Looking forward to the retrospective
The Open City Board, Keith and Virginia proudly welcome the opportunity to complete the RealTime project in 2018 and look forward to engaging with artists, writers and supporters in our grand retrospective of 25 years of transformed and transformational art.
Unmissable from the floor of the main hall of the Casula Powerhouse, the words “Have you seen MY Emily?” stretch grandly the length of a long mezzanine wall. On approach, you find it ends with a painting by Emily Kame Kngwarreye (Untitled, 1994) followed by six vertical video screens — a playful, experimental performative video work by Wiradjuri artist Amala Groom.
On each screen a woman speaks directly to you — as her partner in conversation or confidante as she comments on the exchange. It’s like arriving at a party and being rapidly addressed by a succession of eager strangers, six of them, taking turns that require you to shift attention from screen to screen, person to person and from a position of ignorance (especially if you arrive part way through) that requires you to piece together this reconstruction of an unsettling encounter. But this fascinating challenge for the viewer doesn’t stop there.
Glasses of champagne in hand, the women are elegantly outfitted and coiffed as discrete individuals — all of them played by Groom. But as the words flow, it dawns on you that three of these women, though differently attired, represent just one — the hostess for a reception — and that the other three are variations on Groom herself, the guest. What you are witnessing is in fact a dialogue but one distributed and multiplied to amplify a sense of party ambience, tension and subsequent reflection. It’s a cleverly immersive and simultaneously disorienting device.
Even if you take in the work at its starting point (not common in the weird world of video viewing in art galleries) where Groom’s personae lay the groundwork for the narrative, there’s still work to do, to accommodate the diversity of voices and the dispersion of the narrative and ponder their purposes. The narration, delivered by Groom in present tense by all six characters at once, reveals that she is the guest of the wife of a former Prime Minister of Australia (the artist declines to name her). Groom, one of a number of Indigenous representatives to a UN event, is immediately wary:
“Me 1: This is my job as the performance of my cultural sovereignty to follow my feelings which have led me here to New York. [….]
Me 3: I fear this to be an opportune escapade for the former Prime Minister to shower us, the ‘Indigenous Australians,’ with alcohol and pleasantries so that he may exploit us in furthering his ever ambitious career pursuits. This is politics. This is all about optics. Do not be swayed; there will be photographs, there will be videos. Be diplomatic but do not leave the room empty-handed.”
The former Prime Minister’s welcoming speech, focusing on American race relations “in a room full of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander delegates,” is for Groom, “not only distasteful but offensive.” She turns her attention elsewhere: ” Only minutes after arriving at the event, the artist, already frustrated to the point of exasperation, focused her attention on [the former Prime Minister’s wife] who was conveniently sitting next to her.”
Amala Groom, Have you seen MY Emily? 2017, Casula Powerhouse, production still, courtesy the artist
Chorally, Me 1, 2 and 3 announce, “We are me,” and Her 1, 2 and 3, “We are her” and the discussion commences with a “quite robust conversation spanning both religion and politics.” But it quickly falters at the mention of political art, Groom’s writing deftly gear-shifting between speech and reflection with comedic and satirical verve.
“Her 1: So what do you do for a job?
Me 1: I make political art.
Her 2: I need to change the subject.
Me 2: I would normally just say I am an artist, but I am provoking this lady into having a semi-uncomfortable conversation with me.
Her 3: How do you contribute to the Gross Domestic Product?
Me 3: I still subscribe to the Black Tax which means that Aboriginal peoples should be receiving a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product to support our own political, social and economic independence so that we may be self-determining on our own lands which the Colonial Project has stolen from our Ancestors and continues to steal from us.”
The discussion grows particularly tense when it turns to the ex-PM’s wife’s proud ownership of the Emily Kame Kngwarreye painting referred to in the work’s title.
“Her 1: Have you seen my Emily?
Her 2: I own a very expensive painting.
Her 3: I cannot pronounce Kngwarreye.
Me 1: In the sitting room? Yes, it’s beautiful.
Me 2: Did she really just say that?
Me 3: And the world just stopped.”
The repetition of “her Emily,” “my Emily” and “Have you seen my Emily?” morphs into a grimly comic litany amid the ex-PM’s wife’s increasingly insensitive utterances.
“Her 2: This painting is ‘authentically Aboriginal’ and therefore is an extension of my own personal authenticity.
Her 3: I own a piece of your culture, can’t you see? Have you seen my Emily?”
Me 3: One cannot purchase culture, it’s not a materiality. Yes, I have seen ‘your’ Emily.”
Preferring traditional Aboriginal art, the ex-PM’s wife is afraid of political art. Me 2 comments, “She equates political and social commentary on contemporary society and race relations as being ‘angry,'” adding and later repeating, “Hmmm, does she know the revolution is coming?” while Me 3 wonders, “Does she think ‘angry’ art is going to jump off the wall and go at her?”
Amala Groom has taken a conversation she experienced and elaborated on it to make explicit what she thinks the ex-PM’s wife actually believes, rendering the woman’s utterances ignorant, cruel and sometimes just unbelievably silly — as in Her’s opening lines, ” I am rich …. I am so rich” and when she sings:
“Her 2: I think you are also really angry, why are you so angry? Can’t we all just get along? ‘Kumbayah my Lord, kumbayah… ‘”
Amala Groom, Have you seen MY Emily? 2017, Casula Powerhouse installation view, photo Hamish Ta-mé
The viewer doesn’t know which of the Hers’ words are actual and which invented, but Groom adopts a tonal strategy that keeps all utterances on a similar plane with a simple vocal realism in which there is no mimicry, no differentiation between voices, little exaggeration, just a gentle flow of casually uttered sentences of largely similar length, the rhythm reinforced with the raising and lowering of champagne glasses. This approach tempers the sheer bluntness of the lines I’ve quoted, allowing them room to correspond with the laid-back, ironically well-mannered demeanour of all the women in this work. It allows us to be amused, shocked here and there and yet contemplative. Have you seen MY Emily? might come from a place of anger (at the ex-PM’s wife’s comments) and it might well engender anger, but Amala Groom has fashioned a seductive video installation that implicates the viewer with face-to-face engagement in a casual conversation which seduces us into becoming attentive listeners and amused observers.
One of the most striking characteristics of innovative Indigenous art practice over recent decades has been the extent of artists’ inclusion of images of themselves in their works (Fiona Foley, Christian Thompson, Warwick Thornton, r e a, Tracey Moffatt to name a few working in video), not simply as self-portraiture but as personal statements of connections with country, culture, history and community, as well as satire, as in the video works of Richard Bell. In her first major commission and institutional solo exhibition, Amala Groom has extended this practice with a work that is at once personal, satirical and formally innovative.
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Have you seen MY Emily? (2017), artist Amala Groom, curator Adam Porter, commissioned by Casula Powerhouse, 6-channel digital video, 9′ 56″; Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, 30 Sept-19 Nov
Amala Groom is a Wiradjuri conceptual artist whose practice, as the performance of her cultural sovereignty, is informed and driven by First Nations epistemologies, ontologies and methodologies and articulated across diverse media. In 2017, Groom’s work has appeared in The Public Body .02, Artspace; System of Objects, National Art School; Moving Histories Future Projections, a dLux Media Arts exhibition toured by Museum & Galleries of NSW, 2016-17; and in Visual Bulk, Hobiennale 2017.
Top image credit: Amala Groom, Have you seen MY Emily? 2017, Casula Powerhouse, production still, courtesy the artist
Raoul Peck’s documentary about James Baldwin, titled I Am Not Your Negro, has won unanimously high praise from critics and audiences but been limited in Australia to short cinema seasons. Now it’s available on DVD from Madman and is a viewing opportunity not to be missed.
Lauren Carroll Harris, who saw I Am Not Your Negro at this year’s Sydney Film Festival, wrote on Junkee, “What sets this film apart from other political docos is its profound emotionality. Spoken in melodious, low tones by Samuel L Jackson, Baldwin’s words ring out with an eloquent rage and passion that cannot be contained by the film frame. Peck pairs the sound with montages of the Black Lives Matter protests and portraits of Trayvon Martin and black youths slain by police in the last five years.”
The power of the film as a reflection on the inadequacies of the American psyche (and, by analogy, our own) was captured by Siddhartha Mitter on Hyperallergic:
“In the film, [Baldwin] refers to white America as ‘monstrous’ at least three times. He explains why: because people in the US are caught between narratives as to who they actually are and who they want to be, and narcotising, populist television circulates a story that always emphasizes the latter…The film left me with questions that I suspect won’t be answered in my lifetime, because successive generations of Americans have been brought up with the conviction that they need never understand anyone, not even themselves. How do I live with that?”
We have 5 copies to give away, courtesy of Madman Entertainment.
Email us at giveaways [at] realtimearts.net by 5pm 19 December with your name, postal address and phone number to be in the running.
Include ‘Giveaway’ and the name of the item in the subject line.
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The backlit silhouette of a lone female figure appears centrestage in a voluminous skirt of billowing waves. A soft light shines on her face as the sound of a turbulent current escalates around her and we are introduced, via recorded voiceover, to the Djurra Dreaming narrative of the Bundjalung nation of north-eastern NSW, of the mother summoning her sons from the sea, to the shore, to her, for she is also the headland.
This arresting image is immediately followed by the entrance of the three sons sliding on their backs to emulate the watery expanse from which they’ve come. The brothers, dancing with sticks which are at once paddles and subsequently spears, are depicted as archetypal men of the Dreaming. Featured solos set them apart as individual characters, while also serving to subtly shift us from the Dreaming into the here and now. A chair is placed on stage and the woman (Sarah Bolt) is reintroduced as a frail patient in aged care. We discover the three men are also her sons, who will also return, as her death is imminent.
Director Kirk Page’s Djurra is important for so many reasons, first and foremost as a multi-disciplinary performative ceremony including dance, spoken text and physical theatre in which ritual is enacted.
On opening night Djurra is framed by coinciding events, the first of which is a large-scale sand painting created by local artist Digby Moran. The mandala’s repetitious squares within squares act as a meditation, gently guiding the observer to quiet contemplation.
Damion Hunter, Djurra, NORPA, photo Kate Holmes
Immediately preceding the performance, at the base of the steps of the Lismore City Hall a large crowd gathers to witness a performance by local Indigenous girls’ dance group Nini Ngari-Gali, organised by Sarah Bolt through NORPA . This is followed by a Welcome to Country ceremony in English and in Bundjalung Widjabul language given by Roy Gordon, who along with Rhoda Roberts is one of the cultural consultants on the production. One of the speakers was from a group of weavers commissioned to respond to the Djurra Dreaming history by creating a collection of traditionally woven artifacts installed in the foyer directly opposite the entrance to the theatre.
By the time we take our seats we have unwittingly processioned to our modern day dance ground.
Edward Horne’s set is spare, uncluttered, rendering the stage space flexible. Two large woven mats hang as textured curtains upstage, utilised as vertical projection surfaces on either side. The large horizontal space between also serves as a projection surface, creating a triptych effect with images softened around the edges like floating thought bubbles. A large roving platform is manipulated by the cast to emphasise distance, from one continent to another, from one state, one room or one bed to another, while also serving as the mother’s eventual deathbed — the exposed innersprings of a mattress, suspended directly above, appear to emulate that in-between space otherwise known as purgatory.
This deathbed image is augmented by a captivating dance momentarily taking us out of the narrative. Performed by Joel Bray it begins on the floor, gradually ascending through deft harness work. Bray embodies the spirit through a series of circular movements growing ever more expansive, from smaller sequential isolations, progressing to floor rolls, graduating to larger and larger leaps until he eventually takes flight, eschewing his (and presumably the woman’s) mortal body.
Joel Bray, Damion Hunter, James Slee, Djurra, NORPA, photo Kate Holmes
In an earlier scene, the eldest brother played by Damion Hunter, introduces the harness by emulating the whirligig motion of a helicopter’s rotating blades. By holding onto a short pole attached to the floating platform while directly addressing the audience, Hunter succinctly embodies the precarious dangers of combat his character has left behind.
This transcendental approach is extended to the execution of text, to varying degrees. Not quite abstract nor surreal but not entirely literal, the text was subtly stylised in places, notably by James Slee who plays the youngest brother, who has never ventured far from his childhood roots. With an obvious hip hop background Slee includes the odd quick alliterative analogy accompanied by equally subtle changes in a rhythmic delivery indicative of rap.
In Bray’s first soliloquy I recognise substantial autobiographical elements meshed into his onstage persona as the middle brother who has purposefully distanced himself from, yet is staunchly proud of his familial origins — evidence that the text has been developed through a collaborative devising process.
In another of Bray’s soliloquies — delivered after his mother’s funeral and about men and mourning and upholding a code of male stoicism — I witness something deeply poignant followed by a sense of missed opportunity. This brief scene is framed by a ritual of funereal preparation performed in unison, of shaving, combing and donning the multi-purpose suit jackets that in this instance serve to speak of solemn resignation. It’s followed by Bray’s reminiscence of his mother’s description of a cry. His physiological recollection of a lament as consisting of five short inhalations followed by a long exhalation as having the inverse properties of a laugh — five short exhalations and a long inhalation — so succinctly describes the way in which men are programed to compartmentalise emotion and distance themselves from attachment. As one of the most universally topical issues, this beat is over all too soon.
Sarah Bolt, Djurra, NORPA, photo Kate Holmes
Djurra’s text doesn’t preach declarative fact at the audience, telling them what it is to be Aboriginal in any generalised sense. Rather, its potential strength lies in its revealing the Blackfella condition through character content, through circumstance. For Bray, it’s what it is to be a white Blackfella when having to explain his race to each person he meets while travelling abroad. For Slee it’s the significance of staying on country and maintaining kin connections, and for Hunter it’s the obligation to share personal wealth with community while secretly paying for his mother and brother’s upkeep while he’s on tour in the armed forces.
The text became problematic where it felt simply under-rehearsed or broken in mid-sentence, forcing the audience to work harder than it needed to stay on track and when its delivery was not sufficiently well modulated to get a sense of the work’s dramaturgical arc, ultimately compromising levels of intimacy and audience access. This could also be said of transitions between scenes, which were at times slow and clunky.
As an actor in the inaugural Black Playwrights Conference of January 1987, I can attest that even this raw state Djurra is testimony that we have come a long way from the early days where we were trying to establish an Indigenous vernacular within mainstream theatre. The use of parallel narratives is becoming a more widespread technique, illustrating the element of embodiment, of actually ‘becoming’ in order to access the Dreaming and using the theatrical space to sing those histories alive as seen in Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Bennelong which features a vignette where all of the male performers declare, “I am Bennelong.
Kirk Page’s strength as a director lies in his physical performance history and the inclusion of the harness work, aided by the continuity provided by Jade Dewi’s choreographic hand. Video artist Rohan Langford consolidated images rather than introducing new information, while at low levels, Karl Johnson’s lighting provided an atmospheric quality to the Dreaming scenes, in juxtaposition with the present day narrative, which was imbued with a bright clarity of the everyday. Composer Ben Walsh was also able to work across a broad emotive range without overpowering the work, lending an almost cinematic structure in the versatility of sound the work demanded. I feel this short season is not the end for this production. It would be good to see the actors given the chance to truly inhabit Djurra and for the production to continue to evolve.
NORPA, Djurra,director, devisor Kirk Page, cultural consultant Roy Gordon, performer-devisors Joel Bray, Sarah Bolt, Damion Hunter, James Slee, choreographer Jade Dewi, composer Ben Walsh, contributing artists Mitchell King, Blake Rhodes, set & costume designers Charlotte Hayward, Edward Horne, video artist Rohan Langford, lighting designer Karl Johnson, cultural consultant Rhoda Roberts, dramaturg Julian Louis, Lismore City Hall, 29 Nov-2 Dec
Independent choreographer, performance‐maker and teacher, Vicki Van Hout is a Wiradjuri woman born on the south coast of NSW. Vicki travelled to Lismore courtesy of NORPA.
Top image credit: Damion Hunter, Djurra, NORPA, photo Kate Holmes
In the second of two articles on experimental music in Adelaide — the first featuring Dan Thorpe — Chris Reid interviews Stuart Johnson aka Wolfpanther, curator of Metro Experimental Night. RT
A cornerstone of contemporary and experimental music in Adelaide is the series of monthly concerts titled Metro Experimental Night held at Adelaide’s Hotel Metropolitan. Stuart Johnson curates evenings of mainly electronic music that can range across ambient, drone, noise and all kinds of instrumental work. Importantly, Metro Experimental Night is open to a variety of performers and thus encourages emerging artists and new developments. Three acts featured on 12 July this year are good examples: sympathetic | DIVISION using synthesisers and electronics, Little-Scale also using synthesisers and electronics but stylistically quite different, and a high-intensity solo performance on guitar and effects pedals by Insomnicide.
On another evening, Wolfpanther himself performed — on miked banjo mediated through an array of electronics —with Melanie Walters on flute. Walters has a significant profile in the Adelaide scene, works with Dan Thorpe in the duo Stereo Mono and was a member of the Australian Bass Orchestra in the workshop production of Cat Hope’s new opera Speechless. The 8 November Metro Experimental Night program included a stunning solo recital by Walters who alternated between bass flute, flute and piccolo in works by German-Australian composer Felix Werder (on whose music she is writing her doctoral thesis) and Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. Wolfpanther pointed out that it is unusual to include composed music in a Metro Experimental Night program, but the audience was enchanted.
The music in the program can be variable in quality but is always interesting and sometimes exhilarating. I spoke to Wolfpanther about Metro Experimental Night, his own work and Adelaide’s contemporary and experimental music culture.
Outline for me your curatorial approach to your program.
I took over the Experimental Night from the previous organiser in early 2016, so I inherited something of the approach it already had and particularly the name. Of course the question of what “experimental music” means is not necessarily a simple proposition; my approach was to have a very broad interpretation. I don’t have a clear-cut definition but generally it’s about genres that aren’t usually well represented in a pub live music environment, uncommon instruments; improvisation, genuine experiments… There is likely a bias towards the sort of things and people I’ve been involved with, for example a bit of modular synth, but I try to keep the nights open to as many different approaches as possible. Certainly if someone approaches me with a genre that hasn’t been represented before I’m very keen to get them involved. My aim is to be very inclusive. Doing somewhat unconventional music in a regular pub show can be pretty daunting, so I think it’s good to have a chance to get people to play to an audience open to different kinds of music and understanding that occasionally a performance might not be particularly polished. I think it’s also interesting to get people from the academic side of music to come and play a pub show.
I gather you receive no government funding for the show, but the hotel does pay the performers?
The event exists thanks to the ongoing support of the Metro which provides a guarantee that goes to paying the artists [which] allows the event to be free, and it pays for a sound tech which makes a big difference. Sometimes there are fairly straightforward setups which I could probably handle myself, but when instruments, particularly drum kits, need to be miked up it is great to have someone who knows what they are doing.
Hotel Metropolitan, Adelaide
Tell me about your own work: your ensembles and musical interests.
In the last few years I’ve played in about a dozen or so groups, ranging from Thom Bordism Group — who played regularly for a couple of years and released an album — to bands which existed for one or two gigs. I can’t really settle on one particular approach to playing music so instead I try to do lots of different things with lots of different people. Not all of it is particularly experimental; I spent some time in the Loose Cannons, a singing group which sang traditional sea shanties, and I’ve played lead guitar in a rock band, Stable Vices. I’ve also played solo, mostly in an exploration of various electronic instruments I’ve been collecting for a while, though occasionally on guitar as well. Often I’ll develop an approach for a particular show and work on that before moving on to something else immediately afterwards. Most recently I played a no input effects loop at Metro Experimental Night, which is about the most literally experimental thing I’ve done.
The experimental scene in Adelaide is small and rather fragmented. Do you think that it has the potential to develop, perhaps with targeted funding of some kind?
I guess my approach to music is as a sort of folk art. I’m not looking to do it professionally; I just think it’s really good to be involved with a community of artists and listeners and I always try to encourage a strong participatory aspect to the scene. But I acknowledge I am in a privileged position to be able to have this attitude. I would like better support for experimental music, but it’s difficult to make a living even in more popular forms of music.
The helpful thing for musicians is to be able to perform, to record, to have the opportunity for those recordings to be heard. While anyone can release online this also means everyone does and it’s hard to get noticed, so radio stations and record labels are still important. Being able to have a regular event is a big benefit since most gigs get an audience by advertising a genre, like jazz, or an established name, whereas we have a mix of genres and quite often a whole lineup of musicians almost nobody has ever heard of. Being on every month has meant being able to build a regular audience.
I think it could be nice to have funding to help bring interesting acts from interstate and have them play with locals, which would be good for creating networks for Adelaide artists to tour. We’ve had a couple of interstate acts just through good luck and with local support, for example Ancient World, an artist-run venue, brought over Helm/Croatian Amor who otherwise would have only toured the east coast and put them together with a lineup of great local acts. There have also been great small-scale festivals like Lost City, Half Strange and Bungsound bringing interesting interstate acts together with locals. These sorts of endeavours are always pretty risky and some financial support would be beneficial. I think the Adelaide Festival under Artistic Director David Sefton has done a lot for the local experimental scene — exposing audiences to very interesting music and inspiring musicians with the Unsound program to try new approaches.
Top image credit: Bhenji Ra, Interchange Festival 2017, Critical Path, photo Matthew Syres
Critical Path’s Interchange Festival, held over a weekend from Friday evening to Sunday night, invited guests and participants to share experiences of working across and between cultures as part of choreographic practice via forums, workshops, performances and talks by international guests. Cleo Mees reported on the second day, themed The Political Body, while Nikki Heywood focused on the third, The Start and the End of the Body. RT
Where is the body in interdisciplinarity?
Over the course of the third day of Critical Path’s Interchange Festival 2017 we discussed a diverse selection of works, witnessed small showings, participated in workshops and snacked on a veritable degustation of interdisciplinarity: 22 artists/presenters over five sessions and 12 events.
It is true that Mornings are Difficult (the title of Sunday’s first session), especially so when the question “Where is the body in interdisciplinary work?” is posed before the caffeine has kicked in. Our morning convenor dancer Lizzie Thomson instinctively (and wisely) invites us up onto our feet for a short and sweet exercise. We’re asked to place any surface of our body against any in the room where we’re gathered. My senses start to wake up as pathways of sensation, beginning where my forehead is in contact with the doorjamb, spread to spine and limbs, small shifts of my weight suggesting the potential for further movement. Something so simple as the conscious meeting of fleshy and inanimate surfaces is an effective interruption to the normal arrangement of seated or standing bodies, our usual modes of occupying social place and time. This short awareness task somehow sets the tenor of the day, where the intelligent vehicles of our bodies and our bodily senses are foregrounded as the surface of interchange between self and other, be that other objects, environments, cultures, stories, systems…
Back in a seated position, alert for conversation, Lizzie makes a short introduction to interdisciplinarity. Describing her experience of being a living/talking book in the Newtown Library for the 2016 Biennale of Sydney in Mette Edvardsen’s time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine, Thomson riffs on being subject to the tidal rhythms of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. The “pauses of forgetting” and then the feeling of “words rushing toward” her, highlight for Thomson the “magical force of memory” as well as the labour of embodying and conveying language and the kinetic quality of remembered story.
The theme of the kinesis of language continues as performance-maker Brian Fuata plays on bringing together his parallel practices of ghostliness — where he literally occupies space in various venues covered in a sheet — and his more remote email performances, where curtains of text rise and fall on a scrolling page for an audience in isolated darkness as BCC (blind carbon copy) recipients. Here in the morning sunlight, framed by the open double doors against a backdrop of swaying masts in the harbour, Fuata stands wavering on one leg, interrupting his own stories about performing and accidents, as his ghostly white sheet and large pieces of paper are lifted by the wind. Notions of ephemerality underlined by his descriptions of what might happen are such that I drift in the vestiges of possibility, glimpsing the ghost of a performance that may never appear.
Missing body construction instigated by Joshua Pether, Interchange Festival 2017, Critical Path, photo Matthew Syres
What is the body?
The session continues with two breakaway groups (about eight people in each) tasked to tackle the morning’s question headlong. Our group’s captain Justine Shih Pearson lobs a small grenade; she asks us to consider “What is the body?” Ouch! More coffee anyone? In contemplating the different conditions in which we ascribe its value and whether indeed there is a shared consensus on the nature of the body, I quietly ruminate on why we use the distancing and generic definite article for ‘the’ body? Why not a body, my body, our body? How does our language determine our proximity to the subject in the terms under discussion, such as vulnerability and care? Does the general term “the body” reduce our complexity and objectify our understanding of what it is to be human? We duck and weave amid unsettling notions, pondering the uncertainty of bodies impacted by the forces of power and labour. The tantalising threads of content that we generate are impossible to contain in the short time available to us.
For me, the profusion of thoughts echoes Lizzie Thomson’s earlier proposition of “story as excess,” connecting with threads of my own thinking and research around dance and creativity more broadly as a form of excess. Not in terms of waste product but rather, at times, as an offering or outpouring, even a gift to be bestowed. The creativity that Australian philosopher Elizabeth Grosz refers to in Chaos, Territory and Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (2008) as the excess of our (and other animals’) being. As to the overarching question “Where is the body in interdisciplinary work?” I also wonder if interdisciplinarity is something existing in the body of the viewer. As a consumer of less determinate forms of art practice, I may be called upon to harness my own understanding of history and its codes, my visual acuity, my ability to listen and translate sound and language, my sense of touch and empathy for movement and, possibly primarily, my willingness to suspend knowing and desire for certainty. The synthesis of disparate elements, or crossover of inter-related disciplines, takes place in my body, your body, our bodies, as we participate in art as a form of exchange.
The body on-site
Our next session continues the theme of interdisciplinary work, as architectural theorist, designer and UNSW Art & Design Senior Lecturer Sam Spurr facilitates a conversation between performance ensemble Branch Nebula (Mirabelle Wouters and Lee Wilson) and Rochelle Haley, an artist and researcher working with experimental drawing, movement and spatial performance practice. The common link between these artists is their work in site specific contexts, often with untrained performers; Branch Nebula have worked in shopping centres and skate parks, while for Afterglow, Haley used an empty gallery as a site.
Wilson and Wouters have taken the choreography of skateboarding, BMX-riding, parkour and dance into the realm of the virtuosic and along the way struggled with the paradox of locking out locals from the park, while they make art with the express intent of community inclusion. They have actively engaged with this problem to develop strategies of infiltration, gaining acceptance and subtly challenging territorialism by involving local park users and infecting them with the spirit of collective creation. They embrace anarchic tendencies by making improvised performance with whoever is there.
Haley’s strategies are of a more overtly aesthetic nature. She enlists young Physical Education participants to create a type of expanded painting across a space with moving bodies attending to line, colour and drape of cloth; filling and emptying rooms and corridors with simple choreography, movers and viewers all wearing the same pale mantle of costume. While Branch Nebula and Rochelle Hayley are mutually interested in collectives and bringing people together, and perhaps — Spurr introduces the term — in “the care of looking” and audience behaviours, I am most struck and amused by the stark contrast between Branch Nebula’s gritty, sweating, risk-taking bodies and the apparent cool effortlessness of Haley’s timeless, gliding maidens.
Philippe Blanchard: sensitivity to proximity
Our post-lunch convenor Adelina Larsson introduces two international artists. Sweden-based French choreographer Philippe Blanchard outlined the parameters of his current project, also in terms of bringing bodies closer together. He is generally interested in the experience of migration and uncertainty, literally reflecting destabilisation through practices such as jumping and shaking to exhaustion. Scale and space in Australia provoke questions for him that relate to synchronising impulse and sensitivity to proximity, describing how doing away with the sense of his own body as a personal entity has led him to ask rather, “How do our bodies function together?” This inquiry seems to readdress concerns that have been investigated by practices such as BodyWeather, Body Mind Centering and Contact Improvisation among others across decades.
I-Chin Lin: language unleashed into dance
Taiwanese dancer I-Chin Lin speaks about the recovery of her culturally suppressed ancestral language, when at the age of 26 she experienced heartbreak and found herself swearing in her native Holo. The cathartic explosion of energy brought about what she describes as a connection to her core and to something fundamental to her own culture. For I-Chin the energetic force of passionately expressed language allowed her to newly identify the distinct character of her Taiwanese-ness, such as the inter-related qualities of humidity and the salty sweet nature of Taiwanese cuisine. The inner and outer climates as conditions of influence, embedded in the sound and feel of Holo language, now infuse her choreography in subtle ways. It was refreshing to hear about an artist, triggered by a visceral life event, turning inward to savour the nuances of her own culture. This highlights the tendency of many of us, myself included, who have scanned and sampled the depths of exotic art forms that are not our own, which can of course by its problematic nature be quite creative… notwithstanding our capacity for integration and hybridisation.
Matt Shilcock, Interchange Festival 2017, Critical Path, photo Matthew Syres
Matt Shilcock: The bones of truth
The late afternoon offerings are less talk, more action but here, as always with parallel sessions, the problem is making a choice, with the inevitable FOMO.
Having had a brief chat with Adelaide artist Matt Shilcock about alchemy and essences, I found his session, Osteogenuine – Alchemia Exteriores, intriguing. His own story of transformation, from wheelchair and a propensity for broken bones, to martial arts and the dance floor as a way of staying alert to his body’s capacity, is inspiring. He is interested in how desire and intent can inform his own and others’ embodiment and ensuing choreographic patterns. I marvel at how his circumstance and awareness of his own bony anatomy has carved his approach to conceptual structures, reinforcing the ways in which the architectures of body and mind are intrinsically entwined. I enjoy hanging out in the unknown, in a room with a young choreographer who is finding ways to simultaneously articulate and evolve his process.
To the session’s task. Each of us distils a statement of intent down to an absolute sentence, which is then deconstructed by creating a pattern across a circular arrangement of letters (an alphabetical clock or prima figura) transposed over a diagram of Leonardo’s Vitruvian man. In this way we configure our own 3D movement score in a process that is both mysterious and pragmatic. I am reminded of Surrealist procedures that rely in part on chance, in part on assemblage, as I swing my right outstretched Vitruvian arm from letter N at 10 o’clock diagonally across to Y at 2.30 while lifting left foot from the central V at 6 to G at 4ish, and other variations on that theme. As in alchemy there is a combination of the abstract and the concrete in such processes that I find appealing. Mostly I am left with the memory of Matt Shilcock stating that he is “not so interested in being seen” but in engaging with the osteo genuine or the bones of truth.
Julie Vulcan, Weizen Ho, Interchange Festival 2017, Critical Path, photo Matthew Syres
Performances: exchange, alchemy & ritual
In the curated evening session Julie Vulcan presents six artists under the title Continuity. Transgression. Interruption. Two of the artists are not present, their work shown in absentia. However, dancer Kathryn Puie and Lux Eterna using live camera and projection are in the building and fully fleshed. Their field of enquiry circles the ambiguity of prosthetics and their use to enhance capacity or to replace what is missing, and they propose that prosthetics are already ubiquitous in our lives in the form of spectacles, appliances, furniture, even cars. When Kathryn straps on her stilts and Lux her steadycam apparatus and they take over the space, they demonstrate, via shifting speeds, proximities and angles, the potential for exchange enabled by their individual prostheses. I was particularly interested in the video document showing them both blindfolded, taking the sighted camera for a walk, and also Lux’s developing facility to follow movement with her camera through enhanced awareness of her own body shifts and adjustments in dialogue with her ocular attachment.
Engaging in another kind of alchemy, indeed sorcery, Vulcan presents absent performer Weizen Ho’s work. Vulcan and Ho share an interest in hair as both debris and artefact for rituals of grief and memory. In this instance we are served with Chinese bowls containing a blend of tea and a tightly wound hair ball (blatantly disguised to look like tea) which connects to a ritual involving a slowly brewed herbal concoction that mothers and their children partake in after arguing. There is something of the abject in this offering that elicits a mix of disgust and curiosity in those assembled. Who will partake? As I tentatively sip, a person nearby asks, “How is it? Taste like forgiveness?’ Hmmm…more like green tea shampoo.
In a room upstairs. Alison Pevey, accompanied by the curtained darkness, a rumble of low sound and then a flood of natural light through the window, employs her “body as site” to bring attention to global and human energy cycles. As she expands and contracts in building waves of motion toward a short explosion and then exhaustion, I ponder the evident futility for Pevey as a single body/human to speak of excess and consumption. The collective of bodies stand idly at the sidelines while the cycle continues.
In the next room, the absent artist Joshua Pether is represented by a video screen displaying an x-ray of a spine affected by scoliosis as a kind of headstone atop a slab-like table. We are invited to read aloud the fragments of his text that forms a frieze around the walls, and then to construct the missing body out of an array of available ingredients. Cotton wool, stones, wire, a small light, bright plastic objects, organic things are all arranged by us, the collective, into a spontaneous humanoid assemblage to the repeating distortions of Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” and white noise. I was reminded of William Forsythe’s more sophisticated participatory work seen in Berlin, 2005 where “You made me a monster” involved a hanging cardboard anatomical assemblage and the tracing of the moving shadows. Like Forsythe, Joshua Pether evoked a sense of memorial and an energetic ritual dispersal of grief.
For the day’s finale and in the fading light, Rakini Devi is laid out ceremoniously in black beside a long piece of cloth that stretches almost the entire length of the Drill Hall. There is an ambient gurgling sound and I am drawn to the blood-red stain on her feet, chin and décolletage. An undulating movement rises in her torso and Devi begins her slow worm-like passage up the space. Her obeisant form rises at the end to invoke the spirit of Shiva in a short series of words and gestures before turning with a lifting of the cloth that now becomes her long train. We form her retinue and fall in line to carry the diaphanous cloth out into the evening air and further still some 250 metres to a jetty. I have little idea what this ritual signifies, but the soundtrack now is of bird call, clanging masts and voices of fishermen. Finally Devi/Shakti turns, her face wrapped in a red flower garland, and walks blindly toward us back up the rocking jetty. Not your usual Sydney Sunday by the harbour, beginning with a white-sheeted babbling ghost and finishing with a dark queen of the night — the start and end of the/my/your/our body are slippery co-ordinates.
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Critical Path, Interchange Festival 2017, The Start and the End of the Body; Drill Hall, Sydney, 12 Nov
Nikki Heywood’s response to The Start and the End of the Body was jointly commissioned by Critical Path and Open City, the publisher of RealTime.
Top image credit: Rakini Devi, Interchange Festival 2017, Critical Path, photo Matthew Syres
Critical Path’s Interchange Festival, held over a weekend from Friday evening to Sunday night, invited guests and participants to share experiences of working across and between cultures as part of choreographic practice via forums, workshops, performances and talks by international guests. Cleo Mees reported on the second day, themed The Political Body, while Nikki Heywood focused on the third, The Start and the End of the Body. RT
The second day of the Interchange Festival, The Political Body, yields robust conversation and sharing. In all five sessions I attend from those scheduled, questions and propositions are offered with both candour and care. Morning sessions consider the complexities and political implications of intercultural creative practice.
Mornings are difficult: protocols vs appropriation
The breakfast session, Mornings are Difficult, is facilitated by Raghav Handa in conversation with Tim Bishop, Rakini Devi and Liz Lea. Handa asks how we might think about protocols that seek to prevent cultural appropriation in performance-making. If we accept that culture is not immutable, and doesn’t exist in an airtight container, then where is the line between “appropriate experimentation” and “appropriation,” as Bishop puts it?
Several propositions emerge: one is that intercultural work should, by definition, involve a commitment to deep, extended research and training in all the cultural practices involved. Devi proposes that the term “intercultural work” should describe a methodology, not a product, and that a methodology should come from more than a two-week residency.
Other recurring ideas include the crucial importance of genuine respect for collaborators and cultural materials, and the importance of acknowledging when one has has appropriated something, or acted inappropriately. We talk, too, about what materials one can or cannot touch when making intercultural work, and what audience members can or cannot “read” in performances that draw on specific cultural vocabularies.
This last question has particular relevance for me as a writer reporting on this day. I am a Dutch-born immigrant to Australia, and my life experience has always been one of white, middle-class, colonial privilege. I am queer, I am cisgender (to my knowledge) and I currently do not identify as having a disability. An awareness of what I might not be noticing as a result of my position comes up again and again throughout the day — and I feel it is important to note it here.
Caroline Garcia, Paschal Daantos Berry, Interchange Festival 2017, Critical Path, photo Matthew Syres
Cultural identity: what can & cannot be claimed
Related questions come up in the following morning session I choose, which is a discussion between facilitator Paschal Daantos Berry and artists Caroline Garcia, Amala Groom and Martin del Amo, about how ancestry and a sense of cultural identity inform their practices.
Two hours of rich discussion pass quickly. Wiradjuri visual artist Amala Groom explains how spirituality and Aboriginal law live in her body, and how they inform her working method — from instances of spiritual inspiration that reveal the beginnings of a new work she should make, to questions around when she works, and at what pace. This gives rise to a discussion about how one structures one’s time as a performance-maker, and about the decolonising of one’s own working methods as an Indigenous or a Filipino artist working in an environment that preferences what we might call ‘Western’ approaches to time-management.
Performance-maker Caroline Garcia says that her Filipino heritage is not so much something that she references explicitly in her work, but something that informs process or “how she puts things together.” Among other things, Garcia’s work explores the complexity of both feeling that she is, and is not Filipina as she was born in Australia and has lived here all her life. The experience of travelling to the Philippines — a place that wasn’t so much “home” as a place “of ancestry” — was valuable as a process, too: it was an occasion to explore her “non-belonging.”
Something Garcia has grappled with is the question of what she can and cannot take, or claim, in relation to Filipino culture. A similar question about what can and cannot be “claimed” has come up for German-born dancer and choreographer Martin del Amo, who confronted the question of whether or not to call himself a Butoh dancer at a time in his life when he had trained extensively in BodyWeather and his work lent itself to associations with Butoh, but he had never been to Japan.
The conversation grows to include other people in the room. We work our way into meaty questions. Where does ‘whiteness’ live? When you claim a certain heritage, are you ever at risk of stealing something, or can we say that your ancestry lives in your bones, and that you always get to say who you are? Who in your world receives the authority to establish your mythologies, your identity? Under what creative or performative circumstances can you claim the authority to call something a truth (even if that truth is only a temporary, local one)?
Bill Shannon, Interchange Festival 2017, Critical Path, photo Matthew Syres
Bill Shannon: skateboard, crutches & perceptions of ability
After lunch, we move into a presentation by American choreographer Bill Shannon. Shannon has moved and danced on crutches since he was young. He talks and dances us through key aspects of his practice, in particular those that relate to the theme of the political body.
He discusses the oft-perceived disjuncture between his tools — his skateboard and crutches, often used simultaneously — as the former connotes a radical, transgressive relationship to architecture and the latter tends to be associated with a need to cling onto the built environment, to avoid falling.
He speaks about others’ scepticism about his condition; some fellow nightclub-goers, for example, doubt that he actually needs his crutches. Shannon shows us a dance move with which he fakes being a fake, and thereby playfully and transgressively instantiates a shift in power relations, turning himself from the subject of this idea of fakery, into its host.
He also introduces the idea of his “condition arriving,” that his “condition” (of being on crutches) always “arrives” in a space before the rest of him does. To many, he is first a man on crutches, and then everything else. Caroline Garcia said something similar earlier in the day: that her body is always already politicised, because it is brown. This notion of the politicised body comes up again in the following session.
Bhenji Ra, Interchange Festival 2017, Critical Path, photo Matthew Syres
Bhenji Ra: patience & disruption
Trans Filipinx-Australian artist Bhenji Ra’s afternoon lecture explores disruption on many levels, the performance itself shaking up what a performance lecture could or should be. Before it starts, we wait outside a closed door until Ra steps out in a shiny, head-to-toe alien costume and casually waves us inside.
She sprawls on her belly in front of a laptop, a few other necessities spread about (a book, a phone, audio speakers), and communicates with us through the laptop’s text-to-speech function. As she types, a computerised voice delivers poetic introductory thoughts about disruption and our being here together.
The typing takes time, and Ra jokes with us that “today is all about patience.” It feels like we are hanging out in Ra’s bedroom, on her terms. It’s a given that we’ll pay attention, and it’s a given that we’ll take our time. I think of all the cisgender heterosexual white male film directors whose work I was expected to give my time to as an undergraduate student — the many hours spent watching and analysing their films, many of which were, in retrospect, misogynistic — and think to myself that there is literally no one I would rather be giving my time to right now than Bhenji Ra chilling on the floor in an alien suit, suggesting to me via text-to-speech that we listen to her playlist.
Later the suit is peeled halfway off so we can see Ra’s face, and she continues to talk, or think out loud, about disruption. She talks about the disruption of heteronormative desire — “how could something as delicate as my Adam’s apple disrupt your desire?” — and describes knowing from a young age that her ethnicity would be disruptive in her rural suburban surroundings. Later, the conversation opens up to include the rest of the room. As has been the case several times today, the discussion is at once forthright and careful.
Exit, Bhenji Ra, Interchange Festival 2017, Critical Path, photo Matthew Syres
Acts about change: Newton, Crisp, Ra
The evening program considers the dancing body’s potential to act politically. Curated by Adelina Larsson, it features works by Rhiannon Newton, Ros Crisp and Bhenji Ra.
Sydney dancer and choreographer Newton begins by sharing two scores from her recent work, Bodied Assemblies. Through group improvisations that require listening, collective responsibility and a capacity for working in the face of the unknown, these scores ask both how we can come together and how we can change together.
The scores are attempted in pairs, in a group of four, and then, eventually, with everyone in the room — 40 or more people. As we all attempt to change together, the question of how to do that in a wider political sense — and the complexities, the requirements, the difficulty of doing that — begin to become apparent to me.
Ros Crisp shares fragments of DIRt, a work in progress that addresses her grief and perplexity at witnessing the environmental destruction of the land she grew up on after returning home from a career in Europe. There are video excerpts; there is a lamp-lit reading (an extended barrage of facts about the devastation of the planet); there are bursts of dancing; and there is Crisp’s distinctive way of talking to us — wonderfully loose, but also precise.
Overwhelmed with the question of what to do, and of what (if anything) dance can do about this ecological devastation, Crisp describes a process of “crashing around” — of “crashing back and forth” between dancing and the problem, or between dancing and activism. Crashing around to find, perhaps, a productive relationship between the two. We witness a problem unresolved, and a state of mind very much politically alive.
Finally, Bhenji Ra returns to wrap up the day. She slinks into the performance space in the alien suit I saw this afternoon. As she moves on all fours towards and through the audience, she begins to speak, rhythmically. Together, movement and speech (or is it a chant? or a song?) raise questions about power with both humour and a serious, darker edge. Again, we are in Ra’s space, even as she leads us out of the Drill Hall, through the foyer and into the warm evening, where she disappears into a roaring blue Mustang that tears off into the night.
I have been at the Interchange Festival for 12 hours, and I go home not tired, but satiated — full of food for thought.
Cleo Mees’ response to Political Body was jointly commissioned by Critical Path and Open City, the publisher of RealTime.
Top image credit: Rosalind Crisp, Interchange Festival 2017, Critical Path, photo Matthew Syres
Disruptive Critters
The game has rules but no stakes. Two men kneel either side of a digital interface, the display projected on a large screen for the audience’s benefit. On the screen, a series of dots and dashes each emit their own particular squeal, sigh or belch when set in motion. The men take turns tapping the interface, dragging the geometric flotsam and jetsam from the margins to sonically cross-contaminate. This produces a human-sounding hubbub that distinguishes the shapes as the Disruptive Critters of the work’s title.
The result of the Duckworth Hullick Duo’s collaborative practice, Disruptive Critters is presented in a double bill for Melbourne Music Week with City-Topias. Sharing performers and a childlike sense of wonder, both shows foreground play as a fundamental mechanism of the creative process. In Disruptive Critters this delights the children in the audience, who respond positively and audibly to the humorous grumbling and groaning that the shapes’ interactions and combinations generate. This gleeful response is perhaps further provoked by the framing narrative that features a child protagonist (Astrid Bolcskey-Hullick) in the role of the god-figure from whose mind and whims the game and the critters seem to emerge.
James Hullick, Jonathan Duckworth, Disruptive Critters, photo courtesy JOLT
However, it’s ultimately these efforts to frame the interface at the centre of the work with external theatrics that sees the appeal of the performance eventually wane. Between each level or scene of the work’s game, the three performers enact rituals, carefully laying pebbles out across the stage and walking slowly with arms outstretched from station to station. These actions, with their measured speed and air of importance, perform purpose. But their inclusion implies a lack of faith in the interface’s ability to immerse the audience. The intent here, in cloaking the technology in a narrative of gods toying with their creations, is not misplaced, as without it the show is, in effect, just two people playing a videogame for 45 minutes. But the performative elements appear to be the afterthought of the work’s digital world-building, and consequently the piece’s creation myth lacks visual sense.
At work’s end, the theatre fills with a thunderous rumble, as the digital imagery zooms out from the flat field of play, contextualising the many writhing, squeaking, growling shapes as specks collectively comprising a much larger globe. This image brings unity to the piece’s themes of disruption and creation in a manner that circumvents clumsy theatrics in favour of a clear graphic statement. And while the message is not earth shattering, the revelation of some bigger picture provides Disruptive Critters with the meaning it elsewhere failed to locate.
James Hullick, City-Topias, photo courtesy JOLT
City-Topias
City-Topias continues the mythological premise of its precursor, albeit in an expanded form. Featuring the Bolt Ensemble, in collaboration with Jonathan Duckworth, James Hullick and Milica ZZAA, the work is an 80-minute orchestral rock odyssey that claims to investigate “modes of social organisation and disorganisation.”
To this end, City-Topias, like Disruptive Critters, employs the ritualistic as an organising principle. Dressed in a fur and feather headdress, Zzaa initiates the show by wafting pungent incense throughout the performance space. She then assumes her position as VJ behind an audio-visual desk, projecting mystical imagery of labyrinths and stars and nebulously philosophical lyrics onto the big screen for the duration of the performance. Entering the space, the musicians also assume the pose of the ceremonial, their faces painted with colourful slashes of war-paint.
Flautist Belinda Woods sits before the digital interface with her flute, playing short, breathy notes that fill the space with anticipatory tension. Hullick, face smeared with glittering paint, takes his place as frontman, emitting a guttural drone at the microphone and intermittently plucking at his guitar. Amid the swelling commotion there is a suggestion of the carnivalesque, discordant sonic and visual elements uniting in a manner that renders the absurd significant in the work’s exploration of social configuration.
This thematic focus on rituals and organisational methodologies is realised more fully in the diverse modes of instruction that shape each of the atonal pieces that make up City-Topias. At times an onscreen interface is employed with various members of the ensemble spinning, aligning and highlighting a series of circular graphics complementing the movement of the composition. In one piece, Woods conducts the ensemble with an enchanting physicality that characterises her as sorceress or sibyl with her sweeping numerical gestures. Yet often the musical content is less remarkable than the means by which it is being produced. In particular the more lyrical songs tend to invoke the mythic, building to electrifyingly cacophonous summits only to be flattened by the vocals steering the work into the predictable territory of maudlin rock opera.
Everyone involved appears to have been given the opportunity here to play out their distinctive contributions, the joy apparent in the multiplicity of ideas and methods that have been implemented. Indeed, there is pleasure to be found in watching people revel in the creative process, but what is missing in City-Topias is a cohesion that the vague thematic arcs cannot bring to the performance’s disparate elements. Trying to strike a balance between order and disorder, disarray and design, the performance regularly falters either side of this equilibrium.
Belinda Woods, City-Topias, photo courtesy JOLT
There are moments though when this balance is achieved, as in Heterotopian Manifesto. Here the score is projected onto the screen, letting the audience witness the performers’ interpretation of a series of colour-coded brushstrokes spattered and slashed across the musical stave. The dissonant outbursts and frenetic spates are thus visually contextualised as part of some grander plan in a manner that reflects the heterotopia of the title, and touches upon notions of the polyphonic. If this piece is indeed the performance’s manifesto, then it realises the chaotic cohesion it preaches in a way that the rest of the program’s works don’t quite manage.
There is great value in the sense of fun and experimentation that both City-Topias and Disruptive Critters bring to the field of sound-based performance. Experimental practice is often imbued with a tone of high seriousness, as if to justify its divergence from established norms; the inherent exuberance and wonder of noise-making sometimes seems sorely lacking. On the flipside, that wonder can be denied an audience when the performers become enraptured by their own delight. I leave City-Topias glad to have witnessed skilled performers ply their craft with great joy, but am left wishing I could access their sense of revelation from my place up in the bleachers.
For a different response to Disruptive Critters and City-Topias go here.
Responding to a current MoMA exhibition of works by Louise Bourgeois, American visual artist David Salle, a superb arts writer, declares her evocation “of the female body as having an inside might be her greatest legacy”.
“One drawing — Hair (1948) — lays out the vocabulary that would remain in place for more than sixty years. Using a brush and ink, Bourgeois draws a female figure as two vertical columns of sacks topped by a featureless oval head, the whole figure enveloped in a cascade of hair that flows down both sides of the body, from the top of the head almost down to the feet. The roughly almond shape of the streaming-out mass of hair that frames the pod shapes, all seamed down the middle and topped off with a little button head, give the image another, labial reading. It’s like going inside Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866) and coming back out again as a doppelgänger in disguise. The detail contains the whole, like an image out of Nabokov — the world reflected in a soap bubble.”
Top image credit: Louise Bourgeois. No. 5 of 14 from the installation set À l’Infini, courtesy of MOMA
Two works presented by Sydney’s PACT in its Afterglow series — the organisation’s principal program of works from emerging artists — offer distinctive visions. Thomas E S Kelly’s Shifting > Shapes is a contemporary dance theatre exploration of the drama of shape-shifting in Aboriginal culture, and Fishhook’s FEMMENACE is a contemporary performance work in which women face fears that are embodied in disturbing stage imagery.
Karul Projects, Shifting > Shapes
Choreographer Thomas E S Kelly takes a multifaceted approach to the subject of shape-shifting commencing with a mockumentary in which he interviews a trio of people who reveal that they have other selves — fish, cat and gorilla. Intermittently funny, the video conjures everyday fantasies of transformation and then moves on to something more serious: a solo dance performance imbued, at first impressionistically and then quite specifically, with Dreamtime shape-shifting.
The first stage of NAISDA-trained Taree Sansbury‘s performance is relatively abstract, drawing on but not mimicking traditional Aboriginal dance. Holding her centre of gravity low, she articulates her hands sharply at the wrists, steps firmly and becomes recurrently animal-like — but not literally —whether crouching, moving on all fours or dragging herself across harshly lit terrain. Kelly’s soundtrack evokes desert — a bell, clanging metal, a hollow distant wind — but with urban beats, amplifying the sense of an ancient culture’s timelessness.
With pronounced spinning and stamping (to an emphatic drumming), a sense of determination in the movement emerges, but oscillating with bouts of involuntarism — the body freezing or arms flicking forward. Hands now and then flutter over the heart, evoking depth of feeling in what looks like incipient, compulsive transformation, the body low, elbows reaching out, a finger drawing a snaking line in the dust. A voiceover tells a Dreamtime story of Dirawong, a totem lizard, protecting its people from the Rainbow Serpent and in the process becoming a headland. In a final phase, Sansbury stands still before us, struggling to name herself and succumbing to forces that recall the push and pull and trajectories of the earlier dance — crawling, rolling, arms thrusting, the body locked — but now as if possessed, while eerie electronic birdsong underlines her otherness. Finally, Sansbury utters calm acceptance of her shape-shifting being.
Sansbury’s shape-shifting performance, made in collaboration with Kelly, is earthed, fluent, tautly controlled and convincingly driven. Shifting > Shapes is another fascinating work from Thomas E S Kelly, the maker of (MIS)CONCEIVE (seen in Next Wave 2016) in which Sansbury also appeared and, like it, exudes relentless energy which can at times blur the clarity of the choreography, as it did in Shifting > Shape’s overlong centrepiece. Next to the rest of the work, the introductory mockumentary seems an odd fit, tonally and conceptually, but, strongly danced, Shifting > Shapes has the makings of an economically expressed and even more powerful work.
Three long illuminated poles dance in the dark. Light flares, No Doubt’s “Just a girl” blasts forth and a trio of young female performers advance on the audience before roosting in an upstage scaffolding tower. This opening assertiveness of sexuality in Fishook’s FEMMENACE is immediately put to the test in a string of quickfire exchanges that recall post’s laterally logical way with words. Each, between Cheryn Frost and Cath McNamara, is speculative — What would I do if trapped by an Uber driver, was followed on the way home, attacked at home? Crash the car, scream…? — and complicated with the repetition in each of “What if it was a woman?” “What if there was a gun?” “A gun changes the whole situation.” The first menace faced by women in FEMMENACE is essentially male and the conversation, even though delivered drolly, is a kind of panic control, subsequently played out by the trio leaping about on the scaffolding.
Menace is not felt in Tahlee Kiandra Leeson’s langorous recital of an erotically witty account of a teenage sexual encounter in which personal euphemisms dominate — pinecones for breasts, lunchbox for knickers — followed by regret that “I was too much in the moment to see how he touched my body. Jesus Christ, my cunt hurts.” This time an aura of sexual pleasure is followed by greater threats.
In the work’s major scene, Frost in a totally consuming HAZCHEM outfit adjusts and breaks down the scaffolding. Leeson is locked in a black bag from which she eventually struggles barely free, swathed in black and aglow with tiny lights while a voiceover reflects anxiously on love — “we fit together and fall apart.” McNamara appears modelling a glittering, sexy bridal outfit, adorned at crotch level with a sparkling, mysterious sculptural extension. In stark contrast, from bride to mother, she returns in a pyjama top, heavily pregnant, squats downstage and proceeds to pull out innards of cloth while slowly backing up, leaving a dark trail. The combination of sustained images of, I’m guessing here, suffocating love, fear of pregnancy and a singing HAZCHEM worker cleaning up in its wake made for a grim if not altogether cogent spectacle. The menaces evoked are multiple — including relationships and women’s own bodies — transcending the work’s opening bluntness and evoking a more complex womanhood.
FEMMENACE is a raw work from an emerging ensemble (the trio are recent University of Wollongong graduates) capable of creating striking images and delivering idiosyncratic writing. Once Fishhook achieve greater clarity in their image-making and tauter structural cogency, FEMMENACE will become more than a recollection of vividly provocative moments from bold performers.
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PACT, Afterglow: Karul Projects, Shifting > Shapes, choreographer, composer Thomas E S Kelly, collaborator, performer Taree Sansbury, lighting designer Gigi Gregory; Fishhook, FEMMENACE, creator, performer Cheryn Frost, co-creators, performers Cath McNamara, Tahlee Kiandra Leeson, lighting designer Gigi Gregory, sound design Stephen Kendrick; PACT Theatre, Sydney, 22-25 Nov
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Here are brief profiles of the emerging artists appearing in Shifting > Shapes and FEMMENACE.
Thomas E S Kelly, a Bundjalung and Wiradjuri man of Queensland and New South Wales, studied at NAISDA Dance College, graduating in 2012, and went on to work in dance, theatre, puppetry and as a choreographer ([MIS]CONCEIVE and 1770: A Tale Not Often Told with Founding Modern Australia) and composer. He appeared in Vicki Van Hout’s Long Grass and Les Festivités Lubrifier and Shaun Parker & Company’s Am I.
Taree Sansbury, a Kaurna, Narungga and Ngarrindjeri woman from South Australia is NAISDA Dance College graduate who performed in Force Majeure’s two-year Culminate/Cultivate program, undertook an internship with Australian Dance Theatre in 2014, appeared in Vicki Van Hout’s Long Grass, Victoria Hunt’s Tangi Wai: a cry of water, Martin Del Amo’s Champions, Thomas E S Kelly’s [MIS]CONCEIVE and Branch Nebula’s Snake Sessions for the Artlands Festival in Dubbo, NSW.
Fishhook’s members met while studying at the University of Wollongong and developed a partnership for devising experimental theatre, prizing physicality in performance given backgrounds variously in gymnastics, contemporary dance, ballet, and BodyWeather.
Cheryn Frost, a Yuwaalaraay woman and lead-artist on FEMMENACE graduated in 2015 with a Bachelor of Performance (Acting) from UOW, co-devised, co-wrote and performed Smut & Half Truths (2016 Melbourne Fringe Festival), collaborated on and performed in PACT Collective’s iDNA (2016), and wrote and performed Confessional in PACT’s Salon #2: Possible abilities (2017).
Catherine McNamara has a Bachelor of Performance (Acting) from UOW and Communications and Media (Journalism) degrees, studied ballet and contemporary dance for many years, recently trained in BodyWeather, collaborated on and performed in ERTH’s Prehistoric Aquarium and was a dancer/company member of Victoria Hunt’s Tangi Wai: the cry of water.
Tahlee Kiandra Leeson has a Bachelor of Performance (Acting) degree from UOW, performed in young Australian playwright Ava Caruso’s The History of the World From Now (Adelaide Fringe Festival 2016), collaborated with Bonnie Cowan on Two Marbelous Girls, a performance action at the Ultimo Community Centre, and recently appeared in re:group performance collective’s Route Dash Niner Part II.
Chauka was furtively shot on a mobile phone from inside detention on Manus Island and sent to Iranian-Dutch filmmaker Aras Kamali Sarvestani. This important 90-minute film by Kurdish-Iranian refugee and journalist — and honorary Australian Media and Entertainment Alliance [MEAA] member — Behrouz Boochani, shows us something of what life is like for the 600 people held hostage to our Government’s failed “Pacific Solution.” They have been imprisoned in indefinite detention for over four years now and with no end in sight. Co-director Sarvestani was a student of Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami and that experience strongly influenced his collaboration with Boochani.
Special screenings have been organised by the Refugee Action Coalition which continues to build pressure on the Government to safely re-settle these people.
Watch the trailer below:
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NSW: 6.30 Tuesday, 12 December at Dendy Cinema, Newtown
Sip my Ocean marks the first major retrospective of the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist in Sydney. Ironically, prior to this we have only been offered “sips” of her gently transgressive, colour-saturated dream worlds in which the human is playfully reintegrated into nature, but in this current exhibition we are invited to utterly slake our thirst.
At the entrance is Meditation for Suburbbrain (2011), a two-channel work comprising a small projection of the artist, in super close profile, in front of motion-blurry scenery, the details of which are subsequently projected, floor to ceiling, onto the adjoining wall. The projection surface is covered, bas-relief style, in a series of white objects — boxes, packaging, tattered underwear and baby clothes — aesthetic detritus that Rist has titled The Innocent Collection, dating from 1985 to approximately 2032 (the artist’s predicted retirement or demise?). We don’t hear her words but subtitles indicate she is talking about relationships: “All this overblown romanticism,” “Should one end the relationship at its best?” The tone of this work is surprisingly sombre, the colours muted, the text tinged with pessimism — not what we have come to expect from Rist. It introduces a curious melancholy early into the otherwise positively pleasurable sensorium that is the rest of the exhibition.
Pipilotti Rist, Administrating Eternity, 2011, image courtesy MCA Sydney
Video hits
Beguiling soundtracks lure us around the corner to experience two of Rist’s best known early works. The video from which the exhibition takes its title, Sip my Ocean (1996), introduces us to the artist’s fondness for underwater scenography, showing a water-baby in sunny yellow bathing suit frolicking among the swirling verdant plants of an azure ocean. It’s bright, idyllic and joyous even as we see plastic cups tumble in the currents and hear the guttural wail of Rist as she reinterprets the Chris Isaak hit “Wicked Game.”
The same jubilance is present in Ever is Over All (1997), in which a gorgeous woman in a 1950s pale blue frock and Dorothy-in-Oz red shoes, skips in graceful slow motion down a sidewalk, joyously smashing car windows with her long-stemmed Kniphofia flower. Fields of these flowers, also known as red hot pokers, streak across the adjoining screen, blurry oranges and reds bleeding onto the edge of the other image. In Rist’s world we will destroy oppression with grace and natural beauty, a secret to which a passing, winking female policewoman is privy. In these works we see the key elements of the artist’s thematic and stylistic oeuvre: the natural world represented by water and flora; smashing of gender constraints and social mores; colour as content; and sound as seduction.
Pipilotti Rist, Ever is Over (still), 1997, image courtesy MCA Sydney
Single channel histories
In a small room on the other side of the entrance is another slice of Rist’s history, Das Zimmer (1994/2017), a selection of 15 single-channel video works and excerpts. Ever attentive to the way in which we watch, she invites us to clamber up onto giant couches and channel-hop via an enormous remote control. I notice many people eschew this room, preferring the more spectacular treats that await further into the exhibition space, but for me these works such as I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much (1986), PickelPorno (1992) Sexy Sad I (1997) and Open my Glade (1997, the Flatten series), are integral to reading greater depth into Rist’s work as a whole. In these pieces we see the strength of her feminist beliefs and her battle against sexual and moral convention, leavened with a strong dose of play. Perhaps it is the self-conscious quality of early video and its clunky and limited compositing techniques, but in their rawness these works show Rist’s agenda at its most charged and defiant.
Pipilotti Rist, Sip my Ocean, video still courtesy MCA Sydney
Behind the eyelids, beyond the beauty
Heading further into the exhibition we move away from the flatness of single channel into greater degrees of immersion and three-dimensionality. Marking this shift is the 2011 work Administrating Eternity. For a moment, amid multiple screens made of sheer fabric, fragmenting and diffusing the projections of psychedelic sheep, plant life and geometric patterns, I feel quite happily lost. The gallery walls recede and I am simply surrounded by diaphanous abstractions made from floating colours. For this brief moment I say, yes, this is enough, Rist has succeeded in conjuring the stuff of which dreams are made.
In contrast to the amorphous nature of Administrating Eternity is Sleeping Pollen (2014). While maintaining all Rist’s main concerns in terms of subject matter (the almost excruciating beauty of plant life) and form (fully integrated installation systems with projectors placed inside large mirrored baubles hung like pendulous fruit around the space), this work is startlingly different for its sense of reduction and restraint. Here the plants float in isolation from their environment, as precious, highly detailed specimens on black backgrounds. It is a darkly seductive environment but I struggle to find more meaning beyond the beauty.
Similarly overwhelming is Pixelwald Motherboard (2016). It seems every contemporary art exhibition has to have a work that is perfect for visitor selfies, and this is the one. Three thousand LED lights in sculptural shades (made in collaboration with Kaori Kuwabara) represent pixels of a video image. We are offered a stunning cascade of shifting colours and patterns that Rist intends to appear as an exploded screen or a simplified brain. Though rendered even ‘cooler’ by the (once again) accompanying Chris Isaak cover from Sip my Ocean, it’s another work that fails to resonate beyond its remarkable aesthetics and technical execution.
Pipilotti Rist, Sip my Ocean, installation image Ken Leanfore courtesy MCA Sydney
Worlds made of worlds
At the end of the gallery space a small neon sign implores “help me” and we proceed through a maze-like curtained corridor to emerge into a massive assemblage of works collected under the title Your Room Opposite the Opera. Comprising 14 pieces made between 1994 and 2017, this room alone represents a Rist retrospective. More than a wunderkammer it is a wunderzimmer: a dining table becomes a kaleidoscope; a gin bottle glows with botanic lifeforms; a bed is blanketed with a whole universe; a mobile of underpants whirls with colour; no surface is safe from projection. Beneath our feet, in a tiny hole in the floor, a miniature, naked Rist looks up, yelling to us from the depths of hell (maybe this is the origin of the call for help?). These moments of magic are scattered among books, vases and knick-nacks and we are invited to sit in lounge chairs to become part of the decor.
At the far end of the space, the perpendicular walls form a screening space for Another Body from the Lobe of the Lung Family (2009). The segment I view involves a very cute piglet gambolling in a meadow in extreme close-up on one screen and a naked, nubile young woman doing the same on the other, I witness a toddler, around 18 months old, run screaming with joy towards the enormous piglet. At that moment the screens swap. He stops for a minute, looking at the enormous woman, and then resumes his joyous squealing — it’s all the same to him. A little later I notice what I think is a curious sea slug, and then realise it is in fact a bobbing penis and testicles. In this video Rist has certainly achieved her ongoing aim of fusing the human and natural world.
Following the neon sign to “trust me” we negotiate another curtained maze to encounter 4th Floor to Mildness (2016). We are invited to kick off our shoes and lie on beds to look up at the ceiling projections. A kind of sequel to the video Sip my Ocean, here we are under the Old Rhine rather than the sea. It’s a slightly more fetid world of slimy weeds and tattered lily pads, yet no less visceral and sensual. At times flesh pink pigment is introduced into the water, swirling in clouds through which a breast may emerge, or Rist’s more mature face, or her slightly more weathered hand. In Sip my Ocean the camera follows behind, chasing the image, but 4th Floor to Mildness (2016) is filmed from below looking up at a liquid sky, with little camera movement. This allows us to float, peacefully, almost ambivalently, as we become one with the primordial soup. The soundtrack is also more melancholic. Mixed in with bubbles of submersion are two wistful folk-pop songs by a group called Soap&Skin that allude to lost childhood, memory and nostalgia.
Pipilotti Rist, Selfless in the Bath of Lava, image courtesy MCA Sydney
A crack in the oeuvre
It’s in 4th Floor to Mildness that I find the connection to the discord sensed in Meditation for Suburbbrain. This is an older Rist with a touch of disillusionment perhaps, or simply resignation to being one who sees differently. And this is perhaps what I’m seeking more of in the exhibition as a whole — more of a sense of stress fractures in this fantasy world. Sip my Ocean is indisputably a stunning exhibition full of sensuousness, beauty and wonder, but reflecting on the development of Pipilotti Rist’s oeuvre, as the exhibition deftly allows us to do, leaves me feeling that as the works get bigger and the technology more complex, the more abject aspects, the dangerous ideas, so clear and raw in the earlier works, become codified and aestheticised.
Listening afterwards to the artist’s commentary on the excellent online guide, I am enlightened as to the deeper intentions of Rist’s later works, which at the time of viewing read to me as variations on a theme. Perhaps in seeing such a generous selection of works there’s a danger that, easily overwhelmed by the accumulation of style, we are left with a simplified impression.
By Rist’s own admission, her work is primarily about fantasy. In the audio guide she says, “I don’t think artists have more fantasy than no[n]-artists, but it’s our job to take it seriously and to try to materialise it.” Judged on these terms, there is certainly no denying that the Pipilotti Rist catalogue exhibits seriously fantastic(al) art, offering undeniable sensory pleasures.
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MCA, Pipilotti Rist, Sip my Ocean, curator Natasha Bullock; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 1 Nov 2017-20 Feb 2018
Top image credit: Pipilotti Rist, Sip my Ocean, installation image Jessica Maurer courtesy MCA Sydney
Kirsten Johnson has spent a career behind the camera as a documentary cinematographer. Her 2016 film, Cameraperson, is built from decades of footage from films she shot like Citizen Four for Laura Poitras and Fahrenheit 9/11 for Michael Moore. “Here, I ask you to see it as a memoir,” Johnson tells us in an intertitle at her film’s beginning.
How exactly does a filmmaker build a memoir from the material of other peoples’ films and lives—from scenes as diverse as a Nigerian birth unit to a strolling street-side conversation with Jacques Derrida? How does Johnson use the dialogue of her subjects to give herself a voice?
Critics and editors such as Matt Zoller Seitz, Koganada and Kevin B Lee have produced video essays, an experimental form of audiovisual criticism currently blooming in the digital sphere and all manner of academic and popular circles. In this video essay produced especially for RealTime, Sydney-based critic and video editor Conor Bateman shows how Kirsten Johnson has hijacked conventional forms of editing, montage and dialogue to contribute something entirely new to documentary cinema. Lauren Carroll Harris
Credits: All music used in this video essay was licensed under Creative Commons:
“Ocean Day,” written and performed by rin ishi, is licensed under an Attribution 3.0 Unported license. You can listen to “Ocean Day” here.
“Sayonara,” written and performed by rin ishi, is licensed under an Attribution 3.0 Unported license. You can listen to “Sayonara” here.
“White,” written and performed by rin ishi, is licensed under an Attribution 3.0 Unported license. You can listen to “White” here.
“don’t worry about it,” written and performed by [ocean jams], is licensed under an Attribution 3.0 Unported license. You can listen to “don’t worry about it” here.
Despite its provocative title, referencing Valerie Solanas’ Scum Manifesto of 1967, which advocated the elimination of the male of the human species, and the invocation in the performance of the Wilis, the ghosts of betrayed young women in the ballet Giselle (1841) who force men to dance to their deaths and throw their bodies in a lake, Scum Ballet is largely contemplative, focused on female being, imbued with a sense of ritual and magic and endowed with symbolism that is variously literal and elusive.
Five casually attired female performers stand in a cluster on a stark white floor, expressionlessly regarding the arriving audience. They exit to appear in various locations on the grid high above, leaning or seated, legs swinging, looking down on us. In a sustained blackout they fragilely harmonise a gently melodic, wordless chant. As our eyes adjust to the dark, the voices draw closer and we see shadowy figures crawling onto the floor. The careful shaping and the sense of time suspended at the beginning of Scum Ballet transport us to what will prove to be a most unusual realm.
Ivey Wawn, Scum Ballet, Campbelltown Arts Centre, photo Catherine McElhone
In the ensuing scenes, the women configure themselves in ways that largely suggest a deep unanimity, at first seated in a diagonal across the space, gently sliding, touching, reversing direction, pairing and resting heads across each other’s shoulders before once again gazing at us. An early exception to this togetherness arises in the subsequent scene performed against music that threatens with heavy beats and the startling crash of metal and glass. While others watch, performers face off in successive, circling pairs, dragging long strips of wood — weapons never wielded and only borne when wearing the heavy trousers the performers take turns at sharing. It’s a strange ritual, the tension heightened by the intensity of locked gazes, arms loose but bodies in readiness and a slow, heavy pace barely varied. Is this a ritual refusal of violence? Are the trousers adopted meant to represents a male animus? Blackout and the sound of sticks dropped.
The sense of threat returns. The performers collect short blades, ply them between their fingers, modestly evoking Edward Scissorhands or Wolverine, and, gathering, seat themselves centrestage in an engaging, slow-moving tableau of touching and stroking. The painterly image successively suggests power, danger, intimacy, care and fond togetherness. Subsequently the dancers adopt loosely balletic poses, the blades now eerily extending the natural gestural reach, a variation on the power of Giselle’s Wilis?
Eugene Choi, Angela Goh, Scum Ballet, Campbelltown Arts Centre, photo Catherine McElhone
A burst of song, percussion and roaring drives the performers across the stage, each adopting a distinctive shape, step or momentum — together but apart. This brief surge, later repeated, is quickly countered by formal balletic groupings, three dancers to one side, two to the other in an evocation perhaps of the Wilis but without any intimation of threat, or perhaps it’s simply an expression of harmony through formal dance. An ensuing cycle of intensely coloured lighting cast across the empty stage is attractive but indecipherable, perhaps designed to extend the calm before a new mystery emerges in a scene that suggests ecstatic ritual.
The dancers carefully build a large mat from interlocking segments, on which they sit close in various positions which allow them to each discretely bounce with rapidity and force, Angela Goh facedown, fully extended, body rippling and pounding like a caught fish. This strange violence is self-inflicted but is also a collective expression of strength and considerable endurance, recalling and contrasting with the earlier image of the tender stroking with blades. I did fleetingly wonder if this floor dance correlated with the men danced to their deaths in Giselle, but the connection was slender and identification with the men seemed unlikely given the “scum” in the work’s title. The mind is busy when engaging with image-based works.
Ellen Davies, Verity Mackey, Scum Ballet, Campbelltown Arts Centre, photo Catherine McElhone
Finally, venturing a kind of magic, the performers slide the mat about while one of their number slowly traverses it, all the while our expectation building that the segments will disjoint beneath the weight of the body; they don’t. Scum Ballet might not offer the kind of dance that defies gravity with propulsive steps and giant leaps, but the deeply earthed pounding of the previous scene and the victory over friction in the next exhibit in different ways dancers’ capacities to unsettle expectation, here in the service of metaphor-making to illustrate female strength through collaboration. A similar, perhaps less necessary and less collective, though dextrously executed, routine follows using a door-sized plank in place of the mat. In the end, there is darkness and song, lines gently overlapping, the ritual completed.
Though from time to time experienced as a series of disparate images, welcome in their strangeness, Scum Ballet coheres more memorably on recollection. The strength of female collaboration is evident in strong performances that exude the sense of building “intimacy, love, care and magic between us” that Angela Goh writes of the work’s making, but it’s made even more fascinating by the tensions and ambiguities conveyed in the most potent of her images.
Angela Goh’s intruiging solo work Desert Body Creep is programmed for New York’s PS122 13th Annual Coil Festival, 10 Jan-4 Feb, 2018. Read reviews by Elyssia Bugg and Alison Finn of its 2016 Next Wave premiere.
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Campbelltown Arts Centre: Scum Ballet, choreographer Angela Goh, performers Angela Goh, Eugene Choi, Ellen Davies, Verity Mackey, Ivey Wawn, lighting consultant Mirabelle Wouters, outside eye Sarah Rodigari; Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney, 24-25 Nov
Top image credit: Scum Ballet, Campbelltown Arts Centre, photo Catherine McElhone
This week we report on two important festivals that feature spheres of often underrated artistic activity, one drawing together artists from across the country, the other making global connections. The Hobiennale Arts Festival, a gathering of Australian and New Zealand Artist Run Initiatives (ARIs), exhibited over 100 artists in and around Hobart, and Unsound Adelaide, an experimental music event springing out of Poland, featured international and Australian artists. For our report on Hobiennale, Lucy Hawthorne takes in a wide swathe of the festival and Lucy Parakhina aims her video camera at artworks, events and participants. You can also watch our streaming of NAVA’s forum on the state of ARIs. Chris Reid applauds Unsound Adelaide’s intelligent programming in a country in which experimental electronic music events of scale are far too rare. Amid generic arts festivals, Hobiennale and Unsound yield idiosyncratic pleasures for audiences and hope for artists. Keith & Virginia
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Top image credit: Greta Wyatt and Grace Marlow perform Theia Connell’s work as part of Greater Union, Sister ARI’s exhibition at Cinema One, Hobiennale 2017, video still Lucy Parakhina
The catchy title for Tasmania’s inaugural Hobiennale festival references the recurring exhibitions that have become ubiquitous around the world as a form of cultural capital. But this is not the Hobart Biennale — it’s not a big budget, state-run event, but a festival that celebrates the humble ARI, the Artist Run Initiative. The festival’s name is a composite that in some respects parodies the scale and seriousness of the biennale as institution, replacing the national pavilions of the Venice Biennale with local ARIs that are more likely to collaborate than compete. Each ARI represents a community, a model of working and a significant contribution to the art scene. Staged just as this year’s trio of internationally dominant art festivals — the Venice Biennale, Documenta, the Munster Sculpture Triennial — draw to a close, the Hobiennale is a reminder of the importance of supporting local, experimental events at the bottom of the world.
The ARI writ large
With 18 participating ARIs from Australia and New Zealand, over 100 artists, dozens of exhibitions, performances, critical discussions and participatory events, Hobiennale was always going to be a busy and ambitious event. It also turned out to be one of the most exciting I’ve ever attended, with unscheduled performances, an interested and engaged audience and an evolving and nimble program that reflected the energy and excitement of the artist organisations involved. The inaugural event was curated by Liam James and Grace Herbert and facilitated by Hobart’s Constance ARI, an organisation that (like many ARIs of late) has shifted from being a physical space with a regular gallery program to a project-based model.
Hobiennale inhabited everything from existing art galleries to underground heritage sites and public spaces, many of them usually under-utilised. The 19th century neo-Gothic Domain House held exhibitions curated by FELTspace, Moana, Success and The Curated Shelf + Radio 33. The house is still undergoing vital repairs, but compared to the last time it was open for a one-off exhibition, there was significantly less rot. Eloise Kirk’s installation of paintings picked up on the colour scheme of one of the upstairs annex rooms: the flaking spearmint upper coat and the pink layer underneath. Her paintings were installed upright, the front surface deliciously shiny, the back uncoated wood, picking up on the patchwork of raw timber covering holes in the dilapidated walls.
Xindian Boys’ Lost in Interstellar Space as part of Archive Fever, presented by Success ARI, photo Lucy Parakhina
Admin, instruction & installation
Adelaide artist Monte Masi’s recitation of the text-based work, IN-SPI-RAY SHUN-SHUN APP-LI-KAY SHUN-SHUN (2017) at Domain House was not listed on the official program, yet it was one of the best performances of the festival. The artist’s words were rhythmic, relentless, interweaving the administrative language of applications with absurd statements laced with a mixture of artspeak and lyrics: “describe how you envision the work will be installed in the space / for example / zero visibility / large scale paintings occupying the / south wall / everywhere is hot.” Drawing frequent laughs, he spoke to a specific and very sympathetic audience for whom the language is very familiar.
The work was shown as part of the FELTcult exhibition at Domain House presented by Adelaide ARI FELTspace, which explored the notion of ARI culture as “cult,” and given the knowing glances passing between audience members during Masi’s performance, the point was well made. Also drawing on ARI administration was Jenna Pippett’s Doing Stuff with Anne.J: Episode 6 — How to Volunteer at FELTspace (2017), which used the language of 1980s instructional videos to draw attention to the unpaid labour upon which ARIs (and the arts sector more broadly) rely.
While the FELTspace exhibition was conceptually tight, the install was disappointing and the works seemed to float in the centre of the room, detached from the aesthetically noisy surroundings. By comparison, Perth-based ARI Success, inhabited the basement level with a layout that emulated an archaeological museum – an apt layout for an exhibition interrogating cultural assets and the production of history.
Teen witchiness & play
Light as a Feather… by another Perth ARI, Moana Project Space, also seemed appropriate for the dilapidated neo-Gothic house. The exhibition celebrated the enduring influence of the “teen witch” as a feminist symbol of strength. At its centre was a rather crude wunderkammer that unfortunately received fewer donations of curious objects than it deserved. The shrine by Grace Connors combined 21st century technology with references to the cult 90s movie, The Craft (1996) — a movie that had (from personal experience) many teenagers of the time in search of magical distraction, chanting, “Hail to the Guardians of the Watchtowers of the East…” Between the installation of mood rings and chewing gum by Oliver Hull and Celeste Njoo, the knitted jumper dress “witch kit” by Emma Busswell and Lyndon Blue’s naïve painting of a Fiat perched atop an open fireplace, the Moana exhibition was a little haphazard. Indulgently nostalgic, it nonetheless succeeded with its strong sense of play.
An element of play could be seen again in the work by Theia Connell, performed by Greta Wyatt and Grace Marlow as part of the Greater Union exhibition curated by Sister (a relatively new Adelaide ARI). In the basement of an abandoned cinema, the duo caressed a ribbon of electronic text in a careful dance of negotiation. The bottom half of the ribbon was dead, although the text would occasionally flow through as the kinks in the wiring were manipulated. While unintended, the anxious energy of the performers trying to coax the text past the faulty connection made for fascinating viewing.
Julia Drouhin’s performance as part of Sonic Systematics, video still Lucy Parakhina
Quoll resurrection
Another favourite performance was Julia Drouhin’s interaction with a taxidermied quoll as part of Sonic Systematics, curated by Pip Stafford. Sitting cross-legged in the corner of the convict-era Bond Store and surrounded by vitrines of specimens, Drouhin treated the animal with an antique Provita Generator or violet ray — an early 20th century device used to address everything from spinal conditions to dental abscesses. Borrowed from the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery’s (TMAG) education department, the quoll was taxidermied in a way that rendered the Tasmanian carnivore cute, domestic and even a little bit cool, making Drouhin’s pseudo-ritual all the more curious and absurd.
TMAG also played host to Makiko Yamamoto’s outstanding Utterly Silent, Utter Silence, Utterly Something, Thinking Thinking, Utterly Listening, Utterly Umm… (s 2 ep.1), which used the spoken word as its medium. Presented by Bus Projects (Melbourne), the installation of sound-based works has changed my attitude towards headphones in galleries forever. The artist arranged and lit the headphones in a way that the figures listening with them became a key aesthetic element, and in many respects, the presence of the visitors was as important to the overall experience as the primary soundtracks — something I only truly recognised when I returned to the space after the opening and found myself alone.
ARIs as a social system
Hobiennale was as much about celebrating ARIs as it was exhibiting the work curated by them. Although the forums addressed problematic issues, the exhibitions and openings, parties and performances were largely celebratory events. The NAVA forum, I Don’t Work for Free: Tensions in Artist Run Initiatives could have gone for days, the one hour time-slot barely scratching the surface of this broad yet important topic. However, the issue was continually (and probably better) discussed during the informal conversations that took place throughout the festival. These incidental discussions were particularly evident at events like Frontyard’s (self-described as a “Not-Only-Artist Run Initiative”) potluck dinner and book launch, the culmination of a series of open conversation sessions at a local community arts centre.
FELTspace might have put forth the notion of the ARI as cult, but Hobiennale demonstrated that the ARI is very much a social system, and one that is central to the contemporary art scene. At every event, artists were exchanging ideas, planning new projects and comparing and debating models of funding and programming. Artists might have bemoaned the lack of funding, obstructionist authorities, as well as the difficulties of finding free or low-rent spaces, but the mood among participants seemed largely enthusiastic and positive.
Opening up the city
As noted earlier, few of the spaces Hobiennale inhabited were white-walled galleries. It gave visitors to Hobart and locals alike an opportunity to experience places usually closed to the public, such as Domain House and the underground magazine rooms of the early 19th century Princess Park Battery. It reflects the current popularity of unusual and meaningful sites as exhibition spaces, as well as the make-do attitude of many artists, who can and will do incredible things with just about any space if only they are made available. The Hobart ARI, Visual Bulk, for instance, exists within a tiny city garage/basement, hosting a fast-paced exhibition program that consistently shows some of the best experimental art in Hobart. Another participating ARI, Alaska, operates out of a carpark in Sydney’s Kings Cross, and the before-mentioned Success ran a program underneath a former department store in Fremantle before recently switching to an off-site model.
Te Ara Te ao Hauāuru, Kauri Hawkins, presented by Meanwhile, Hobiennale 2017, photo Lucy Parakhina
NZ on-site
Of course, when exhibiting stand-alone work (as opposed to work made specifically for a site), there’s a significant difference between a garage and underground fortifications. Yet, when sites are used strategically — as in the case of Christopher Ulutupu’s The Romantic Picturesque (presented by New Zealand ARI, Playstation) — they can enhance certain aspects of place and alter our reading of pre-existing works. On entering the dank underground battery space, visitors could hear the soundtrack of Ulutupu’s central karaoke video work, including the upbeat pop song “Brown Girl in the Ring,” which contrasted with the shadowy environment. The act of entering such a space prepared the viewer for the darker side of Ulutupu’s videos, which evoke romantic ideals of landscape, family and place with an uneasy twist. On first glance the video painted a rosy picture of two women singing karaoke in a forest. However, there’s an unmistakable tension created between the women and the white man being groomed off to the side, his eyes on the women, his gaze unreciprocated.
Representing Meanwhile (the other New Zealand ARI), Kauri Hawkins’ public artwork combined the familiar language of street signage with contemporary kowhaiwhai (Māori painting). Hawkins described a kind of new colonisation in which Māori are moving to Australia from New Zealand seeking wealth. The sculpture was naturally flashy, made from highly reflective signage material and shaped like wings. The initial location was a little odd, awkwardly tucked in among the Glenorchy Art and Sculpture Park pavilion. It was later moved to the colonial era Rosny Schoolhouse complex, which gave it a little more space, although I felt it demanded still more.
lump, Grace Blake, as part of Surface World, presented by ANCA, photo Lucy Parakhina
ACT in The Commons
Surface World, the excellent exhibition by the Australian National Capital Artists (Canberra), took advantage of a half-renovated building, The Commons, to produce installations that worked with the crumbling walls and mis-match of doors. Patrick Larmour’s intricate paintings were hung on bubble-wrap coated walls — a textural lead-up to Grace Blake’s gloriously silky and suggestive web of latex. Cat Mueller’s geometric paintings drew attention to the patterning of the partly exposed lath walls, and Tom Buckland’s tiny peephole dioramas gave us a glimpse into intriguing and sometimes disastrous technological scenarios.
A festival to learn from
There were far too many excellent events in Hobiennale’s demanding program to cover in a single review. The festival was rightly supported by a range of funding bodies, including the Australia Council for the Arts, yet existed on a relative shoestring, relying (as most ARIs do) on volunteer labour and the goodwill of artists and curators. Despite these challenges, it was a festival with a distinct personality, and one that larger biennales could learn from for its experimentation and nimble programming.
Watch a visual overview of the Hobiennale, featuring interviews with festival directors Grace Herbert and Liam James, and participants from Brisbane, Sydney and Alice Springs, below.
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Hobiennale Arts Festival, directors Grace Herbert and Liam James, facilitatorConstance ARI; Clarence, Glenorchy, Hobart, 3-12 Nov
Top image credit: The Romantic Picturesque, Hobiennale 2017, photo courtesy Play_station and Christopher Ulutupu
“The Daly River Girl began its life in 2013 over a cup of tea with a fellow arts peer,” says Tessa Rose in her program note. The making of the performance has taken four years and includes several creative development periods; one with the Yellamundie Writers Festival in Sydney and another in Darwin supported by Brown’s Mart where the play’s director, Alex Galeazzi and Tessa Rose worked intensively on the script to balance the painful stories with lighter moments from Tessa’s extraordinary life. This development resulted in a work-in-progress showing which, even then in its raw state, showed clear signs of the powerful piece to come.
Tessa Rose is a warm and compelling performer who speaks directly to the audience, telling her story in non-linear segments that move fluidly across her life. The audience follows her journey — her early childhood with a Seventh Day Adventist foster family in Perth, her failed fostering with three other families, her adult career as a successful stage and screen actor in Australia and on tour in Europe, her teens as she is reunited with her Aboriginal family in Daly River, her excruciating experience of domestic violence as a young woman. Tessa Rose bares it all in a scrupulously honest exposé of her life.
The play opens with Naina Sen’s video projection of a group of young girls laughing as they sing “Ring a ring o’ Rosie” and dance in a circle with hands held. Backing this is Panos Couros’ gently eerie, suspense-filled soundtrack which evokes the essence of this play — the melding of horror and laughter in the life of a resilient survivor who recounts her stories with wry insight.
Tessa Rose, The Daly River Girl, artwork Jacqueline Marranya, photo Glenn Campbell courtesy Brown’s Mart
As the film ends, the lighting changes to reveal Tessa behind a scrim, her face framed in the centre of a projected artwork by Tessa’s sister Jacqueline Marranya — a circular pattern of dotted pathways with tendril paths branching out, each animated with a colour reflecting the story being told. The animation is subtle, almost slow motion so that a path is often fully coloured in before being noticed and then fading to black and white only to be coloured in again, while the evocative soundtrack both punctuates and links the various segments of story.
Standing before a projected photograph of her younger self, Tessa recounts the experience of her first Shakespearean role in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, reciting her lines as Titania. Phil Lethlean’s lighting design and Jessie Davis’ lighting operation are seamless as action shifts frequently from behind to in front of the scrim, into film projection, into images of Tessa’s past theatre productions, into animation of Jacqueline’s artwork. The technical complexity is smoothly done but Tessa Rose’s charisma is such that some of the most powerful moments occur when she appears in front of the screen with nothing but herself and her extraordinary life story and addresses the audience directly.
Tessa Rose, The Daly River Girl, artwork Jacqueline Marranya, photo Glenn Campbell courtesy Brown’s Mart
Tessa Rose has performed with Sydney Theatre Company, Queensland Theatre Company, Belvoir Theatre, Adelaide Festival and Darwin Festival. She has featured on the ABC’s award-winning show Glitch and Glitch 2, as well as Cleverman 2 and Redfern Now, but this is her first time as playwright. As she says in a press release, “One of the hardest experiences of writing my play was bringing up all the years of pain and anger inside me.”
She does not shy away from embracing the hardships and trauma of parts of her life. There is the repeated refrain “falling… falling” backed by a teeth-gritting soundtrack as Tessa clasps her head in response to cruelty from a violent partner, a bully at school, a casually cruel family member and rejection by her Daly River family for “not being black enough.” It is a story that is unfortunately all too familiar, but Tessa Rose’s humour and extraordinary resilience offset the darker moments.
The Daly River Girl is a brave and engaging solo show from one of Australia’s known and loved performers. The NAISDA-trained performer (National Aboriginal and Islander Skills Development Association) sings, acts, dances and she and director Alex Galeazzi weave these together with great understatement, not simply as a showcase of Tessa Rose’s skills but instead as a journey through a varied life and performing experiences. The Daly River Girl is a great piece of story-telling by a compelling performer. I anticipate that it will continue to develop and refine and will captivate audiences around Australia and overseas.
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The Daly River Girl, writer, performer Tessa Rose, director Alex Galeazzi, lighting designer Philip Lethlean, sound designer Panos Couros, video projection artist Naina Sen, artwork Jacqueline Marranya, animation Kingdom of Ludd; Brown’s Mart Theatre, Darwin, 8-26 Nov
Top image credit: Tessa Rose, The Daly River Girl, artwork Jacqueline Marranya, photo Glenn Campbell courtesy Brown’s Mart
Lucy Parakhina provides a visual overview of the Hobiennale Arts Festival, which brought together artist-run initiatives and emerging artists from across Australia and New Zealand for 10 days of exhibitions, music, performance, parties and talks, across Hobart and surrounds in November 2017.
Featuring interviews with festival directors Grace Herbert and Liam James, and participants Llewellyn Millhouse (Outer Space, QLD), Julia Bavyka and Connie Anthes (Frontyard, NSW) and Beth Sometimes (Watch This Space, NT).
Founded in Krakow, Poland, in 2003, the Unsound Festival is a series of concerts and talks foregrounding new electronic music that has expanded into an international network. The Unsound Dislocation Project 2016-2018, developed in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut, now takes Unsound into numerous locations including Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Central Asia as well as the UK, the US and Canada. Unsound programs have been a welcome inclusion in four Adelaide Festival programs under former director David Sefton (see my review of the 2013 music program and Gail Priest’s review of Unsound 2015), but they were limited in scale. Sefton and Unsound co-founder and Artistic Director Mat Schulz have now established Unsound as a stand-alone festival in Adelaide, the new event involving a diverse range of high-level international and local artists in concerts at Thebarton Theatre, club nights at Fowler’s Live, the Discourse Program at the University of South Australia and sound installations at the Botanical Gardens and Adelaide Railway Station.
Sound Installations
Unsound often locates events in prominent architectural spaces, and Unsound Adelaide this year opened its program with three unobtrusive but immersive sound installations totalling two hours in the tropical plant conservatory at the Adelaide Botanical Gardens. Renowned UK wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson’s 55-minute Mare Balticum-Narva Wall Mix is a blend of field recordings from the Baltic sea with the sound of waves lapping the shore, sea birds, seals and the rumble of fracturing ice transporting the listener to a very non-tropical world. Australian Leyland Kirby’s How Deep is Your Love takes the listener underwater, creating a sound world that sits between music and field recording. Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement’s (USA) work Shield Ferns/Brown Ferns Magic, commissioned by Unsound, is another gentle piece based on what are described as synthetic field recordings. Listening while studying botanical specimens is a meditative experience that focuses the mind on our perilously fragile environment.
Robin Fox, Unsound Adelaide, photo Andre Castellucci
Thebarton Theatre, Friday
The first concert opened with a mesmerising sound and laser light show, Euclidian Drone, by regular Unsound performer Robin Fox (Australia) in which he projected dazzlingly coloured geometric shapes through haze. The visual display is synched with a densely layered composition, and in a talk the following afternoon, the artist revealed that he uses drawing software to create the imagery and takes a live feed from it to the sound system, his drawings triggering unexpected and exciting musical effects.
Legendary US band Wolf Eyes delivered a stunning performance, the trio now including an unnamed cellist to accompany John Olson’s array of wind instruments, maracas and tambourine and Nate Young’s vocals, samples and electronics. Blending electronic noise, vocals and acoustic instruments (Olson sometimes playing two wind instruments simultaneously), and recalling free jazz, Wolf Eyes’ music has a humorous edge and otherwise defies categorisation.
Fowler’s Live, Friday
Following the concerts at Thebarton Theatre, Fowler’s Live nightclub hosted Unsound performances until 4.00 am on Friday and Saturday catering both to electronic music and club audiences. The night opened with Adelaide ensemble Club Sync — Rosa Maria, Baby Angel and Sacrifices) alternating back-to-back on the desk. The set was highly involving, the performers successively creating individual musical languages that melded into a wonderful composition.
Club culture is the engine room of much musical evolution, generating consumption and informing aesthetics. Dance brings people together, although, as Nate Young observed during his Saturday talk, “people go to clubs to be alone with other people,” perhaps a characteristic of contemporary society. Sometimes the music is overly loud, even disturbingly nihilistic, but it creates a community to which people relate and there is a feeling of being-in-the-present in such relational activity. Importantly, Unsound acknowledges the culture that has emerged in parallel with the evolution of instrumental and communications technologies dating back to disco.
Holly Hernden, Unsound Adelaide, photo Eddy Hamra
Thebarton Theatre, Saturday
The evening began with an exquisite performance by classically trained pianist and church organist Kara-Lis Coverdale (Canada) on electronics. In her talk later, she indicated that most of her sounds are sampled from a variety of organs, including some dating back centuries. Her set was like an extended, deeply layered organ symphony, recalling the powerful organ symphonies of French composer Charles-Marie Widor (1844-1937) as well as choral symphonies. Thebarton Theatre was transformed into a cathedral.
Berlin-based, American musician Holly Herndon’s set contrasted with the long instrumental sets of many Unsound performers, being built around shorter songs and creating a hybrid pop-electronica sensibility, the songs articulating concerns about the impact of technology in everyday life. The video for Chorus, from Herndon’s 2015 album Platform, shows desks on which sit the laptops that she suggests contain and transmit one’s existence. The video accompanying her Unsound set shows figures floating about in virtual space, another metaphor for contemporary life. As she and band-member Colin Self sang, Mat Dryhurst overlaid the video projections with a live feed of SMS-style texts such as, “leave facebook srsly its ruinin yr life,” and an image of Dryhurst captured by his laptop camera, as if he were carrying on a live conversation with the audience.
Senor Coconut, Unsound Adelaide, photo Andre Castellucci
Thebarton Theatre, Sunday
As the first performance of the evening was about to begin, I overhead an audience member behind me remark, “A grand piano at an Unsound concert? That’s unheard of!” Unsound has traditionally focused on electronic music, so the piano did seem unusual, but bringing together a trio comprising Chris Abrahams of the Necks (piano), Oren Ambarchi (guitar and electronics) and Robbie Avenaim (percussion, including his lap-top driven motorised percussion) turned out to be a marriage made in heaven. The effect was magical, like a Necks concert glistening with the complex sonic colours generated by Ambarchi’s instrumentation.
The performance by Señor Coconut was a significant innovation. Sunday’s concert embodied two essential characteristics of Unsound — the willingness of the artistic directors to experiment and create a program appealing to a wide audience, and the capacity of musicians and composers to collaborate to create wondrous new musical forms. Señor Coconut is German artist Uwe Schmidt (who has appeared under the name Atom™ in a previous Adelaide Unsound program) on electronics with an ensemble comprising brass, percussion, bass and vocals. They rework as cha-cha dance music such classics as The Doors’ “Riders on the Storm,” The Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” and Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water,” as well as several Kraftwerk numbers, humorously subverting the character of the originals. The music is a delight and suddenly audience members are no longer dancing alone but joyously engaging with one another.
Wolf Eyes, Unsound Adelaide, photo Rob Sferco
Discourse Program
Unsound Adelaide’s Discourse Program addressed the revolutionary impact of new technologies not only on music production, performance and aesthetics but on distribution, consumption, monetisation and income generation. Other themes included the difficulties of being a travelling performer (including the carbon footprint that travelling generates), instrument building, the social impact of new technologies and the communities that music creates.
Adelaide’s Gabriella Smart opened with her paper, From Daleks to Noise, by summarising the work of Tristram Cary, a pioneer of electronic music in the UK in the 1950s and 1960s and a composer of film scores and incidental music for Dr Who who relocated to the University of Adelaide in 1974. Without pioneers such as Cary, the kinds of music heard in Unsound might never have developed as they did, Smart noting that much needs to be done to preserve Cary’s legacy. University of Adelaide lecturer Christian Haines demonstrated the VCS3 synthesiser which was co-designed by Cary and used by many notable musicians.
In a discussion on communities, Giuseppe Faraone of Club Sync joined Colin Self, who performs with Holly Herndon and is involved in community practices in Berlin, and Adelaide artist Matea Gluscevic who manages WildStyle which supports emerging artists and performers. They discussed the need for and creation of cultural centres, Faraone describing how Club Sync facilitates musical development through the provision of a performance venue and a record label. Unsound believes it has an important community engagement role, moderator Gosia Płysa (Unsound’s Executive Director Global) indicating that Unsound can now engage more directly with Adelaide music communities as an independent festival.
Robin Fox moderated a revealing discussion on technology and performance with Nate Young of Wolf Eyes, Kara-Lis Coverdale and Errorsmith (Erik Wiegand, Germany), who has created his own synthesiser, Razor. The discussion examined issues such as the definition of electronic music, Coverdale pointing out that organ builders throughout history were designers of sounds. The discussion also raised the question of the extent to which some performers actually perform or, as Nate Young suggests, just press “play;” many performers such as Wiegand set up broad sonic parameters and then work within those when performing. Musical quality was highlighted, Fox acknowledging that some performers substitute high volume for compositional strength.
Errorsmith, Unsound Adelaide, photo Eddy Hamra
David Burraston (aka Noyzelab, Australia) gave a lecture on DIY construction of budget modular synthesisers and passed sample components around the audience, revealing how Unsound’s musical magicians do their tricks. There remains strong interest in DIY modular construction, despite the advances made in midi-controlled software such as Ableton.
In her interview with Gosia Płysa, Holly Herndon spoke of how technology and social media shape our lives and how she addresses these issues in her music. The artist expressed her mixed feelings concerning social media, which she acknowledges can bring people together, but has discontinued her personal Facebook page while maintaining a professional one. As well as addressing issues relating to technology and social media, Herndon has produced a track intended to induce autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR). She indicated her interest in the online community evolving around ASMR. And she revealed that the images of desktops in her videos were drawn from invited public submissions — they thus constitute a relational artwork, such activity clearly an important characteristic of her work. Finally, she acknowledged Ableton’s contribution in developing compositional platforms and suggested she and they were almost collaborators. Ableton has posted Herndon’s 2016 talk on her compositional process on YouTube.
The Discourse Program concluded with a talk by Mat Dryhurst, titled “Ideologies on the Blockchain,” addressing the use of emergent technologies to support online music. He highlighted the disruptive and perhaps democratising potential of cryptocurrencies to support Soundcloud. Herndon, who has taught at Stanford, and partner Dryhurst, who teaches at New York University, added an important theoretical dimension to the Discourse Program that contextualises the evolution and consumption of contemporary music and especially emphasises the need for consumers to be wary of an online world dominated by commercial interests and surveillance. Smart and Haines’ talk on pioneer Tristram Cary and Dryhurst’s discussion of the technological future bookended the evolution of electronic music production, distribution and consumption over the last 60 years.
Unsound Adelaide was outstanding in its conception and delivery, adding a crucially important dimension to musical programming in Australia. With a recurrent Unsound, Adelaide is now more firmly positioned in a growing world-wide circuit that focuses on and stimulates experimental composition, performance, technical development, discussion and criticism and supports local performers and communities. It is to be hoped that Unsound continues to flourish.
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Unsound Adelaide, Artistic Directors David Sefton, Mat Schulz; venues Thebarton Theatre, Fowler’s Live, the University of South Australia, Adelaide Botanical Gardens, Adelaide Railway Station, 16-19 Nov
Top image credit: Club Sync, Unsound Adelaide, photo Andre Castellucci
The body of our mother (In Utero) is an unaccountable memory. Our first house or home, how strange to imagine this memory. The further we travel from the nonsense of babydom, through ideally, the magic of childhood, to the here and now, the literate, logical, discerning world, the further away we get from this memory and the grainier the image becomes. If this imagining is a memory, it is a sense memory, embodied but forgotten. It is perhaps our most sensuous memory in a literal context, the memory of before thought. Children are atemporal, free of time, but mothers mostly are not. Perhaps this partly explains the sometimes horror of children/motherhood in our present time-structured, machine world.
The maternal body, rapidly colonised by the disciplines of medical science and technology in this century, is still intriguingly absent in the world of art. This body is a place where nothing is sacred or profane, the abject and strange up for grabs by the most everyday of artists. It is as magnanimous and invisible as the red-cloaked Bush Mary in Teena McCarthy’s self-portrait found in the Realising Mother exhibition curated by Zorica Purlija — undeniable, omnipresent yet cloaked and indiscernible. In major galleries and ARIs alike, where Sex and Death lurk around every corner, the subjective maternal body is absent, but not in Realising Mother.
As Serafina Lee elucidates in her catalogue essay, “Realising Mother articulates a critical subjectivity [and has us] question notions of autonomy and agency as a socially selective privilege granted to specific bodies. We consider our own relations and involvements with these bodies. We are urged to adjust our own position, to afford an expanded logic, one that realises the maternal body as unmoored from its genealogical and representational constraints.”
During the exhibition opening I occasionally managed a whole adult conversation (despite the fact that my date for the night was my three-year-old son) thanks to the artistic creation and ritualistic documentation of 02-02, 2014-15, a live performance and video by Rafaela Pandolfini; Claude was mesmerised! Did he intuit his own journey in a pregnant mother giving form to her formlessness through visual documentation of a ritualised dance or just find this uncouth display of animated pregnant dancing as liberating as Pandolfini did herself? This artist elegantly jitterbugs to the intimacy of a body within a body, perhaps an artwork in itself!
Deborah Kelly, The Miracles After after del Sarto, from series: The Miracles, 2012, Realising Mother, Kudos Gallery, Sydney
Deborah Kelly takes on the miraculous family of the Bible, creating new permutations in her Miracles series, wonderful adaptations of paintings by old masters. Kelly’s 35 miracle portraits (three of which were on show) are of simply anything but the hetero-normative and biological baby-making families of history. With the advent of ART (Assisted Reproductive Technology) we have seen an expanding of the scope of family; Deborah Kelly uses a different art to make these new family forms boldly visible.
Raphaela Rosella busts open a different part of the dominant discourse on family with her divinely luminescent and proud portrait of Tricia and Ty-Leta (2016): a young Aboriginal woman breastfeeding her baby in the light of a staticky television screen. It was my favourite image in the show; shocked by its beauty, I was not surprised to read how Rosella had spent time with Tricia breastfeeding their babies and that she photographs women she is connected with. This begs the question of gaze, and how the photographer sees, being implicit in what is depicted. Rosella’s role as an embedded storyteller, a mother herself, is a defining factor in her capacity to capture the resilience of the young mothers in her photographs.
Raphaela Rosella, Tricia and Ty-Leta, 2016, Realising Mother, Kudos Gallery, Sydney
Anguish might seem to be a recurring motif when one turns the lens on mothers. Anne Zahalka speaks of an unbridled bond in relationships between mothers and daughters in her heartbreaking exploration of her grandmother’s letters to her daughters before her murder in Auschwitz. Having left their family home in Vienna in 1938 following persecution, the daughters fled to Czechoslovakia, eventually finding safe passage to England. Zahalka uses a collection of artefacts including letters, photographs, postcards and archival documents left to her after her mother’s death, to construct a textual still life which, hanging like an artwork of seemingly random points of connection, mapping chronological intersections, overall has a breathtaking beauty. Alongside it is a video work comprising letters written by the mother to her children after their separation, transcribed from German to English and, embedded in a table top, viewed from above. This translation gave the artist historical insight into this very poignant love between mother and daughter over 70 years ago, and makes it available for reinvention and interpretation by the artist and her own daughter in the present day.
Anne Zahalka, Rewriting, 2017, video production Orson Heidrich, pinboard: letters, photographs and other ephemera, Realising Mother, Kudos Gallery, Sydney
These are just some of the powerful and unexpected works exhibited in Realising Mother. Sally McInerney’s photographs capture everyday moments in the lifespan of motherhood including her own mother, renowned photographer Olive Cotton with Sally’s own daughter. Denise Ferris developed a technique of using breastmilk in screen printing to ruminate on ambivalence and resistance, death and nurturance in motherhood. Sarah Rhodes explores how language and place connect child and mother in embodied learning in Indigenous culture. Clare Rae charts the literal territory of the maternal body, photographed in a series of juxtapositions in Sutton Gallery, before and after birth. The exhibition also included variously explosive, dynamic, playful and remarkable works by Ella Dreyfus, Lottie Consalvo, Theresa Byrnes, Donna Bailey, Julie Sundberg, Miho Watanabe and Anke Stäcker.
Never has an art exhibition been so embodied, the body so present, even if reflected through the lens. Absent/hidden bodies, dancing bodies, clutching/bonding bodies, performed/artifice-d bodies, collaborative bodies, lesbian and gay (or LGBTQI) bodies, single, Blak, social, historical, cultural, child and maternal bodies. A body in which something may or may not grow but assumes this indiscernible yet vast conception of the maternal. This vision of the maternal body I now ponder deeply, is so expansive! Unlike the m(other) body of the Male Gazing Art Canon, the meanings alchemised in Realising Mother explode open a sentimentalised, infantilised, worshipped even, other body and restores agency to the lens. The exhibition puts this real and messy, imperfect and beautiful, often unexpected maternal body back front and centre.
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Realising Mother, curator Zorica Purlija, artists Denise Ferris, Sally McInerney, Julie Sundberg, Ella Dreyfus, Anke Stäcker, Deborah Kelly, Raphaela Rosella, Miho Watanabe, Sarah Rhodes, Teena McCarthy, Clare Rae, Donna Bailey, Anne Zahalka, Rafaela Pandolfini, Theresa Byrnes, Lottie Consalvo; Kudos Gallery, Sydney, 1-13 Nov
Jasmine Salomon is a mother of four, a scholar of the maternal in art, a midwifery graduate and a curator who has no formal childcare and is re-wilding and unschooling her two youngest children on a headland in mid-north NSW. Her praxis centres around presence, she is investigating several philosophical propositions including the idea that all humans are artists (especially children), that children inherently collectivise for the positive, that genuine collaboration in art (especially with children) is a powerful tool for social change.
Top image credit: Rafaela Pandolfini, 02- 02, 2014-15, a dance for every day of my pregnancy, live performance and video, Realising Mother, Kudos Gallery, Sydney
I have been without a phone since August this year. The transition was awkward at first, requiring some adjustment. However, I have since come to enjoy the sensation of being “off the grid” and the time and space opened up to me in everyday life. Of course, this is much to the ire of friends, family, colleagues and the odd curator who has had difficulty contacting me. It was not a political decision, or at least not at first. What happened was this: the Nokia 3210 I was using became inoperable when the provider I was connected with turned off their 2G service. I had been moved on from another service, also closing, not long before, and simply gave up the chase, deciding to go without. I believe there is now only one telecommunications provider left in Australia that offers a 2G service, and this will become inactive shortly, making all the phones on that platform inoperable in the process. It will be the end of an era.
Aphids’ Artefact provides a memorial service for this sort of orchestrated obsolescence of technology. Originally a ceremonial event staged at the 2016 ANTI Festival in Kuopio, Finland, the project has now taken the form of a video work that had its premiere at a one-off event at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne on 3 November, the same day that Apple released yet another iPhone. The video primarily comprises documentation of the original event, but in such a way that the eulogy it delivered is retained, continuing the memorialisation. The video is more than typical self-mythologising in which documentation provides a trace of the artists’ cultural capital for posterity. Admittedly, it does this as well. It is aesthetically very pleasing and creates a longing to have been at the event. More than this, the video expands the world of the project, in which the death of technology is acknowledged, celebrated and reflected upon.
When we enter the ACMI cinema, an usher warns strobe lighting will be used and hands out a program that asks phones be left on in order to communicate with the audience during the screening. We are requested to text the message “I’m here” to a provided phone number and reassured that we will not have to participate directly. Rather, we are invited to “contemplate the ideas present in this ceremony: technology, obsolescence, death.”
The screening begins with a series of shots of individual children wearing veils and staring forlornly into the camera. One shot is of a baby lying on its back, against a background of seemingly infinite blackness. The sound of old-fashioned mobile ringtones humorously offsets the moody footage. Segue to a church in Kuopio, where something akin to a funeral ceremony is taking place accompanied by a death-metal choir conducted by a figure with a pixelated face. Artist Willoh S Weiland, black-clad and veiled, leads the ceremony in a procession from the church to the nearby Technopolis Park. There, mourners from the local community, somewhat directed by the choir leader, dig a hole as a base for a 15-tonne grey granite monument — a cross between a gravestone and a featureless mobile phone or tablet. The scene brings to mind 2001: A Space Odyssey, but where the Stanley Kubrick film focused on progress, here the emphasis is on obsolescence.
Artefact, Willoh S Weiland and JR Brennan, Aphids and the ANTI Contemporary Art Festival, photo Pekka Mäkinen
During the screening video artist Emile Zile sent texts at opportune moments to audience members (a friend shared their phone with me), triggering a cacophony of digital ringtones and creating a makeshift orchestra. These contrasted with the sounds of the old mobile phone featured in the screening, making them seem ridiculous in comparison. The texts frame the content of the screening and facilitate its transcendence beyond documentation into an ongoing memorial service. They achieve this with dramatic allusions that, for example, connect the emotional pain of losing a technological device with the experience of sensing a phantom limb, or nostalgically recall the feeling of playing Snake, as well as providing information about the history of Nokia and its commercial standing.
The screening of Artefact sheds light on the economic and environmental consequences of manufacturing for obsolescence. Progress has brought great precarity to brands like Nokia, a Finnish company with a 152-year history and a staple of the country’s economy. Zile texted, “Nokia 3310… lest we forget…. requiem for buttons and keypads laid to rest… please recycle thoughtfully.”
Artefact is wonderfully timely, positing the value of farewelling devices with which we’ve formed intimate relationships, whether your old mobile phones or gaming platforms.
During a post-screening Q&A, Weiland wondered if Artefact could have been made here; would we have been able to take the subject seriously? But this wonderful tension between seriousness and silliness is the strength of Artefact, which is simultaneously ironic and sincere. During the Q&A a child cries and has to be carried out of the auditorium, the parent explaining that the tears were caused by the screen of her phone going dark, adding a final ironic touch to the requiem. Coupled with the release that morning of iPhone X and the impending end of 2G service in Australia, it added a further sense of timeliness to the project.
Over drinks after the screening, ANTI Festival Director Johanna Tuukkanen informed the artists that a gravesstone, a button with an ‘x’ on top and installed with the commemorative monument in Technopolis Park, had somehow been moved to a skate park next to the site. The artists were thrilled to hear it was now being skated on.
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Aphids Artistic Director Willoh S Weiland received the 2015 ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art — a commission for the Artefact project.
To watch Artefact, send an SMS to 0437 839 625 saying: Yes, please.
Artefact: concept Willoh S Weiland, creators Willoh S Weiland, JR Brennan music direction, original composition JR Brennan, cinematography Kim Saarinen with Matthew Gingold, Lasse Hartikainen, editor Kim Saarinen, video editing Matthew Gingold, Artefact design Willoh S Weiland, Susan Cohn, presented by Aphids and the ANTI Contemporary Arts Festival; ACMI performance text Willoh S Weiland, Emile Zile; ACMI, Melbourne, 3 Nov
Writer, performer and a founding member of the performance collective Team MESS, Malcolm Whittaker is completing a practice-based PhD at The University of Wollongong. Titled “An Intellectual Adventure in Ignorance,” his thesis centres on the Ignoramus Anonymous project which takes the form of a support group for the ignorant, with meetings held since 2013 at festivals and in galleries, libraries and community centres across Australia.
Top image credit: Artefact, Willoh S.Weiland and JR Brennan, Aphids and the ANTI Contemporary Art Festival, photo Pekka Mäkinen
Spoiler alert: this review includes key plot details from writer PJ Hogan’s adaptation of his screenplay for the film Muriel’s Wedding (1994) for Sydney Theatre Company’s Muriel’s Wedding, The Musical.
Friday night, 17 Nov: Muriel’s Wedding, the film
Watching PJ Hogan’s Muriel’s Wedding for the second time in two decades, I’m impressed, moreso than on first viewing. I recall my surprise at how grim it was, funny but painfully frank about parental psychological abuse, peer group bullying, compensatory escapism (via wedding fantasies and the music of ABBA), political corruption, sexism, suicide and a devastating brain tumour. On second viewing the film was as bleakly funny as ever, but revealed itself to be far better scripted, shot and acted than I remembered. Not only did it face full-on the issues it confronted, but was largely and very effectively unsentimental. The moment when Muriel announces that she’s taking her wheelchair-bound erstwhile best friend Rhonda with her back to Sydney, is near-teary but brisk and funny and deftly counterpointed with the tense scene between Muriel and her unrepentant father in which she firmly rejects pressure to take on responsibility for her emotionally damaged siblings. Muriel might not be bright, but she’s a far better person than she ever thought, and now she’s wise, leaving behind the self-obsession into which her tyrannical father and helplessly complicit mother had driven her and committing to caring female friendship.
Saturday night, 18 Nov: Muriel’s Wedding, The Musical
Attending the red-carpeted opening night of Muriel’s Wedding, The Musical, I’m apprehensive. How much of the film’s spirit, especially as embodied in the screenplay — adapted from his screenplay by Hogan and with lyrics by the musical’s composers Kate Miller-Heidke and Keir Nuttall — would be retained? I needn’t have worried. And, would the film’s incisively drawn principal characters be reduced to all singing and dancing sketches? They weren’t. Muriel and Rhonda, though more broadly characterised than their film counterparts, are convincingly realised.
Muriel Heslop, a most unlikely lead character, is Hogan’s genius touch. A slow thinker, often unaware of her impact on others, Muriel is slow to pick up on insult and rejection and all too easily slips into her fantasy world. Maggie McKenna acquits herself in the role admirably with a toothy goofiness and a slack-lipped, innocent stare, extra-rounded vowels and vocal register lower than her sharply articulated singing — a quite different voice. Madeleine Jones’ quick-witted, sexy Rhonda perfectly and compassionately counterpoints Muriel, while her descent into pain and bitterness is keenly conveyed. The pair’s soaring, nigh operatic duet, “A true friend,” is a passionate expression of friendship.
I had wondered if the musical would underplay the darkest dimension of the film — the suicide of Muriel’s mother, Betty. It didn’t in one way, but did in another, which I’ll return to. Justine Clarke’s sensitive portrayal of the woman as an emotionally befuddled, physically disoriented, lost soul is acutely felt, if modified by new additions to Hogan’s narrative. Gary Sweet as Muriel’s father is more ebullient than Bill Hunter’s sinister original, a bigger performer on the business stage and given his own number with an enormous regional development maquette to romp about on. A re-write of the screenplay’s final scenes unfortunately undercuts any opportunity for Sweet to deepen his characterisation; I’ll come back to this too.
Sizeably enlarged is the role of Muriel’s Sydney boyfriend Brice (Ben Bennett), transformed into an embattled parking inspector and a more likely romantic prospect for her affections than in the film, if still a tad defeated by life, as expressed in a witty take on “pessimism, the ointment for the rash of disappointment” in the song “Never stick your neck out,” performed with the male cast. The other key character in the narrative, an Olympic swimmer, Alexander (Stephen Madsen) looking for marriage with which to gain Australian citizenship, is this time not South African but more aptly Russian and given a new dimension, very much of the moment. Other characters, like Muriel’s cruel peers, remain outright satirical creations granted additional force through superbly harmonised singing and frantic team dancing, while her siblings, Joanie (Briallen Clarke) and especially the slightly deranged Perry (Michael Whalley), are immediately familiar variations on the originals and truly memorable, the audience erupting with laughter and applause the first time Joanie utters, “You’re terrible, Muriel.”
In the film, Muriel’s escapism is restricted to taking refuge in the music of ABBA, holidaying with stolen money, running away to Sydney and visiting bridal shops; in the musical it’s given fantastical dimensions, the most deftly realised of which has been to turn ABBA, who astonishingly pop out of Muriel’s wardrobe, into a glitteringly costumed, supportive chorus who ultimately attempt to keep the immature Muriel all to themselves. When she goes serial shopping for wedding dresses, Muriel’s fantasising is fast running out of control, her neglect of the crippled Rhonda irresponsible. The stage, in the manner of Hollywood musicals of especially MGM in the 1940s and 50s, swells with parading models and swathes of cascading soft curtains washed in pastel lighting, with Muriel as the glorious bride, adored by ABBA.
It’s not just Muriel’s fantasies that are writ large, the whole world is, whether a Chinese restaurant evoked simply with an arc of huge red lanterns or Sydney with a stage-filling Harbour Bridge and, seen beneath, the Opera House which later, courtesy of the revolving stage, arrives before us, revealed to be of human scale and great to loll about on. Muriel’s meeting with Alexander is akin to an Esther Williams’ (MGM again) swimming pool sequence, the dancers on their backs semi-circled across the stage, miming water ballet kicks.
The power of musical theatre and of opera resides in a shared acceptance of distortions of scale — amplification of character, place, sound, movement and everyday behaviour — with roots in ritual and a search for transcendence. In Muriel’s Wedding, The Musical we are implicated far more heavily in Muriel’s fantasising than in the film — the escapism is ours as much as hers with scene after scene of engrossing invention and spectacle. But, for all the excess, the musical feels emotionally true to Hogan’s original vision, with Kate Miller-Heidke and Keir Nuttall’s dramatic fusion of contemporary pop with the idiom of the musical (more Lloyd Webber than Sondheim) providing rich counterpoint to the sheer pop pull of the ABBA songs.
There is however, a point when excess turns bad. The first sign is the disdainful Alexander finally having sex with Muriel (as in the original some kind of limited affection grows between the two, and even there it felt odd); but then reveals he’s gay. Then Hogan’s script and the composers let rip with Betty’s funeral, at which Muriel heroically makes public her father’s sins, rendering him supine and abandoned by his girlfriend and associates. An apparition of a now happy Betty appears, professing, out of the blue, her own love for ABBA, effectively uniting her with her daughter. Muriel breaks into an adoring eulogy, the mawkish “My Mother,” in which Betty’s maternal support and love is applauded. As in the film, and the musical up to this point, unconditional love has not been evident — it’s Betty’s tragedy that she has always capitulated to Bill, never defending Muriel.
As if this sentimental overload isn’t enough, at the very moment that the bond between Muriel and Rhonda is restored, a triumph for female friendship, Muriel is reunited with erstwhile boyfriend Brice — to what end, Muriel’s wedding? Hogan and his lyricists’ additions do pass by in a tumult of high drama, song and dance, but on the morning after I wake to that queazy feeling of a sugar overdose.
Muriel’s Wedding, The Musical was in many ways a special experience, expertly directed by Simon Phillips, deftly choreographed by Andrew Hallsworth, with excellent musical direction and arrangements by Isaac Hayward and endlessly witty inventive set and costume design by Gabriela Tylesova. The play between ABBA songs and new ones validated the update of Muriel’s Wedding to the present alongside a plot strand in which Muriel becomes a short-lived social media sensation (shutting down her fantasies she simultaneously closes her account). The story of the redemption of a psychologically damaged outsider rings as true in the musical as in the film, but an unwarranted turn to high melodrama and blatant sentimentality, the excesses common to the form, made for a magnificent but imperfect musical.
In Adelaide and Melbourne in the 1970s and 80s, the hard talking, hard living poet Christopher Barnett was a force to be reckoned with — socially, artistically, politically. A charismatic public performer, this self-styled “cultural Bolshevik” — after his hero, Russian poet, playwright and propagandist Vladimir Mayakovsky — was a key collaborator with Nicholas Tsoutas and Peggy Wallach as a writer for the groundbreaking All Out Ensemble. Barnett left Adelaide for Melbourne and then in the mid-80s relocated to Nantes in France where he co-founded a highly regarded experimental company, Le Dernier Spectateur, working to enable performances by the disenfranchised.
Adelaide-based filmmaker Anne Tsoulis’ Heathen Dreams is an admirable introduction to Barnett, a significant if underrated figure in Australian cultural history. Tsoulis writes, “To understand what shaped the artist, we explore his formative years, raised in poverty in a dysfunctional Adelaide family to becoming the teenage poet and enfant terrible. We discover that, at an early age, his Communist ideals helped him to survive his own challenging circumstances.”
The 53-minute documentary includes footage of readings, reunions, a rare homecoming to suburban Adelaide after a 20-year absence and an exacting visit by road in a European winter to visit an unwell Thomas Harlan, radical documentary filmmaker and translator of Barnett’s The Blue Boat (1994).
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The resounding ‘yes’ vote for marriage equality legislation came as a great relief, until those same politicians who instituted the postal process (avoiding parliamentary responsibility and hoping for an indifferent public response) commenced demanding discriminatory, theocratic rights out of place in a democracy. The fight continues. Keith & Virginia
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Top image credit: A Wave and Waves, Totally Huge New Music Festival, photo Bohdan Warchomij
Something in the lone, three-legged photo-boxes straddling the landscape speaks of dystopian invasion: the spindly War of the Worlds tripods landed here in a remote paddock as forerunners of a semi-remembered technology, an unravelled history of the photograph. The farmland gullies outside Cootamundra have been abruptly colonised by the unknown, the weird and the naggingly unnamed familiar.
On Saturday 21 October, the Wired Lab artist-led organisation, as part of its platform for evolving interdisciplinary art practices in rural Australia, staged the agri(culture) project as “a participatory landscape-scale and omni-sensorial exploration of rural and agricultural phenomena with regional and metropolitan audiences.” Twelve interdisciplinary Australian and international artists and collectives presented creative outcomes, with the viewer/participant trekking into and through site-specific landscape installations, from early afternoon until 11pm — the art-walker on an experiential tour.
Installation view, Green Ant Gin Jellies by Soon Lee Low, Insecta Delecta by Cat Jones for The Wired Lab, 2017, photo courtesy the artist
The experience of lying flat, pressed to the earth, on grassy hillocks teeming with insect forms, is the core of Julie Vulcan’s DARKbody, an immersion chamber with headphones and sonorous, wry narrative of descent into sleeping pits in the earth. It is a contemplative sound-dive into a recited tale of “humans sandwiched between literal darkness above and beneath us” — of scotobiology (the biology of darkness) as affective encounter with non-human agency. It is a profoundly meditative slumbering encounter with grass, earth and a slipping away into myriad tiny deaths of darkness within the earth hidden beneath us.
Several other site works are part of the late afternoon land-walk, from Cat Jones’ Insecta Delecta — gourmet helpings of edible insects, served up by a chef to walkers thrown into a sudden field-based Blade Runner future of insectivorous farming — to the rampant honesty of Kids vs Art’s podcast critiques of the varied artworks [hear Kids vs Art’s vivid response to Insecta Delacta, shared with a local farmer. Eds]. I had this firmly in mind as a well-intended community art means of engaging kids, an arrogance of mine rapidly dispelled by not only the sheer clarity and insight involved but by the kids’ astute interviewing of UK sound artist Chris Watson, among others. Here was art shoved off its white plinth and viewed through a child’s lens, a finely attuned crapometer, asking ‘Why are you doing this, and why should we give it value?’
Kids Vs Art, Wired Open Day, presented by Field Theory, photo Joshua Thomas courtesy The Wired Lab
I was most taken by Beggan Beggan (created by NSW regional artists The Ronalds, David Burraston and Wired Lab’s Sarah Last), how it constructed and navigated a traditional shearing shed viewed on blank, undulating land through the simple, stolid device of viewing boxes seemingly left idle in a paddock. The tiny dioramas seen in the boxes ‘mapped out’ the spaces and evoked a sense of a ghost-shed, resonating strongly and endemically with the land and place preoccupations of Wired Lab’s focus on agri-culture. Even with the lineage of an eroded technology faded into history, the boxes reminded me of speaker-stands littered around an abandoned drive-in theatre, awaiting some invitation to rise from sleep. At once inert and motionless, these are brown bones of time lost in history’s sepia photobook pages and the disappearing wash of darkroom trays of arcane liquids.
The installation made dramatic use of the spectral histories of landscape to evoke what once was likely roped off with now invisible builder’s string, charting the dormant, heritage-listed shearing shed on Beggan Beggan station near Jugiong. Each almost childlike diorama with its squat, singular scope of one curved viewing lens in a wooden box on legs akimbo is the simplest puppet-show of perception; yet there is a granular, modulated tone to the images that requires the viewer to walk, and tilt and reconstruct in both mind’s eye and memory the spaces and assembled views — the walker in the paddock rebuilding The Ronalds’ images back into the light. The installation is consciously low-tech. According to Shannon Ronald, “We wanted the experience to be as immersive as possible. We designed each of the boxes with peephole lenses so your vision is completely encapsulated by the scene inside the box… We liked the sensory experience of looking around inside the box and straining to see the detail that each vignette presented.” And it is this series of frosted plays, frozen in time as tiny, self-contained vignettes that are so elementally reconstructive of walking through the landscape to pace out the presence of its use, its shearing history, as the viewer/participant becomes an active bricoleur, reassembling footfalls of the past.
Beggan Beggan installation, The Ronalds, David Burraston and Sarah Last, photo Joshua Thomas courtesy The Wired Lab
David Burraston’s sound sensibilities glide in and under most aspects of the sensory experience of this depiction of the recreated shed in Beggan Beggan — albeit as thin echoes emerging from partially concealed speakers near the boxes or in his soaring co-composition at night with Chris Watson. Watson’s Beyond Ol Tokai multi-channel sound recording is of a herd of African elephants in the Olodare marshes of Kenya. He specialises in natural history and location sound recording but “documentary” would be a limited categorising of his post-production ability to create engulfing soundscapes which not only sample, but echo the presence of animals as overheard monoliths encircling us. In the shivering, jet-black night, we unwittingly join a herd of African elephants lumbering across blackened marshlands.
There is a forlorn edge to the surrounding sounds of elephants snorting, rolling or careening weightily through the brush, coming at the listener from all directions on a stony hill, overseen in the deep dark by a bright roof of stars. We stand rigid on the sloping farmland, alongside cut logs, huddled against the night’s rapidly creeping cold, caught and dipped in liquid sound, a medium usually thought of as background rather than narrative driver. It is the late-night bookend to the earlier visual field full of wooden camera-boxes. As a biting frost begins to cut across the still, darkened treetops, we are left with the curious thought-pictures prompted by Chris Watson’s sounds of looming elephants in an imagined Kenya — beneath an all spangled sky.
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Read an interview about the Wired Open Day Festival with Wired Lab, Artistic Director Sarah Last here.
Dr Neill Overton is a Senior Lecturer in Art History and Visual Culture at Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga. He has worked extensively as a newspaper illustrator, exhibiting artist, art reviewer and novelist. His critical essays address the relationship between contemporary regional and urban art.
Top image credit: Participants experiencing DARKBODY, Julie Vulcan, agri(culture) project, photo Joshua Thomas courtesy The Wired Lab
Tura New Music’s biennial Totally Huge Festival of New Music is a major event in Perth. 2017 was notable for two immersive works which offered what one might call a “phenomenal” experience — DCC: Glitch and A Wave and Waves — which provided a combination of felt sound, perception of duration and the sonic dramatisation of space. Featured artist Anne LeBaron was also superb, mixing an arguably more conventional concert model with outrageous fun in open-ended, semi-improvised provocations closer to her early work with avant-garde rabble rousers Raudelunas.
DCC: Glitch
Early in the program, DCC: Glitch featured Mitsuaki Matsumoto on amplified biwa (a Japanese lute-like instrument), accompanied by Kouhei Harada on laptop, while Shohei Sasagawa managed projection. Although the soundscape certainly had glitchy elements akin to say Fennesz and Frank Brettschneider, the broad palette was closer to the razor sharp, bleeping tones and punctuations of minimalist electronic compatriots such as Ryoji Ikeda. Matsumoto led with fairly distinct, harshly plucked notes, initially on his own, before being joined by Harada. The use of a wonderfully precise surround system made sitting in the centre, as I was, an almost hyper Wagnerian experience in the heart of a clinical digital maelstrom. Sounds moved about, at times crossing at angles before engulfing one from all sides. The graphics initially consisted of a shifting architecture of white lines against a black background, with various arcs hinged at rounded joints where they coalesced. With different intensities and configurations of sounds, the armatures expanded and reconfigured themselves, before turning into coloured spots which gradually covered the wall, recalling painter Georges Seurat’s pointillism. The biwa playing was especially pointed, providing a useful counterpoint to a sound world which at times became more like an awesome textured mass, than a blending of distinct tones. The suite was broken midway by a silence of 4 minutes, 33 seconds (pace John Cage) and it was at this point that the audience discovered that exclamations and claps from them rendered the projected lines wavy as data from the room was fed into Sasagawa’s laptop. In short, it was a remarkably varied piece which by and large maintained a sense of exacting minimalism, that nevertheless delivered quite a dense wallop.
DCC:Glitch, Totally Huge New Music Festival, photo Bohdan Warchomij
Ross Bolleter, Quarry Music
Ross Bolleter, a WA legend who plays “ruined” or severely damaged pianos, gave what was promoted as his “final public performance” at PICA, although at his artist talk there seemed some ambiguity regarding what constitutes either a “performance” or a “public” one. It was perhaps not surprising then that his presentation in the theatre of Quarry Music reflected a similar ambiguity. The work consisted largely of pre-recorded text which related tales of rummaging through a quarry for recyclables after World War II and the figures one might meet there, while the playback of plangent strumming of ruined pianos filled things out. Bolleter himself largely acted as a living sculpture, seated on the ground, back to the audience, his head against the piano frame, fingers occasionally stretching towards the strings or keys, but, more often than not, halting before playing. More frequently, Bolleter joined us in listening. While the presentation lacked the joyous sense of sharing in a moment of spontaneous sonic creation which characterised the last of Bolleter’s improvisations I attended, his outdoor concert at the York Ruined Piano Sanctuary for the 2005 Totally Huge New Music Festival, Quarry Music came across as a session of communal listening to a well presented CD, played back in a space populated by three restive sculptures: Bolleter and his two pianos.
Ross Bolleter, Quarry Music, Totally Huge New Music Festival, photo Bohdan Warchomij
Mississippi Swan: Daybew
Composers Rick Snow and Chris Tonkin collaborated on the installation Mississippi Swan: Daybew into which they fed a diet of chart-topping songs, as well as text from international news streams and tweets. An algorithm then crafted an EP of stylistically related songs. Although programmed to leap from genre to genre when visitors hit a button, the algorithm is also meant to gradually acquire trends and tendencies. At the Totally Huge New Music Festival Conference, Tonkin played the first track it composed, a rather interesting skewed piece of techno music with angry, scrambled vocals, but this appeared to be a one-off. The program does indeed spit out songs which exhibit some recognisable stylistic features (the bouncing beat and echo of dub, for example), but after listening to about 30 tracks, I lost interest. The material is too stylistically inconsistent and weirdly jarring to work as generic pop or techno. Other than the first track, none seemed sufficiently way-out to offer an alternative. The screened video of a multicoloured glass swan tumbling along beside the abstract EP covers (the latter all using the same basic coloured roundel design) had a curiously hypnotic appeal, but if Mississippi Swan represents AI in music, then artists will depend on genius producers like Stock, Aitken & Waterman, Giorgio Moroder, Pharrell Williams and Timothy “Timbaland” Mosley, well into the future.
Infrathin II, Totally Huge New Music Festival, photo Bohdan Warchomij
Anne LeBaron
A festival high point was the retrospective of American composer Anne LeBaron’s compositions for harp and other instruments. After the composer performed the solo prepared harp piece Doggone Catact, Perth harpist Catherine Ashley joined LeBaron for the duet Infrathin I, which explored more extended playing techniques, including agitating rubber balls across the sounding box and frame. Doggone especially offered a series of discontinuous miniatures, with slack sounding twangs as well as sharp attacks.
LeBaron, who has been producing works since the 1970s with both playful and demanding specifications, performs in a remarkably light and relaxed manner. Her notes seem to gently bend into the ear. The relatively young Ashley on the other hand performed with an intensity and hard grasp on the mechanics of the compositions which contrasted well with LeBaron.
I Am An American… My Government Won’t Reward You was a well-balanced but nevertheless angry denunciation of “blood chits” — printed offers in multiple languages of rewards for those in foreign countries who assist downed US airmen but which have been rarely honoured. Performed here on amplified solo harp accompanied by a recording of LeBaron’s premiere of the piece, it commences by evoking Jimi Hendrix’s famous shredding of the US national anthem, and then moves into spooky, scraped, echoed string sounds, together with a reading of the text of the chits, sounds of warfare and other material. Outside of this sense of fury and use of literal noises of destruction, I Am An American… is quite open and meditative, suggesting a metaphysical journey through modernity in its use of train whistles (shades of Steve Reich’s Different Trains), moving in an unhurried way towards a disappearing, bassy thrum at its end.
LeBaron also conducted re-workings of two other pieces, the structured improvisation Infrathin II (slightly marred by a tendency of the performers to rather urgently attempt to foreground their own signature sounds) and Concerto For Active Frogs. The latter was composed by LeBaron for Raudelunas — a Midwestern equivalent to Fluxus, Neo-dada and the Mothers of Invention. It employs a Folkways recording of frog calls as a sort of score. Here performed by a garbage-bag clad choir of singers, set against the extraordinary Perth experimental vocalist Sage Pbbbt as soloist, the piece was enormous fun, performatively engaging (Pbbbt’s grimacing producing a wide range of expressions from schizophrenic joy to grief) and quite acoustically complex. Highlights were the direct call-and-response sections between Sage and the choir, with the two groupings staring intently across at each other as croaks ping-ponged between them. A great piece of po-faced fun which also made for provocative listening.
A Wave and Waves, Totally Huge New Music Festival, photo Bohdan Warchomij
A Wave and Waves
The festival concluded with the Speak Percussion ensemble leading 96 lay performers in Michael Pisaro’s suite for quiet percussion, A Wave and Waves. Originally produced as a multi-track recording for Greg Stuart, who radically reconceived his practice after an illness left him only able to perform small movements and quiet, subtle noises, Speak Percussion staged the work for the 2015 Melbourne Festival at the Meat Market with players spot-lit in a smoky room as audience sat on the periphery. In Perth however, Wave was presented as a kind of gentle equivalent of DCC Glitch, with listeners seated among a grid of standing performers, dressed in black, and all facing a set of screens which counted down numbers to cue their actions. The audience sat at right angles to this, in two blocks facing each other, intermeshed within the performance space itself: namely the spacious, aircraft-hangar-like former Midland Railway Workshops. Where the Meat Market performance was enhanced by the sound of proximate cars and inner city nightlife, Midland’s vast creaking venue cracked, expanded and breathed in the sun, as changes in temperature caused its aged metal shell to flex. The distant rumble of planes alternated with birdsong. The performed sound itself was a phenomenal, low key experience over an extended duration. Divided into two halves with a silent interlude, the second movement was relatively more active and noisy, and after the deep immersion in small sounds during the first movement, seemed if anything too much.
As fellow audience member and local sound personality Rob Muir explained to me, the title A Wave and Waves refers not just to the sounds themselves, which accumulate very slowly in slightly irregular masses spread about the venue before they ebb and rise, but also to the audience’s attention, which similarly comes and goes, making the perceived noises at times seem much louder than in fact they are, before one falls again into blissful, curious somnolence. An exquisite work at every level, in terms of its elegantly simple and immersive staging and its mysterious sound palette (I later identified a steel bowl filled with gum leaves in addition to rice on drums and gongs of various sizes, bowed cymbals, sandpaper on various surfaces, and more), A Wave and Waves was not only experientially superb, but visibly well attended by diverse audiences from young families through to ageing sound junkies like me; an ecumenical way to end the festival.
Top image credit: Anne LeBaron, Totally Huge New Music Festival, photo Bohdan Warchomij
North-eastern New South Wales is the home of the Bundjalung nation. Djurra, the title of a new stage work produced by NORPA (Northern Rivers Performing Arts) and directed by Kirk Page, an Indigenous actor, physical theatre artist, dancer and choreographer, means “lore.” For Aboriginal and non-indigenous audiences, Djurra’s talented creators will conjure a Bundjalung Dreamtime creation story entwined with contemporary domestic reality. The generous sharing of culture is a hallmark of Indigenous art, but so too is communication of the pain and anger felt over a culture betrayed.
Djurra features artists with considerable experience and culturally diverse backgrounds: dancer Joel Bray, a Wiradjuri man, Bundjalung dancer Sarah Bolt, actor Damion Hunter, actor James Slee, originally from Kuku Yalanji and Goa clan group lands, Lismore-based Indonesian choreographer Jade Dewi, visual artists Charlotte Hayward and Edward Horne designing set and costumes, musician and composer Ben Walsh with Mitchell King, a Yaegl Bundjalung man, and Blake Rhodes, video artist Rohan Langford and lighting designer Karl Johnson. A key role has been played by cultural consultant Roy Gordon, a Bundjalung Elder, actor and teacher who began his acting career performing in Waiting for Godot, performed entirely in Bundjalung language with English subtitles, during the Festival of the Dreaming in Sydney in 1997.
NORPA Associate Director Kirk Page is a descendant of Mulandjali people in south-east Queensland, Badu Island in the Torres Strait, Germany and Wales. His credits, spread across a 20-year career in the arts, are considerable, including acting (Redfern Now, My Place, Bran Nue Dae and Krush), movement consultation, involvement in Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Rekindling Youth Dance Program, as Assistant Director for Sydney Theatre Company’s Bloodland and My Darling Patricia’s Posts in the Paddock, and as an emerging choreographer in Force Majeure’s 2013 Cultivate program. During rehearsals for Djurra I spoke by phone with Page. He was clearly excited by the scale of the work, its cultural resonances and a distinctive collaborative process.
Kirk Page, photo Kate Holmes
Kirk, tell me about the cultural sources for Djurra.
Djurra is inspired by a creation story from this area, from Bundjalung country. The way I’m approaching it is to create a highly visual, image-based experience of an epic dream state, a liminal space. So one line is the creation story and running through it is another line, a real-time family domestic story. In the dream story there’s the Gami [grandmother] who created the three brothers whose families eventually populate the country. The story goes that she was on the mainland — we’re not quite sure if she was grandmother or mother; there are different versions of the story — and that the brothers who can’t find her have left in their canoes. She finds she’s been left on the shore and calls out to the men. Essentially, she conjures up the waves and the wind and brings the men back. So they return home. We also found in our research a story of one of the men returning from a war at the centre of the Earth. Each of the men has experienced conflict. So we found strong themes around return — returning home and, quite simply, listening to your mother.
What will your audience see and experience of this departure and return?
There are moments of abstract image-making that relate to the elements — fire, water, wind. We’re also working with the men to create personas inspired by elements — wood, metal, air. Djurra’s like a contemporary dance piece with some theatrical scenes. I’m really interested in the audience feeling they’re being taken somewhere.
Describe to me some of the stage action.
We’ve built a rostrum on wheels that moves around the space. It provides us with a domestic space and it’s also an island — a sort of floating, liminal space. We have some rigging so there’s flying, ascending and descending. We can tip gravity off-centre and have the men function in the space where they’re not exactly upright. There are also some great scenes in which the men remember their youth; this week we’ve been looking at just what lore means and how it plays out in our lives and the extent to which we follow it.
How do you dramatise something like that?
At this point it’s essentially storytelling, the men recalling moments in their lives when particular things happened. Were they signs, or callings? There are ideas around listening to the environment, having that ‘bigger listening’ to the world and the Earth and the elements.
How do you portray family life?
The men return, appearing one by one. There’s also some really great audio and visual material. We’re signalling the elements and the men with big video moments (Rohan Langford) and some incredible sound design (Ben Walsh). Ben really wanted to create all of the sound material from the earth, on country. So he’s gone out to Evans Head and Lennox recording wind and trying to create the female whose voice is the wind.
Damion Hunter, Djurra rehearsal photo Kate Holmes
How do you represent modern life in this interplay between contemporary life and the heritage of the Dreaming?
We’ve done it [in part] through the costuming. The men appear in suits. There are also scenes of death and the cycle of life. The men are returning dressed as if for a funeral. Or the suit is the colonisers’ skin or a layer of protection or a way of creating status or being accepted through the formalising of attire.
You’re directing a work with a lot of elements — music, sound, video, a set designed by visual artists, and Dreamtime and dance and domestic scenes performed by two actors and two dancers. But although a choreographer you’re not credited as one for Djurra.
We started with tasks and building images. Jade Dewi, a local Javanese lady who’s a contemporary dancer and choreographer, is really putting the performers through their paces and having them create personas and building on their capacities.The dancers are spectacular and I really like the way an actor’s body interprets. We’ve been getting them moving, getting them confident first and building scenes.
When you say ‘personas,’ do you mean the performers are playing particular characters?
I’ve tried to steer away from the idea of character; it conjures up the false creation of an empty body. They are sort of characters — youngest brother, middle brother and the eldest. But really it’s what they represent as archetypes rather than being naturalistic characters
Is the choreography influenced by traditional dance?
These are Indigenous bodies so they interpret and have a sense of movement that is their own. Some have performed cultural dances in the past. The movement will be contemporary dance — everything from walking to being quite still to quite virtuosic. It’s not going to be beautiful, flowing movement.
In the press release for Djurra, there’s mention of brokenness, eulogies and rage. How central are these ideas in a work in which you’re sharing culture with a racially mixed audience?
In the black community there’s often tragedy and lots of death, whether it’s from suicide or substance abuse. We’ve tried to frame it as a metaphorical war. One man is returning from overseas where he’s been fighting a war for another country. There’s also the rage that comes from inherent anger around the position of a lot of black men in this country, whether they’re on the bottom rung or at the top. There are problematic elements for both. If you’re successful you have a voice but then there’s judgement at community level that says, “Oh, you don’t get to speak for us!” And there’s the rage about our history. That’s been a difficult thing to handle, so that we don’t just have screaming heads on stage. [LAUGHS]. We’re composing a journey through the story so it’s not just angry. But you’re definitely going to see people talk about what it feels like.
Joel Bray, James Slee, Djurra rehearsal photo Kate Holmes
What will an Indigenous audience get from Djurra?
I’d really like them to see themselves onstage, to see their stories, especially the local people from this area, to see their own culture, their own history played out and having that put to the forefront on a platform that is magical and beautiful and heart-wrenching. It’s really about inviting these people into the theatre space to see a story that’s not someone else’s; it’s theirs.
And what might it mean for a white audience?
I’d like them to walk away with some insights and understanding about the day to day to lives of Aboriginal people and what lies beneath the rage and the hardness. And to also experience the beauty of these stories and our culture and who we are as people.
So it’s celebratory as well as critical. What has making Djurra meant for you?
It feels like I’ve been having my own initiation of sorts. It’s a really wonderful opportunity to have a voice and to work in an artistic realm in a way that I wouldn’t usually do. Over the years, I’ve enjoyed the experience of devising theatre and I like sharing that skill and [at the same time] sharing another way of working with Aboriginal and TSI artists.
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NORPA, Djurra, director Kirk Page, cultural consultant Roy Gordon, performers Joel Bray, Sarah Bolt, Damion Hunter, James Slee, choreographer Jade Dewi, composer Ben Walsh, contributing artists Mitchell King, Blake Rhodes, set and costume designers Charlotte Hayward, Edward Horne, video artist Rohan Langford, lighting designer Karl Johnson; Lismore City Hall, 30 Nov-3 Dec
Top image credit: Roy Gordon, Kirk Page, Djurra rehearsal photo Kate Holmes
Presented by FORM Dance Projects and Parramatta Riverside Theatres, Common Anomalies is a triptych of solos produced by Carl Sciberras for “young performers” to investigate “cultural identity.”
Imanuel Dado, What We Don’t See
Imanuel Dado begins his solo in a pool of light, dancing a softened krump. While the music mechanically clangs and jingles, a stylish black-on-black costume flows and clings. From internal to external, from contraction to extension, these hydraulic legs, up and down, lever the dance in and out, as Dado leaves and re-enters the light. His hands and face are mobile as he swivels and slides, making circles in discrete body regions until he is wrapped in himself, scared.
White powder breaks the black. Showering in whiteness, creating clouds, Dado smears the black back wall with curves, hand prints and shadows. An ashen man making mess. Drugs? Flour? Washing powder? Ashes?
Forces gather. He is battling, leaning, pounding, hitting, hitting, hitting. Then upside down, fluttering. Where am I? In a solo about choices, Imanuel Dado asks; who are you? Why do you matter? His answer? Listen. Just Listen.
Bhenji Ra, Approaching Gone (#ytfingers), Common Anomalies, FORM Dance Projects, photo Heidrun Löhr
Bhenji Ra: Approaching Gone (#ytfingers)
Bhenji Ra is a trans Filipino-Australian performer who adopts the third person plural pronoun ‘they’ to embody a gendered multiplicity and to politicise experience. Quietly, stealthily they appear in a dark corner of the external courtyard, in a costume that is a love child of the Cookie Monster and a Smurf. Big, blue, with bulbous white eyes atop a round head, the Cookie Smurf treads tenderly. Pudgy blue hands carve calm gestures in a cartoon tai chi. With blue back to the audience, the round belly and soft floppy feet make pelvic sways cutely amusing. But then hip hop Smurf appears, down low. Ra is stripper, sorceress/sorceror, sista/bro: multiple existences that shyly comment on themselves.
They lead us into the theatre slowly, calmly. No rush here. What began in open air silence has become a noisy, smoky, enclosed world. A screen shows rotating two-dimensional figures of goddesses or devils, all horn and tongue behind dripping rain. Where has Cookie Smurf gone? There, in the back corner, doing a half-arsed, almost non-existent dance, mouthing words that cannot be heard amid the din. But words are coming.
The stripper returns, squashing the space between performer and spectator: approaching, touching and sitting, asking to be disrobed, but only a little. The big head is gone. Big sharp ears of wisdom revealed. The miked voice whispers and repeats: “Now that I’ve got you in my space, can I ask you a question?”
The din has subsided, and this slim, breast-less body breathes out, “Can u see it? Can u know it? Can u take it?” Laughingly “Can u rate me” turns into the horror of “I’m a 10” into the even more horrible “Can u kill me” with “ur fat white fingers.” Darker and darker they disappear.
Carl Sciberras, Gbejniet, Common Anomalies, FORM Dance Projects, photo Heidrun Löhr
Carl Sciberras: Gbejniet
Gbejniet is a traditional Maltese cheese. During Gbejniet, Carl Sciberras cooks a soup with this cheese, adding, stirring, smelling, eating. Like the soup and the constant returns to the kitchen, this solo relies on admixture and repetition.
A screen hangs like a framed picture in a living room. Todd Fuller has created animated drawings of departure, travel and arrival. An Italian-esque rolling piano soundtrack travels along with the scenes of hillsides and ships, of land and sea. Meanwhile, the chopping of parsley crunches.
Scriberras frees himself from the kitchen to dance, assembling a quirky circle of standing spoons, pulling each from a holster like a gun. He spins and whisks himself, becoming busier, bolder and bigger, his arms slicing and carving, so fast they become a blur where… he is lost. He returns to his soup.
Balloons, tethered to the Earth with weights, sway and lightly bob like comic sentinels. Sciberras dances a waltzy folk dance, circling a balloon ballroom round and round with an absent partner. Then down he goes, into a rolling set of released floor movements.
An occasional microwave ding humorously breaks up the now laboured piano music as the pot steams and aromas spill. He returns to his soup.
Now he dances alone. He is heating like the soup. The once separated elements are becoming entangled and meshed.
His red and white shirt stained with sweat, he has one last dance. Turning turning turning. Music dissolving. He returns to the soup. He blows to cool it. He eats.
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FORM Dance Projects & Riverside Theatres: Common Anomalies: Approaching Gone (#ytfingers), choreographer, performer Bhenji Ra, composer Negroma, visual artist Tristan Jallah, costume Matthew Stegh, lighting Mitchell Kroll; What We Don’t See, choreographer, performer, Imanuel Dado, music Ori Lichtic, Olafur Arnalds, Nils Frahm, lighting Mitchell Kroll; Gbejniet, choreographer, performer Carl Sciberras, composer Mitchell Mollison, visual artist Todd Fuller, set, costume design Carl Sciberras, Tricia Cooney, Arnaldo Giordano, lighting, Mitchell Kroll; Lennox Theatre, Parramatta Riverside Theatre, Sydney, 2-4 Nov
Top image credit: Imanuel Dado, What We Don’t See, Common Anomalies, FORM Dance Projects, photo Heidrun Löhr
My interview with Jackson Davis, a member of the re:group performance collective, took place via email in two stages. I’d heard early in 2017 that re:group were to stage a sci-fi work, Route Dash Niner: Part II, in September, a fascinating prospect for a genre fan like myself. In August Davis replied to my request for an interview from Japan where he was performing in Erth’s Dinosaur Zoo. Subsequently I was in Adelaide for the OzAsia Festival and missed Route Dash Niner, but in my stead Nikki Heywood provided an evocative account for RealTime, describing the group’s dextrous deployment of props and cameras:
“Dizzying sequences and scene cuts abound as live camera feed is projected onto multiple projection screens. Instead of CGI animation re:group makes hilarious and inventive use of toy spaceships moved by hand across black cloth to simulate space cam footage, creating the impression of an extensive craft by filming in corridors, broom closets and barely concealed behind pillars.”
Heywood concludes her review, asking, “when will we see Route Dash Niner: Parts I & II staged as an epic double, on tour or programmed into a major arts festival?”
When Davis next communicated he was again with Erth, this time in Abu Dhabi. I was keen to know about re:group’s influences and aspirations. The collective, comprising Davis and fellow core collaborator Carly Young along with Stephen Wilson-Alexander and Solomon Thomas, all University of Wollongong graduates in performance, had gripped me with their 2014 work Lovely, a hugely inventive tribute to the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. In an attempt to conjure the actor’s spirit, the performers recreate scenes from films he appeared in and which are clustered according to characteristic tropes — Hoffman on the phone, Hoffman smoking, etc. Individual performers variously become the actor against manually wielded cardboard cut-out backdrops while the rest work as film crew operating cameras and microphones in a deft dance of furious studio production. We simultaneously see the original film scenes on monitors suspended across the performance space. My immediate response was that Lovely, with its telling portrait of an actor’s idiosyncracies and an evocation of his charisma, along with its deft use of humble means, warranted a larger audience. Although formally influenced by the work of UK live artist Richard DeDominici’s The Redux Project, Lovely stood out as a highly original work.
I was also intrigued that Davis and re:group are part of a steady stream of UOW graduates in performance from over the last decade who have continued to mount distinctive productions, individually and collaboratively, including Team MESS, Appelspiel, Nat Randall, Malcolm Whittaker and Mark Rogers. One-time Team MESS collaborator Georgie Meagher is Artistic Director of Melbourne’s Next Wave and, in April this year at Belvoir, Shopfront Arts Co-op presented, in a double bill, The Carousel, a sharply observed account of the travails of teenage sisters written by Pippa Ellams, directed by Hannah Goodwin and performed by Alex Francis and Tasha O’Brien, all recent UOW graduates. Jackson Davis attended UOW from 2008 to 2012.
Route Dash Niner, re:group, photo courtesy the artists
How would you describe your own and re:group’s approach to making work?
Our projects are experimental, exploring pop culture and videography through hybrid art forms. Personally I like the internet, video games and electronic music. At best my work should be fun, new, harsh and should cast its net as broadly as possible. I want to spend as much time not doing art as I spend doing it. For the benefit of both.
Who are your most significant influences?
At university I loved Societas Raffaello Sanzio, The Wooster Group and the writing of the Slovenian Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek. Now I like pretty much anything from digital content juggernaut Adult Swim. The more time I spend online, the more I appreciate its fever dream-like body of work. Richard DeDominici’s The Redux Project has been a big influence on my approach to pop culture and videography — he’ll go to the locations of iconic Hollywood blockbusters and re-shoot sequences starring himself and his friends. Lovely borrowed heavily from Richard DeDominici’s style, as well as my lifelong crush on the now dead Philip Seymour Hoffman. I also think a lot about Christian Marclay’s The Clock, how it uses that one cinematic trope to engineer a functioning machine.
Tell me about the successive stagings of Route Dash Niner.
The idea was to do a sci-fi work in two parts, separated by a year. The first, performed October 2016, was staged as a press conference announcing the discovery of a mysterious signal coming to us from a distant pocket of the universe. We declared our intention to investigate it, saying goodbye to four brave friends who had volunteered to commandeer the mission. Family members were invited to say their goodbyes and give parting gifts. Now, one year later, we are on-board the ship just weeks from the crew’s destination.
Part Two is a celebration of the making of an ambitious home video and DIY-interstellar wonder — the shooting of a sci-fi film in real time before a live audience. We wanted to build on the trashy cinematic aesthetic we had developed in Lovely, with its bustling performers jumping between actor, cinematographer and prop. And sci-fi felt like a good genre, bouncing around in your seat to simulate meteors hitting the solar array; that kind of thing.
What did your years at UOW give you?
I got a lot out of student-initiated projects during my time there. These allowed my peers and me to put into practice the performance-making skills we had been learning in class. Surrounding myself with a crew of passionate artists of equal inexperience was a really exciting and enriching opportunity. We got to play performer, director, writer, designer and dramaturg, mostly in response to whatever problem a project faced. Being given the freedom to work in this way, under brief and enabling mentorship, gave me a strong sense of experimentation, allowing me to test what worked and what did not, helping my peers and me develop our taste and style. Without these opportunities my first attempts at performance-making would have occurred post-degree, with my resources greatly diminished and my self-discipline a few grits rougher than it should be.
Lovely, re:group, photo Heidrun Löhr
What are you currently working on?
I’m at the end of a tour performing with Erth. It’s a puppeteering first for me, and a really rewarding environment to develop that craft. And kids give very clear feedback. I’m now collaborating on a new piece called UFO Play (working title) that uses tabletop miniatures to stage an alien landing.
Does Lovely, which I’m keen to see again, have a future? And what kind of future do you see for re:group?
We would really love to bring Lovely to a broader audience; I think people would really enjoy it. The dream for now is to give the work the time and production it deserves, getting it up somewhere in Sydney then touring it nationally. A remount is inevitable. I’m confident the work is solid, it just needs an equally solid pitch. Long-term for re:group is to keep making performance works that innovate with videography.
Top image credit: Jackson Davis, Lovely, re:group, photo Heidrun Löhr
Based on the survival experience of Israeli-Australian Yossi Ghinsberg, Greg McLean’s sixth feature film Jungle is in some respects a departure from the horror in which the Wolf Creek director specialises. But while the genre might differ, there are clear stylistic and thematic affinities with his previous work. Jungle’s motifs of adventurous travel, wilderness, isolation, suffering, endurance and the simultaneous beauty and horror of the landscape are also present in McLean’s Australian-set Wolf Creek opus and monster croc movie Rogue (2007).
Jungle begins in 1981, as Ghinsberg (Daniel Radcliffe), a footloose 21-year-old “desperate to escape the well-worn path” and “experience the extraordinary,” travels to Bolivia. After a carefree sojourn in the country’s capital La Paz, Yossi, along with two friends, is enticed away on a makeshift expedition into an uncharted region of Amazon rainforest by an enigmatic Austrian ex-pat, Karl Ruprechter (Thomas Kretschmann).
Jungle
There’s a light-hearted, faintly unreal quality to the prelude in La Paz, where Yossi and his friends, Swiss school teacher Marcus (Joel Jackson) and aspiring American photographer Kevin (Alex Russell), camp with others in a forest of stupendously tall trees, wander the streets to gently twanging Bolivian guitar music and wind up in picturesque bars. The yellow-hued, soft-edged cinematography has a nostalgic Kodachrome quality that underlines the fact we’re viewing events through the idealised lens of Ghinsberg’s memory. At this point the Bolivian landscape, soon to become a formidable player, is still picture-postcard territory: an idyllic playground for the Western traveller.
The tonal shift away from this happy-go-lucky introduction is deftly negotiated. Accomplished horror director that he is, McLean cannily teases out the tensions that arise when people are stripped of their usual comforts, individual quirks suddenly thrown into relief. As the four go further off the beaten track, giving the impression of playing at being explorers, a less than appealing aspect of traditional masculinity is brought to the fore, with the sensitive, easily rattled Marcus acting as foil to the aggressively capable Karl, while Yossi and Kevin distance themselves from the former in order to emulate the latter.
The misguidedness, delusion and extravagant, hallucinogenic madness evoked in Jungle recall the benighted expedition taken down the Amazon River in Werner Hertzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972), in which a crazy, messianic Klaus Kinski leads his followers on a futile search for El Dorado (in Jungle, Karl also holds out the lure of gold and an undiscovered tribe to the three younger men). McLean has a talent for intimately portraying humans in extremis, alone in indifferent or hostile environments, dependent solely on fortitude and their wits. In Jungle, the landscape becomes an inexorable antagonist at the point Yossi is swept into river rapids, in a chaotic sequence skilfully (and courageously) shot and edited so as to throw the viewer helplessly into the turmoil both above the churning water and below, dragged under with Yossi, never allowing an opportunity to fix on one position — until all sound is hushed in submerged unconsciousness.
Jungle
An elemental quality also pervades the jungle scenes following Yossi’s escape from the water, as he is drenched by storms, bogged in quicksand and, sanity disintegrating, clutches a tree trunk covered in fire ants and runs burning back to the river. Having visibly lost weight to play the starving Ghinsberg, Radcliffe shoulders the physically demanding performance persuasively, making the transition from an unassuming yet adventurous young backpacker to a filthy emaciated figure running the gauntlet of torturous nature (which McLean not unexpectedly punctuates with strategic moments of body horror) before seemingly attaining a state of spiritual transcendence. Much of Jungle is a one-man show; Daniel Radcliffe’s intensity easily commands attention for the duration.
As Yossi fights for survival within the jungle, reduced to pain, memory fragments and hallucination, the film becomes an almost purely sensory journey, conveyed through a delirious sequence of images collapsing one into the other, underscored by a cacophonous collage of sound. McLean does not shy away from grandiose cinematic language, and it’s this willingness to break away from realism into bold expressionistic territory, without ever losing sight of the real humans behind the drama, that makes the film striking,
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Jungle, director Greg McLean, writers Yossi Ghinsberg, Justin Monjo, performers Daniel Radcliffe, Thomas Kretschmann, Joel Jackson, Alex Russell, cinematographer Stefan Duscio, editor Sean Lahiff, composer Johnny Klimek, production design Matthew Putland, art direction Diana Trujillo; distributor Umbrella Entertainment, 2017
Top image credit: Daniel Radcliffe, Jungle
I tried hard to forget Chekov’s Three Sisters and see Andrew Upton’s adaptation, directed by Kip Williams, on its own terms. It’s not easy, not unlike seeing double; the better you know the play, the more giddying the experience when seeing a production that throws an image of the audience back at itself and mirror doubles its players.
Olga (Alison Bell) is filling balloons for a party on the first anniversary of her father’s death. Life, death, inflation, deflation, hope and despair. From simple beginnings, Williams and Upton vigorously ramp up tensions and mood swings. Desires are stalled, blocked and defeated and resilience severely tested as the limited culture of a regional town erodes the sisters’ hopes, especially the desire of the youngest, Irina (Miranda Daughtry), to return to their beloved Moscow. Words are not enough: the third sister Masha (Eryn Jean Norvill), is verbally and physically volatile, so too her speechmaking lover Colonel Vershinin (Mark Leonard Winter).
Passions are expressed with physical heft, conversations overlap, partying borders on cacophonous, “Shut up!” is wielded like an axe. In loose configurations, characters stream casually about the house (simple table and chairs before a huge glass wall, at once mirror and window). Complications ensue; the brother Andrei’s (Brandon McClelland) vulgar wife Natasha (Nikki Shiels) initiates her takeover of the household and an affair commences. Years (number not specified) pass, the world narrows, after a fire, to a small room claustrophobic with despair; more years on, it enlarges to a wide outdoor space with a single tree with barely a leaf. Long gone is the relatively convivial sense of community: the open stage is a closed space of reckoning, tortured separation and a limited future for the sisters. This overall trajectory and the performances in particular deeply engaged me, whatever misgivings I had about the adaptation and design — a disjunct I’m compelled to worry at.
Alison Bell, Miranda Daughtry, Eryn Jean Norvill, Three Sisters, 2017, Sydney Theatre Company, photo Brett Boardman
Upton’s Three Sisters transmutes the playwright’s original, albeit constantly recognisable, into a new play, grimmer, fevered and largely stripped of the gentility of its end of the 19th century regional middle class milieu. Masha demands of her lover Vershinin, “I want to see you while you fuck me” and impresses on her romantically fixated sister Irina the joys of sexual penetration. Old folk songs, Pushkin and Tolstoy, who unite the lovers, are replaced by Bob Dylan, whose songs, according to Upton in an interview in the program, tally with director Kip Williams’ desire to set the play in the 1970s, a period of intense sexual, social and political instability in the West and gradually felt in the Soviet Union. The songs are an awkward fit and not all the most recognisable of Dylan’s output.
Far more challenging is Upton’s excision of the sisters’ final words, Olga’s above all, in which, shortly after the death of Irina’s fiancé in a duel, the sisters sadly rise to the challenge of their limited prospects. It’s an authorial decision that denies director and actors to likewise rise to a challenge — how to balance the sisters’ stoic determination with the sheer weight of pain so recently inflicted on them. Presumably Upton felt the original insufficiently hard-nosed for the 1970s and our own times. In doing so he ignored the rigour of the play’s emotional ebb and flow in which a pattern of crisis, acceptance and resilience plays a key role in the overall arc of the work.
Although the Baron Tusenbach (Harry Greenwood) is killed in a duel with the jealous Solyony (Rahel Romahn), Irina had accepted him as her husband, taking to heart Olga’s counsel, “Love is not an idea” and abandoning her romantic idealism — “I let go.” She can now face life more openly. Miranda Daughtry’s performance is an exquisitely delineated journey from optimism to bitter despair and numb acceptance. She is adroit at catching sudden mood swings: from the child-like joy of mocking her brother (who has mortgaged their home without consulting the sisters) with a pillow stuffed up her jumper to seconds later — hating work, lonely — uttering fiercely, “I want to die!”
Harry Greenwood, Miranda Daughtry, Three Sisters, Sydney Theatre Company, 2017, photo Brett Boardman
The production’s most affecting scene is played out between Irina and the Baron (played by Greenwood without bluster as an awkward, sensitive soul, judicious to a fault) as they hesitantly reach an agreement about marrying without guarantee of anything more than affection; it’s in stark counterpoint with the rough separation of Masha and Vershinin, but both exemplify the taut emotional push and pull of the production at its best.
Masha proves to be a surprising realist, admitting her love for Vershinin to her sisters, but with a caveat: “I always knew the crash was coming.” Her determination to live in the moment is thrillingly realised in Norvill’s hyperactive portrayal. It’s hard to imagine that this Masha will ever settle, regardless of the hopes of her accommodatingly optimistic husband Kulygin (Chris Ryan’s fine performance, part witless joker, part empathic observer, dextrously sidesteps pathos). The sexual attraction between Masha and Vershinin is overt, manifesting as a dance-like interaction of people with excess energy resulting in a risky sexual encounter replete with an irrepressible erection and, at the play’s end, a moving departure with Masha clinging desperately to her lover, he stumbling backwards, until Olga intervenes, Kulygin watching on. For Olga, resilience and wisdom are all she has in a town that, as Masha says, can never acknowledge or nurture her brilliance. She is bound to accept an unwanted promotion to headmistress, if with Irina as a fellow teacher. The surface calm and reasonableness of Alison Bell’s Olga barely belie a tremulous psyche and deep disappointment.
Vershinin too is on a path to acceptance of his circumstances. Initially this is expressed as fatalism induced by the burden of a suicidal wife, two small children and the sorry state of the world. But the colonel is also an optimist; whenever he despairs or the conversation slumps he swings into vigorous speechmaking, taking centrestage or standing on a table, speculating on the emergence of a benign society some 200 to 300 years hence (a position Olga takes at the end of the original play). It’s a compensatory hopefulness. When the town is badly damaged by fire, Vershinin’s despair is tempered by his pride in his soldiers’ firefighting and his growing sense of familial responsibility. Mark Leonard Winter fully embodies the drive of a man keeping anxiety at bay — “If I don’t talk I’ll die”. Masha, however, knows that words can be “precious life talked into a stew of blather.”
The sisters, Vershinin, the Baron and Kulygin, in one way or another, adjust as best they can to the cards that personality, class, culture, the state and fate have dealt them, opportunistically in the case of sister-in-law Natasha — pure pragmatist, happy adulteress and unashamed of her vulgarity. Nikki Shiels plays her with escalating force, climaxing in her unrelentingly cruel treatment of the elderly maid Anfisa, affectingly realised by Melita Jurisic. The other characters are beyond change. Already failures, Solony (clearly dangerous from the outset in Rahel Romahn’s performance) and the doctor Chebutikin (Anthony Brandon Wong in an intense, low-key performance) are absolutists, utterly dismissive of others’ concerns; the former is responsible for the Baron’s death, the latter for not preventing it. Upton elaborates on Chebutikin’s cynicism (“Do we exist?”), amplifying the doctor’s sense of professional helplessness with disturbing images: guts described as “a bag of cats.” Andrei is also beyond help. Revealing his suffering, he crawls into Olga’s bed to be comforted, but is not saved from Natasha or himself. All the gradations of hope, despair, denial and acceptance are finely wrought across the ensemble.
Miranda Daughtry, Alison Bell, Three Sisters, Sydney Theatre Company, 2017, photo brett Boardman
Performance in Three Sisters is disadvantaged by the production’s framing. For a director who is usually rigorous with design and screens, the deployment of the wall/mirror seemed limited, providing brief forays outside the house and, for whatever reason, reflecting the audience and doubling the actors, yielding a complex space and reducing focus. Perhaps it aimed to provide a sense of intangibility on the one hand and denser communality on the other. As for implicating the audience, our reflection would need to be put to further use to make a point, but it was abandoned in the second half, as if we no longer counted.
I’ve already mentioned the problematic use of Dylan songs, to which should be added the bridging music of the moment, not of the 70s, provided by The Sweats especially when juxtaposed with a Soviet Union army choir heard within scenes. As with the design, this was indicative of a failure to run with the 70s concept, or whenever, say up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The uniforms worn by Vershinin and the Baron appeared to be Soviet, a newspaper read by the doctor possibly Russian. The samovar given to Irina in the original is replaced with a doll (hardly of the same order). There is little in this Three Sisters that generates a palpable sense of place or time as the years go by uncounted. The 60s and 70s in the USSR saw the emergence of significant dissidence, for example Shostakovitch’s Symphony 13, Babi Yar, a protest against anti-semitism, and the hugely popular and publicly performed poetry of Yevtushenko (whose lines appear in part in Babi Yar). Using these or like materials might have made better sense of an era. The previous Upton adaptation for the STC, The Present, from Chekov’s Ivanov, conveyed at least an apt sense of the brash, corrupt nouveau riche that emerged from the collapse of the USSR. Without sufficient texturing this adaptation fails to evoke an era, let alone correlate relationships between the 1890s, 1970s and now. As it stands, Three Sisters offers moving performances from actors who have embraced the overt emotional range and trajectory of the adaptation and direction, but within a framework that is conceptually underdeveloped.
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Sydney Theatre Company, Three Sisters, writer Anton Chekhov, adaptation Andrew Upton, director Kip Williams. designer Alice Babidge, lighting designer Nick Schlieper, composer The Sweats, sound designer Nate Edmonson; Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, 20 Nov-18 Dec
Top image credit: Three Sisters, Sydney Theatre Company, photo Brett Boardman
This week we offer our third and final set of reviews of the Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art, an invaluable event in a city where independent contemporary performance, live art and dance often seem scattered and sparsely programmed across the year. Alongside reviews of works by Justin Shoulder and Geumhyung Jeong, Keith completes his series of responses focusing on the expectations raised by the use of the descriptor ‘experimental’ and how it might be more meaningfully engaged with in future Liveworks. Rounding out our Liveworks coverage, we bring up from our Deep Archive a wonderful article about Gena Rowlands, the film actress whose role-within-a-role Nat Randall adopts in The Second Woman, a great Liveworks success. This week we’re streaming via Facebook forums featured in Hobiennale, the current gathering in Hobart of ARI representatives from across Australia and New Zealand. We’ll report on the event’s exhibitions with images, video and a review in coming weeks. After a short break, we’ll be back on 22 November. Keith & Virginia
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Top image credit: 7 Ways, Geumhyung Jeong, Liveworks 2017, photo Wooshik Lee
I learned from reading and listening to interviews with Justin Shoulder that his practice was formed in community — in queer clubs, and in association with queer, activist and diasporic performance collectives. The prominence of community in his work is reflected in the turnout at this evening’s performance, and in the appreciative roar from the audience even before CARRION has begun.
I have previously seen images of Shoulder’s costumes (made in collaboration with Matthew Stegh), but have never seen them animated by a performer. While the costumes possess a transformational power all of their own, one of the aims of CARRION was to explore how the body could become more deeply engaged in these transformations — how the body itself might also transform. What I sense, in CARRION, is a profound melding of costume and body, a mutual transformation which produces creatures that feel real, through and through.
The creatures both are, and are not, recognisable. They possess multiple qualities that flicker in and out of sight, depending on how they move. The effect is mirage-like. A giant, innocuous-looking grub or butterfly pupa has a sensual cleft running down its centre, which folds open to reveal a smooth human back. A long-limbed, masked figure that wears its bones on the outside is simultaneously endearing in its curious exploration of the stage, and somehow sinister, with its gash-like smile and croaky, staccato vocalisations. I often don’t know quite what I’m seeing, sometimes don’t even know if it’s possible to be seeing what I’m seeing. I have had this sort of experience in recent work by choreographer Victoria Hunt (artistic collaborator on CARRION) — it turns my stomach.
CARRION, Justin Shoulder, Liveworks 2017, photo Alex Davies
The piece takes us through an epic progression of different states, as Corin Ileto’s musical score drives emotion through the performance space in big, vivid strokes.
A costume of bones is prepared in reverent solitude, knuckles clattering on the floor in the quiet. That endearing yet unsettling masked figure becomes riotous, and tears down a cloudscape so that it lies in a heap in the rising smoke. A pink, flouncy enormity rises up, the size of a house, burping, gluttonous, like a spirit gorging itself, and then sinks back down into the earth.
Throughout, a set of small plastic birds is arranged and rearranged on the stage. They shunt their necks mechanically from side to side, spurting erratic squawks, whistles, and the sing-song phrase, “I see you!”
This artificial birdsong takes on a particularly eerie resonance at the end of the work, when only one lone, plastic bird still sputters, and a big, bird-like creature with a long neck emerges from the debris of all that has gone before. This bird-like being strikes me as a lone survivor lost in a destitute landscape. It takes in its surroundings and releases a devastating, otherworldly howl. Mourning. Panic. In this moment, all feels lost in the world.
CARRION presents something like a dream-space – an allegorical space, a space of in-betweens and of fantastical proportions – in which critical questions about contemporary humanity present as vivid, amorphous emotions. It feels apt that this world should disappear the way it does at the end of the work: that, as our lone survivor releases a final wail, it is all whisked away into total, inky blackness.
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Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art, CARRION, lead artist, performer Justin Shoulder, composer Corin Ileto, mentor, artistic collaborator Victoria Hunt, costume, set design Matthew Stegh, Justin Shoulder, lighting, visual design Benjamin Cisterne, sound mastering Bob Scott; Carriageworks, Sydney, 25-28 Oct
Top image credit: CARRION, Justin Shoulder, Liveworks 2017, photo Alex Davies
Once again Liveworks provided us with a concentrated gathering of Australian and Asian performance constellated around the notion of experimental arts — the kinds of mind- and formula-bending works we’re desperate to see at Carriageworks year-round. Works this year proved to be experimental to greatly varying degrees — sometimes simply evoked as such, sometimes actual. A virally pervasive preoccupation with transformation, thematic and formal, offered clues as to how we might test for experimentalism.
Of course, transformation is one of art’s commonest themes, but we largely look to changes in form for signs of innovation and evidence of the experimentation to which Liveworks lays claim. One-on-one works across the last decade have generated numerous performative possibilities, engaged intimately with topics often unlikely to be dealt with in theatres (see our review of the 2017 Proximity Festival) and made members of the public ephemeral co-creators. Nat Randall’s innovation is to have taken the private one-on-one model and made it simultaneously a theatrical experience. Male participants have spoken of how little sense they had of the audience because the room in which they met Randall was so self-contained. The Second Woman exudes a sense of experiment, with its 100 samples over 24 hours (the men I called lab rats in my first review of Liveworks), a strict methodology, performer endurance witnessed by audiences often staying over many hours, all heightened with intimate camera close-ups.
Mark Harvey’s Helping Hand — a mix of one-on-one and group conversations in various spots in and around Carriageworks — also evoked experiment, one doggedly exercised across the two weeks of Liveworks. Video documentation and an artist’s report on how his chance participants responded to his amiable presence and physical discomfort (eg lying down on stairs headfirst while conversing) might make for interesting sociological study in the tradition of Erving Goffman’s investigations into everyday behaviour. Not that such a report is necessary, but like much innovative art today Helping Hand prompts that kind of R&D thinking.
The experiment that is Jen Jamieson’s Let’s Make Love has been encouraged by recent scientific research about self-generated oxytocin’s influence on our sense of wellbeing. The outcomes are necessarily impressionistic but, as with any artwork it’s the degree to which those feelings are shared in post-one-on-one word of mouth that determines if the experiment has worked or not. Lz Dun’s AEON, also inspired by scientific research, had participants mimicking bird behaviour in a work that says much about our own at a time when the human/animal divide is steadily eroding and biomimicry is vital to our future. In these two works, form and content appear to be satisfyingly in synch, however nebulous the outcomes — feelings, impulses, urges (see Cleo Mees’ account of AEON).
Eisa Jocson (Corponomy) and Geumhyung Jeong (Oil Pressure Vibrator) took the lecture-performance model up a notch with their carefully calibrated, personal accounts of vision and the process for its realisation. Jocson’s was quite political, Jeong’s more personal, both delivered precisely and with an air of almost clinical detachment (until Jocson became Snow White and Jeong lay spasming before a screen image of an earthmover probing a sand model of her naked body), each evoking an investigative science of performance. In her review of Jeong’s performances Nikki Heywood applauds the artist’s obsessive artistry and the rigour of her process.
CARRION, Justin Shoulder, photo Alex Davies
Justin Shoulder’s CARRION, a personal account of stages of human/animal evolution if without Darwinian logic, was strikingly imaginative. Shoulder and his collaborators’ design sense is superb. As Cleo Mees writes, there is “a profound melding of costume and body, a mutual transformation which produces creatures that feel real, through and through.” However, while Shoulder’s experiments in design are undeniably ingenious and his movement skills strikingly improved since I last saw his work, CARRION remains a series of images that don’t cohere. A creature is birthed from a carapace, sits in the dark transforming at length into an indigenous male figure (why are we not to see this?) and is absorbed into a huge gut-like inflatable, his head impossibly poking minutely from a pulsing protuberance. The carapace becomes the body of a monstrous beast which emu-like inspects its terrain and dances its way to apparent extinction. Transformative images and movement (when not interrupted by inexplicable wanderings) are memorable and the sense of a dark, maturing vision palpable, but the work is not compellingly organic, rather it recalled an older model of contemporary performance, as did Agatha Goethe-Snape’s Rhetorical Chorus and Christian Thompson’s Tree of Knowledge, works fascinating in themselves but falling short of experimental.
New to Liveworks this year were two keynote addresses. Tang Fu Kuen, a renowned dramaturg, curator and now Artistic Director of the Taipei Arts Festival, and r e a, a leading Australian media artist. Tang’s overlong address (leaving little time for discussion) focused on the challenges he faces in leading a very large arts festival and dealing with a huge, not yet completed art venue, one of many of such scale that are springing up across Asia ready to house major performances, often without considering the profusion of smaller, innovative works. We learned little of the kinds of work Tang will program at a moment when we’re fascinated with innovative and experimental Asian performance and its connections with Australia through Liveworks, OzAsia and Asia TOPA. R e a delivered a succinct, deeply personal account of her emergence into experimental media practice in terms of her engagement with technology, her Aboriginal heritage and the challenges that come with being adequately acknowledged (if at all) in visual arts discourse simply as an “Aboriginal media artist.” Performance Space needs to rethink the staging of these talks in terms of its experimental credo and build an audience for them.
Either we accept “experimental” as an umbrella term for contemporary performance, live art, one-on-one performance, performative installation, relational works et al, or we get serious about it. Performance Space needs to engage its public in a discussion about the rationale for the festival’s being. Its audiences are the intelligent, supportive subjects of its experimental testings. Q&As for individual works don’t have the scope. During Liveworks, the Australia Council for the Arts and Performance Space held a very welcome one-day forum on experimental performance for practitioners from around Australia and several international guests. Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend, but it prompted thoughts of such a forum shared in part with the Liveworks audience and, far more important, another which, late in the festival program, would draw together Artistic Director Jeff Khan, artists and audience in a substantial discussion on the state and calibre of experimental art as evidenced by the current festival. That would be serious.
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Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art, Carriageworks, Sydney, 19-29 Oct
Top image credit: Ringo, Tetsuya Umeda, photo Alex Davies
One characteristic of improvised music in this century has been a growing commitment by some practitioners to engage with outback Australia. The last time I experienced Warmun (in a remote part of the East Kimberley) was with my partner Hollis Taylor. We’d just endured a night of hell when our campervan was overrun with hundreds of creeping, crawling, biting critters that had joyfully hitched a ride with us (evidently caused by accidentally parking on the site of a dead kangaroo). The following bright Sunday morning found us waiting for the petrol station to open with the hope of a new day. The most endearing quality of that place was that the petrol pumps were all painted up in traditional iconography — as were the rocks nearby. The rocks are still there, but the petrol pumps have been replaced with some corporate logo horror which shall remain as nameless as it deserves.
The relationship of white Australians to their Indigenous brethren remains a permanent news item — an open sore that never heals. The recent debate about colonial statues is typical of how contemporary a trauma it remains — certainly for blackfellas, and for many whitefellas too (see Stan Grant’s “Between catastrophe and survival: The real journey Captain Cook set us on“). The early thugaroo Lachlan Macquarie, whose ubiquitous name is impossible to escape in NSW (he plastered it over everything he could get his hands on), had a new statue plonked down in Hyde Park as recently as 2013 under the watch of no less than Lord Mayor Clover Moore. Clover, how could you?
I arrived in Sydney in 1976 and a few years later I ran into one of the many contradictions of our confused Australian culture. While playing in a country and western band (covering completely ludicrously displaced tunes like “I’d rather be an Okie from Muskogee”) in outback Queensland, I was gobsmacked to realise that, along with white audience supporters of small-time dictator Joh Bjelke Petersen, there were many groups of Aboriginal fans of country music. They loved the stuff. I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, put the cultural ramifications of that together, and so determined that I best stay clear of working with Indigenous culture as it would most likely turn out for the worst (not that there is anything inherently wrong with country music as originated and played well in the USA by citizens of that country; it was the unquestioned import that disturbed me).
In Warmun
And now here I am in Warmun, deeply involved with a regional residency organised by the intrepid Tos Mahoney of WA’s Tura New Music. Tos has been building relationships with remote communities of The Kimberley for most of this century, and based on the trust he has nurtured, some extraordinary results are showing. I am contributor and beneficiary of this ongoing work.
The first thing that has to be asked is why anybody from Warmun would even talk to a whitefella, let alone collaborate on a musical adventure. Like many outback communities, Warmun is something of a refugee camp, with survivors of various nations who have had their land first stolen, then have been subjected to employment as feudal serfs, then kicked off their land again when the white owners were legally obliged to pay a living wage. In addition, Warmun was wiped out by catastrophic flooding in 2011 (there is a large fridge still sitting in the branches of a tree six metres off the ground) followed by the crooked activities of a builder and serial conman. Contracted by the WA Department of Housing, Craig Dale allegedly embezzled $3 million of federal money in the rebuilding of the town.
Earlier, in 2001, something similar happened when phantom payments amounting to thousands of dollars were made under the stewardship of convicted criminal Kevin Maxwell Curnow, causing the town’s corporation budget to collapse with $1.5 million of debt. Somehow, the Gija people are a forgiving lot. It is a privilege to work among them.
So what’s the project? It’s another manifestation of The Wreck — the transformation of a car wreck into a musical instrument [a project commenced by Jon Rose in 2012 and continued with Tura New music in 2016-17]. Wrecks are iconic markers of the outback. While mapping this continent performing the Fence Project, I started photographing the hundreds of wrecks that I came across. Leave a wreck long enough and it morphs entropically into the landscape, indeed eventually bedding down in company with the raw red constituent chemicals from which it originated.
You can’t just rock up to an Aboriginal community and pick out your wreck and go to work; that would be a non-starter, as all the wrecks belong to someone. They are not simply detritus; former objects of mobilisation that have themselves become immobile are, once the spare parts have been selected, too expensive to destroy or move to an official dump. These wrecks are family. They signify a personal and sometimes painful set of stories. In an odd and contemporary linking between the natural and the supernatural, they are kin containing stories, travels, temporary shelter, memories of love, children, accidents, dogs, disasters and hope down the road.
Once a suitable wreck has been negotiated, there has to be interest and desire from the community to set the project in motion. Every move is one of consultation; otherwise there will be no community project — just a classic case of whitefella toiling in the sun with blackfellas standing around in general amusement waiting for whitefella to leave, maybe leave some money, probably not come back.
Lindsay Malay is our next door neighbour. He is part Aboriginal and part Afghan and very keen on this project, providing all kinds of help and practical assistance. But first things first: we gotta get smoked by Gabe. I’m wanting to get on with the project, but Tos assures me, no smoking, no project. He is right. I’m still not in tempo. So we get smoked and welcomed to country as it should be.
The white house
We are staying in the “white house.” That’s not an ironic political name; it just happens to be painted white. The structure is also built on stilts to accommodate the heat and the wet; this also means snakes and other inquisitive animals are unlikely to visit. Wrong. On the second day my shoes are stolen from the balcony. A quick survey of the surrounds around Lindsay’s house finds dozens of single shoes masquerading as dog bones. Well, I find one shoe but the other remains missing (or dismembered). Our two canine crims turn out to be simply curious. They follow us around, more interested in displays of fighting than taking chunks out of our legs. “Us” is the excellent photographer Bohdan Warchomij, who has had guns pointed at him in his line of work in war zones, so deranged dogs amount to trivial pursuits. Despite signs in town demonstrating success with the de-sexing program, shoes and dogs become a running sub-plot over the next weeks.
Two days later, the sole of one of my “tough Australian made” work boots falls off. Much to my amazement, Steve (who runs the East Kimberley Job Pathways workshop) has half a shop’s worth of work boot replacements right there in Warmun. The same cannot be said about the availability of functioning tools. It’s a challenge. As foreman Kevin explains, “someone has greater need than we do for functioning tools” and who’s to argue with that philosophical view on reciprocity? Barry, Walter and Glen are the Pathways home team and we get on well. Barry is completely skilled up on welding and unorthodox use of the Bobcat forklift, and he takes a keen interest in the redesign of the wreck. It is hard to assess what they really make of the project — possibly a passing apparition.
An available wreck
Initially, we ask about two suitable wrecks but for logistic reasons they are not available. Lindsay introduces us to a local man who has ‘the’ Wreck beyond the beyond. Ceremonially burnt, no wheels, engine rusted to chassis, barely any floor left, the panelling decorated with dot paintings and representative Rainbow Serpent generated not by human hand, but by 20 years of weathering. We could have it, but how to get our beautiful Wreck to the workshop? From out of outback central casting steps “Chook.” With an excessively long white beard, ruddy face and an avalanche of expletives, Chook offers to bring it via the biggest forklift in town to the workshop and stick it…where was that? Somewhere dark where the sun doesn’t shine, if I remember right.
Meanwhile, the temperature has risen to 34C in the shade, but the Wreck is not in the shade. I’m trying to show positivity by getting stuck into removing the drive shaft with an angle grinder. With sweat pouring off my face, extremely poor vision (due to a recent unsuccessful cataract surgery) and the thought that my left violin hand could be severed and sent flying across the yard at any moment, Kevin and Steve suggest we wait until the oxy-acetylene cutter is fixed — eh, maybe next week with a bit of luck. Whenever I see Tos, we break out with the Bernard Cribbins classic “Right Said Fred,” a 1960s pop song about a hapless gang of British workers under-employed in the piano moving business. Our piano is the Wreck. Days start to tick by and our time in Warmun is limited by all kinds of parameters, a performance date being the key one. Such linear materiality is not much of a currency in a community such as Warmun, but they humour us. Enter Dallas and Deno. They have the tools, they will do it, they need to be paid. And verily it was done upon the next day. No surprises there as Dallas and Deno have the government contract for fixing most of the roads in the East Kimberley and are the proud owners of the biggest wreck site and car spare parts in Warmun. They know their stuff.
Last year’s Wreck was converted by the Bardi people of Lombadina and Djarindjin (170 kilometres north of Broome). An old Toyota ‘Troopie’ was selected, the engine removed (to be replaced by loudspeakers in the form of a V8) and a mass of ringing exhaust pipes welded to the side — it looked like a stunt vehicle from a Mad Max movie. A ladder and rack provided access to the roof and rotation hub section for players with the nerve to get up there. The bonnet (hood) was removed and welded to the side of the engine area for ease of access and was played as a large gong. Inside, the Toyota was stripped out of soft fittings, thus increasing the volume and depth of the principal resonating chamber. As is becoming de rigueur in these wreck projects, fence wire and strainers converted the vehicle into a formidable string instrument. More by neglect than design, all the doors of the Troopie still functioned, so cathartic door slamming became the thematic material for the whole three-week experience at Cape Leveque. Amplification, smoke and lights completed the show, which took place in front of the school, exactly on the border between the two communities (who very much run separate agendas).
This year’s model
This year’s Wreck, by comparison, is a tougher proposition, as it is literally a rusted bucket with no working parts (e.g. doors). But if the last one took after Mad Max, this one is clearly influenced by the sails of the Sydney Opera House — an institution with which I have had a special relationship at times!
There are three bonnets welded to the top of the cabin — clearly the Sydney Opera House! The hope is to encourage some of the exceptional painters at Warmun to get up there on a Bobcat and paint ’em up. There is a hinged percussion section bolted onto one side of the Wreck, and an abundance of 44-gallon drums in Warmun adds an auxiliary percussion section. The four fence wires are accessible both front and back of the Wreck. The engine and drive shaft have been removed to make way for speakers and other gear.
Despite the ruthless attacks and wilful stupidity of its CEO Michelle Guthrie, the ABC remains a central conduit to a functioning community here in the Kimberley. Morning show host Vanessa is following the wreck story from last year’s manifestation at Lombadina Djarindjin to this year’s project with genuine interest and curiosity. I demonstrate some of the sonic qualities down my phone live on her show. Later that day, my two constant canine companions produce a stirring performance of my latest composition, “Sonata for two crazed fighting dogs and violin obligato.”
The Wreck: neutral cultural zone
Wreck could be a neutral cultural zone in which to create connections between European and ancient Indigenous vocabularies and avoid such trite Jindyworobakism retrofitting orchestral works with a didgeridoo or simply cutting-and-pasting the exoticism of Aboriginal culture within dominant practices such as jazz or opera. Composers of popular and unpopular music have eaten out the supermarket of exoticism in any case; there is nothing left on the shelf that is not tainted. A car wreck is so far removed from an accepted musical practice that it allows a return to first principles and little in the way of baggage — or maybe it’s just a piece of sonic detritus (finally an end point to Cage’s love of traffic sound).
The development of a music that discards much of the baggage of European and American cultural empire building is probably impossible to achieve in an internet age. But to my knowledge, there is no tradition of wreck music stretching back to the Renaissance and beyond; there are no popular music genres with car wrecks in the feature role like the electric guitar. (There have been performance art events with car wrecks, but these do not constitute an ongoing tradition.) In the context of Indigenous society, wrecks become the containers for a collection of embedded contemporary stories (I hesitate to use the word “dreamings” as I don’t want to push a whitefella’s presumption onto this proposition any more than I want members of the Warmun community to stand around singing “Kumbaya” or droning away on “Om”). The wreck is a canvas ironically clean of presumptions.
But why don’t you just bring in some decent musical instruments for them to play? The arrival of a musical instrument in a remote community brings forth an ownership conundrum. It’s either owned by no-one or by everyone (or at least everyone related through the kinship system of moiety). Apart from the pressure of humbugging, there are problems: who will replace the strings on the guitar, where are the drumsticks, how to fix the amp? A wreck is already part of the community — it can be transformed, but it doesn’t need fixing.
Gabe gives us permission to set the Wreck up on the Joonba ground. This is the community place of spiritual and celebratory dance gatherings. Gabe, not knowing what wreck music is going to sound like, is hedging his bets: we are allowed on the edge, not the centre, of the space. Over the next days, we are visited by various age groups from the school; the teenage boys’ class goes wild. They reduce some of the side drums to crumpled metal. Their teacher controls them with an ear-shattering cyclone whistle. Straight out of Picnic at Hanging Rock, a visiting party of Perth private school girls try their hand: they push the violinist in the class forward to bow the amplified fence wires. I have made samples of every aspect of the Wreck, including the non-existent motor and horn; with these well-audible in the live mix, and some quick demos of technique from time to time, the music just goes off.
The concert
The first half of the advertised concert features a junior class playing homemade harps designed and instigated by Catherine Ashley. Not your average symphony harpist, Catherine is up for all things challenging beyond the concert hall. Now it is common knowledge in the music business, don’t go on stage with children or animals. Catherine’s tiny tots have the audience hooked, oohing and aahing in seconds; then, almost on cue, it’s time for the wild dogs to attack and all hell breaks out with screaming kids running helter skelter. Like a tropical downfall, it’s all over as quickly as it commenced and the Wreck is cranked into action. Soon enough the energy of metal, fence wire, smoke and lights takes centrestage. As with last year’s manifestation, after some initial shyness, it’s often unclear who is in the tag team and who’s just hanging out. Eventually the smell of food wafts into the performance area and…enough of all that wreck stuff. Everyone rushes to fill their stomachs. Food is a big drawcard.
On the second night of performance, kids of ages 5-12 play for several hours, in the course of which they go from beginners who have never held a drumstick or a bow in their hand to some sort of self-educated, fresh, joyful yet incomprehensible system, with waves of sound penetrating the night air. Some might say a music of chaos; others would say a music of polyrhythms. Intense, yes. They play long and hard. There’s no food tonight. The power goes down and sound man Guy Smith disappears into the darkness under the gallery director’s house to wade through all the squelchy cane toads to re-connect. The smoke machine is still pumping and Catherine, playing fence wire, looks like she is about to pass out. Meanwhile, the talented dancer who had committed to performing around the Wreck shows up on crutches, injured in last night’s basketball contest.
The morning starts in Warmun at 5am with raucous mass fly-pasts of ravens, cockatoos, corellas and a host of other hyperactive avians. Amid the mayhem, pied butcherbirds start up a golden duet in the nearest highest tree (song post). Blinding sun reveals the day.
The symbiosis of staggering beauty and piles of trash is a common enough outback trope in both white and black communities. In Warmun, there are grey-haired nomads and the odd big art sale to think of, so large signs point to the trash bins. In the traditional way that South Sea Islanders left their pre-industrial trash on the beach and let the tide take it away, so the original inhabitants of Australia let nature take its course. It’s just that with plastic, tin and wrecks, Nature needs a lot of years to take its course. Many inhabitants of Warmun simply don’t see trash, and after a few weeks here I’m not sure I’m seeing it either. Aboriginal people have a casual disregard for the tenets, products and detritus of capitalism. It is not that they are wilfully refusing economic orthodoxy, they simply have another take on what’s important, another take on ownership — a 65,000 year point of view linking the critical animate and inanimate forever. Things can be discarded, kinship cannot.
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The Wreck Residency has been produced in 2016 and 2017 by Tura New Music in association with the Warmun Arts Centre and with the support of the Ian Potter Foundation and Healthway. The first Wreck performance took place in 2012 in White Cliffs, NSW. In 2013 a wreck was hauled 1,000 kilometres from White Cliffs to Carriageworks to be performed as part of the Sydney Festival.
After the first of South Korean choreographer/performance artist Geumhyung Jeong’s two interconnected performances for Liveworks, she left some audience members underwhelmed, pronouncing they’d seen it all before. Maybe they had. Jeong began work on 7 Ways in 2004 and premiered it in Seoul in 2009, and many artists before and since have mined the territory of object-based performance. However other spectators, like me, were fascinated with Jeong’s eccentric dive into human and non-human interaction.
After performing 7 Ways in Liveworks, Geumhyung Jeong presented Oil Pressure Vibrator, a performance lecture that artfully revealed something of the artist’s process and self-examination in the making of 7 Ways and the rigour invested in her ongoing exploration. Oil Pressure Vibrator takes her obsession with objects into an astounding new partnership with an earth-moving machine; it is literally groundbreaking.
7 Ways, Geumhyung Jeong, Liveworks 2017, photo Wooshik Lee
7 Ways
White light on a white floor, no music and no pretence. Geumhyung Jeong waits watchful and still as the audience enters. There are objects scattered about, the most prominent being a robed mannequin, sitting close to centre stage. The inanimate female looms large in this work, beginning with a featureless dummy and ending with a brief appearance by an open mouthed plastic blow-up sex doll inflating from a suitcase, bookends to Jeong’s strangely compelling performance.
Nonchalantly undressing and then donning a concealing black body-hugging suit, Jeong becomes … a Ninja? A hooded puppeteer? A void? A white masculine mask, placed on her foot, takes on a life of its own, rising from the floor supported by its long leg/neck and compelled by a magnetic attraction toward the pale mannequin. The creature plays with a threatening proximity, and hovers about the female figure.
Jeong’s dark form is contorted and reshaped as the other leg becomes a hand, stroking, undressing and then detaching the upper half of the dummy and making off with it, like a mutant body snatcher, only to return for the lower half. Torso and legs are reconfigured horizontally and the sequence concludes with the lifeless figure being humped by a shadowy ghoul that climaxes in a whimper of vibration and pathos.
A subdued tone persists throughout, yet Jeong undercuts any sense of mundanity with a series of manoeuvres that verge on the sexually macabre. Her disquieting assemblages confound the senses to create uncanny acts of puppetry between the body and unlikely apparatuses, such as a small electronic organ and later a masted galleon that sails across the ecstatic turbulence of the performer’s body now covered by a sea of blue cloth. Many of Jeong’s manoeuvres involve vibration, pumping or sucking of air, and her understated depiction of female sexual excitement is itself closer to the elements of air and water than the qualities of fire or earth.
The central disturbing sequence features Jeong at her most visible and vulnerable lying across an industrial vacuum cleaner cylinder, manipulated by a shaggy haired male visage attached to the end of the suction hose. Like a mad professor in an act of necrophilia, he comes to life as a long-necked molesting incubus, and she is a rag doll under his leering control. Evoking a sense of menace, as the masculine/alien/machine and prone woman/puppeteer are artfully conjoined in one image, the performer becomes a victim at the behest of her own lamprey-like creation.
Woman as still life, woman dismembered, woman in a suitcase, woman as prey and object of sexual gratification all evoke a passive lack of agency — problematic images that Jeong resists and yet persists with inventively in her revealing performance lecture.
Oil Pressure Vibrator, Geumhyung Jeong, Liveworks 2017, photo Gajin Kim
Oil Pressure Vibrator
In contrast to the brightness of the first work’s white space, Oil Pressure Vibrator is staged on a black floor in low light, with Jeong seated at a table with laptop. And now we hear her voice, speaking live in native Korean with succinct English subtitles projected on screen behind her. She presses ‘play’ on a reprise of the blue figure with the ship moving on waves of her breath. This was the image that seemed less congruent with the palette of mechanical objects in 7 Ways, yet there is something delightful and liberating in this version of elated anthropomorphic coupling.
Jeong’s ‘lecture,’ along with video footage of sequences we have seen in 7 Ways, outlines the evolution of her thinking. Most illuminating is her decision to split herself in two in order to become a hermaphrodite. We learn that she wants to become sexually independent by creating new partners for herself and to enjoy the liberty of isolation in a closed feedback loop. It is at this point where it becomes difficult to discern the person from the artist and where I become intrigued with her long-term commitment to this demanding (and one might say onanistic) project.
When people/friends told Jeong of concerns that within her work she was always playing the passive female character, she decided that being passive was unattractive to her. It became imperative to actively play both roles, and to incorporate the characteristics she finds most desirable in men — their hands and mouths. She chose to employ more objects to perform her sexuality at a distance, and we see the example — a vibrating electric toothbrush penetrating the mouth of one of her masks. These playful experiments are humorous and intriguing and also involve other constructions with long flexible necks and “better suction.” We watch on screen as she creates and trains her perfect lovers, but even so, with time and too much familiarity she claims “the orgasms decreased” in intensity. Even resorting to “cheating” with a real life man, she could get no satisfaction. The sheer mechanics of sex are not enough.
Jeong’s resourcefulness knows no bounds (or boundaries) when “destiny” and her quest for total union draw her toward the ultimate apparatus, something huge with the requisite “long neck and flexible joints,” “strength in motion.” Something to satisfy her desire for “orgasm unto death” — a giant, multi-attachment earth-moving machine. Gasps of disbelief and hilarity from the onlookers. But Jeong is serious.
Determined to perform the role of and with this perfect being, she engages in the logistics required to meet the machine. The only woman in the heavy equipment training program she undertakes, she is exultant to learn it moves by the flow of liquid and internal oil pressure. “Breaker” her favourite attachment, a sharp beak-like drilling tip, could fulfil her fantasy: “one gentle touch would melt me away.” After passing the written exam and three attempts at the difficult practical test she is qualified to become one with the machine.
A ritual is prepared and on an empty beach, the perfect venue for a wedding, her proxy sand sculpture woman and giant drilling partner are aligned. With initial gentle strokes from Breaker’s tip — like a tongue or finger — she is ready to be tenderly pierced. In an extraordinary act of puppetry (and hermaphroditism) the larger than life sand Jeong does indeed melt away, finally flattened by machine driver Jeong. “Orgasm unto death,” behold. The climax was also the end of the lecture-performance, and I needed a cigarette.
Both works are exemplars of Geumhyung Jeong’s obsessive artistry, they are skilful and well resolved in ways that were not visible in some other offerings I saw in this Liveworks. Evident depth of thought and aesthetic cohesion surely come with time and the support to experiment and fully develop ideas into action that is satisfying for both artist and audience.
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Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art: 7 Ways, creator, performer Geumhyung Jeong, 25 Oct ; Oil Pressure Vibrator, creator, performer Geumhyung Jeong, cinematographers Geumhyung Jeong, Hoseung Jeon, Bongwoo Park, Youngkyo Choi, video editing Geumhyung Jeong, Younghyun Jeong, 29 Oct; Carriageworks, Sydney
Top image credit: 7 Ways, Geumhyung Jeong, Liveworks 2017, photo courtesy the artist and Liveworks 2017
JOLT are offering readers of RealTime two tickets to City-Topias for the price of one. Simply email: charlotte.bolcskey@joltarts.org with your full name and the code “We love sound!” and what date you would like to book for, to redeem.
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With concerts titled City-Topias and Disruptive Critters, Melbourne’s JOLT is about to deliver a substantial dose of excitement to the forthcoming Melbourne Music Week. I had a taste of it when JOLT Artistic Director James Hullick recently performed his new work Were/Oblivion on electric guitar with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in its Dream Sequence concert, drawing on the Jimi Hendrix legacy to unleash a powerful instrumental and vocal epistle to daughters Astrid and Scarlet.
For Were/Oblivion Hullick’s visage was painted with bright colours and a touch of glitter and will be again for City-Topias in which he figures as one of the god-like presences visiting Earth in the concert’s fantastical scenario. Were/Oblivion is one part of City-Topias, an 80-minute audio-visual spectacle promoted as “a wild sci-fi sound art/acousmatic/chamber music/pop art experience.” It’s an unusual claim to make for a work even in the rapidly morphing contemporary classical field, but Hullick is emphatic, he wants sound artists, and audiences, to have fun — seriously realised fun. His use of “sound artists” to cover a range of practitioners, composers and players reveals an integrative vision and reflects the functioning of the musical organisation he heads.
JOLT is a production house that presents performances by the BOLT Ensemble (contemporary music, often with a technological dimension), The Amplified Elephants (a sound art ensemble featuring performers with Down Syndrome), Noise Scavengers (a group of young sound art and experimental music makers) and James Hullick himself. JOLT has staged performances in the UK, Europe and Asia and in Melbourne in 2016 an ambitious three-day event, The Book of Daughters, celebrating International Women’s Day and inspired in part by Hullick’s concerns and hopes for his two daughters.
I spoke with Hullick by phone about this year’s event in which he and Jonathan Duckworth will perform at 7pm on 17 and 18 November in Disruptive Critters and then join the BOLT Ensemble and special guest, the VJ Milica ZZAA, for 9pm performances on the same nights.
James Hullick, photo courtesy JOLT Arts
City-Topias
Where did the alien-god that featured in City-Topias come from?
It was sparked by my daughter Astrid, who is nine. She came home from an art class with a statue that she had painted. When I asked who this fabulously glam rock character was she said, “Dadda.” I laughed of course, because one’s mind tends to gravitate to the flaws in oneself rather than the positives. But I thought about it later, and about her seeing the best in me, and how kind that was of her. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be a loving gift if I could give her that — to be philosophically realised in this way — like the god in this sculpture?” My personal growth — through Astrid’s insight and encouragement — has been significant since that little sculpture came home. And the art has become much richer.
I’m one of the aspects of that entity but another is the BOLT Ensemble themselves and Milica ZZAA who is the VJ for the show. These god-like characters, though they’re not necessarily enlightened, come to communicate with the humans about various facts of life. One of the influences is David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the culture of bringing performance art to pop culture and, in City-Topias, to sound art and seeing how they can co-exist in entertaining and, hopefully, enlightening ways.
Promotional image, City-Topias, photo courtesy JOLT Arts
What instruments will you be playing and in what way god-like?
Electric guitar and keyboards. There are other machines. This god character I’ve been building doesn’t necessarily operate in human ways. The show’s designed so that things manifest rather than being consciously or deliberately delivered, which plays out, for example, in the scores, which are graphic; that hands a lot of interpretation and creativity over to the players. There’s an emphasis on spontaneity, though there is some notation so it’s quite clear what needs to happen at each point in time — an interesting balance with the moments of freedom. [This corresponds with] the god-like characters who have to work out ways of making themselves comprehensible to human beings who just don’t get it.
The visual artist Milica ZZAA is collaborating with you. How will her VJ-ing contribute?
She’s always the smartest person in the room. At one point she said, “Well, if these gods were trying to communicate with humans they’d probably have to use the languages of symbols and sounds because words are too slow for them and humans can interpret a lot of artistic symbols and sounds much more quickly than they can words.” I thought that was actually a lovely thought about the value of art to culture.
A lot of imagery will be galactic as well as from nature, elements of the performers themselves, projected live, words from the songs in the show and my graphic scores.
How is City-Topias structured?
There are four sections. The god is saying, “You’ve got these options for how you can live. There’s Dystopia, Utopia, Heterotopia and Ecotopia, each commented on in song. Were/Oblivion, which I performed in Sydney, is in Dystopia. About Utopia he basically says, “it’s going to require you to simplify and detach yourself from your material possessions, but you can’t do that, so you need to find something else!” (LAUGHS). This god does not have a polite button. He just carries on. It’s up to you to decide what you’re going to do. In the end, he’s saying to the humans, “Maybe the best you can hope for is some kind of Ecotopia where you’re attached to nature and somehow melding your cities more with nature.” And this is happening. There’s a beautiful building in Sydney covered in vines. Urban design is really changing along those lines.
What duration is the work?
About an hour and 20 minutes. It’s become bigger and the reason is that it’s sort of writing itself. We’ve been rehearsing and engaging and adding new thoughts and moments. It’s been lovely to see it develop organically which is not easy in the current arts-funding environment.
As well as an eight-piece chamber ensemble, vocals, guitar and prepared piano, video projection, there’s a Resonance Table. I saw the Amplified Elephantsperform with the table at the Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music (BIFEM) in 2015. It’s quite magical. How have you integrated this and other machines in the work?
The Resonance Table is basically a large, horizontal touch-screen, hand-made by Jonathan Duckworth who has been making the interfaces with RMIT. You place objects on the table which can read them and as you move the objects around you change the sound. It’s spatialised with surround sound and features in two scenes in City-Topias. There’s another sound machine in one scene, the Gotholin: a robotic violin that plays in grungy industrial and simple ways; it doesn’t sound like a violin at all. And we have the “whirling dervishes” — literally, re-purposed power tools with spinning bowls on each end. The idea with these devices is that the gods are manifesting material things at will. If something pops into their heads, then it’s there.
Would you say City-Topias is fundamentally optimistic?
There’s optimism mixed with a bit of annoyance. The solutions are there; so what’s the problem?
James Hullick, Jonathan Duckworth at the Resonance Table, photo courtesy JOLT Arts
Disruptive Critters
These gods are disruptive; are they companions to the Disruptive Critters in your second program?
The whole point about City-Topias and Disruptive Critters — and this is something I’d like to emphasise — is my feeling that sound artists just aren’t having enough fun. So the work is playful and still highly skilful and refined in, say, the way the technology is used and the techniques involved. That’s a magical combination that doesn’t often happen in sound art, to be brutally honest. It’s difficult to get all those elements together and it costs money. Sound artists generally don’t have a lot of money to spend on their shows. So the bottom line was why not have fun and at the same time include some hard-core kind of philosophical enquiry within the humour? I love stand-up comedy; there’s not nearly enough of it in sound art!
Disruptive Critters has ended up being like the prequel to City-Topias. It’s like a creation myth that plays out in hilarious ways. Jonathan Duckworth and I are onstage characters who play the Resonance Table, which looks like it has the same interface but runs a different program — Disruptive Critters — which has little avatars and creatures running around that we can control. It’s very simply designed and it’s as if we’re playing with the building blocks of life. There’s a subtext in the form of an emergent female child, voiced by my daughter Astrid. It becomes apparent that she hasn’t emerged out of our Disruptive Critters, it’s the other way around — she made us; she is the elemental force. So we end up as the Disruptive Critters because we’re fools. Initially I was a bit concerned about how these shows would speak to each other. We really didn’t know at the start but it ended up emerging quite effortlessly. I think that’s a really important point about this whole project. It’s not the product of a rational, corporate plan. LAUGHS. I think our audiences will feel like they’ve had a real experience, in the Jimi Hendrix sense of the word.
City-Topias was commissioned by APRA Australian Music Centre Art Music Fund; Were/Oblivion by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Read more about JOLT here.
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Melbourne Music Week: JOLT : City-Topias, artists James Hullick, The BOLT Ensemble, VJ Milica ZZAA, Jonathan Duckworth, Meat Market, 9pm, 17, 18 Nov; Disruptive Critters, artists Duckworth Hullick Duo, Meat Market, Melbourne, 7pm, 17, 18 Nov
Top image credit: Dadda doll, Astrid Hullick, photo courtesy the artist
What a match: neo-fascist industrial band Laibach will play a concert in North Korea. Clickbait aggregators, news-bite feeds and lame TV comedians with late night talk shows devoured it following Laibach’s media missive in June 2015. Typically, it added to the centrifugal force field of disinformation encasing the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) since Kim Jong-un’s bloodline ascendancy to Supreme Leader in late 2011. Superficially read, Laibach’s touting of a tour to the demonised North perfectly synchronises with a slew of pseudo-investigative, morally outraged anti-nuclear projects claiming to ‘expose’ in some way the terror and insanity of North Korea. Everyone (especially those with young families) seems to be teetering on the edge to see whether the DPRK will become the ultimate demon of the new millennium by launching a nuclear war.
While many regard this as an urgent topical issue for global responsibility, the urge to anxiously respond to any floating news node relating to the DPRK’s official proclamations is reflexively powered by irrational fears and fantastical projections. Some readers may be signing off here, but my point is to clear some critical ground to consider (a) how Laibach — a notoriously misunderstood highly-politicised collective addressing radical notions of national identity — have articulated a contentious yet rational relationship with the DPRK, and (b) how the documentary of their concert seems oblivious to both entities’ ‘post-political’ stances and in place replicates the lazy assumptions people hold of each.
The documentary is Liberation Day (2016), directed by Ugis Olte & Morten Traavik. In standard fashion, it follows the travails of Laibach attempting to perform a concert in Pyongyang. The bulk of the footage captures the protracted protocols which seem intent on retarding Laibach’s genuine desire to play there. While the documentary notes how the mostly non-music press had largely treated Laibach’s strategic event as either comical, absurd, duplicitous or delusional, Olte and Traavik unfortunately do little to support or clarify the seriousness of Laibach’s intentions or aims. Some comment on Laibach is therefore warranted.
The collective has long traded in seemingly offensive presentations designed to affront liberal sensibilities. At least, such was a punkish prankster guise in the early 1980s when Laibach became critical darlings in the UK and later were signed to Mute Records. Filed under “Industrial Music,” the band’s presence within English-speaking channels of performance and distribution was submerged by a glut of similar fetishistic bands, ranging from Throbbing Gristle and SPK through to Depeche Mode and Rammstein. Within this milieu, pre-WWII iconography was furiously and — in most instances — naively appropriated in an oil-and-water swirl of Teutonic, Aryan, Gothic, Neo-classical, Supremativist, Bolshevik and Proletariat imagery.
Conversely, Laibach were always specifically engaged with the pre-Modernist pre-globalising historical specificity of their home turf of Slovenia (Laibach is the German name of the country’s capital Ljubljana) and how their identity had been rerouted by both Yugoslavian and SFRY formations since 1918, and further detourned through NATO interventions and manoeuvres since 1991. Indeed, Laibach — and their link to the art collective Irwin (part of the broader grouping of the umbrella organisation Neue Slowenische Kunst) presage much of the cultural identity politics which have excited contemporary art’s global biennale grandstanding in the 21st century. Watching Liberation Day reminded me of this, but also made me realise how Laibach have been hiding in the light ever since the Bosnian/Serbian conflicts of the early 1990s. To still treat them as a cabaret band posturing politics (which, admittedly, is a governing aesthetic for the Mute roster) implies a dismissive reading of their pop/rock status while ignoring the hardened seriousness with which Laibach have expressed their own globalist critique.
Laibach concert in Pyongyang, 2015
Everything I am asserting here is neither visible nor audible in Liberation Day. Yet I remain confused as to why this is the case. On the one hand, the documentary is yet another insensitive incursion into a foreign culture while laying great claim to understanding that culture. The film abounds with moments where — in my view — Olte exhibits arrogant attitudes towards both the people of DPRK and the hapless go-between assigned to handle these strange foreigners as they attempt to implement their grandiose scheme. But is this all staged? Is Olte deliberately characterising himself this way, as part of an elaborate Banksy/Jackass/Vice-style media gag? And is there a specific reason why the key Laibach musicians remain largely silent throughout the film (apart from officiated interjections by original group director Ivan Novak)?
I’d like to think that in some measure, Laibach actually let their art speak for itself — such as when they perform a special mock-concert, sampling some of the tracks for the forthcoming one. The fiery hoop set for the band is that the DPRK censorship board wish to see and hear the concert themselves so they can decide whether or not it can proceed for the public. Frustrations abound in the preparations for this contrived and stressful event, and this constitutes the central core of the film. But stepping back from the obvious, anyone who has engaged in mounting largish theatrical productions in foreign countries can attest to this being the norm in the trade. Liberation Day’s framing of this as a distinctively DRPK tactic is a bit disingenuous.
The key song Laibach performs here — which is disallowed in the final concert — is a mind-boggling mash-up of “Do-Re-Mi” from The Sound Of Music and the unofficial ‘anthem’ for DPRK, the winsome folk song “Arirang.” Laibach perform it in their distinctive morbid militaristic dirge style, with Milan Fras intoning the former’s lyrics like a lowlands Bohemian behemoth, while a truly innocent young girls’ choir generates dulcet tones of the latter. Adding to this, Mina Spiler admirably attempts to sing “Arirang” in Korean to provide a Bach-like counterpoint. It’s a weird moment. On paper, it reads simultaneously as a glib Pop-ist gesture and an earnest symbolic statement of cross-border unification (which, lest we forget, has been at the core of Laibach’s poetics, aesthetics and politics). In the film, it’s magical: all discursive and contextual framing evaporates into air — not the politicised air preferred by Marxist apologists, but the culturally dense noise field which defines the terrain of popular music. It’s a world away from the camp cynicism which would normally frame any reference to Julie Andrews warbling in The Sound Of Music. Under Laibach’s reterritorialising gaze, the original Broadway play and the subsequent Hollywood film’s (1965) bizarre meld of musicalized Aryanism and corporatised Zionism are recalled rather than repressed. Milan’s voice sounds tender; the girls’ chorale sounds ghostly; Mina’s enunciation sounds forlorn. It is the sad tonality of de-unification.
For all its quasi-interventionist chutzpah, Liberation Day comes nowhere near the committed staging of this performance’s transnationalist punch. Fortunately, the film attests to the power of music, sound and song despite a documentarian’s attempt to rationalise their effects. Director Olte pontificates on-camera in numerous interludes, set against brutalist architectural backdrops of the DPRK, but his rote sociological quips about art and society quickly pale. Again, this could be a deliberate pompous tick, but when Laibach pulls out their “Do-Re-Mi,” Olte’s journalistic rhetoric sounds banal and trivial in comparison. Ultimately, the film is full of suspect sleight-of-hand in its editing and narrative framing which obfuscates the contextual truths which shape DPRK in ways beyond our outsider wishful thinking. (The edits of the audience’s reactions while Laibach finally perform seem suspicious and over-weighted to me.) One of the most powerful aspects of the DPRK is its unknowable logic, its holistic otherness, and its political anti-contemporaneity.
For those who think they ‘know’ North Korea through our available media channels (especially those bent on investigative exposes of “the insanity of the North”), Liberation Day will reinforce the terrible clichés born of ‘weirdising’ another world. I sense that Laibach truly identify with the DPRK due to the meta-linguistic disinformation which decontextualises both parties’ discourse to the world. Therein lies Laibach’s presence: uncomfortably grappling with their performance in Pyongyang, while trapped within this documentary’s journalistic dance.
Top image credit: Promotional poster for Liberation Day, 2015
When we’re ill, worrying about the wellbeing of our doctors and nurses is far from our thoughts, unless we sense in them signs of anxiety and exhaustion which, in turn, exacerbate our own stress. Grace Under Pressure, a verbatim theatre work by David Williams and Paul Dwyer, and directed by Williams, incisively probes the experiences and attitudes of nurses and doctors working in hospitals, essentially 19th century institutions which persist unchanged in some fundamental ways into the 21st with class- and role-bound hierarchies, complex bureaucracies, eternally long surgery waiting lists and punishing working hours. We hear about these matters regularly in the media, along with occasional reports on bullying and suicides. As one of the workers quoted in Grace Under Pressure says, “It’s not as if the public doesn’t know.” But news bites are not knowledge, let alone tools with which to understand and come to the aid of beleaguered hospital staff, adding to an increasing sense of our public powerlessness in the face of inflexible institutions and reform-averse governments. Grace Under Pressure is a corrective, drawing directly on the lives of healthcarers and directed and performed with a sense of intimacy, immediacy and urgency.
The striking set comprises a circular, bright white floor populated with black microphones and stands over which hovers a large white disk. The outer area is emphatically black in contrast with the vivid performance space, underlining the binary tensions that emerge when the four performers seated at the rear periphery enter to deliver the words of ambulance staff, nurses, interns, doctors, surgeons and consutants drawn from extensive interviews for this project. The stylishness of the design recalls new and upgraded hospitals with their sleek facades and reception areas and artworks exuding a sense of wellbeing. But not all is well within. The suspended disk also chillingly evokes a large light suspended over a surgeon, nurses and patient in a white operating theatre. As Grace Under Pressure unfolds, the light on the disk is systematically infused with a variety of colours and shapes reflecting the growing complexity and emotional tension embodied in the utterances delivered by the performers. The set also doubles as a media space, the performers weaving to and from microphones as if speaking publicly for radio or TV, or even a government enquiry, and with minimum need to project, so that intimate engagement with the audience is sustained. The accompanying music, heard cinematically behind the dialogue, quietly doubles as ambient hospital foyer music and a provider of subtly varied emotional subtext, soothing, then quietly haunting and becoming expressively emphatic in the work’s final painful moments.
Renee Lim, Sal Sharah, Grace Under Pressure, photo Heidrun Löhr
Williams and Dwyer have structured their expert cut-and-paste of the recorded interviews to move broadly from short utterances, recollections and observations to longer anecdotes, exchanges between speakers, intensely private revelations about suicidal impulses and finishing with a conversation about the final moments of life. The first words come from nurses, then a variety of interns, doctors and surgeons, whether in large hospitals or a small, under-resourced rural one, but in a cumulative weave so that there’s always a sense of many voices and roles, intricately but often problematically connected.
The tales of insult, humiliation and abuse, of overwork, compromise and failure are cumulatively challenging, but full of idiosyncracies which make the four performers distinctively personable even though each never plays a sole character throughout. Captured speech rhythms, hesitations, interruptions and cadences abet differences in attitude from amused to resigned to cynical and despairing. Williams and Dwyer have good ears for specifics that will fascinate us as well as speak to workplace challenges — a nurse who sees herself as a sociologist; another who does ambulance duty on her hospital days off; the first experience of laying out a body; knowing when to declare a person dead and having the authority to do it when a doctor is slow off the mark; and an experienced nurse who speaks to the dead. A soft pink suffuses the rim of the overhead disk and the rippling organ-like music now lingers with sustained notes and light phasings. Death is no longer a horror, but a young nurse is advised that it’s a good idea “to check your own pulse.” Once again, there’s been no time for dinner.
The light now blue, the music lightly warbling, the words from an older nurse firmly assert that she’s there to help her patients, not the doctors whom she sees as always confused about the role of nurses, who often save them from terrible errors. A female intern refuses to join the orthopoedic surgeons’ rugby and booze club. The blue intensifies: an intern learns not to address consultants, not to burst into tears. A senior nurse has finally had enough and “doesn’t give a shit.” An older male nurse is wrongly castigated by a doctor, apologised to not by the offender, but by that doctor’s senior and not in front of the shocked patient and other staff. Someone asks, “Was anyone ever praised?” Staff complaints when made singly or collectively about bullying are ignored. Long notes exude melancholy. Working hours are astonishing: 80 to 120 per week. The rationale, “We pay you for 55, you do 100 because you’re young and lazy.” Suicidal thoughts loom.
Rose Maher, Grace Under Pressure, photo Heidrun Löhr
What grace remains is now lessening under severe pressure. Beneath an eerie greenish hue, the tale is told of a surgeon who is an hour late for an operation and becomes furiously abusive in front of patient and staff when he finds an associate, a friend, has taken over. They later restore the friendship, but the speaker admits “no-one defends the abused” because the offending doctor, who behaved “like a psychopath,” is regarded as “the greatest surgeon who ever lived.”
The light in the disk mingles darkening colours as authority in the hospital is revealed to be absolute and the emotions constellating around it fraught. A nurse tells of a surgeon quizzing her at “so low a level and so constant” about her sex life over a long operation and his laughing it off as “just joking.” She says of him, “He’s not a great person, just good at his job.” A moon-like cusp forms on the curve of the disk and doctors talk with grim humour of repeated driving accidents, one caused by tiredness from performing an all-night organ transplant. The sheer enormity of the risk taken is breathtaking. Why is it then that “in no other industry are these hours allowed?” This is the knowledge we have, but is never acted on and, says one speaker, is held in check within the system by an “audit culture” and the need to keep the Minister of Health happy.
This hospital world grows nightmarish beneath the disk, hued an ominous orange. Having dealt with a family of car crash victims without sufficient assistance, food or sleep, a traumatised young doctor in a regional hospital registers a complaint. Subsequently appearing before an employment panel she is identified as “that whinger” and decides to leave the profession. Those who don’t can be prone to suicide. The disk becomes an intense blue halo, the music a deep slow pulse and a corridor of white light cleaves the floor. A young doctor on the edge of suicide steps along it and out beyond the frame, to kneel among us, beyond understanding that she could have found help within a system that clearly didn’t vigorously proffer it.
Wendy Strehlow, Renee Lim, Grace Under Pressure, photo Heidrun Löhr
It’s asked, “Are there any good stories?” There are, of course; for example the strange things that can go on in a maternity ward under a full moon. Another, in the work’s final scene, turns to the relationship between patient and healthcarer in the face of death. Can the final minutes or hours of life be made less painful and how is this decided and performed ethically? We hear talk of the slow morphine drip and the agonal breathing (irregular and sometimes with unusual vocal sounds) that might signify imminent death; we hear it in the deep, grinding, slow, sometimes fluctuating pulse of the music. We hear the relatives ask if they can wash the body. Yes, they can, beneath a benign blue halo.
Grace Under Pressure is greeted with passionate enthusiasm by its audience who have been amused, informed and moved. It is a work with a clear sense of social purpose, complexly enriched with the observations of those who are responsible for us in hospitals and whose own lives are subject to often inordinate pressures. We need to care for them.
Isabel Hudson’s set design, Richard Manner’s lighting and Gail Priest’s music serve David Williams and Paul Dwyer’s script and Williams’ direction admirably in a finely integrated production, performed with conviction and conversational ease by Sal Sharah and Wendy Strehlow, who bring great gravitas to their roles as senior hospital staff, and Renee Lim and Rose Maher, who convey the youthful potential of those who should never be driven to contemplate suicide. Grace Under Pressure should be seen widely, so that what is often just news becomes knowledge, becomes action.
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Seymour Centre & The Big Anxiety — Festival of Arts+Science+People: Grace Under Pressure, writers David Williams, Paul Dwyer, with Sydney Arts & Health Collective, director David Williams, performers Renee Lim, Rose Maher, Sal Sharah, Wendy Strehlow, dramaturg Paul Dwyer, lighting designer Richard Manner, sound designer Gail Priest, set and costume designer Isabel Hudson; Seymour Centre, Sydney, 25-28 Oct
Top image credit: Cast, Grace Under Pressure, photo Heidrun Löhr
Australian theatre director Benedict Andrews’ feature film debut is a tense, chilling account of a young woman, Una (Rooney Mara), vengefully confronting Ray, a former neighbour (Ben Mendelsohn), who sexually abused her when she was a child (played by Ruby Stokes in flashbacks). The encounter is staged within a huge, sleek factory, a symbolic labyrinth underlining the film’s moral ambiguities, in which Ray, a foreman on the way up, has been tasked by his bosses to choose who of his workmates should be sacked as the company downsizes. Austerity economics and sexual abuse make a double villain of Ray, but writer David Harrower and director Andrews want us to think better of him, a fascinating test of Mendelsohn’s calculatedly low-key characterisation and the screenplay’s logic. Coolly shot by Thimios Bakatakis (cinematographer for The Lobster and The Killing of the Sacred Deer by director Yorgos Lanthimos), Una is well worth seeing, not least for those who know Harrower’s play Blackbird from which the film has been adapted. KG
5 DVDs courtesy of Madman Entertainment.
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Top image credit: Rooney Mara in Una
In the wake of Nat Randall and Anna Breckon’s success with The Second Woman, it’s time to consider the film and the performance that inspired it, celebrated in a superb article from 1994 about performance and identification by Lesley Stern.
Perhaps I Want to be Gena Rowlands
Lesley Stern on film performance, audience engagement and histrionic cinema
RealTime 4, December-January 1994-95
“I’m not me. I used to be me. I’m not me anymore,” says Myrtle Gordon, extemporising freely and playing for laughs. Or perhaps it’s Gena Rowlands who speaks here — acting out for all she’s worth and upstaging her own character. It’s the Broadway opening night of a play called The Second Woman and she, the famous actress, has arrived late and gone on stage so drunk she can hardly stand. But we are not actually at the theatre — we are watching the final sequence of a film called Opening Night (John Cassavetes, 1978) which tells the story of Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) and the difficulty she experiences in playing the part of a woman unable to come to terms with ageing.
Opening Night a film is pertinent to current interests: it theatricalises the body, particularly the female body, and dramatises the self — as performance. But to tell the truth, I’m only writing this because I want to contemplate the incomparable Gena Rowlands, to watch this movie over and over again so I might come to know through her many faces, her every quizzical gesture and gut-wrenching grimace, each goofy trick she plays, how it is she’s so sublime. Perhaps I want to be Gena Rowlands. Well yes, but not entirely, for part of me wants her to remain other, out there, up on the screen. I want to watch her again and again because of this: for all the harrowing intensity that frequently accrues to her presence I emerge from her films exhilarated and invigorated — always it is as though I have been taken by surprise, have seen and experienced something new.
In performing, Rowland enacts the declaration, “I like to act” — and this makes me believe that I too can be an actor. Yet it isn’t simply a showing off of pleasure that is inspiring, it is as though the history of herself as a performing body, the skills that have been learnt in her previous stage and film incarnations — in earlier Cassavetes’ films for instance, such as Faces (1968), Minnie and Moscowitz (1971) and Woman Under the Influence (1975) — are written into each role she plays — who knows — there is the possibility that I too can learn those skills, can aspire to a more decidedly nuanced body and way of being in the world.
Gena Rowlands is an actress who particularly foregrounds acting as a process of production (as an engendering of the body) and Opening Night is a film that is particularly concerned with various regimes of fictionality (film, theatre, the quotidian) and also with the very question of identity and identification. It explores the question of how to act: on the most mundane level — how to act when the world and self are disintegrating; and on a more specialised level — how to act on the stage, how to perform a fictional identity, how to seduce an audience.
Gena Rowlands, Zohra Lampert, Opening Night
How to act: for Myrtle this problem is acutely professional and therefore practical, but insofar as it is a matter of identity, it is not separate from her personal or ‘private’ life. It has to do with the troubled relationship between character and actor and with the way in which fictional energy exploits this tension to generate belief and knowledge (and love and despair). Likewise, the film struggles to find a way of articulating this tension. The film itself and the filmic body are both subject to disintegration and marked by resilience. This tensile reciprocity characterises what I call histrionic cinema.
While ‘histrionic’ denotes something about film that is actorly, I use the notion to refer to more than the register of acting. Rather, we might say that in the histrionic a particular relationship exists between the actorly performance and the filmic; the film is conceived within the parameters of a dramaturgy that is not centred on character, but this is nevertheless charged by an intense investment in acting. The cinematic codes tend to be ostentatious and their very amplification owes something to the theatrical imagination — not theatre in terms of staging or even representation, but in terms of an enactment, a fictionality realised through a world that is acted out, in the process of acting up. This suggests the creation and mobilisation of a world that is fraught with surplus value, a world in which objects, scenic terrains, the cinematic landscape itself, are charged as if by the supernatural, as if possessed.
Myrtle Gordon is faced with a conundrum: if she identifies with the character Virginia, with the role she has been assigned (and everyone attempts to persuade her that this is her life), if she plays the part well she will then be identified by her audience as old and her career will be severely limited. If she plays the part badly then her career and identity are also likely to be ruined. The suspense of the film hinges on the question of how and if this conundrum can be resolved. Narratively, it hinges on the question of whether Myrtle — given that she seems to be finding it harder and harder to stay in touch, is drinking excessively, prone to hysterical outbursts, haunted by a malevolent ghost and on occasion herself possessed — will make it to opening night at all. However, there are trajectories here other than narrative ones. One of the major questions is that of how to play. “I’m looking for a way,” Myrtle tells the playwright Sarah, “to play this part where age doesn’t make any difference.”
There are two pivotal ‘events’ in the film. Firstly, what I refer to as the “slapping scenario” — there is a scene in The Second Woman where Virginia has to be hit across the face; Myrtle simply cannot play the scene, and a great deal of drama is generated around her struggle to play and simultaneously resist. Secondly, Myrtle is haunted by a ghost, a young girl fan who is initially comforting but turns extremely nasty so that Myrtle eventually has to exorcise her in an extremely violent encounter. Myrtle’s problem is not that she confuses on-stage and off-stage activities but that she condenses two moments: the girl being hit by a car in the street and herself being hit on stage. The difficulty she has in playing the slapping scene is not to be construed simply as a refusal of violence; more profoundly — and less coherently — it is a resistance to passivity and resignation. It is not the slap in and of itself that troubles and confuses her; in fact the condensation she performs (and the film enacts this cinematically) poses the slap as a gestus that actualises the discursive violence she is experiencing. And her conjuring up and eventual exorcism of the ghost is a way of transforming the scenario.
Gena Rowlands, Opening Night
It is often unclear — during all the rehearsals, improvisations and enactments — whether we are watching, in Myrtle’s hysterical reactions, a consummate drama queen going over the top, or simply a woman cracking up. I think both. At once. Myrtle refuses the terms of the transaction, the brutality of the representational act, but her refusal is not considered, not subject to planning and judgement; something in her refuses — to grow old gracefully, to submit to passivity and being without weapons — but her refusal is inchoate, non-discursive, primarily somatic. It is however a process of improvisation, of working out how to play this part. And it absorbs us because of Gena Rowlands’ acting, her fictionalisation, and the way this is articulated by and with the cinematic codes.
Her ‘crack-up’ is made manifest through a skilful deployment of energy, of bodily rhythms, of shifting vocal intensities. And these modalities are echoed by the camera’s insistent unblinking attention, the long takes often in extreme close-up, hovering and hand-held, the juxtaposition of angles and the sudden recourse to extremely distanced long shots. We know that she (Myrtle) is playing a part or parts, and we know that the identity between the actor (Gena Rowlands) and the character/s (Myrtle and Virginia) is precarious, yet the more we know “the more difficult it is to believe and the more it is worth managing to do so.” (Jean-Louis Comolli).
What Myrtle does, in the end, after exorcising the ghost, is to turn the “slapping scenario” into slapstick. She turns the drama of identity (and age) into hilarious farce. As she goads Marty (played by Cassavetes), as she sends him up by making faces at the audience behind his back and gesticulating with hyperbolic abandon, so he rises to the bait, gets the giggles and enters the game of upping the ante. He becomes the one who is turning grey and becoming anxious about ageing — jumping up and down and thumping his chest like a chimpanzee — “I am Superman! I am Superman!”
Somewhere between Gertrude Stein and the Marx Brothers:
Myrtle: Well, I am not me!
Marty: And I know that I am someone else.
Myrtle: Do you think I am too?
Marty: Yes!
Myrtle: OK, it’s definite then! We’ve been invaded. There’s someone posing here as us. And you’re right, there is definitely something wrong with your smile!
What I have referred to as the “I like to act” dynamic opens a space both of identification and contemplation. When Gena acts out the trope “I like to act,” I believe for a moment or more that I too can be an actor; I don’t primarily believe that I am her — Gena or Myrtle or Virginia (though I might get caught up in various regimes of fictionality) — but I know that I too can act differently, be somehow other.
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Three films by John Cassavetes featuring Gena Rowlands — Faces (1968), A Woman Under the Influence (1974) and Opening Night (1977) — are included in a 2004 Criterion DVD box set. Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), Gloria (1980) and the sublime Love Streams (1984) are individually available on DVD.
Lesley Stern is a US-based Australian film scholar, writer and academic, author of Dead and Alive: The Body as Cinematic Thing (2012), the Scorsese Connection (1995) and The Smoking Book (1999).
Top image credit: Gena Rowlands, Opening Night
Performance Space’s Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art proved once again that it can challenge and exhilarate, generate intense debate, and party. This week we look at Eisa Jocson’s Corponomy, LabAnino’s This Here. Land (image above), Tetsuya Umeda’s Ringo, Mark Harvey’s Helping Hand, Lz Dunn’s AEON and Jen Jamieson’s Let’s Make Love, a fine constellation of works that expanded our sense of what is possible, formally and emotionally. Next week we’ll conclude our Liveworks coverage with responses to Justin Shoulder’s remarkably inventive Carrion and Geumhyung Jeong’s challenging 7 Ways and her strangely enlightening Oil Pressure Vibrator. While Liveworks offers hope through creativity, the Australian Government delivers despair, whether in its escalating, utterly callous maltreatment of refugees and those refused that status, and its nonsensical clinging to the Adani Carmichael coal mine venture. As we head towards Christmas, there’s no time to party. Art is not enough. Make your voice heard now. Keith & Virginia
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Top image credit: Andrew Cruz, This Here.Land, LabAnino, Liveworks 2017, photo Heidrun Löhr
In the era of digitally generated dopamine as stimulant of choice, are we losing the ability to manufacture our own oxytocin? This is a question that has enthralled Jen Jamieson, who greets me in hard yakka overalls lying on a small waiting room couch next to the Carriageworks box office. This and many other questions populate a 20-minute interaction that invites me to consider rebalancing this bonding hormone within my overall biological functioning. Having been temporarily separated from my partner for a month, I am attuned to how I might redress my oxytocin deficiency.
We kick off with a clinically orchestrated hug in view of patrons criss-crossing to various Liveworks events. In any theatre foyer, this first act requiring us straddle the tension between accepting intimacy and being offered up for incidental gawking. Armed with our first dose of oxytocin, we wander the backstage area like a pair of cells navigating the hidden bloodstream of Carriageworks, while Jamieson foregrounds her obsession with oxytocin from different angles. She asks me to consider the differences in male and female responses to the post-coital release of oxytocin and informs me that synthetically concocted volumes of it are used to strengthen tribal ‘in-group’ morale to aid effective military aggression, but also used in shopping centres to establish a warm emotional link with the act of consumption. Jamieson wears her uber-objective on her denim sleeve to help build resistance to these dehumanising actions.
Jen Jamieson and participant, Let’s Make Love, Liveworks 2017, photo Heidrun Löhr
Outdoors, we role-play a shared sense of adventure and, in the process, of building our trust; we pause to literally smell the flowers — a pinch of calming lavender leaves from pots placed strategically around the harsh concrete perimeter. Jamieson signals for us to walk past a metal scaffold structure that reaches a single storey high into the Redfern night sky. She indicates that we would be up there if not for gusty winds threatening the security of some of the props. Instead, I am ushered back into another corridor where a mattress wrapped in silk is installed. We lie side by side, hands held and I stare up into the cavernous space, allowing the shared silence to wash over me as I watch for any feeling of closeness. The rolling of trains punctuates this final meditative embrace. Head rested, I stare in to the distance until “Songs to the Siren” blasts from Jamieson’s phone to bookend the experience. Surely, the feeling of calm that washes over me indicates that oxytocin levels have been raised.
Jamieson leads me away from the space and gently informs me that it is time to disconnect and return to my own life, leaving mind, body and heart mildly discombobulated.
Jen Jamieson’s heartfelt mission acts like a soothing balm alongside Nat Randall’s marathon of tense gender micro-invalidations in The Second Woman. Let’s Make Love is spartan and seeks to unsettle the very forms that it attempts to engage with along the way — interactive biochemistry lecture, guided meditation and mini-date — all unfolding to allow moments of confected intimacy to spread through the concrete box that is Carriageworks. I walk away, still wondering if oxytocin alone can bridge the void we have blown open with our ubiquitous embrace of technology.
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Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art and Proximity Festival: Jen Jamieson, Let’s Make Love, Carriageworks, Sydney, 11-29 Oct
Top image credit: Jen Jamieson and participant, Let’s Make Love, Liveworks 2017, photo Heidrun Löhr
In the foyer, like a shrine, looms a Hills Hoist, suspended upside down. Pegged on its sagging, rusty lines are photo negatives from the Filipino-Australian Berry family album alongside other bicultural paraphernalia — a serpentine jade-tinted Catholic rosary, a takeaway box from the Philippines’ own multinational fast food company Jolibee, an errant strip of a plastic doily and a single child-sized gumboot.
When the doors to the performance space open for LabAnino’s This Here. Land, a collaboration between Filipino-Australian and Philippines-based artists, Andrew Cruz’s welcome reminds us to keep our belongings close before crossing into yet another Manila migratory transplant. Unlike the interactive cardboard city of LabAnino’s 2011 production Within and Without at Blacktown Arts Centre, this Manila aspires to Instagrammable cultural cache, dotted with white gallery plinths, red carpets and golden bollards. Our first stop is at large double doors thrown open to reveal more Catholic imagery — a tableau comprising audience members from the previous performance crowded around as Kenneth Moraleda and Valerie Berry recreate an iconic image of one of Rodrigo Duterte’s drug-dealer widows cradling her bullet-ridden partner on the street.
Members of Anino Shadow Play Collective, This Here. Land, LabAnino, Liveworks 2017, photo Heidrun Löhr
It is an image that Cruz instructs us to illuminate with our phone torch apps before ushering us into the next area. There, in a graphic description of poet Jose Rizal’s execution, he energetically provides the bloody historical context of Filipino independence before splitting us into groups to experience stories that take place either in the heart of Manila or the hearth of the Berry household in Western Sydney. I end up at a street hawker stall where I’m served an instant coffee while listening to a working class man (Cruz) ranting in Tagalog (with Hazel Gutierrez interpreting) his begrudging working class approval of the killings, wishing to dissociate himself from what he perceives as the more criminal elements of his milieu.
Later, Gutierrez performs what could be termed an ultrasound-monologue, broadcasting her unborn child’s heartbeat from her pregnant belly. We also read its worries in a simultaneously projected text, lamenting being born to artist parents in tumultuous times.
This Here. Land, LabAnino, Liveworks 2017, photo Heidrun Löhr
Next, Berry whisks us away from manic Manila to peaceful corners of South Australia, reminiscing about many a family excursion aided by projections of old photos and Anino Shadowplay’s exquisite sand-based animation. When the Berrys move to Sydney, Moraleda, repeating the granular motif by cutting up a long coke-line made of Epsom salts, recalls bohemian life in 1990s inner city Redfern, where stereotypes of the suburb’s downtrodden residents abound, linking Australian and Filipino attitudes to drugs.
We wrap up our journey with a karaoke-soaked candlelit memorial for the fallen in Duterte’s war and are ushered into the foyer to form the tableau that greets the next audience.
This Here. Land presents an engaging collage of stories with a sense of continuity that evokes, if on a smaller scale and at some 35 minutes, Alexander Sokurov’s breathtaking Russian Ark (2002), its 96-minute continuous camera shot taking viewers through Russia’s tumultuous history reflected in St Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum collection. LabAnino is a dynamic ensemble. If at the time of viewing, This Here. Land narrowly subordinates the Berrys’ Australian suburban narrative, the sense of urgency expressed in highlighting contemporary Filipino social upheaval is palpable.
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Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art, LabAnino, This Here. Land, artists Kenneth Moraleda, Valerie Berry, Teta Tulay, Datu Arellano, Andrew Cruz, Toni Muñoz, Hazel Gutierrez, Paschal Daantos Berry, with contributions from members of Anino Shadowplay Collective, lighting designer, Frank Mainoo, outside eye Paschal Daantos Berry, Deborah Pollard; Carriageworks, Sydney, 19-22 Oct
Top image credit: Hazel Gutierrez, This Here. Land, LabAnino, Liveworks 2017, photo Heidrun Löhr
The second week of Performance Space’s Liveworks had a more pervasive sense than the first of creative processes on show, experimentation and fascinatingly indeterminate outcomes. Next week, Cleo Mees will respond to Justin Shoulder’s remarkably inventive Carrion, and Nikki Heywood to Geumhyung Jeong’s challenging 7 Ways and the strangely enlightening Oil Pressure Vibrator.
One-on-one works yielded a strong sense of participants being intimately engaged in events quite out of the ordinary, if at the same time intricately tied to the everyday. Teik-Kim Pok experienced Jen Jamieson’s Let’s Make Love as “interactive biochemistry lecture, guided meditation and mini-date,” with each form now viewed from a new perspective. In Mark Harvey’s Helping Hand, Pok felt that the limits of everyday political conversation had been revealed by the amiable artist’s physical risk-taking. AEON, in which a number of participants and performers opt to engage in flocking behaviour, produced complex feelings and urges in Cleo Mees: “Questions thump in my chest: ‘What is happening? What will we all do? Also, what will I do? Will I run? Should I run? I really, really want to run.‘” The mark of each of these works, is the option for participants to decide the degree to which they will engage, although art’s seductiveness might well rule out a rational response.
Eisa Jocson’s Corponomy and Geumhyung Jeong’s Oil Pressure Vibrator were enlightening lecture demonstrations about process and vision. 7 Ways, which read like performance art staged as theatre and requiring the requisite audience patience, had the artist engaging erotically with everyday devices and sculpted heads given great agency via Jeong’s sometimes basic, sometimes virtuosic puppetry. Oil Pressure Vibrator revealed the artist’s astonishing rationale for her body of work with brief accounts of episodes seen in 7 Ways and, climactically, in a filmed work about her relationship with an industrial excavator.
Jocson, seen in a previous Liveworks, as well as in Adelaide’s OzAsia Festival and Melbourne’s Asia TOPA, exercises gently on the floor to one side of the stage, stretching limbs before standing, facing a large screen and then vibrating furiously. She stops and moves to a table on the other side of the stage where she sits at her computer triggering a scrolling text that lists her productions and reveals Corponomy to comprise ‘corpus’ and ‘economy’ — a coinage complementing the artist’s consistent preoccupation with exploitation of the body, especially among poor and migrant workers. She will also (in tandem with an offstage technician) trigger videos that reveal an artform that attracts her, herself being taught and mastering it, and a glimpse of the finished work. The videos are incrementally added until they collectively fill the screen. Until the final episode Jocson does not speak.
For Death of the Pole Dancer (2011) we see Jocson watching, learning, performing dextrously and then, in the highly abstracted finished work, moving slowly and sinuously before plunging dramatically down the pole. Onstage she puts on boots and engages in new exercises to prepare her body for Macho Dancer (2013) where we witness her onscreen observing the young men, often from poor backgrounds, who perform erotically for both men and women. Poster images of them in embrace or in the role of St Sebastian flicker by before we see Jocson being vigorously instructed and then, her musculature more pronounced, performing the resulting work. There’s reference to her Philippines Macho Dancing Academy and manual of 2014. Onstage Jocson echoes what we’ve seen onscreen, flexing and breathing emphatically, her body now that of a macho dancer.
Host (2015) addresses the role many Japanese women no longer wish to commercially enact and which Filipinos, female or transgender, will, often in Japanese guise. We see Jocson observing and being taught traditional dance with fan and umbrella by a Filipino transwoman entertainer, performing Filipino Sexbomb dancing and moving to K-pop. In an interview Jocson calls Host “a one-woman-entertainment-service-machine” with which she investigates “how these women negotiate their femininity, or their Filipino identity, in relation to the idea of the female-male identity in Japan.”
For the final episode of Corponomy, Happyland Part 1: Princess, Jocson gathers up her hair in a girlish bob with a red ribbon, slips on red shoes (but not the costume seen in the photograph from the actual production) and shows a scene from Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the excerpt opening with the princess saying to the dwarfs, “I didn’t mean to frighten you…I was afraid.” Jocson and another performer, her collaborator on the project, learn a song and choreography for the Snow White role but, as we are told, “In Disneyland Hong Kong, a legion of dancers from the Philippines are employed as professional entertainers to repeat formatted performances of ‘happiness’ as their daily labour. Excluded from the main roles reserved for specific racial profiles, they are assigned anonymous supporting roles.” In response, “two Filipino performers hijack the white-skinned princess, the archetypal model that dominates the narrative imagination of children while excluding their context, bodies and histories.”
Jocson becomes Snow White; adopting a cute falsetto and sweet giggle she moves among us, asking, “What’s your name?” and, in one instance, “What food do you like?” The answer, “Apple pie,” prompts the only near break in the facade: “I like adobo, which is chicken marinated in vinegar and soy sauce, and I miss it.” Jocson returns to the stage, gradually dismantling her role and becoming, among other things, the Macho Dancer, fake innocence turning muscular and ambiguously sexual as her version of herself and the words, “I didn’t mean to frighten you…” ever so slowly fade. It’s a chillingly triumphant conclusion.
Jocson’s commitment to researching and coming to understand the economic necessities that can drive art-making and, in some forms, the exploitation of that human capacity, is palpably felt because she is willing to embody and, where necessary, critique those practices. Corponomy is an admirable summing up of an evolving body of work, adroitly constructed to delineate the subject, the body regime, the learning, the work, and, not least, though few words are spoken, the thinking and its incisive delvery, as in the interview cited above: “The entrenchment of American culture in the psyche of the Filipino people has produced disciplined bodies suitable for affective labour in the happiness empire.”
Tetsuya Umeda, RINGO, Room 40 presentation at IMA, Brisbane, photo Louis Lim courtesy Liveworks 2017
Tetsuya Umeda, Ringo
Compared with Eisa Jocson, who finds and fashions movement forms she has encountered and which intrigue her politically, and Geumhyung Jeong, who anthropomorphises domestic and industrial devices to calculatedly erotic and self-transformative ends, Osaka-based sound artist Tetsuya Umeda is an artist whose work brings to mind Alexander Calder’s dictum on abstract art: “This has no utility and has no meaning, it is simply beautiful. It has great emotional effect if you understand it. Of course, if it it meant anything it would be easier to understand, but it would not be worthwhile.”
An apparent experimenter, Umeda is an artist at work in his lab — the space we share with him. Expressionless, casually attired, tool belt around his waist, he restlessly manipulates the lights, objects, liquids, wiring, switches and strange devices littered about the floor. When not triggering or layering sounds or setting up for cause and effect (adding liquid or chemicals or a tiny microphone to containers), he’ll occasionally step back from the attention-demanding minutiae to gauge the space or the evolution of his sono-kinetic creation. Early on he generates a big picture by hoisting high a partly filled, spinning plastic water bottle, angling light to project it onto a wall, later adjusting it so the image becomes a huge abstract whirlpool. Umeda persistently balances small aural and visual detail with his overarching building of a sculpted space and a musical composition.
On the floor are littered myriad devices including small gas cookers, buckets, rubbish bins, conjoined tin cans, a wine bottle, a large hollow glass ball, a car battery and a block of dry ice, which Umeda chisels and hammers. He casually strokes a thin metal pole releasing high harmonics and by turning the pole rapidly in the dry ice block unleashes an elephantine trumpeting. Ringo is full of such surprises — unusual sounds from unlikely sources — some short-lived, some enduring and accumulative, building texture and structure. A suspended horn speaker with a small screen attached picks up a voice which gradually becomes chant-like, growing deeper and increasingly guttural, yielding a persistent sense of ritual.
As Umeda moves among his devices, he takes precautions, puts on gloves (if not always with the dry ice) and mops spilled liquids, enhancing the sense of risk and experiment (and playing the audience with a repeated party trick). Lighting flickers inexplicably. Some things look risky, but are doubtless not. In dimmed light, Umeda adds more and more water to the glass ball, which has within it a pulsing, glowing filament. Reaching in, he places a small device, a microphone perhaps, at the base, instantly triggering a vigorous boiling motion and corresponding burbling. It’s a memorable image in a work with many striking moments, small and large, and an arc that moves from quiet subtleties to a climactic passage — the voice agitated, siren ringing, horn trumpeting and a deep pulsing, from who knows where. It completes itself with a long, sustained, grainy note, interrupted by odd outbursts of cracked dialogue. Umeda switches on the room lights. Illusion over.
Though an improvised composition with many instrumental variables, Ringo has a pleasing cogency, as does the overall audio-visual shaping of the performance: fluent, cumulative and reforming organically after absorbing a plethora of surprises. Tetsuya Umeda is a humble magician, trickster, visual artist, sound artist, composer and ritualist of the everyday.
The extent to which Ringo is experimental, given that its form is of a kind Umeda has used regularly and travelled widely with, depends on the performance spaces he must adjust to, new elements and devices he chooses to add to his collection, and the inevitable variables introduced by often lo-fi devices that are not necessarily stable. The work seems more improvisational than strictly experimental, the outcome broadly predictable, but full of invention and potential in its detail. It’s interesting to note that in other works Umeda has collaborated with the faux violent ensemble contact Gonzo who tussle around his music-making and a large scale work in Korea that includes strings, brass and architectonic lighting. It would be good to see more of his work in Australia.
The commemoration of actor-comedian John Clarke’s passing and the ascent of film director Taika Waititi (Boy, 2010, and Hunt for the Wilderpeople, 2016) has thrust irreverent Kiwi humour back into the public consciousness in its dealing with dark worldviews with warmth and laconic resilience. In a similar spirit, the series of public exchanges that Aotearoa artist Mark Harvey offers in Helping Hand may raise chuckles at first, but his personal charm merges cheery humour with acts of dogged openness. The work aims to address the effects of decentred, social-mediatised discussion and asks us to question the ideological filter bubbles through which we conduct political discussion with strangers.
Out of seven different exchanges on offer, I make it to three: Thought Leader, Backward Conversation and Face Down Projections, each occupying or traversing various Carriageworks spaces.
There are no bookings to be made with Harvey. I find him by spotting a festival minder who keeps a respectful distance. Harvey is either waiting for someone to make the first move or is already deeply engaged in conversation with participants, which I am invited into as soon as he catches my eye.
In Face-Down Projections, the artist invites participants to stand on his back while he lies flat on his stomach on harsh concrete and during which he claims to be able to measure our individual carbon footprint. With the help of the artist minder, I take a moment to stabilise my position on the artist’s back before heading into a discussion about climate change and energy policy, checking my balance every so often. Mostly I am concerned about my daily energy consumption converted into body mass and the force I’m placing on his coccyx.
Mark Harvey & participants, Upsidedown Life Tips, Helping Hand, Liveworks 2017, photo Lucy Parakhina
For Thought Leader, I find the artist blindfolded and being led by another participant, who clocks my approach and hands him over. I am instructed to steer Harvey on a walk around Carriageworks by placing my hand on his back while simultaneously offering some thoughts on, well, thought leadership. Initially stumped, I offer a half-baked TED talk impersonation on embracing failure and change as I navigate the physical obstacles ahead. I query Harvey as to why he’s seeking my advice; he simply replies that “as a white male, I feel like I just need to receive.”
For the last encounter, Backwards Conversation, a small group of us discuss the Australian Government citizenship debacle of the day while following the artist who leads us by walking backwards, tracing the entire, vast Carriageworks foyer. We continue without a hiccup, only momentarily interrupting the conversation to warn Harvey of any obstacles behind him. Sadly, my progressive cultural bubble isn’t challenged in this conversation with other live art afficionados. Instead, what Mark Harvey manages to illuminate is that by making physical peril a prerequisite to conversation, we are forced to consider the stakes of voicing our opinions to each other. If passionate disagreements arose at any point, would we have been thrown off our emotional centres and stopped looking out for our own and the artist’s safety? At what cost and risk are we prepared to voice those views?
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Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art: Mark Harvey, Helping Hand; Carriageworks, Sydney, 10-20 Oct
Top image credit: Mark Harvey & participant, Face-Down Projections, Helping Hand, Liveworks 2017, photo Lucy Parakhina
I’m hearing my voice played back, out of context, asking, “What’s meant to be happening?” According to the instruction manual, the headset I’m wearing records the sounds of the exhibition space, delaying them by two, four or six seconds. The participant can choose in which of these time differences they will experience the space by pressing a series of buttons on the side of the recording device.
This experience comprises the audio component of Antoinette J Citizen’s multiplatform work Apparatus and Method for Time Displacement (2017), exhibited in the multimedia triennale, Experimenta: Make Sense. The exhibition contains 19 works that employ technology as a means via which to explore an overwhelming array of political, social, scientific and personal subject matters. The result is an immersive sense of disorientation that vacillates between gratifyingly deliberate and unfortunately inadvertent.
Particularly powerful is Robert Andrew’s installation Moving from the Binary (2017), exploring the loss of context and autonomy that colonisation inflicts upon Indigenous cultures. In a complex process of translation, Yawuru phrases and their English equivalents are coded mechanically as a machine processes the textual information as temporal action. This takes the form of a pair of rocks grinding slowly across the surface of a metal table covered in a layer of red dirt. Over time, the movement pushes away the dirt, allowing light to filter through holes in the table onto the floor. The negative space here slowly pieces together shards of light onto dirt residue to form the word “buru,” meaning land, country, time and space. In this way, the machine reveals what is lost in colonial translation. As it converts the difference between the Yawuru “marlu milarrjin,” and the English, “don’t forget,” into the frictional slide of the rocks, the encompassing notion of being and place is written in fragments, and can be viewed only in absentia. In this sense, the repetitive three-hour process of Andrew’s work draws attention to the dispossession of land and cultural sovereignty that manifests in language as a silence and a silencing, but which is present nonetheless in the gaps between the binary of coloniser and colonised.
Lauren Edmonds’ work also enacts a loss of context via the medium of the mechanical. A cardboard Rube Goldberg machine, the piece invites viewers to stamp a piece of paper with the phrase “I DUN GOOD.” This action propels an implement forward to click an oversized and alternating “SIGN PETITION” or “LIKE” button on a touch tablet. The work’s comment is sardonic and self-evident, asking the viewer to participate in a hollow gesture, void of direct action in a manner that mocks the kind of hashtag activism saturating social media platforms. Disappointingly, though amusing in its interactivity, the farcical mechanism fails to transcend the self-satisfaction that it satirises. The work has no function outside of the spoof it performs. Because of this, the viewer’s interaction with the work produces a smugness akin to that which the piece is positioned to skewer.
In contrast to Edmonds’ interest in actions of little consequence, Matthew Gardiner’s The Folded Geometry of the Universe (2016) attempts to visually encompass a sense of infinite expansion. Taking the form of a 3D-printed sculpture, curled nautilus-like atop a plinth, the piece employs mathematical modelling to represent the series of space-time folds that constitute our universe. These folds are apparent on the outer-surface of the sculpture, which recedes elegantly in on itself in a jagged whorl. Prompted by the wall text, we are invited in looking upon the work, to “contemplate an infinity of folds as time oscillates between being and nothingness.”
Without this context, the work would perhaps have appeared simply as an example of the sculptural grace that may be born out through the medium of 3D printing. However, the ideological grandiosity the work strives for is in some ways hindered by its visual humility. As the most static work in the exhibition, the piece struggles to bear out the sense of motion implicit in its thematic concern with time folding and unfolding. The empty space that constitutes its core hints at simultaneity, at presence and absence, “being and nothingness,” and its coiled form and repetitious shape touch upon notions of endless iteration. Yet as exhibits all around it seek to expand our sense of the world — visually, temporally, spatially, sonically — the investigation taking place in The Folded Geometry of the Universe appears comparatively unresponsive.
There is a tendency in an exhibition like this for the novelty of sensory experience to overwhelm ideas that are less tangible than the technological means used to illustrate them. Though visually compelling, Gail Priest’s installation SonoLexic (2017) is challenged in this way. Entering the space, the viewer comes to stand in a spot-lit circle at the centre of a darkened room. Here they are faced with a thin tube, across which holograms of neon-coloured light waver, peak and flow in accordance with a soundscape that rumbles and hums ominously. At different moments throughout the 26-minute cycle the sound morphs into short breathy notes or a textural hiss, and the hologram responds by mapping out a delicate pink staccato across the length of the tube. There is text too, that scrolls by at intervals, posing questions such as “where do the words go after they have been read?” The text fundamentally serves the work’s examination of how words echo and resonate, how sound is internalised and described, or externalised and embodied. However, the lasting impression of the work is of having been transported to the set of a science fiction film, and while this is a joy in itself, Sonolexic perhaps falls short of the artist’s searching. (You can see Sonolexic here.)
Shuffling between the screens and soundscapes and switches and dials, my experience of the exhibition is shadowed by the pervading sense that technology is as much a creator of distance as it is a means of engagement. I feel this acutely as I adjust the headset for the visual component of Citizen’s Apparatus… and try to make out half-formed figures on the dim VR-screen. They’re sketchy impressions of visitors moving through the space throughout the day, recorded by an overhead monitor, then played back. I catch glimpses of people putting on the headset, as I just have, but the rest is a blur.
After a moment, I put down the headset and puzzle over whether the experience, of the work and the exhibition as a whole, is truly engaged in an enactment of the digital’s fragmentation of context. This seems to be the case, as the shared medium of the technological, in conjunction with the exhibition’s theme, sees all of the works, directly or tangentially isolate, manipulate or dislocate the contextual information that ordinarily constitutes our perception. Yet, this feeling of disorientation and distance could just as easily be the result of something vital having inadvertently slipped my grasp in the deluge of information and sound and images. For the most part, I want to believe that it’s the former, as it’s in this way that Experimenta makes sense.
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Experimenta: Make Sense: International Triennial of Media Art, artists Robert Andrew, Keith Armstrong with Luke Lickfold and Matthew Davis, Ella Barclay, Michele Barker and Anna Munster, Briony Barr, Steve Berrick, Antoinette J. Citizen, Adam Donovan and Katrin Hochschuh, Lauren Edmonds, Matthew Gardiner, Jane Gauntlett, Liz Magic Laser, Jon McCormack, Lucy McRae, Gail Priest, Scale Free Network: Briony Barr and Gregory Crocetti, Andrew Styan, Judy Watson, Katarina Zdjelar; RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2 Oct-11 Nov
Two pieces of information return to me throughout the experience of AEON and the hours that follow: that flocking birds work in a context of uncertainty, and that flocks are physically a bit like “flying avalanches.”
These facts are written on cards that we, a group of eight participants, read out to each other at the beginning of our journey. The other key piece of information we receive at this time is that there are no leaders or followers, and no right or wrong ways to experience this work. With a portable audio speaker in hand and no further instructions (except to refrain from speaking), our facilitator turns us loose into Sydney Park.
It strikes me immediately that what happens next — what we do next — is potentially in all of our hands. I have agency, and I have responsibilities: to find a listening place between leading and following, to remain open to possibilities on all sides.
We drift over open grasses, filter through banks of trees. We snag and billow, form momentary intimacies that swiftly dissolve. Our portable speakers emit unique streams of sound that feel both electronic and organic. Together we tick, rumble and caw — a haunting, syncopated chorus. Eventually, we see it: a much larger flock of people, up against a hillside. It is clear that this is where we are headed.
Aeon, Lz Dunn and collaborators, photo Bryony Jackson
We meet, and merge. A sea of half-strangers, weaving, feeling each other out. Unique soundstreams moving in and out of earshot. In this slowly churning mix, something starts to shift: individuals break into sprints, running for their lives in great, swooping arcs, and then return to walking. The running feels urgent, and looks delicious to do. Questions thump in my chest: “What is happening? What will we all do? Also, what will I do? Will I run? Should I run? I really, really want to run.”
Flocks are like flying avalanches, and these runners feel like an avalanche. The vivacity of their movement tugs at me, pulls me toward flight. But most people are not running, and there are no instructions to run (or not to run), and is it really my place to run? I recognise, somewhere in this mix of intense longing and uncertainty, something that relates to emergent frontiers in my own desire and becoming. I also reflect, later, that other responses, including the desire not to run, might have been just as compelling.
I give it a go: I run as fast as I can over the sloping grass. The running feels full, energising. I try again — longer this time. And again.
As the crowd drifts on through the park, those who initiated the running (and who are gradually emerging as AEON’s collaborating artists) start to do other things. They bounce rhythmically on their haunches, rub up against trees, balance experimentally on rocks and logs. Later, their movements evolve again: they become bolder, more sexual. The expanding, expressive vocabulary of this group throws into question what is okay for me to do, and simultaneously floods me with longing and awe, so that by the time we reach the edge of the park, I am brimming with feeling.
This is what AEON, a study of flocking and queer ecologies, facilitates so effectively: an immersive encounter with the feelings of these phenomena — uncertainty, agency, desire, becoming — which have both personal and wider ecological significance.
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Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art: AEON, lead artist, concept, performer Lz Dunn, choreographer Shian Law, sound artist Lawrence English, performers Carly Sheppard, William McBride, Kieran Bryant, Bonnie Cowan, Leila El Rayes, Caroline Garcia, Loren Kronemyer, Rhiannon Newton, Sue Reid, Ian Sinclair, Dinda Timperon, dramaturg Lara Thoms; Sydney Park, 19-22 Oct
Top image credit: Aeon, Lz Dunn and collaborators, photo Bryony Jackson
Leading Australian sound artist, composer and curator Lawrence English once described to an interviewer the origins of his passion for field recording, an art that has taken him around the world to many a unique location, as you’ll gather from sampling his works on SoundCloud. In the 1980s, his father would take him and his brother bird-watching or, as instructed in the case of the reed warbler, bird-listening — to first close their eyes in order to locate the hard-to-find bird: “It sounded incredible, like a modular synthesizer on steroids,” writes English.
For his performance in the Cleveland Contemporary Music Event (CCME), English will present Viento: Blizzards of Antarctica and Beyond, mixing sounds he recorded at Argentina’s Antarctic Station. He writes, “The wind battered the base structures and telecommunications equipment, making a range of unusual tonal phase drones, which you can hear in the recordings… Listening back to these recordings I am struck by the sheer physicality of the wind. It’s rare that you feel physically reduced by the motion of air, but in both Patagonia and Antarctica that is just how I felt. A small speck of organic dust in a howling storm.”
Rather than a documentary, Viento is field recording as visceral poetry and it’s about the intersection between what English heard, recorded and will mix in the theatre and what each listener in the audience will experience, refracted by their own associations when the Antarctic blizzards buffet their ears, as the artist explained to me by email while on a European tour.
Viento, Blizzards of Antarctica and Beyond, Lawrence English, photo courtesy the artist
In the festival press release, you describe your concerts as “innately synaesthetic.” In what sense are they synaesthetic?
That statement applies more to my solo musical works such as Cruel Optimism. There is a point of nexus where sound transgresses audition and becomes ‘physical,’ where I think a point of synaesthetic realisation can and does occur. This ties into the work I am doing in performance around the concept of the body as an ear — recognising the notion of vibration, more broadly, as an approachable material comprehension of sound.
Will the audience, as you did, feel the force of the winds and sense being reduced to a speck?
With Viento I think the experience is more personal and interior. I think with sound, especially field recordings, there’s an invitation extended to the audience to invest themselves in the sound and complete their understanding of those sounds based on their own experiences and memories. I’ve performed this piece many times now and after almost every performance I’ve had people come up to me and explain where the sounds took them. Some people have told me about memories of being children during big storms or one person recounted being trapped on a boat during a hurricane. Sound is so very pliable in a sense and that opens it up to people, giving them an opportunity to connect to it in ways that can be very direct.
Lawrence English, photo Tralanos Pakioufakis
What form will the concert take in terms of structure and the placement of your audience and the sound system?
Viento is in two parts: two distinct storms or blizzards that were recorded in the summer of 2010. It’s essentially a diffusion piece in the classical sense. I use as many speakers as possible to route the work throughout the space, moving around the sound and highlighting certain qualities of the room, the speakers and the piece. It’s very dynamic in that sense. It’s about playing with the space and dimensions of the room and also the system itself. The mixer is the instrument.
For an audience unused to this kind of work, do you encourage ‘eyes shut’? And do you provide an introduction, for example about field recording?
I think concerts like this are a wonderful excuse to reject ocularcentrism for sure. That said I do introduce the piece and explain how the work happened and some of the experiences I had in Antarctica making the pieces. I think it’s important to create a doorway through which people can approach the work. Once you let yourself walk into the room, a universe of possibility opens up and I know from personal experience the beauty that lies within that place.
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Playing this week in the Cleveland Contemporary Music Events are concerts by Kupka’s Piano (Friday, 3 November) and ELISION (Saturday, 4 November). Read about these concerts by leading, adventurous Australian musicians and local and international composers here.
Cleveland Contemporary Music Event: Lawrence English, Viento: Blizzards of Antarctica and Beyond; Redland Performing Arts Centre, Cleveland, Brisbane, 10 Nov
Top image credit: Viento, Blizzards of Antarctica and Beyond, Lawrence English, photo courtesy the artist
Spread over three days and two venues — the Adelaide Festival Centre, including the Space Theatre and Dunstan Playhouse, and the Queen’s Theatre in Adelaide’s west end — and presented as part of the 2017 OzAsia Festival, the biennial Australian Theatre Forum was held in Adelaide this year for the first time, attracting nearly 300 delegates from every state and territory (and one from Canada). In keeping with previous forums (the last was held in Sydney) co-curators Alexis West and Steve Mayhew, in their program note, described this year’s conversations as “an opportunity for a sector and those present to find out more, to feel connected, to rally, to identify, to feel heard, to impart knowledge, guidance and much more.”
Real diversity
In low-key introductions, West called for utopian visions, tolerance, diversity and access while Mayhew reflected on the “devastated and devastation” of the last two years [Vitalstatistix Director Emma Webb’s paper incisively revealed the extent of the damage. Eds], describing ATF 2017 as “a love letter, a suicide note and a freshly written to-do list.”
Some numbers give a sense of the diversity of the forum’s delegates, who self-identified as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (31), culturally and linguistically diverse (47), disabled (25), deaf but not disabled (3), them or they (5), LGBTQI+ (58), regional (70) and young or emerging (78). Perhaps, as I heard a few delegates grumble over the three days, the only underrepresented group was the major performing arts companies.
Jacob Boehme, Australian Theatre Forum 2017, photo Ben Searcy
Learning to listen
Each day saw a mix of events adding up to a more conversational approach than in previous forums — fewer panels, Q&As and roundtables, and more informal discussions, surrounded by scattered keynotes, sector updates and “considered responses.” Many of the conversations were organised around a model — a little unwieldy at times — whereby an inner circle of chairs was reserved for those who wished to speak, and an outer circle for those who preferred to listen. The importance of listening, flagged by the forum’s motto, “listen, examine, speak, celebrate,” became a recurring theme. Director and dramaturg Sarah Dunn, in her day one considered response, told us “I don’t know; I’m listening” were “words to speak over and over,” while, in what was billed as a “provocative pep talk” on day two, South Australian Dignity Party representative Kelly Vincent asserted that there is “no such thing as voiceless groups — just stories we haven’t learned to listen to yet.”
Sharing in silence
Additionally, over the course of the three days a “keynote project” unfolded, an iteration of Performance Encyclopaedia by Toronto-based experimental performance collective Public Recordings. The project saw six Australian writers collaborate with co-creators Tomoyuki Arai, Shannon Cochrane, Ame Henderson and Evan Webber to create, print and bind a text featuring reflections on keywords selected by the writers before the forum, as well as responses to the various conversations. The performance itself took place on the forum’s final day during which delegates read the text in silence for one hour before it went “out of print,” providing a welcome moment of shared experience and stillness within a crowded, often intense program designed to be navigated individually.
Printing of Performance Encyclopaedia, Australian Theatre Forum 2017, photo Ben Searcy
Timeliness and its limits
The theme of this year’s forum was “About Time,” aptly chosen for its suggestion of live performance’s temporality but more significantly for its intimations of change, too long delayed, perhaps finally having come. Conversations around diversity and the problem of cultural homogeneity in arts practice and governance have figured heavily, albeit sometimes divisively, at events of this kind for some time, but their deep integration in this year’s program felt new, a sign perhaps of an emerging paradigm. In her day one keynote responding to the theme “Our Status Quo,” Indigenous designer Linda Kennedy called for a decolonisation of our theatre, an idea that manifested throughout the forum in conversations that touched on non-Western dramaturgies, colonialist myth-making and best practice for arts organisations working with Indigenous artists who have inherited a legacy of dispossession. In his day three keynote, “Possibilities and Futures,” Indigenous performer and curator Jacob Boehme urged artists and organisations to embrace “60,000 years of dramaturgy rather than performed culture on stage.”
There were designated safe spaces for First Nations and people of colour, and for women (a third, for LGBTQI+ people, was also mooted) while the forum was bookended by irreverent, politically charged opening and closing ceremonies led by Aunty Katrina Karlapina Power, the first, memorably, held at dawn on the Festival Centre’s Bistro balcony and concluding in several dozen sleepy-eyed delegates dancing to Yothu Yindi’s “Treaty” as the sun rose over the Torrens River/Karrawirra Pari. If the framing of the forum in this way signalled a timely corrective to the predominance of straight white male perspectives at previous national theatre sector gatherings — one need only glance back at the first ATF program in 2009 to see how much things have changed — then it perhaps came at a cost. The political tenor of many of the conversations risked exhausting and discouraging us, and failing to acknowledge the progress — however tenuous or incomplete — that has taken place since previous forums.
Reading of Performance Encyclopaedia, Australian Theatre Forum 2017, photo Ben Searcy
Making room for optimism
In counterpoint to the ‘heaviness’ of these conversations, others were conducted in optimistic, even visionary terms. In his keynote, Forest Fringe’s Andy Field exhorted us to take care of ourselves and each other, and to conceive of the works we make as “versions of the world we want to live in” and as “fragments of utopia.”
In her sector update, the Australia Council for the Arts’ Marion Potts, while acknowledging “undeniable inequities” in the states, the ongoing issue of gender parity and the risk aversion of the major companies, nevertheless insisted we have “a responsibility to be hopeful.” Drawing on a “desktop analysis” of 2018 theatre company seasons, she cited the burgeoning of a more nuanced conversation around regional performance, the positive reception of Australian work overseas and the “pushing up” of small to medium companies as reasons for hope.
I also detected a utopian strain in the conversations I joined, as well as a desire to embody hope in our processes, practices and politics. A range of both individual and collective measures to address the global ecological crisis were canvassed in a session titled “Imagination for Adaptation,” co-facilitated by producer Pippa Bailey who argued that, while individual artists were “doing great things” in this space, the cultural sector “has its head in its hands.” We discussed how cultural organisations could reduce their carbon footprint and mooted the creation of a body that could oversee this. In “The Spaces We Create to Create,” a conversation facilitated by the Malthouse’s Mark Pritchard, State Theatre Company of SA’s Elena Carapetis and Black Swan’s Jeffrey Jay Fowler, positive noises were made about improvements in diversity, access, and the representation of women in these companies, as well as their relationship to smaller arts organisations and artists working in the independent sector.
Any single view of a program as far-ranging as this forum’s is bound to be partial and highly subjective. It’s also true, as is often observed of such events, that many of the most interesting conversations happen informally, in the cracks of the official schedule — the meal breaks and after hours meet-ups when the pressure is off and guards are lowered. Unlike in 2015, too, there was no grand concluding gesture (however symbolic) at this year’s ATF, no lens with which we could look back on the previous three days with a sense of unified purpose. Instead we were left with echoes. As Jacob Boehme, looking forward two years in his keynote, implored us “to be, embody, and to do,” I found myself thinking back to UK performance artist Jo Bannon’s presentation on the first day, and her provocation that seemed to ring throughout the forum: “How can we unfuck the world?” By talking, yes, but by doing too, and through the embodiment of a politics of the radical.
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2017 OzAsia Festival: Australian Theatre Forum 2017, About Time, curators Steve Mayhew and Alexis West, producer Theatre Network Australia (TNA), Space Theatre, Dunstan Playhouse, Queen’s Theatre; Adelaide,3-5 Oct
Top image credit: Steve Mayhew, Alexis West, Australian Theatre Forum 2017, photo Ben Searcy
In Danny Wild’s Around the Block (2014) discrete images are packaged up and reproduced as flow. Dimensions are rendered flat, yet they are layered. Distinct timescales are interlinked, while also giving narrative the slip. I am thinking about the American architect Greg Lynn and his articulation of a “smooth” theory of architecture. Smoothness, he writes “does not eradicate differences but incorporates free intensities through fluid tactics of mixing and blending.” Expanding on Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the fold, Lynn’s aim is to argue an alternative position in the longstanding deadlock around the two poles of unity and contradiction within architectural theory.
The unities and contradictions of a suburban block are turned into collage, which is turned into diorama, which is turned into a cul de sac. Here then we turn to detournment, the Situationist’s protocol for walking the streets. There we find Danny Wild with his camera. The shape of the cul de sac forces a turning. And turning predetermines volatile change — a known thing can and will morph into something unrecognisable. We have seen this in the case of Ramsay Street, our most famous cul de sac, which has delivered over 30 years of surprise twists.
Brick work, garden plants, carports, front lawns, powerlines, garbage bins. These are the kinds of free intensities that Wild makes smooth. Laid out in flat, postcard-like shapes, as if cut out from a newspaper, it’s as much the intricate affiliations of surface that create the smooth effect as it is the video’s visual spin, a streaming alliance of colours and shapes. As the single Australian flag in the video reminds us, unity is a troubling position to take. Contradiction, meanwhile, can easily be just another kind of holding pattern. So as viewers we are turned to a different, smoother mode of thinking where place remains particular as well as part of a greater sum. Emily Stewart
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Sydney-based Danny Wild is a multidisciplinary artist, musician and curator who explores routine and repetition through audio, video, performance, installation and intervention. Since completing a Bachelor of Digital Art at the Australian National University in 2013 he has curated screenings, events and exhibitions nationally and internationally, exhibited in the Sydney Biennale, Tokyo and New York and is a founding member of audio-visual collective Zonk Vision.
Adelaide’s Her Majesty’s Theatre, built in 1913 and Australia’s last remaining Tivoli theatre, was aptly chosen for the premiere of Angelique by local all-female ensemble isthisyours?. The company, comprising graduates of the Flinders University Drama Centre, has been around for almost 10 years, producing work that is distinctively playful, audience-focused and formally experimental and staged in small venues and on the fringe festival circuit. The site-specific Angelique, however, is markedly more ambitious than the company’s previous offerings, and benefits from the scale of Her Majesty’s proscenium arch, expansive auditoria and faded elegance (the theatre is currently undergoing a major redevelopment, expected to be completed by late 2019).
As the small audience is herded into one section of the stalls by energetic ushers — who, we will learn, are integral to the performance, later assisting us at various moments to promenade through the theatre’s backstage spaces — a letter descends from the ceiling on a red ribbon, and an audience member is instructed to read it out. “Think about why you are here,” it says. “You imagine you are one thing but really you are something else.” The work’s concerns with the slipperiness of identity and the unreliability of appearances thus flagged, a scene of domestic disquiet begins to unfold on the stage against the backdrop of Jonathan Oxlade’s characteristically retro-flavoured design: big velvet drapes, daggy furniture and a large gilt mirror.
Schoolgirl Angelique (Jude Henshall) writes in her diary, mother Carole (Anna Steen) pores over an ‘improving’ book, while father George (a moustachioed Louisa Mignone) huffs and snipes ineffectually. There is an elephant in the room — the disappearance of Angelique’s sister, Evelyn — and, soon, a ‘real’ animal in the form of a blue parrot. Captured and caged, the parrot begins to speak a strange language that fascinates Angelique but seems to threaten her father, who — in a moment of rupture pitched somewhere between horror and farce, and reminiscent of Ionesco or Frisch in its darkly comic absurdity — wrings the life out of the bird. In subsequent scenes, the parrot’s spirit returns in human, English-speaking form as the flamboyant Birdy (Ellen Steele), who is like a cross between a life coach and a sleazy variety act.
It’s not easy to summarise what follows. The audience is, at first, taken backstage in two groups to view the remainder of the scene from the wings — decentralising our perspective on the unfolding family drama, and evoking for me the idea of the mind as a sort of ‘backstage’ space — and then ushered past the dressing rooms as the actors await their cues. We are led up and down various fire escapes, and return several times, at the behest of a bell, to a classroom located behind the theatre drapes, where Angelique’s teacher (Nadia Rossi) facilitates a series of student presentations responding to the theme “Your Career.” When, at the show’s dénouement, Angelique has to make her presentation, she tells us, cryptically, that she wants to be an anaesthetist. It seems partly a joke, perhaps on the conformism of her classmates, or does she just want to numb the pain — of her sister’s disappearance and her family’s slow breakdown — and continue, like everybody around her, to elide and supress? What does Angelique really want, and how can she know at an historical moment in which, as playwright Duncan Graham observes in his program note, quoting Italian theorist Bifo Berardi, “we have entered into the field of chaos” in which humans struggle to “critically decide between good and bad, between true and false.”
There is a stimulating, if ultimately frustrating, elusiveness in Graham’s script — co-written with isthsyours? and realised with flair by director Tessa Leong — as well as a great deal of both humour and cruelty. A critique of the hypocrisy of bourgeois values runs through several scenes, such as one in which a Dadaist, life-sized lobster is ‘painlessly’ boiled alive at a party for Angelique’s mum (the lobster, despite Carole’s assurances, screams theatrically as it dies). There are echoes of the films of Michael Haneke and Luis Buñuel, as well as Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1943 film Le Corbeau in which anonymous poison pen letters signed “The Raven” are sent to various residents of a small, unnamed French town.
Steered back out into the foyer at the end of the work, the ushers encourage us to read one of several dozen letters suspended from the ceiling on red ribbons. “Thank you,” the letters read, and tell us we have been “anxiously suspended in the mirror of [our] choices.” We are on the threshold of the world again. The blind master awaits us.
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inSpace: isthisyours?, Angelique, writer Duncan Graham, director Tessa Leong, designer Jonathan Oxlade, lighting Chris Petridis, composition, sound design Alice Keath, performers Jude Henshall, Louisa Mignone, Nadia Rossi, Ellen Steele, Anna Steen; Her Majesty’s Theatre, 13-21 Oct
Top image credit: Jude Henshall, Angelique, isthisyours?, photo Cynthia Gemus
Top image credit: The Ride, Cigdem Aydemir, Proximity Festival 2017, photo PAVLOVA
Located in the newly developed complex near St George’s Cathedral, with restored and reinvigorated Treasury Buildings and the architecturally-celebrated new City of Perth Library clustered around Cathedral Square, Proximity Festival 2017 sends participants on a walking tour of discovery.
A whirlwind of experiences takes each participant through the festival’s diverse offerings. Jen Jamieson generates oxytocin with her participants in a re-working of Let’s Make Love, first presented at Proximity Festival 2014. In Tresse // Passing — Don’t Touch My Hair, Hannah Brontë weaves together hair, personal and political reflections in a poetic braid. The Trees of St. Georges Square has Mike Bianco making horticultural digs at Australia’s immigration policies. Liam Colgan hides in plain sight while sharing his daily experience of invisibility with Reflex of a Blush, and Nat Randall perseveres with an extended cultivation of celebrity in Exclusive.
This Little Light of Mine, Rachael Dease, Proximity Festival 2017, photo PAVLOVA
This Little Light of Mine
In This Little Light of Mine, Rachael Dease uses silence, darkness and the evocative experience of lighting and extinguishing candles to present the perspective of a lifetime. Following the concise written instructions within a progression of gift boxes, I light a row of 83 candles, in line with statistical data for Australian average life expectancy, before extinguishing one for each complete year that I have lived. The process creates time for silent contemplation in the flickering light. When I’ve exited through blackout curtains into a bright, colourful space, Dease slowly walks toward me while singing; asking what would I choose to do if this were my last day, if this were my final candle? Departing with a candle labelled with my expected remaining years, I am left shaken and thoughtful.
Consent
Through dance, Tyrone Robinson challenges our self-perceptions and sense of compassion in Consent. A slightly opaque plastic sheet and cumbersome headphones detach me from the world as Robinson, covered in white paint, scampers around with animal motions, including cute and endearing mannerisms. A red lanyard strapped onto his head and face becomes a muzzle as an assistant, concealed in a whole body suit and mask, attaches a carabiner and tether. Restrained, Robinson rears upright, reminiscent of a dancing bear. On my cue, I take a seat in front of him and Robinson, seemingly nervous and unbalanced, holds my attention with his staring dark eyes emphasised by the white paint. Disconcerted, my headset silent, I rise and detach the tether. Returning to all fours, Robinson scampers until again restrained by the assistant. Trembling, he faces me, as recorded instructions direct me to the table next to my chair. By marking the creature’s white body with powders and dye provided, I am promised qualities such as “strength,” “grounding” and “wisdom.” Unable to proceed, I listen to instructions to run a coloured line across “its” chest” and rub dye into “its” mouth, while Robinson shivers and watches me. Each moment is confronting, intense and distressing, later reflection further questioning my sense of privilege, ownership and self.
Shell Game, Martyn Coutts, Proximity Festival 2017, photo PAVLOVA
Shell Game
Meeting on the street at the corner of Treasury Building, Martyn Coutts in Shell Game engages me in ice-breaking small talk, sharing stories of recent life experiences and our hopes for the future. He skilfully moves the conversation to developments in the South China Sea while we adjourn to the atrium. Coutts produces a deck of cards to scry the fortune of the Spratly Islands. Each card depicts an island, with a satellite photo, its name written in the language of the occupying nation and a simple symbol. Coutts explains the symbolism as we examine the cards, lending context to the shape, vegetation and facilities of each island. My three chosen islands are all claimed by China, each displaying extensive development and fortifications, indicating a Chinese influence in the Spratly Islands’ future. Geopolitics has never been so convivial.
The Ride, Cigdem Aydemir, Proximity Festival 2017, photo PAVLOVA
The Ride
The Ride transforms a church hall into a movie set. Industrial fans are arranged in front of a motorcycle which is ‘posed’ for a camera that sits before a screen with an image of the Australian outback. As I don a jacket and sunglasses, Cigdem Aydemir briskly puts on a black hijab, tucking excess cloth into her black leather jacket that co-ordinates with her form-hugging black trousers. An extra, I wait for rescue by the main character. After a brief practice run, we record. With slow graceful movement, Aydemir steps lightly onto her bike. I follow, ungainly in comparison, mounting the pillion seat. She starts the bike and we move along the road, the fans blasting as we accelerate and the scenery rolls past. The calm hero, Aydemir, is in control, as the wind unfurls her hijab and its magnificent length trails us across the desert. She points as we pass something and we turn our gaze before the ride ends and she leaves without a word. The screen replays Aydemir rescuing another extra, the glamorous star creating an iconic image of machine in the vast red landscape framed by the fluttering hijab flying free, a breathtaking rebuttal to white masculinity’s likely attempts to monopolise a heroic narrative like this one.
Let’s Make Love, Jen Jamieson, Proximity Festival 2017, photo PAVLOVA
In 2017, Proximity Festival continues to celebrate ideas and innovative communication where intimate collaborations between artist and audience create unique and memorable experiences. Blurring the lines between artistic disciplines, with no fourth wall and focusing on the individual in each moment, Proximity Festival challenges boundaries, creating art that defies neat categorisation while expanding personal horizons.
In moving from an annual to a biennial performance schedule, Proximity Festival has been able to grant nine artists longer sessions and greater resources for each work than in previous festivals, which each comprised 12 performances. For 2017, curators Sarah Rowbottam and Kelli McCluskey invited artists with unique ideas, fresh perspectives and the courage and enthusiasm to push the comfort zones of their participants. Provocateur Jeff Khan, with Rowbottam and McCluskey, ran a two-week Proximity Lab in December 2016, assisting artists to develop their presentations. With a longer lead time between the Lab and performances than in previous festivals, artists have been able to develop mature works.
Listen to Claire Nichols’ interviews with Proximity artists here.
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Proximity Festival 2017, director, curator, mentor Sarah Rowbottam, curator, mentor Kelli McCluskey, provocateur, mentor Jeff Khan, artists Cigdem Aydemir, Mike Bianco, Hannah Brontë, Liam Colgan, Martyn Coutts, Rachael Dease, Jen Jamieson, Nat Randall, Tyrone Robinson; Perth, 26 Sept-7 Oct
Top image credit: Consent, Tyrone Robinson, Proximity Festival 2017, photo PAVLOVA
As host and co-producer of FBi Radio’s experimental music program Ears Have Ears, I listen to new releases by innovative artists every day. And even though our team is sent mountains of music from city acts, it has been vital for us to recognise and appreciate the exciting sounds coming from Australia’s regional areas. This playlist features artists outside the city creating interesting audio — from coastal creatives reimagining local histories, to statement makers whose music is a form of activism.
Jason Campbell, photo courtesy the artist
Jason Campbell (Newcastle, NSW) has delved into concentrated synthesiser studies under aliases Stitched Vision, Collector and most recently, J.Campbell. When J. Campbell’s debut cassette A Death At The Steelworks landed on my desk earlier this year, I was thoroughly impressed. The heavy, melancholic 8-tracker — released by Canadian label Summer Isle — offers a uniquely Australian take on musique concrete. Each soundscape features fragments of piano, organ, viola and, of course, synthesiser. Added to the mix are field recordings from Newcastle’s ill-fated and abandoned BHP Steelworks. The piece is a striking reflection on Newcastle’s industrial past and Jason’s familial connections to it.
Some time ago, I interviewed Kris Keogh (Nhulunbuy, Arnhem Land, NT), about his choice of instrument. He told me that the harp is a reflection of its regal past and he wanted to destroy that concept. After all, why should a certain pocket of society own this instrument’s history? What happens when you take the harp outside its usual context and subvert it even further using home-made software, drawing inspiration from Debussy and Atari Teenage Riot? You’ll find the answer on Keogh’s delicate, shimmering release Selected Harp Works II, from Provenance Records. He has rewritten the harp’s history, much to his delight, I’m sure!
Monica Brooks (Blue Mountains, NSW) is an accomplished and prolific artist whose musical collaborations include Great Waitress, West Head Project and Electronic Resonance Korps. Whenever I listen to Monica’s solo piano work I get the sense that time is elastic because there is fluidity and space in each and every note.
Leah Barclay, photo courtesy the artist
Leah Barclay (Noosa, QLD) is a sound artist, composer and researcher whose art intersects with science and technology. Instead of watching static performances, her audiences are invited to explore Queensland’s coastline through a river listening phone app, or hear the impact of climate change through an installation. Barclay’s fascinating studies have taken her from Noosa to Vanuatu, New Zealand and Canada to explore the sounds and science of very different environments.
Warren Burt (Daylesford, VIC) has shaped Australia’s experimental music landscape since the 70’s. I’m struck by his creative flexibility, which veers into electroacoustic, installation and text-based music.
In the remainder of this mix you’ll also hear dizzying soundscapes from Bateman’s Bay NSW duo School Girl Report alongside electronic, almost interplanetary music by Lismore NSW’s Tralala Blip. Finally, there’s a track by UK-based, Australian artist Kate Carr who has fastidiously captured and released sounds from the farthest reaches of Australia (and beyond) since 2011 through her label Flaming Pines.
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Brooke Olsen in a Sydney based broadcaster and curator. She’s been involved in experimental and innovative music for a decade — curating, writing, documenting and broadcasting across multiple formats. Currently Brooke hosts and co-produces FBi Radio’s award winning music and soundtrack program Ears Have Ears.
Top image credit: Brooke Olsen, photo courtesy FBi Radio
Oh to be in Cleveland, Brisbane, for the Cleveland Contemporary Music Event (CCME) which features concerts by ELISION and Kupka’s Piano, ensembles foregrounding electric guitar in works that are visceral and haunting.
Every now and then in new music the electric guitar is allowed out to play. James Hullick in Were/Oblivion, which he performed in the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s recent Dream Sequence concert, drew on the Hendrix legacy to unleash a powerful instrumental and vocal poem-letter to his daughters. In the 2012 Aurora Festival of Living Music in Sydney’s west, Zane Banks, grippingly focused and passionate, performed George Lentz’s 60-minute Ingwe (available on Naxos CD and on Spotify), part of a body of works with a cosmological drive. In a review, I described the experience as “an epic coursing through the dark night of the soul for solo electric guitar with the doubt, passion and wit of a metaphysical poet cut adrift from his god.” As in the Hullick, the scoring drew on a heritage of popular and jazz electric guitar techniques to powerful effect.
And now the electric guitar is to be let loose in two concerts in Brisbane’s Cleveland Contemporary Music Event. ELISION Ensemble Artistic Director Daryl Buckley on lapsteel with electronics will perform solo Aaron Cassidy’s short but exacting The wreck of former boundaries (the title too of the concert), while in a Kupka’s Piano concert, Hauntology, Co-Artistic Director Liam Flenady will play electric guitar with the ensemble in the premiere of his own work, Hauntolgy (also the concert title). Electric guitar takes the lead!
ELISION, The wreck of former boundaries
Australia’s leading new music ensemble is a force to be reckoned with, as demanding with audiences as it is with itself in concerts that have a visceral intensity.
Cassidy composed the 33-minute Wreck… so that it can be played in full by the ensemble or in short modular units. Daryl Buckley will be playing one of these, described as “music that sets movement, energy, force and velocity against various states of friction, resistance, viscosity and elasticity. Its material bends and grinds, wobbles and pulls, flickers and swerves, leaps and twists, gurgles and coils. And erupts and explodes.” It does so, epically in a mere seven minutes with a nuclear fusion of guitar and electronics. In a video trailer where you can glimpse some of the playing, Buckley says, “The wreck’s notation inscribes itself into the body of the player.”
One of my favourite 21st century works is UK composer Richard Barrett’s Dark Matter, a massive cosmological creation written for ELISION and performed and spectacularly staged by the ensemble in Brisbane in 2001 (you can read my description of the experience here).
Seek out the work on Spotify, listen to track four and feel the power and the textural subtlety of Buckley’s playing which will also feature in one of two Barrett works in The wreck… concert, world-line (2012/14; 35 minutes), for electric lap-steel guitar, piccolo trumpet/quarter-tone flugelhorn, percussion and electronics. The tuning and setup was devised by Barrett in collaboration with Buckley, to whom world-line is dedicated.
Daryl Buckley, ELISION, photo Nico Keenan Lichen
ELISION says of the work that, drawing on the Theory of Relativity in which a “world-line” denotes the history of a particle passing through time-space, “the music could be thought of as a miniature universe, whose matter and energy are composed of sound, which expands (from low pitches) and recontracts (towards high pitches)…”
After grunting and growling in world-line’s opening like a demented power tool, Buckley’s guitar loops and soars in spectacular slides over a murmuring sea of sounds and impressively engages in a sustained dialogue with Tristram Williams’ eloquent trumpet. Elsewhere it’s one sinuous voice amid others in a sublimely extended, quiet soundscape.
Also in the program is Barrett’s codex III (2003; 16 minutes) for trumpets, percussion, violin and electronics and James Gardner’s Torc (2016; 12 minutes) for violin and trombone. Playing alongside Daryl Buckley will be Benjamin Anderson on alto trombone, Graeme Jennings on violin, Peter Neville on percussion and Tristram Williams on trumpets, all superb musicians. The wreck of former boundaries promises to be a very special experience.
Kupka’s Piano, Hauntology
Kupka’s Piano, the Brisbane new music ensemble have garnered praise in RealTime in recent years and today in Matthew Lorenzon’s report from BIFEM2017. They’re presenting a concert in CCME titled Hauntology, featuring works that are variously eerie, weird, bizarre and strangely beautiful, as in American composer John Luther Adam’s mesmeric Red Arc / Blue Veil. I spoke about the concert program by phone with ensemble member, Co-Artistic Director, composer and guitarist Liam Flenady.
The title of the concert, Hauntology, is also the name of work that you’ve composed.
It’s the first piece I’ve written that’s semi-improvised — sliding between fully-notated sections and guided improvisation sections. It’s for a quintet, a bit of a strange one: two flutes, clarinet, percussion — mostly vibraphone and glockenspiel — and the electric guitar.
Where did the idea for the composition come from?
Well, it’s a nice title! I’d been reading books by Mark Fisher who wrote about hauntology, a concept he borrowed from Jacques Derrida. It’s about the persistence [as, for example, in the case of ghosts, ideas etc] of traces of absence as in the presence of [a sense of] absence or the absence of presence. That’s what I’m trying to deal with, at least vaguely.
How have you realised that play between absence and presence musically?
The difference between the electric guitar and the other instruments is dealt with in a way that sharply highlights rather than disguises the difference between them — like putting the guitar in a completely reverb-saturated space while the other instruments are very present, and then switching the guitar to a fully brittle, in-your-face sound while the other instruments are more mellow. These are ways of generating the sense of a trace of something that’s absent or distant from the room, but also actually supremely present.
It’s more than a theory inspired notion then?
Its about the affect that you get when you have an eerie feeling that something is there but it’s not.
Is Hauntology a dialogue between the guitar and the other instruments, between the present and the absent?
There are moments of dialogue, like communicating via Ouija board — the idea that you might commune with a spirit that’s not actually there but nonetheless some kind of interaction takes place.
I wasn’t suggesting it’s a concerto. Tell me about your guitar playing.
LAUGHS No, not a concerto; that would put the pressure on me and my guitar skills. So ideally not. I studied jazz guitar and played a lot of rock music and only in the last year or two have I started playing with Kupka’s Piano even though I’d been composing for them and have been co-Artistic Director for a long time. I’ve recently plucked up the courage to be a new music guitarist.
What other works are in the program?
We’re playing the Australian premiere of a duo for flute and clarinet by Israeli composer Adam Maor. It’s a beautiful, I guess, Giacinto-Scelsi-inspired dialogue between the two instruments with extended techniques and very subtle microtonal interplay between. We’re playing a short very enjoyable piece by US composer Natacha Diels for piccolo and audio playback. It’s quite bizarre and virtuosic. We’re also playing John Luther Adams’ Red Arc / Blue Veil, something of a departure from Kupka’s normal aesthetic, but we thought it would provide an interesting counterpoint to some of the more European Modernist sounds we normally go for.
We’ll also play Adelaide composer Dan Thorpe’s false cognate for flute and electric guitar [hear a version of this other-wordly creation here. Eds] and Olive, a flute duo, composed by Hannah Reardon-Smith, one of our ensemble members. Olive appears on our new album, Braneworlds; it’s a gorgeous, haunting work.
Next week RealTime will preview another of the CCME concerts, Lawrence English’s immersive sound work, Viento: Blizzards of Antarctica and Beyond (10 November).
Top image credit: Kupka’s Piano, photo Jai Farrell
The first busy week of the Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art is over, leaving in its wake recollections of excitement and foyer debate over “experimental” as a valid descriptor, and if so, which works warranted it. The adjectives alternative, hybrid, multidisciplinary, exploratory and experimental have been deployed since the 1970s to distinguish emergent modes of performance from traditional mainstream practices. Experimental currently enjoys common usage, reinforced by some funding body criteria and doctorates in creative practice research.
If a work is to be experimental, we expect it to pose a question and come up with an answer, but a conventional play can also do that. The actual expectation is that the work challenges not only mainstream forms but prior experiments in its own field — modernist or postmodern, in contemporary performance and dance or live art — and makes new the art experience. These days the experimental and the experiential are bound together in a culture forever in love with the new, setting a high bar for any artist who lays serious claim to experimental practice. Any formal regression or standing still will be criticised, as if the artist has failed to shake off the past, their work helplessly haunted by ghosts with their own agenda.
Rhetorical Chorus, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Liveworks 2017, photos by Document Photography
Agathe Gothe-Snape, Rhetorical Chorus
We enter the vast Carriageworks Space 17 via the stairs to find ourselves suspended high above a deep stage and before a huge screen, either side of which are monitors, small at this distance, on which appear in particular the gesturing hands of American artist Lawrence Weiner, often called a conceptualist and who himself creates works of scale and believes art to be a language. Clearly, from Gothe-Snape’s program note, Weiner has been influential for her own practice. Onscreen, he speaks (unheard) and gestures (mostly in close-up). Onstage, two dancers ‘become’ his hands, left (Lizzie Thompson) and right (Brooke Stamp). In solo forays and bursts of synchronicity, the arms of each arc and shaped hands touch — the choreography’s most interesting moments residing in the upper body as much as the lower.
Renowned American singer Joan La Barbara (The Transmitter) sits to one side while The Rhetorical Chorus of six populate the floor in various permutations and vocalise with La Barbara to composer Megan Alice Clune’s gradually intensifying and increasingly layered score in Benjamin Carey’s wraparound sound design. On the screen large regular slabs of colour — a reddish orange and blue — persistently glide, rearrange themselves and ultimately fuse, in part, into a vivid purple. This geometric abstraction, reminiscent of Elsworth Kelly’s Colour Field paintings, seemed an apt pairing with Weiner’s conceptualism.
That’s the picture, but chronologically the work opens grandly, like a movie, with projected credits identifying the participating artists with letters that slip and fall, signifying the instability of language and the difficulty of linguistic representation that we associate with conceptual art (this is writ large in a video sequence within the body of the work with words falling from and returning to columns with fluid ease). We are suddenly lit and performance artist Brian Fuata (The Prologue) appears among us delivering Weiner utterances collated by Gothe-Snape. Fuata speaks the enigmatic text eloquently, but it’s his intensifying dance of arms and hands that makes “gesture become language,” of a kind. In the work’s final passage, La Barbara will sing the same words, “transmitting” them to another aesthetic plane, rendering them quite beautiful. The music reaches a new level of intensity and the hard edge of conceptualism is softened. Or, as Gothe-Snape puts it in her program note, the work’s trajectory “fragments the singular, rhetorical voice, dissolving it into a spectacle of transmission.”
Her purpose, inspired by Weiner when she met him briefly in an airport, is essentially to humanise the artist, to separate him from his artwork, or a standard view of it, by “transforming his rhetorical delivery into new forms.” She writes, “The sense of hierarchy that I had inherited and so willingly accepted — centre/periphery, old/young, male/female — dissolved. This was replaced by the reality of physical, temporal and visceral proximity: hair, bones, skin, sweat, aeroplane smell.” This hierarchy is not necessarily, however, dissolved by The Rhetorical Chorus, a work of such scale that its stage performers remained distant figures and a new form hard to discern. While the dancing was engaging from time to time, the choreography and the deployment of the chorus lacked palpable overall shaping or a sense of collective being — heard in the singing but not otherwise experienced. The middle of the work felt increasingly amorphous, improvisational and distended. I’ve been told that in subsequent performances, the work’s sequence durations, which are directly controlled by Gothe-Snape, were shortened, but this would address little of the work’s spatial and focal problems; a work of this theatrical scale demands a stronger directorial and choreographic vision.
As to its standing in a festival of exploratory art, Rhetorical Chorus is, in terms of its staging and theatricality, in the lineage of what was once American experimental performance, from Cage and Cunningham to Glass and Wilson and Robert Ashley — with whom Joan La Barbara worked — and the image-makers of American contemporary performance, like Mabou Mines. Consequently, Rhetorical Chorus felt familiar. Though the work failed to surprise, I was intrigued by its subject, Weiner, sadly minus the promised “bones, skin, sweat,” and what little I could grasp of him; by the alchemical transformation of rhetoric into song; and by an enduring, confounding, uncommunicative distrust of language. Weiner is still alive, but the ghost of his cool project is no less present, however warmed up by Gothe-Snape. That said, I admire the artist’s ambition — works of scale in contemporary performance are, sadly, rare these days. I thought her staging striking, although overblown (including glossy cinematic framing). I relished the superb singing from La Barbara (why wasn’t her presence trumpeted about Sydney?) and the Chorus and in particular the magnificent mutation of Brian Fuata’s prologue into La Barbara’s finale. Something of Rhetorical Chorus has stayed with me, like a dream memory, a keeping and compacting of the best bits into a memorable if fragile whole, while feeling haunted by a sense of a vision that looks further back than forward.
In her “transmission” experiment, Gothe-Snape has asked if she can ‘dissolve’ the influence of a dominant artworld figure on herself, and presumably her generation, and see him as a fellow skin and bone human. In the work’s own terms, she achieves some of that, but without breaking from the constraints of a conceptualist vision (she well might not want to) and without rigorously addressing an inherited postmodern form.
Christian Thompson, Tree of Knowledge, Liveworks 2017, photo Heidrun Löhr
Christian Thompson, Tree of Knowledge
Tree of Knowledge commences in the dark with a growled, quickfire voiceover, an epic litany of words attached to “Aboriginal” — “black Aboriginal, gay Aboriginal, Nicole Kidman Aboriginal, pussy Aboriginal” and on and on. A reclining Christian Thompson is a barely discernable silhouette in the performance space. On the opening night, a spotlit white Auslan interpreter (Neil Phipps) gestures the words with a brilliant dance of hands, arms and facial expressiveness that gave the stream of utterances added lyricism, heft and humour.
Christian Thompson onstage and off is funny. His remarkable body of photographic and video works too are laced with wit and irony, but there’s an essential seriousness allied with pristine image-making. But in Tree of Knowledge the performance is raw, the images roughly hewn, blackouts clunky, presence casual. Initially ignoring us, Thompson, in a face-obscuring, bulky hoodie, reclines on a bed, smoking and flipping over the pages of a magazine. We’re here on his terms and in his real time.
Thompson turns to a screen above him and activates in turn images from a video album of a white cat observed, a small child the artist greets, queuing for the cash register in a supermarket. He’ll consider one or two of them again. From then on the work comprises a series of discrete scenes in which Thompson peels off layers of hoodies (the designs unreadable in dim light) to reveal a glittering Aboriginal flag top; brutally brushes out his abundant hair as we hear his complex DNA delineated, not a lot of it Aboriginal it would seem; appears on screen singing gloriously in the language of his people; undresses a Boy George Barbie doll, sucks the head and spits it out. And there’s more glorious singing, again untranslated.
Tree of Knowledge is brash and elusive, funny and irritating. It recalled contemporary performance works of the 1980s and 90s that frequently left the audience to make of them what they would, which is why Thompson’s artist talk suggested a work that could give a little more, without becoming too literal, and with some force. The talk revealed that the video album reflected his life in Amsterdam when studying for his MA at DAS Arts in Theatre: an outsider, he identified with the cat which knew nothing of life outside the apartment. When a child, the Boy George doll was allowed him by his father, but not a desired black Barbie doll. When asked about the songs he’d composed, the words not translated for us in performance, Thompson said he simply preferred his listeners, and all Australians, to grow used to hearing Aboriginal languages. Point taken, but even so. Together the performance and talk added up to a more complete experience. Without surrendering his idiosyncratic presence, Thompson needs to work at reducing the distance between himself and his audience and create a form of performance that is as individual as his constantly evolving photographic and video work with its inherent sense of relentless experiment.
It was clear from the talk that Thompson felt the move to the stage and its three-dimensionality liberating. It’s not surprising then that he’ll be making a commissioned VR work over the next 12 months, which will inevitably be, he says, performative, and shot in the western Queensland landscape he grew up in, one location in a peripatetic childhood with an RAAF father.
The Second Woman, Dark Mofo 2017, still from production
Nat Randall, The Second Woman
Nat Randall’s The Second Woman looked like a real experiment. The 100 men who perform in the work over 24 hours, one after the other without rehearsal, just lines learned and instructions absorbed, are lab rats, with Randall effectively the stand-in for the cheese — the chance to perform publicly and for a $50 fee. The audience observe closely each iteration of the brief scene, aided by intense video feed close-ups, get to know the lines and the moves and look for any telling variation — aggression, apparent rule-breaking, overacting, being funny — and what it says about the men individually and collectively. The easiest assumption to make is that most of the men will run with Marty’s indifference to Virginia when it come to the subject of love, which he deflects back to her; the blunt force of the line itself is inescapable. But there is some room to move at the end: the man can choose from the available options to profess or reject love and/or perhaps even refuse the money. Or, while following the rules, possibly texture the scene with palpable affection. A very hard call in tightly constrained conditions. It’s pretty much inevitable that the men’s responses read as callous and sexist. In her Guardian review, “Stunning endurance theatre takes aim at patriarchy,” Stephanie Convery describes, in some detail, most of the men as playing to form, which is what I witnessed in a small sampling of performances.
Is The Second Woman a rigged experiment? In part, and it has to be, but there are other variables. Randall herself is an experimental subject: how will she endure over 24 hours, responding, for example to varying degrees of aggression and, representing womanhood across history, for just how long? She becomes, against the odds, a survivor, a heroic figure, however abject. And there’s the audience, wonderfully patient and observant or variously looking for laughs and too easily mocking the men, or enjoying Virginia’s abjection or her drunken collapse (which man will restrain her fall more than any other?) or relishing the moment when she dismisses Marty, or tensing for his last words.
There’s no doubt that works that fall within the field of relational aesthetics, where the public become participants or co-creators in the moment and outcomes can be unpredictable are ideal for experimentation. I hope Randall will at some time give an account of how she felt the men and the audiences for The Second Woman performed, what the experiment revealed of herself and how it might shape future work.
The ghost of performances past in The Second Woman, resides in Randall’s source, a stage play within a 1977 film written by a male director, John Cassavettes, featuring his wife and collaborator Gena Rowlands, whose remarkably ambivalent smile (which can turn feral or hilarious in an instant) Randall expertly reproduces, especially in exquisite close-up. Postmodern theatre and performance works have mostly tackled familiar classics, making for public dialogue about legacy and hegemony. Few in The Second Woman audience would know the film or the traumatising stage slap which is pivotal to this scene and the whole film, wisely not retained in Randall’s edited version. But for those of us who do know the film, The Second Woman conjures briefly the spirit of the original, but, understandably, with little but a hint of its complexity — felt here in that smile, the falling down and the messy mix of abjection and assertion. I was agreeably spooked by Nat Randall’s dreamlike condensation of a scene from a film that ever haunts me. Randall looks back to the past with little to say about Opening Night, doubtless not her aim, but deploys it to conduct a telling experiment, which might not reveal much more than we already know about male behaviour, but, like any good experiment, in testing volunteers, audience and the artist herself The Second Woman opens up myriad possibilities for performances to come.
Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art: Rhetorical Chorus, lead artist Agatha Gothe-Snape, 19-22 Oct; Tree of Knowledge, artist, performer Christian Thompson, 19-22 Oct; The Second Woman, concept, performer, Nat Randall, script, direction Anna Breckon, Nat Randall, 20-21 Oct; Carriageworks, Sydney
Top image credit: Christian Thompson, Tree of Knowledge, Liveworks 2017, photo Heidrun Löhr
A staticky, granulated landscape, foliage blotched into opaque black. A touch of Australian painter Louise Hearman in the lone car, road off kilter, the whirling trees. Ghost tape, mangled documentary. An artefact of colonisation, corrupted by trauma.
Like the weird VHS tape in Japanese horror film The Ring, Matthew Berka’s sinister, melancholy video, responding to a particular place and the colonialist narratives that have shaped it, has the quality of being sentient in itself, born of terror or rage — or shame. It’s a filmic badland, the kind Ross Gibson talks about in Seven Versions of an Australian Badland: a place that’s become a no-go zone, charged with fear for colonising populations due to deliberately concealed histories of atrocity. Uncanny, alien; the sort of place that can swallow you up.
It’s a piece of found footage where fragments of meaning swim to the surface, coming in the form of intercepted wireless signals, of repeated phrases thrown up on the screen, of the soft strains of convict folksong “Botany Bay,” of abstracted landscape resolving Rorschach-like into faces. The male narration (Bill Peach, maybe?) from some 20th century documentary about Hume and Hovell’s 1824 expedition across the Great Dividing Range tries to assert itself over the landscape only to be intercepted by scratchy, hissing grabs of image and sound, the tape fracturing as though besieged by what has been suppressed.
But this is not merely a haunted historic document. Amid the buzz of imagery imprinted on the tape there’s that one car fuzzily driving through the bush, ultimately vanishing into the video’s pale ether. A warning, perhaps, to us onlookers: drive into the badland at your own risk, for here is emptiness. Here is absence. Katerina Sakkas
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Matthew Berka is a London-based artist and curator from Melbourne who works with film, video and sound. Through audiovisual assemblage he creates speculative films that explore associations between place and the unknown. You can see more of his works on his website.
Matthew Berka, Hume’s Disappointment, Super 8mm transferred to 2.5K video,
colour, b/w, stereo, 11’00
Top image credit: Hume’s Disappointment
Hold on to your plastic safety helmets, fasten your fantastical seat belts, you are in for an epic cosmic ride! Route Dash Niner: Part II, by Re:group Performance Collective, picks up where their 2016 Part I left off. A fast initial recap of Part I’s Earthbound press conference heralds the group’s intention to launch an intergalactic investigation to find the source of a mysterious signal emanating from “the deepest corner of the universe,” somewhere in the vicinity of Absconsus.
Despite the fake media briefing, when the lights go out for the start of Part II, Australia’s first interstellar mission has already departed and the “brave souls” bade a fond farewell to seek contact with alien life forms. Aboard their transport vessel, Hat-Thrower, the valiant crew surf the celestial slipstream of Route 9 toward an uncertain destiny. They stretch the umbilicus of live video feedback to the blue planet for as long as possible and, as reception fades, they keep filming nonetheless. The pacey action of preparing the scenographic tricks, and then shooting live film onstage, is what drives the quirky spatial choreography of this inventive and deftly handled work.
Route Dash Niner Part 2, re:group, photo Jackson Davis
Successfully creating a live performance experience while focused on the camera is no easy feat, but the clunky playfulness the performers employ is what makes this work such a delight. A seemingly random scattering of tables, monitors, shonky modules made of cardboard and styrofoam and a staircase going nowhere transform the wood panelled Wollongong Town Hall into something resembling an early set from Lost in Space. As Hat-Thrower ventures beyond contact with Earth, the question is, can this foolhardy group of space cadets really “trust the universe to take care” of them. Indeed, who or what can they trust at all?
Twelve months into the voyage it is the task of Mark (Rogers), a bearded human-like-machine (part nerd, part spooky hipster embodiment of HAL) to wake the crew, somewhat early, from cryogenic slumber. One of those woken, Carly (Young) is a drily downbeat version of Princess Leia. Together, across the breakfast table, they need to deal with some unexpected technical “anomalies” and the impending threat of collision with a random neutron ball — a wobbling maquette made of aluminium foil.
Hurtling at great speed among comets and arguments, crunching numbers, obscure formulae, floating breakfast cereal and existential angst, the cast deftly slide between tasks as paranoid astronauts and film crew. Employing “acceleration” and a “bypass,” they narrowly miss a suction event into the oblivion of a black hole.
Route Dash Niner Part 2, re:group, photo Jackson Davis
Dizzying sequences and scene cuts abound as live camera feed is projected onto multiple projection screens. Instead of CGI animation Re:group makes hilarious and inventive use of toy spaceships moved by hand across black cloth to simulate space cam footage, creating the impression of an extensive craft by filming in corridors, broom closets and barely concealed behind pillars.
Sitting near the control desk I could see how dextrous the vision switching needs to be and how tight the sequencing of action. At times it’s breathtakingly fast and very impressive for this group of distinguished University of Wollongong grads, who claim never to have made a film before. In the few years since university they have however made some memorable theatre across a number of configurations and artist collectives. These are fresh and unafraid voices.
Re:group gorges with relish on the innate human desire to scout the stars, to hitchhike across the pearly galaxy. They take the piss, they re-invent. They manage convincing scene shifts as one brave soul must make the narratively inevitable excursion outside the craft to repair the engine — with a rubber hose and a hammer. Dripping heavily with irreverent borrowings from and spoof-like tributes to all the sci-fi movie blockbusters, Route Dash Niner Part II conjures moments of suspense and mystery as well as some pathos associated with the loneliness of the long-distance voyager, the abject ennui of one-way travel into the as yet unknowable. The long muffled goodbye. Can you hear me Major Tom…?
The next question is, when will we see Route Dash Niner: Parts I & II staged as an epic double, on tour or programmed into a major festival? Don’t miss the next smoking orbit of this eccentric craft. No doubt, they’ll be back.
Re-group Performance Collective, Route Dash Niner Part II, creator-performers Jackson Davis, James Harding, Tahlee Leeson, Mark Rogers, Steve Wilson-Alexander, Carly Young, director Jackson Davis, camera operators Tahlee Leeson, Harry McGhee, sound design Tom Hogan, lighting design Taryn Brown, producer Merrigong Theatre Company, Wollongong Town Hall, 29 Sept
Top image credit: Carly Young, Route Dash Niner Part 2, re:group, photo Jackson Davis
The 2017 Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music’s Music Writer’s Workshop for emerging critics was conducted by Matthew Lorenzon and Alistair Noble. You’ll find links to Partial Durations reviews by Joel Roberts, Kishore Minifie Ryan, Lewis Ingham and Simone Maurer in Matthew’s overview of the festival below.
Plank Rodeo
The festival began with four of its most virtuosic soloists balancing atop a pile of amplified wooden planks. In Plank Rodeo, Jacob Abela, Matteo Cesari, Jessica Aszodi and Jane Sheldon share each other’s weight, bending and swaying according to a series of performance directions devised by the composer Jenna Lyle. At times, they hold one another as though they are delicate musical instruments; at other times they stomp around the planks, which explode in loud pops and creaks. The planks and bodies are echoed in the frames and figurative paintings adorning the walls of the performance space, a small room in the Bendigo Art Gallery. An opening ceremony of sorts, the inextricably linked sounds of bodies and wooden instruments echo out of the room and throughout the gallery’s collections.
Plank Rodeo, Argonaut, BIFEM 2017, photo Jason Taverner Photography
Already known for her physically demanding performances of contemporary opera and concert music, Aszodi has opened a rich seam of physico-vocal exploration through her partnership with Lyle. Their co-devised work Grafter saw Aszodi and Lyle intertwine into one sound-producing body by muting, resonating and modulating each other’s sounds. Aszodi convened the BIFEM Composer Colloquium around the topic of Author/Agent/Process/Frame, where much was made of the festival’s role in mediating the audience’s experience of such performances. Whereas the BIFEM audience seemed happy to perceive Aszodi and Lyle’s works as primarily musical, this was apparently not necessarily the case in prior showings within visual art and dance contexts.
You who will emerge from the flood
US singer Juliana Snapper and UK composer Andrew Infanti’s underwater opera You who will emerge from the flood continued the theme of vocal exploration. The modular work incorporates video, pre-recorded audio and live singing above and below water (see excerpts from earlier productions). BIFEM got the budget version, which is performed in a dunk tank, but the work can also be performed in a swimming pool with the audience’s ears submerged. The context informs the work so profoundly that I doubt one can really compare the two. Atop the tank in a black dress and with long blonde hair extensions, Snapper cuts a carnivalesque figure.
A dunk tank is an instrument of ritual humiliation and frames Snapper as an object of sexualised humiliation. However, she is not dunked, but enters it willingly, lying on the platform and singing just above the water before slipping in as if as an afterthought. As she explores the tank with her voice, a close-up video feed is projected onto two large screens. Snapper forms striking and beautiful tableaux, as when, floating face down, curled in a ball, the hair extensions protruding from between her legs fan out symmetrically. Her movements become gradually more frantic and a video appears of two men repeatedly holding her underwater, letting her rise to the surface briefly to breathe. In the tank the power relationship is more nuanced. She dives to the bottom, holding herself underwater by pressing her foot into the cage above. The audience feel empathy with Snapper, holding its breath as she dives. However powerful the performance as a work of theatre, the phenomenon of underwater singing sounds exactly as you might expect.
Juliana Snapper, Illud Etian Concert, BIFEM 2017, photo Jason Taverner Photography
Illud Etiam
Strip the stage back to a music stand, four speakers and some atmospheric lighting, and Juliana Snapper is able to sing with her full terrestrial force, accompanied on electronics by Miller Puckette (inventor of the ubiquitous Max/MSP software). Their program provided a panorama of possible interactions between the voice and electronics from the unobtrusive background of Philippe Manoury’s En écho to the fire and brimstone of his Illud Etiam, after which the concert was titled. In a simple but powerful gesture, Snapper lights a match as bells toll at the end of this arcane work. The small flame seems to banish all the water of the previous night.
Argonaut String Quartet
The almost universal appeal of the string quartet makes the Argonaut String Quartet’s program a favourite each year. This year saw the premieres of new works by Samuel Smith and Caterina Turnbull next to works by Clara Iannotta and Anahita Abbasi. I wasn’t sure whether Turnbull’s quartet was animal, vegetable or mineral. Eminulos (a Latin adjective describing a slight projection) was commissioned by Julian Burnside QC, and is a menagerie of bird-like chirps and call-and-response. The repeated gestures fork and grow organically between the instruments. On the other hand, the stratification of instrumental effects folding into one another gives the sense of aeons of geological activity. Smith’s BIFEM Box Office Commission, Dead Oceans, is a dense microtonal flow of harmonics, rocketing glissandi and wood-on-string death rattles. Nothing stays still, but the audience catches glimpses of harmonic repose that founder and disappear from sight. While the composer claims the work is only tangentially related to climate change, it is one of the most devastating environmental works of recent years.
Matthew Horsely
BIFEM’s coveted solo recital series was back with concerts by Matthew Horsley on uillean pipes, Mauricio Carrasco on classical guitar and Anna Kwiatkowska on violin. The odd one out in this list is clearly Horsley, a proponent of contemporary music for the Irish bagpipes. His performance of Liam Flenady’s A Book of Migrations for electronics and uillean pipes involved the composer wayfinding through Horsley’s own catalogue of almost 200 fingerings on the instrument. The microtonal part is supplemented with electronics and readings in medieval English and Gaelic from the Seamus Heaney poem Buile Shuibhne. Kwiatkowska’s survey of contemporary works for violin by Polish composers was a welcome link between present and past in a festival that focuses on the bleedingly new.
Kupka’s Piano
This festival saw the Victorian debut of Brisbane’s Kupka’s Piano, the most exciting contemporary music ensemble north of Sydney. Their program included Elliott Gyger’s first thoroughly microtonal work, a double concerto for flutes entitled Fray. So finely managed were the microtones that the piece did not sound very microtonal at all. Instead one was lost in the thoughtful and restrained atmosphere as Gyger carefully worked his way through all the possible permutations of two players and bass flute, alto flute, treble flute and piccolo.
Matteo Cesari performing with the Argonaut Ensemble, photo Jason Tavener
The Argonaut Ensemble
Never a festival to shy away from political or controversial works, BIFEM’s house band The Argonaut Ensemble performed provocative works by the Israeli composer Adam Maor and the Argentinian composer Fernando Garnero. Maor’s BEYROUTH15072006 takes as its inspiration the recorded improvisation of the Lebanese trumpeter Mazen Kerbaj during the bombing of Beirut in 2006. The trumpet is here transformed into the trombone played by Charles MacInnes, which slides anxiously among samples of bombs and car alarms from the original recording.
Garnero described Neon Pig as a work “with no historical depth,” but he began the concert with a speech about the disappearance of the indigenous rights activist Santiago Maldonado. It was particularly alarming given he was one of over 30,000 people “disappeared” during the Dirty War of 1974–83. At the end of the oinking and snorting work, Garnero stood up from the electronics desk at the back of the stage and ‘withdrew’ each performer one by one with a grasping hand gesture. Far from a work with no historical depth, in this performance context the work was a warning against ahistoricity.
More BIFEM
An endless stream of events including the Monash Composers’ Concert, the tape duo Sultan Hagavik, Erkki Veltheim’s late night Ganzfeld Experiment, a concert and forum dedicated to the Australian composer Keith Humble (1927-1995), Miller Puckette’s computer music workshop, a concert for massed clarinets, an electroacoustic listening room, a children’s concert by the percussionist Madi Chwasta, the Music Writers’ Workshop (linked liberally here) and a pre-concert analytical lecture from the Melbourne Music Analysis Summer School (by yours truly) ensured that festival goers were both entertained and exhausted throughout the weekend.
This year’s concert program was perhaps most interesting within the context of Australia’s wider contemporary music culture. Despite the privileged place of percussion music in Australia and all the clichés of sports-loving Australians, contemporary performers remain stubbornly glued to their instruments. The occasional scored physical gesture or sprinkle of dramaturgy usually suffices to signal a boundary-breaking work. I don’t think anyone really minds an excellent performance stock-still in front of a music stand, but if you’re going to move you might as well somersault with a partner, jump in a water tank, or make an overt political statement.
BIFEM 2017, Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music, Bendigo, 1-4 Sept
Top image credit: Juliana Snapper, You who will emerge from the flood, photo Jason Taverner Photography
The plain fact is that a lot of what we call independent theatre in Melbourne is actually subsidised by one government arts funding program or another. Not always well subsidised, but subsidised nonetheless. This is widely known and not generally regarded as incongruous. It has been the reality for many, many years.
So, no, the word “independent” does not imply a commitment to financial self-sufficiency. In the Australian context it in fact implies dependence. For most independent theatre makers, subsidies are not only desirable but necessary. And everyone, it seems, or practically everyone, is comfortable with this. Within the industry, anxieties about grant reliance and application fatigue are focused more on the inadequacy of available funds and the bureaucracy associated with their administration. The importance of subsidies is not in question.
Enter local government. Despite intensive recent debate about federal and state government support — or lack of support — for independent artists, the important role of local government has gone largely unremarked. This is curious because local governments, which are only relatively autonomous from state governments, are in many ways the perfect friend for the independent performing arts sector. And over the last 20 years they’ve been getting a whole lot friendlier.
Take the City of Darebin, in Melbourne’s inner north. In addition to dealing with roads, rates and rubbish, Darebin also has its own arts agenda, part of a broader cultural engagement plan for a more vibrant, more innovative local economy. And independent theatre and dance artists have a significant role in this. Since 2013, the council has funded the Darebin Arts Speakeasy, a performing arts program at the Northcote Town Hall that develops and presents new work from Melbourne’s independent performing arts community.
Speakeasy has partnered with many leading independent companies and artists, and has also provided an opportunity for new artists to show their work in a professional context. Their 2017 season is typical of the kind of work they support, opening with productions by two stalwart independent companies. First, Elbow Room presented Niche, a new play created by Eryn Jean Norvill and Emily Tomlins. And then Little Ones Theatre, led by director Stephen Nicolazzo gave us an adaptation of Christos Tsiolkas’ Merciless Gods.
Underworld, Sarah Aiken, Rebecca Jensen, Darebin Arts Speakeasy, photo Gregory Lorenzutti
Underworld
Then, in September, there was a new dance-theatre work by Sarah Aiken and Rebecca Jensen called Underworld, described as a companion piece to the enormously messy and involving OVERWORLD (2014, reviewed here and here). Underworld translates an obscure Australian thriller called Long Weekend (1978) into an agitated, at times frantic, procession of shadowy images and fragmentary scenes. The movie tells the story of a couple who are attacked for no obvious reason by an army of demoniac marsupials while on a camping trip somewhere north of Sydney. It’s a badly made film, but the idea of malevolent natural forces thrumming beneath a picturesque landscape is intriguing.
In Underworld, the four dancers manage both to parody the trashier aspects of the film and also to amplify its supernatural thrills. The performance maps fairly closely to the film, responding scene by scene, beginning to end, but gives everything a darkly surreal twist. It’s certainly a more concentrated theatrical experience than OVERWORLD. But while the dramaturgy is tighter, I feel as if Underworld is too restrained, lacking something of the hugger-mugger madness and originality that made OVERWORLD so irresistible. It seems less ambitious, less motivated and overall less energetic.
The Sky is Well Designed
Also in September, the Speakeasy presented two shows as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival. The first was The Sky Is Well Designed by Fabricated Rooms, an intimate work of eco-critical science fiction written and directed by Patrick McCarthy. This is the story of two scientists, played by Emily Tomlins and Ben Pfeiffer, who journey to a remote corner of the world in order to establish a dialogue with the Earth’s atmosphere.
This is a serene but melancholy work, brightening at the edges, full of subtle implications suggesting a great variety of ideas about our relationship with the environment. It alternates between meandering conversations about life, death and the mysteries of the cosmos and musical passages featuring unique instruments designed by Robert Jordan. These instruments are the devices by which the scientists attempt to make contact with the Earth — to speak, to explain and to beg for help.
It’s a polished piece of theatre with many thought-provoking details, but I don’t admire McCarthy’s so-called hyper-realistic writing style: to me, all those phatic asides and mumbled circumlocutions sound like the most unnatural kind of prattle.
Too Ready Mirror, Darebin Arts Speakeasy, photo Greta Costello
Too Ready Mirror
The second Fringe Festival show was Too Ready Mirror, directed by Rachel Baring and written by Jamaica Zuanetti. This is a sharply intelligent play: political, confessional, poetic and formally daring. It has a strong feminist theme — announced in the title, a quote from Simone de Beauvoir — but also an earnest personal quality that gives it a kind of understated authenticity.
There are three separate narrative strands that come together in a tight collage-like structure. There’s the real-life story of Nell Gwynne, English actress and royal mistress who was famous during the Restoration. There’s a young couple living in Melbourne who squabble and fight and tear each other down. And then, in the not-so-distant future, there are two students at an ominous-seeming institute for girls.
It’s a play that makes visible a web of labile connections between gender, sex and class, and points to the ways in which these constrain our everyday behaviours and interactions. I taught Zuanetti for a semester at the Victorian College of the Arts and I’m impressed with how far this play has come since I first encountered it at a reading almost two years ago. This is her first play and has many of the flaws of a first play, but this is a more than encouraging debut.
The production itself is very sleek and slick, albeit the tempo being a bit on the slow side. Indeed, all the productions I saw as part of the Speakeasy season were very slick. It is not simply that they were artfully produced. They also had a cool, polished quality to them that seems almost – dare I say it – mainstage.
Again I find myself worrying about that word “independent.” I’m not talking about the money. I’m talking about the ethos. The look of the work. The ambition. The politics. Do the works featured in the Speakeasy program suggest a relationship of alterity with main-stage tastes? Would we be surprised to see these works, say, at the Malthouse Theatre? Or even — God forbid — the Melbourne Theatre Company? If not, well, what value does the word independent have? Is the rhetoric of independent now obsolete? Is it time to put it back on the shelf next to alternative and experimental?
Perhaps a more appropriate term for the kind of dance and theatre at the Speakeasy is “emerging.” No doubt this observation is belated. Looking back, I think the signal moment was probably the Melbourne Theatre Company’s three Neon seasons (2013-2015). Billed as a festival of independent theatre, this short-lived program in fact announced the end of independent theatre. It was an acknowledgement that separateness from large cultural institutions was no longer regarded by theatre makers as something in itself desirable. It was no longer us and them. The Neon Festival was the dream of a single integrated performing arts ecology with clear career pathways from the fringe to the centre, gleaming like emerald-coloured bike lanes.
“Emerging” means not yet completely institutionalised, but oriented in that direction. It has little to do with age or experience. It is a relative term. Some theatre makers will always be emerging. It is worth pointing out that both Elbow Room and Little Ones Theatre participated in the Neon program. Are they still emerging? Can we describe them as stalwarts of Melbourne’s emerging theatre scene? Why not? Deferral of the desire for institutional acceptance bestows even greater significance on the dream of what it would be like to work with — or to work for — a major cultural institution.
Anyway, that’s what I saw at the Northcote Town Hall. Emerging artists. The Speakeasy project gives artists a taste of what institutional acceptance feels like. And it shows them, and their audiences what their work might look like if it were produced on a main stage. In this way the Darebin Speakeasy feels like a rote perpetuation of that Neon dream.
This article is a review of two fringe shows and a dance work that happened to be subsidised by a local government organisation. It is not a developed reflection on the role of government subsidy in the performing arts. And it is not a proper survey of the independent scene. I offer it only as a provocation, a starting point for thinking about the discourse of creativity and the growing significance of local governments in shaping that discourse.
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Darebin Arts, Speakeasy, Underworld, 1-9 Sept; The Sky is Well Designed, 15-28 Sept; Too Ready Mirror, 15-28 Sept; Northcote Town Hall, Melbourne
Top image credit: The Sky is Well Designed, Fabricated Rooms, Darebin Arts Speakeasy, photo Greta Costello
Early this year, artist Georgie Pinn was awarded a three-month residency at The Cube, in Queensland University of Technology’s Science and Engineering Centre, to develop and exhibit her interactive artwork Echo, which was shown in QUT’s Robotronica. The Cube brings together researchers from the STEM disciplines and the Creative Industries.
Echo is a singular experience of interpersonal portraiture and narrative that attempts to engender responses of empathy and identification. In a media culture dominated by sound bites, tweets, Instas and Snapchats, Echo swims against the tide, revealing deeper potentials for human and transhuman interaction.
Taking a form similar to the photo-booth, the work links back to older technologies — to an era of pre-digital images where photos were arguably more intimate, precious and less disposable. Photo-booths were designed for taking official headshots for passports or other identification documents, but were popularly used for taking photos of friends and couples play-acting and pranking. This booth calls herself Echo and offers to “help you connect.”
Leaping from the daggy analogue past to an AI future, you sit down and touch the screen as instructed. Echo takes your photograph, placing it centre screen, and brings up a side menu of other people’s faces. When selected, each still portrait then plays as a short film, telling a highly personal story of an important life experience. The booth is now a confessional, linking back to even older technologies and social relations. The interface’s aesthetic mix of popular entertainment, official surveillance, retro and sci-fi is tightly controlled, seamless and original.
While a film plays, Echo gradually maps your face onto the narrator’s, so that by the time the story is finished it is still your own face, but slightly distorted by the speaker seen behind. You select other characters, all quite different in age, race, gender and appearance with no hint of what their story might be. Each time your face meshes with theirs, as though listening were a transformative act of absorption. The stories are intimate in nature, often dealing with difficult life experiences that relate to the person’s appearance, including experiences of discrimination. These are stories that would only be told to a trusted friend, someone who would listen with sympathy and understanding. The meshed portraits are uncanny and watching yourself tell their story, wear their account, is unnerving.
Echo, Georgie Pinn, photo courtesy the artist
Echo works to suspend judgement and urge reflection, prompting thoughts such as, ‘What if this story were mine?’, ‘what if this had happened to me?’ The filmed subjects are not the characters of a game, their stories are not clues for a puzzle-solving exercise, they are not your friends or part of your social circle. Echo is a relational archive that can potentially teach the value of intimacy, the value of listening to those unlike ourselves in a way that allows us to experience that difference safely. Such acts of identification, however mediated, may expand identity formation and build tolerance. Pinn’s use of technology may potentially foster a deeper sense of inquiry into what it is to be human.
The next phase of the work is more playful. In real time, sections of your face on screen can be selected and replaced by the facial portraits in Echo’s gallery. These include more characters than the narrators, and even animals. The hybrid portraits animate in real time by mirroring your facial movements through facial tracking technology. When the portrait play is completed, there is an option to upload the portrait to Facebook. This stage of the work is perhaps not as successful as the first, but it nevertheless continues to build the interpersonal, allowing the viewer to feel the slippage between identity and appearance, raising awareness of the constructed and fluid nature of both. The mirroring and tracking technology intensifies the experience of the uncanny and turns the viewer’s gaze inwards via self-portraiture. Echo’s dynamic unpacking of self and other pivots beautifully around the stranger without and the stranger within.
Interestingly when Pinn was developing the work, she initially produced the confessional stories as fictional narratives, based on real accounts, written and acted with QUT drama students. However, this proved a degree of mediation too far. In the end she approached her friends to participate, drawing on an existing platform of rapport and trust. Echo certainly relies on the authenticity of the first-hand accounts, but it also succeeds through Pinn’s masterful editing which makes the accounts sharp, compelling and sometimes confronting. You are not being asked to bond with these individuals; their stories are for you, to bear and understand, and that emphasis offers a critical perspective on the nature of media communications. The mediascape is undoubtedly becoming more intensely personalised and predictive, as consumers are profiled and targeted ever more closely and competitively. Echo pursues an alternative line of transhuman communications, deeply invested in a feminist ethics of care. It is Pinn’s intention to keep developing Echo and build the archive of intimate confessions. Perhaps Echo might one day become a real AI, directing us to the stories that really open our eyes, saving us from narcissism’s curse.
QUT, Robotronica: Georgie Pinn, Echo, commissioned by The Cube; The Cube,Brisbane, 20 Aug
Beth Jackson is an independent arts writer and curator based in Brisbane. She is the owner and Director of Artfully, an arts consultancy with a focus on art for the public realm.
Top image credit: Echo, Georgie Pinn, photo courtesy the artist
This week we look forward to the Wired Open Day Festival with its art and agriculture synthesis, including Cat Jones’ participatory, diet-changing edible insect installation (image above), and we complete our extensive coverage of a thrilling 2017 OzAsia Festival with, among others, reviews of works that forecast radical change, featuring a tragic virtual pop star in The End and an autonomous singing android in Scary Beauty. Also this week, more change: Experimenta: Make Sense, an exhibition of the latest in experimental media art, and Soft Centre, a successful foray into expanding the creative dimensions of an electronic music event. And we look forward to Perth’s ever provocative Totally Huge New Music Festival, which includes a sublime 100-performer percussion work. All change for the better. Now, we’re off to Performance Space’s Liveworks. Keith and Virginia
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Top image credit: Cat Jones, Insecta Delecta, Wired Open Day, promotional image courtesy the artist and Wired Lab
Tucked away in the rear of Experimenta’s current installation of its International Triennial of Media Art is a modest video installation titled Shoum. Created by Dutch artist, Katarina Zdjelar, the viewer first encounters a blank screen while Tears for Fears’ “Shout” plays on the soundtrack. Hands appear, writing in a notebook, an old iPod player occasionally in shot. The hands, we are told by the didactic panel adjacent to the video screen, belong to two Serbian men who speak no English. They are transcribing the song’s words (“Shout, shout, let it all out”) phonetically: ŚHON ŚHON LAJDI O LAU.
The words are not a translation of what is being sung but a new language based instead on a perception of what is being heard. It is an elegant enactment of an idea Jonathan Crary describes in his Techniques of the Observer (1990). Writing of the attempts by philosopher Maine de Biran (1766–1824) “to grasp the density and the immediacy of the ‘sens intim’ [‘inward sense’],” Crary notes that de Biran “began to blur the identity of the very inwardness that was his original object. He employed the term “coenesthesis” [“coenesthesia”] to describe “one’s immediate awareness of the presence of the body in perception” and “the simultaneity of a composite of impressions inhering in different parts of the organism.” In other words, de Biran and others, were coming to see that a new multilayered and temporally dispersed perception made “a soul reduced to pure receptivity” an impossibility. Subjective observation, Crary continues, is not the inspection of an inner space or a theatre of representations. Instead, observation is increasingly exteriorised; the viewing body and its objects begin to constitute a single field on which inside and outside are confounded.
Sense, in this sense, is co-constituted. It is from this place that Make Sense as an exhibition mounts its first question. How do we, or can we, make sense of the world? Works like Anna Munster and Michele Barker’s Pull play with our sense of temporality, forcing us to rethink our experiences as they relate to time through our immersion in the instance of the breaking of a wave overhead. One large screen slows down the moment, drawing the experience out over roughly seven minutes. The other screen renders the GPS-tracked movements of the underwater cinematographer as a 3D animation. Both renderings simultaneously resemble and dissemble that moment when a force of nature renders the body mute against it. The work is both sublime and serene. It is also a subtle commentary on the relations between our own inflated human sense of time and the magnitude of geospatial time at a time of ecological crisis.
Keith Armstrong’s collaboration with Luke Lickfold and Matthew Davis, Eromocene (Age of Loneliness), takes its title from the work of Harvard biologist EO Wilson who coined the term in his book The Meaning Of Human Existence (2014). Noting that “Earth relates to the universe as the second segment of the left antenna of an aphid sitting on a flower petal in a garden in Teaneck, NJ, for a few hours this afternoon,” Wilson’s view of the fate of humanity as no more or less important than any other species is given life in Eromocene as an ephemeral, chimeric projection in a totally blackened space. The work asks us to consider a world of perception without human perception because humanity has ceased to exist. It is delicate and beautiful and reminiscent of something made from smoke and mirrors.
Similarly mesmerising is Scale Free Network’s A Hierarchy of Eddies, an art-science collaboration staged to capture the materiality of turbulence. Small foam balls, like those that endlessly escape from bean bags, are housed in a large glass box. Two fans, placed at different heights from the floor, engage intermittently, sending the balls into the characteristic whorls that make turbulence both an essential but mysterious force in nature from blood flow to tornadoes to the smoke rising from a cigarette. Changing patterns of light capture the movement, rendering it improbably beautiful. Unlike other works in the exhibition, A Hierarchy of Eddies celebrates perception without any consequent demand to make sense of it in the vernacular use of the expression.
Other works play less directly with our perceptions and more with perceived norms of communication. In The Thought Leader, Liz Magic Laser takes the now somewhat prosaic form of the ubiquitous TED talk and twists it into a bizarre and menacing visual spectacle. The video features a young boy delivering a monologue adapted from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novella Notes from the Underground (1864). He delivers his lines with the same idealistic blandness that characterises many such performances while his audience remains quietly hostile and unmoved. Only when he encourages them to poke their tongues out at him do they become animated and the initially child-like gesture grows more and more grotesque.
Jane Gauntlett’s In My Shoes: Intimacy takes a similarly familiar technological form and subverts it into an uncanny encounter. Wearing a Samsung Gear VR headset, the viewer is invited into three intimate scenarios — two strangers, two comrades and two lovers — alongside another viewer similarly equipped with a headset. Once inside the virtual space, you encounter the other person as a character who is engaged in a dialogue with the character you are inhabiting. What is surprising is that there is not that much to see. The development of virtual reality has been so heavily invested in visual mimesis that the absence of a sense of visual immersion is disconcerting. The connection to the world is predominantly auditory as you try to follow both the internal commentary of your own character alongside the often awkward interactions they are having with the other person present in the space. Given the confessions of Occular Rift’s creator, Palmer Lucky, that VR is still a long way from being able to craft stories using the technology, Gauntlett’s foray into this space is intriguing.
Materialisation is a constant connective theme in the exhibition. In some works, we are reminded of the material basis for our perceptions while in others we are able to see materialised worlds that alter our perceptions. Judy Watson’s two works — The Names of Places and The Keepers — both render visible the repressed and repressive histories of European colonisation. The Names of Places is a web-based work which seeks to collaboratively document the massacres of Aboriginal people following the invasion of this continent. The Keepers documents the artist’s encounter with stolen Aboriginal artifacts now housed in the British Museum. As the camera moves over the objects, the viewer is invited to contemplate what it means for them to be far from their own place and what it would mean for them to be returned. The violence of their removal from an ancient, living and continuous human culture is made stark in the sterility of the images of blue plastic gloved hands moving across them.
There are many other works in Make Sense deserving of comment (19 in all) but not time and space to make sense of them all. Experimenta continues to strive to make these kinds of works and ideas accessible and interesting to a wider public. In an age of such austerity, as it relates to arts funding, it’s refreshing to see that some attempt is being made to keep Australia’s rich media arts legacy alive and to showcase artists who help us make sense of what is an increasingly fragile and chaotic world.
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Experimenta Make Sense: International Triennial of Media Art, artists Robert Andrew, Keith Armstrong with Luke Lickfold and Matthew Davis, Ella Barclay, Michele Barker and Anna Munster, Briony Barr, Steve Berrick, Antoinette J. Citizen, Adam Donovan and Katrin Hochschuh, Lauren Edmonds, Matthew Gardiner, Jane Gauntlett, Liz Magic Laser, Jon McCormack, Lucy McRae, Gail Priest, Scale Free Network: Briony Barr and Gregory Crocetti, Andrew Styan, Judy Watson, and Katarina Zdjelar; RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2 Oct-11 Nov
Lisa Gye teaches media and social impact at Swinburne University. She is also a member of Memefest, an international collective of activists, artists and academics who are interested in socially responsive communication and art.
Top image credit: Hierarchy of Eddies, Scale Free Network, image courtesy the artists and Experimenta
Tos Mahoney, Artistic Director of Western Australia’s Tura and its annual Totally Huge New Music Festival has come up with a highly attractive program for the 2017 event, revealing the extraordinary range of today’s contemporary music-making and featuring works with wide appeal. Leading American composer Anne LeBaron will be in residence; Melbourne’s award-winning Speak Percussion will present their compellingly crafted creation Fluorophone and lead the 100-piece performance of American composer Michael Pisaro’s A wave and waves. These are works that will be as exciting to watch as to listen to and, in A wave and waves, to sit amid.
I spoke with Mahoney by phone, asking him about the choices he’s made. He’s emphatically open to chance, telling me, “the process ends up being curatorially improvisational. Taking clear intention out of it ends up making for more interesting connections and juxtapositions not necessarily planned for.” The important thing, he says, is that each of the choices “has its own story.” I ask what the story is behind the programming of LeBaron, whose operatic works, easily accessed on YouTube, have impressed me with their inventiveness and accessibility.
Anne LeBaron, photo courtesy Totally Huge New Music Festival
Anne LeBaron
Mahoney explains that he’d long known of LeBaron’s work as an expander of harp technique and as a composer, but that the connection with her came through a young Perth musician, experimental harpist Catherine Ashley who, he says, “has been developing her own work with electronics and improvisation with the harp and has worked with Tura both last year and this on Wreck projects in the outback, including the recent one in Warmun with Jon Rose [read about Wreck in a forthcoming edition of RealTime]. Out of that collaboration with Catherine we thought it would be fantastic to invite Anne to Perth for the whole festival to be artist in residence. She’s not just a harpist but a composer, thinker and philosopher. She was the obvious choice for the keynote for the festival conference as well.”
Mahoney’s looking forward to LeBaron’s semi-improvised Concerto for Active Frogs, which is for a large ensemble (with Perth’s iMprov Collective), vocalist and field recordings of frogs. (LeBaron’s concern over the widespread reduction of frog populations and their diversity led to the making of a music theatre piece titled Croak, or The Last Frog.)
Speak Percussion, Fluorophone
A festival highlight is bound to be Speak Percussion’s Fluorophone in which music and visual components strikingly synthesise in works composed for what is effectively a quite theatrical installation using an array of percussion instruments, fluorescent lights, lasers and matches too. Video excerpts, Gail Priest’s review of the performance at SONICA and an interview with Speak Percussion provide ample encouragement for audiences to experience this ensemble’s radical expansion of the realm of percussion.
A wave and waves
That realm is huge in a Speak Percussion-led performance of American composer Michael Pisaro’s A wave and waves, a work for 100 musicians in which, writes the ensemble, “the audience sits among the performers to experience the music as if part of an ocean of sound. Colossal percussive waves are created by layers of imperceptibly soft sounds — sandpaper on stone, seeds falling on glass, bowed bells — forming a textural landscape bristling with detail.”
Mahoney tells me that “after two full weekends of rehearsal,” the work will be performed at the Midland Railway Workshops, an ideal place for a work of this scale. He explains that A wave and waves is not conducted as such: instructions are followed from large screens. A musician who participated in the Australian premiere at the 2015 Melbourne Festival, has written a vivid account of what it feels like to be part of this musical organism.
Ross Bolleter, Quarry Music
One of WA’s most significant musical figures is Ross Bolleter whose works with and for ruined pianos are legendary. In what he says will be his final appearance, he’ll perform Quarry Music with pianos “in surround and with other sounds,” says Mahoney. “The work is inspired by the Claremont Dump, which no longer exists but is the site of new sports arenas and the state swimming centre, and the gas from the dump provides energy for the sporting activity.” Quarry Music will be recorded and placed in the West Australian New Music Archive.
Rick Snow & Chris Tonkin, Daybew
New Orleans artist Rick Snow, another international guest of the festival, has been working with Chris Tonkin, Head of Composition at the University of Western Australia, on a most unusual project, Daybew, which promises to generate a new music album at every push of a button. As to how this device, named Mississippi Swan works, the festival’s program notes give some indication: “Beginning with the notion of ‘originality as synthetic’— a fusion of existing ideas and information — the artists implement custom text-to-speech algorithms, assembling lyrical material from tweets and news feeds originating in Mississippi Swan’s home cities of New Orleans and Perth. This vocal content is accompanied by algorithmically generated rhythmic and harmonic musical structures derived from popular electronic music idioms.”
Callum G’Froerer, photo courtesy the artist and Totally Huge New Music Festival
More Totally Huge
For a very different take on the use of information, in a concert titled DDC: Glitch, Japanese artists Kouhei Harada (electronics), Mitsuaki Matsumoto (prepared biwa) and Shohei Sasagawa (experimental video) creatively embrace the loss of data and its effects. Mahoney tells me that these artists have a strong connection with the Perth ensemble Decibel whose own concert Electronic Concerto will feature co-composed works for solo electronic musicians and ensemble, including one by Catherine Ashley. Callum G’Froerer, a Western Australian composer and trumpet player based in Berlin since 2015, will present a recital of new electro-acoustic works featuring the double-bell trumpet, “an instrument never seen on Australian stages.” A program note explains, “A second bell allows for graceful transitions between different tone colours, new methods of articulation, and for allowing acoustic and electronically processed systems to occur simultaneously within the one instrument.”
Gathering to face the big questions
The festival conference, provocatively titled Embracing the Irrational: The Sonic Arts in a Post-Factual World, says Mahoney, “runs for a full day with Anne LeBaron as keynote speaker and about 15 papers being presented across the day.” Speakers include Adelaide’s Melody Watson and Dan Thorpe whose paper, “A Discourse Analysis of Wikipedia’s LGBT Composers Category,” posits them as “Candidates for Deletion.”
“Without being clichéd, Keith,” says Tos Mahoney of Totally Huge, “it’s the notion of a festival being much more than all the individual parts that counts. It is about that gathering, that energy, that exchange, the things that come out of a festival like this as much as the actual events and performances themselves.”
Top image credit: Fluorophone, Speak Percussion, photo Robert McFadzean
In several RealTime articles over the last few years I’ve bemoaned the lack of a Sydney-based experimental electronic music festival of scale. We have been fortunate to have Brisbane-based Lawrence English presenting Open Frame at Carriageworks ove the past two years and the large attendances illustrate that there is an audience, but there is still the issue of the right multi-room venue and, more importantly, the right promoter willing to take the risk on such a venture.
Then a few months ago word got around of an ambitious all-day festival slated for Casula Powerhouse in Sydney’s South-West. The Soft Centre producers publicised the event as taking inspiration from international activities such as Unsound, Berlin Atonal and Norbergfestival. As I haven’t haven’t had the pleasure I can’t make a comparison but I can say that Soft Centre was a vibrant festival with an impressive selection of local, interstate and international artists from various bands of the experimental spectrum, with a clear emphasis on cross-disciplinary collaboration and multi-sensory stimulation.
Meagan Streader installation, Soft Centre Festival, photo Charl Anfield
Inhabiting the whole of Casula Powerhouse, one of Sydney’s first industrial art space conversions, Soft Centre offered two music stages. The cavernous Turbine Hall was home to the more large-scale dance-oriented acts such as Made Up Sound, Simona, Various Asses, hndsm. and Harold (beyond the scope of my review but who certainly had the crowd moving) as well as performance/music collaborations. The smaller Hopper Gallery offered the experimental, less party-focused artists, or at least it was so in the earlier stages of the day, getting progressively more beatsy as the evening progressed.
The gallery adjoining the Turbine Hall was handed over to visual artist Meagan Streader. Her installation Response VI (Partition II) comprised long lengths of electroluminescent wires tracing the perpendiculars of the space to create a series of suggested rooms and corridors. It was an elegant and immersive intervention into the site, well suited to the dance party context. In a smaller chamber by the side of the stage was ASTERISM’s Desire//Loss, a four-screen video installation showing large glowing objects, reminiscent of both magnified cells and floating asteroids. These masses pulsated and changed colour with shifting levels of saturation, subtly interacting with the sounds floating in from the main stage. Best experienced lying on the huge bed made of Koala mattresses, this space served as a very popular chill-out room.
Asterism Desire Loss, Soft Centre Festival, photo Jordan Munns
Another light installation formed the set-piece for the Hopper Gallery. Hyper Reelist’s Helixis featured a floor-to-ceiling strand of DNA that appeared to be sound responsive. It served as ambient lighting for the music acts as well as holding its own as an impressive luminous sculpture. Given the experimental nature of the acts in this space, this was where I felt most at home. The impressive sound system allowed the complex textural and interlocking rhythms of Jasmine Guffond’s music, drawing on her recent impressive release, Tracings, to really reach full intensity. Lawrence English’s dense curtains of sound fully bathed the audience who lay supine on the concrete floor, offering more tonal ascension than previous performances of his I’ve experienced. Half High’s set presented some satisfying semi-chaos, a kind of sonic stream of consciousness, replete with whispered poesy and unexpected noise ruptures. The non-metric tone of the space started to shift with the mesmeric minimalist beat studies of Matthew Brown that got the crowd moving. This transition continued through the set by Makeda, a hybrid between DJ set and delicate textural electronica, so by the time DIN (Rainbow Chan & Moon Holiday) took to the stage, the dial was well and truly turned to party. (Alas my end of winter illness meant I could not stay to experience it all.)
House of VnHoly, Soft Centre Festival, photo Sean Foster
While the Hopper Gallery was my natural habitat, I popped into the Turbine Hall occasionally to get a feel for the full flavour and scale of the event and to check out the specially commissioned performance collaborations. Catching only the second half of The House of Vnholy & waterhouse collaboration, I missed how the semi-naked body became slathered in white clay, but the subsequent performance image of the black-sheathed archeress with beams of light scattering from the tube of reflective material covering her head, was particularly powerful. The moody reverb-drenched tones of waterhouse were well-matched to the neo-gothic image-making.
Hossein Ghaemi and Jannah Quill’s collaboration also made for some strong visual stimulation. Inhabiting the floor of the space, Ghaemi’s choir wore hooded white robes with neon-light trimmings and the accompanying dancers were in bronze spangled dresses and veils. The choir’s ecstatic dronescape, and occasional flute bursts were difficult to hear in the mix with Jannah Quill’s hard-edged alterna-techno, but a certain level of ironic ritual ecstasy was unlocked.
Hossein Ghaemi Choir, Soft Centre Festival, photo Sean Foster
Deliberately less ecstatic was the collaboration between Melbourne’s Divide and Dissolve and Sydney’s phile. Divide and Dissolve have an unabashed political agenda attempting to “abolish white supremacy” through their wall of noise conjured up from guitar, drums and saxophone. Matched with the dark machine drones of phile, the instruments were once again slightly lost in the mix but the power of the message was certainly not, reinforced by powerful words from Divide and Dissolves Takiaya Reed.
In fact, it was this commitment not just to music and partying, but to larger social issues that created the unique tone of Soft Centre. With behavioural guidelines posted around the space it was very clear that this was to be an event that strongly encouraged individualism but also insisted on mutual respect. Perhaps this next generation of producers and audiences has learned that if you want a safe space, you need to actively construct it — you can’t assume it’s going to manifest on its own. This attention to social responsibility was in every detail of the event, from the impressive ratio of non-male artists programmed (with no calling to be congratulated for it), to the gender-neutral toilets, the use of local Turkish and Egyptian vegetarian food vendors, down to the not-for-profit ticketing company, a portion of the proceeds going to Women’s Community Shelters. The producers of Soft Centre succeeded not only in presenting an impeccably organised electronic music festival that reached locals but also got people out of the inner city to Sydney’s South West, building a little temporary world where things could actually be better for everyone, if only for a little while.
Read an interview with Alice Joel who commissioned Soft Centre’s music and performance art collaborations.
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Casula Powerhouse, Soft Centre, curator-producers Jemma Cole, Thorsten Hertog, Sam Whiteside, commissioned collaborations Alice Joel; 23 Sept
Top image credit: Cassius Select with Hyper Reelist’s Helixis sculpture, Soft Centre Festival, photo Jordan Munns
Near Cootamundra in South-West NSW, the Wired Open Day Festival, a much loved, adventurous open-air celebration of place this year features performances, installations, photography, sound art, edible insects, Indigenous weaving, insights into the characterful architecture and sounds of the shearing shed, immersive listening to a body-quaking elephant herd on the move, the murmur of mycelium networks, young people podcasting urban/rural viewpoints and great local food and beverages. It’s an art event with a distinctively experimental edge, rooted in the region but with far reaching appeal.
Festival host Wired Lab is a significant regional arts venture and an idiosyncratic one. Located on the farm that Artistic Director Sarah Last grew up on and now runs, it enjoys a long-term national and international reputation for its focus on sound and site. The Wired Open Day Festival hosts leading multidisciplinary artists who engage with the local environment, the region’s community and visitors who come to the event from afar. It’s a festival that celebrates not only place but reveals the extent and range of the organisation’s commitment to environmental and cultural sustainability via a range of exploratory art practices and its projects with local Aboriginal communities and young people.
Currently central to Wired Lab’s activities is the agri(culture) project, “a participatory landscape-scale and omni-sensorial exploration of rural and agricultural phenomena for regional and metropolitan audiences.” The project makes its inaugural appearance in this year’s Wired Open Day Festival, featuring 12 interdisciplinary artists. I spoke with Sarah Last by phone about the open day and Wired Lab’s current projects.
Tell me about the aims and the scope of the agri(culture) project.
It’s a long-term focus and a lot to do with the location of Wired Lab on a working farm and my background as a fourth generation farmer. I want to have a very deep engagement with the agrarian sector over coming years. This first iteration takes a very broad look at the theme — agriculture past, present and future.
Cat Jones, probably best-known for Scent of Sydney, an aroma-driven participatory work in this year’s Sydney Festival, is “working with Soon Lee Low, an internationally trained molecular chef [to] create a human-scale terrarium of edible ‘exotic’ delights.” I asked Cat via email, to tell me a little about the Insecta Delecta experience. She wrote, “Audiences will enter the vivarium of live insects and begin a graded exposure, an aesthetic sensory transition, towards eating (them).” She added that “Bogong season has just begun and The Wired Lab is very close to a migratory site. The vivarium will become a giant moth trap after dark.”
Cat’s been meeting with entomologists and is addressing future agriculture in terms of edible insects. We need to diversify our protein sources and Cat’s research reveals what an incredible source they provide, they’re small and they can be farmed on a large scale without needing large areas. If I’m mustering cattle, I’m doing it at landscape scale; with insects it’s at a very human scale. The problem is how to overcome resistance in Western culture to eating insects.
DARKbody, Julie Vulcan, photo courtesy the artist and Wired Lab
In your notes to the festival, you mention participants “lying down on a fungal super-highway” in a work by performance artist Julie Vulcan.
For her new installation, DARKbody, Julie has been doing a lot of work around scotobiology, the biology of darkness. Darkness and light are such fundamental elements — we need both for growth. Julie is fascinated by the idea that we’re sandwiched between darkness above and below us. She’s built full-scale mounds on the farm using mycelium that we sourced from local mushroom farmers — it’s compost off-casts. People will lie down on the mounds and via an audio work they’ll meditate on a mycelium super-highway. We’re only just discovering how remarkable mycelium is, including as a communication network for plants and trees.
UK sound artist Chris Watson, who has worked extensively with David Attenborough, is promising the experience of a herd of elephants. At first, I thought “agrarian?” but then I recalled that one of the major wildlife problems in Africa is that farms and wilderness adjoin.
Exactly. As soon as human management of wildlife comes into the picture, it becomes an agrarian practice issue. To maintain elephant population and the pathways they’ve walked for who knows how long needs human intervention to take into account all of the considerations that good farming would do — maintaining a habitat for survival of the animal you’re wanting to preserve.
Beyond Ol Tokai, Chris Watson, photo courtesy the artist
Watson’s work, Beyond Ol Tokai, is described as “a multi-channel sound diffusion which follows a herd of African elephants across an equatorial sunset after a day in the Olodare marshes of the Amboseli National Park, Kenya.”
Chris is working with a sound system that we’ve developed for the performance. The audience will deeply feel these elephants as well as hear them. It’s going to be very spatial. We have eight channels, eight speakers and huge sub-speakers.
Human culture is the subject of another part of your project, the Melbourne company Field Theory’s Kids vs Art Podcast Seriesin which “kids from a small rural school (pop. 19) meet urban counterparts to survey rural living and review contemporary art.”
There have been a number of residencies led by Jackson Castiglione from Melbourne’s Field Theory working with young people from rural NSW. He has [a group of] city-based young people he worked with in the first iteration, which was a Melbourne Fringe commission. It’s about capturing the rural context and the honesty with which these kids convey [their experience] that is quite wonderful. We forget the way they grow up in the country — the embededness of the world around them is very distinctive and different from what we might stereotypically expect a young person to experience. They have an environmental intelligence; the way they talk about the seasons is completely different… and the kinds of activities they’re involved in. I think the city kids found [the rural kids] quite wild, but it’s just their normal state: they ride motor bikes and go off on their own for hours; they help their parents in hard manual labour; they have an acute understanding of primary production and where food comes from; some of them even have gun licenses.
There’ll be six episodes all up and the kids have started interviewing artists. Because of the expansive art forms that we work in there’s some rich material. The way Jackson’s editing tells a story, capturing the counterpoints between the kids. The first episode really sets the scene, with the kids getting a feel for each other. It’s kind of amusing. The country kids are expecting the city kids, in their words, to be “really soft.” One says, “They’re gonna run for the hills!” It’s sweet but I think there’s a real poignancy to it as well.
Kids vs Art, Wired Open Day, photo courtesy Wired Lab
What are the regional visual arts pair, The Ronalds [read the RealTime profile], contributing?
The Ronalds are collaborating with David Burraston and myself. I really wanted to capture some of the vernacular architecture in Australian agrarian practices and a really good example of that is the shearing shed. The way they’re built, their appearance and the materials they’re built from have not changed in 200 or so years. We got access to a heritage-listed shearing shed on a property called Beggan-Beggan and The Ronalds have done a sort of forensic photographic documentation. We’re working similarly with sound; David in particular has been recording the shed when it’s in use and highly productive. He also captured the auditory signature of the building when it wasn’t in use, the changes due to environmental conditions. As the day warms up, it creaks and wonderful wind patterns pass through because they’re highly ventilated spaces. That will be an audio-visual presentation. We’ve developed lovely little boxes with lenses, each for viewing a sort of diorama of the shearing shed. The installation will be laid out in the footprint scale of the shearing shed.
Where does the performer Bronwyn Batten fit into your program?
I asked her if she’d be interested in adapting her show On Stage Dating, because I wanted to play on the way that the farming community is often negatively portrayed in popular culture. It’s important to set up projects like this so the event doesn’t seem entirely earnest. We’re calling it On Farm Dating, like Farmer Wants a Wife — it’s a play on that, drawing out the men or women who are of that agrarian background and vernacular.
A really diverse audience that represents where we live attend Open Day. I’m proud of that. We program quite expansive contemporary art works and these people often say, “I never thought I’d like something arty,” but then they realise it’s actually about them and that’s the point of connection.
Tell me about another of your projects for young people, The Edge.
That’s been a two-year community-based project with photographer Tamara Dean working with young people from Cootamundra and Tumut. Cootamundra is a farming town and Tumut is an alpine town at the foothills of Kosciusko, very different places for young people. We’ll be screening the stunning images they made with some recordings of them talking about the experience of the project and then their work will be shown in Wagga Wagga Art Gallery next year.
Aunty Anne, Sarah Last, photo courtesy Wired Lab
Lastly, the Wiradjuri Grasslands Project provides you with a focus on the Aboriginal communities in the region. In what ways and why “grasslands”?
It’s another ongoing project. In the Wiradjuri community in recent years there’s been a lot of cultural rejuvenation activity around language thanks to Uncle Stan Grant Snr. Charles Sturt University now has a Graduate Certificate in Wiradjuri Language, Culture and Heritage. As well, a lot of activities have been happening around weaving and other cultural practices.
One way I engage with the Indigenous community is through native grasses and pastures which I’m interested in and that relate to what I do as a farmer. As people learn to weave we’re bringing in grasses from surrounding areas which are known to be good fibres. We have two weavers, Melanie Evans and Harriet Gould, leading the project. Harriet is based in Robertson, but is originally from the Wired Lab area, and Melanie is an Indigenous curator who’s done a lot of work with the Indigenous community in the South-West region.
The weaving also relates to a project about managing country. We’re establishing a grassland and learning about plant identification — how to re-establish native grasses using different ways of planting, growing and harvesting techniques.
There’s also interest in learning natural tanning because possum-skin cloaks were part of Indigenous culture here. Possums are protected so last weekend we ran a kangaroo-skin tanning workshop. With each of these projects, I’m really aware of how culture evolves over time and cultural progression correlates with growing the grasslands, with the natural cycle.
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Read more about Wired Lab from Sarah Last here and here, and about earlier Open Days from our archive here and here.
Wired Lab is offering a special discount to RealTime readers and subscribers: $60 tickets for $45. Enter the promo code EARS at Wired Lab’s trybooking checkout.
Top image credit: Beggan Beggan shearing shed, The Ronalds, photo courtesy the artists and Wired Lab
In the second of his reviews of OzAsia performances, Ben Brooker embraces works by Hot Brown Honey, Joelistics and James Mangohig, Darlane Littay and Tian Rotteveel, and Aakash Odedra, their performances revealing the complexities of cultural heritage and exchange.
Hot Brown Honey
“Moisturise and decolonise” is the catch cry of Hot Brown Honey’s MC Busty Beatz (Kim Bowers), who presides, resplendent in oversized afro, over Black Honey Company’s ensemble of “black, brown and mixed beauties” – six female performers of Indigenous Australian, South African, Maori, Tongan and Samoan heritage. The work, which has toured extensively since 2015, defies categorisation. Intensely politically charged, it is burlesque-like in its parodic treatment of popular forms, especially those reliant on racist stereotyping, but hews closer to the Victorian era idea of burlesque as extravaganza. Routines draw on circus, cabaret, stand-up comedy and striptease.
The aesthetic is similarly mixed, heavily inflected by vintage hip-hop but spruced up with designer Lisa Fa’alafi’s glittering costumes, their multiple layers frequently cast off in ways that suggest the performers’ disavowal of imposed identities. The stage is bare except for “the hive,” a honeycombed, open-sided gallery — designed by Tristan Shelley and vibrantly lit by Paul Lim in a way that synchronises with much of the action — that serves as Busty Beatz’ base. From here she musically directs the work, marshalling the performers around her own compositions and delivering short, sharp sermons on feminist theory, quoting, among others, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”
Hot Brown Honey is an unapologetically didactic, rallying work. Sequences touch on and subvert the longstanding typecasting of women of colour as maids, the casual racism of white Australians on holiday and stereotypes of the dusky maiden/noble savage variety that have long been the source of sexualised European fantasies. Some scenes are more abstruse, such as those including Ofa Fotu’s scorching torch song-like reclamation of James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” and Crystal Stacey’s aerial routine that serves as a powerful metaphor for intimate partner violence. Underlying all of this is a discourse — sometimes edgily evoked, as in a scene in which Torres Strait Island performer Ghenoa Gela pointedly casts off the Australian flag —on the rights of indigenous peoples in a post-colonial world. While the tonight’s predominately white audience is implicated in the intersecting oppressions exposed, the atmosphere remains unifying and celebratory. Everybody is clapping and dancing by the end, some spilling onto the stage to mingle with the performers as the last of Busty’s pounding, soulful grooves reverberate around the theatre.
Joelistics, James Mangohig, In Between Two, Contemporary Asian Australian Performance, photo William Yang
In Between Two
In Between Two, a collaboration between Asian-Australian musicians Joelistics (Joel Ma) and James Mangohig, also recuperates the political charge of early and alternative hip-hop. In the opening song, Ma raps about what the form means, or rather doesn’t mean, to him: misogyny, homophobia. His political awakening was concomitant with the rise of Pauline Hanson and her infamous warning that “we are in danger of being swamped by Asians.” Ma informs us he and Mangohig — both ‘mixed race’ with Asian fathers and white mothers — have been long-term friends since meeting under a tree in Darwin during a music festival. There, they bonded over their shared status as outsiders in a majority white music industry and their worship of Brisbane band Regurgitator, led by Asian-Australian multi-instrumentalist Quan Yeomans.
Produced by Contemporary Asian Australian Performance, In Between Two is the latest iteration of a performance model developed by theatre-makers William Yang and Annette Shun Wah. Here, as in The Backstories, which premiered at this year’s Adelaide Festival, Yang and Shun Wah provide dramaturgy with Suzanne Chaundy directing. The setup is simple and effective: against visual designer Jean Poole’s backdrop of sensitively curated archival photos and videos the performers share stories from their lives and family histories in a series of direct address monologues. The stories are interspersed with songs that utilise both live and recorded instrumentation, Mangohig occasionally taking up his bass guitar, Ma rapping and playing a variety of instruments including keyboards and samplers. As performers, Mangohig and Ma have an abundance of chemistry and charisma. “Each of us,” Ma muses, “is a vast archive of our family stories.”
And what stories they are. Ma’s grandparents — the beautiful, Australian-born Edith and the handsome Charlie from Hong Kong, who chose her from a photograph to be his bride when she was just 17 — were well-known identities in Sydney’s Chinatown. Charlie ran a fruit and vegetable business. In the 1960s, Edith was a partner in the glamorous Chequers nightclub, mingling with the top entertainers of the day (in one photograph she poses with Bob Hope) as well as assorted gangsters. Ma’s parents were bohemians, setting up for a time in a London squat before returning to Australia and separating by the time Ma was two (“I grew up between two households,” he says).
Mangohig’s story contrasts sharply. His father was a preacher from rural Philippines, his mother the daughter of conservative Dutch migrants. Pen pals at first, the two eventually overcame parental objections to their marriage and settled in Darwin. Mangohig was a “pastor’s kid,” playing in a Christian rock band and seemingly headed for the ministry until experiencing a crisis of faith. He marries and divorces, earning the wrath of his father and his church. Ma, too, has a dark night of the soul, his dislocated adolescence resulting in truancy and drug abuse, a collapse of purpose. Both are troubled by racism and alienation, and locate music as a potential site of redemption. “So what was mine to embrace?” asks Ma rhetorically. “Music.”
For Ma, the arrangement and telling of these stories is in itself a kind of sampling, wherein “little nuggets of gold” are unearthed to construct new ways of knowing. “We are [our family’s] wildest dreams and their most elaborate remixes,” he says. In their careful crafting of these dreams and remixes, Ma and Mangohig, and their skilful collaborators, provide fresh insights into the nature of multicultural identity, and the power of meaning-making — whether through music or theatre — to suture and transcend.
Darlane Litaay, Tian Rotteveel, Specific Places Need Specific Dances, photo Tian Rotteveel
Specific Places Need Specific Dances
In Specific Places Need Specific Dances, Papua-born, Indonesia-based dancer Darlane Littay and Netherlands-born, Berlin-based composer and choreographer Tian Rotteveel take as their starting point the idea of waiting — for inspiration to strike or, more prosaically, simply for something, anything, to happen.
It’s an idea embedded in the form of the work, which is structurally loose, and presumably largely improvised (I say presumably because, though the work often feels extemporary, videos available via Google show marked similarities between this and earlier productions).
Littay and Rotteveel chat with each other, sometimes inaudibly, both in English and their native languages. They wander around the space in everyday clothes, show us a little bit of what looks like rehearsal footage on a TV monitor they wheel on and off. Eventually Littay picks up his mobile phone and inserts it into a cardboard cup for amplification. He plays snatches of music. Some of it sounds like it might be Papuan — traditional, ethereal —some of it Western, beat-driven. Rotteveel moves a little to it; nothing too defined. He sways, fans his arms out slowly. Mostly I think he is just listening.
The roles are reversed to no particular effect, Rotteveel eventually finding his way to a mixer attached to a subwoofer on castors. He pushes it around the space, manipulating a sonic pulse that becomes steadily louder until we can feel it in our bodies. Rotteveel wields a shaker in time with the pulse. Both he and Littay vocalise synchronously with it, sometimes grunting, sometimes seemingly issuing short injunctions to each other. They undress fully, and individually don koteka, elaborately decorated penis sheaths of Papuan origin. Also applying luridly-coloured face paint, the two dancers become strikingly ‘other,’ a process complicated by the cultural reciprocity – or is it appropriation? — underway. We may speculate that Littay has given Rotteveel permission to enter into this highly specific tradition, that he is even suitably placed to do so, but we can’t be sure.
Littay and Rotteveel continue their meandering explorations of the space, and each other’s practices, replacing all of the theatre’s lighting gels with red ones, holding a sheet of plastic over the subwoofer to create a startling buzz saw-like effect, and making each other dance to Empire of the Sun’s “Walking on a Dream.” Finally, Rotteveel reads from a long, rambling letter detailing the daily rituals — most of them a kind of waiting or delaying — that surrounded the duo’s working together. It’s a fittingly offbeat conclusion to a work that, despite its title, engages less with the idea of site specificity in performance than with the complexities, both banal and unexpected, of creative process and cultural exchange.
Aakash Odedra, Rising, Photo Chris Nash
Rising
The work of British-Bangladeshi choreographer Akram Khan bookended this year’s OzAsia Festival, which opened with Khan’s momentous Until the Lions and concluded with British dancer Aakash Odedra’s suite of four solo works, Rising, featuring Khan’s In the Shadow of Man.
The first solo is choreographed by Odedra himself, and takes its names from nritta, a ‘pure’ version of the classical Indian form Kathak that emphasises footwork, gestures and turns, all gradually increasing in speed and energy. Barefoot and dressed in traditional dhoti and loose-fitting trousers, Odedra uses the full depth and breadth of the Playhouse stage to execute a mesmerising series of pirouettes, turns and leaps accompanied by a soundtrack of tabla and drone in traditional 16-beat time. He spins on his knees, so rapidly that the eyes can’t keep up and his whole body blurs, in a partial deconstruction of Kathak’s characteristic verticality. Elsewhere the solo is more traditional, Odedra’s face retaining Kathak’s expressiveness, and sharp turns of his head indicating shifts in speed and motion.
In Khan’s In the Shadow of Man, atmospherically lit by Michael Hull, Odedra is transmuted into a monstrous figure. He crouches in the near-dark, emitting an animalistic howl, bare-chested with his back to us, his shoulder blades flexing grotesquely. As Jocelyn Pook’s ominous electro-acoustic sonic landscape builds, Odedra starts to move, arms bent back behind his body, reminiscent of a newborn animal learning to walk, conscious and frightened of its vulnerability. In a move that will be replicated in the following piece, Odedra — supremely confident and supple — extends backwards onto his hands, his face leering horribly at us from floor level.
In the third solo, Russell Maliphant’s Cut, Hull’s lighting is used to create columns, walls and washes of sometimes diffuse, sometimes tightly focused white light that Odedra manipulates — casting shadows that create the illusion that his hands are growing in size, or that sand is running through them — in a choreography that is fluid, controlled and deeply sensuous. In a repeated gesture, something like cradling or praying, and sonic and choreographic references to the movement of clock hands, I detected themes of entropy and the inexorability of time.
The final piece, Constellation, choreographed by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and lit by Willy Cessa, brings the evening, and the OzAsia Festival, to a reflective, quietly transporting close. Fifteen light globes hang above the stage at different levels. Odedra moves slowly, gracefully among them, activating each in turn with his touch, and setting them in motion with gentle pushes that have unpredictable results. Sometimes the lights merely bob up and down, gradually expending their kinetic energy, and sometimes they careen erratically through the space, narrowly avoiding each other and Odedra. Olga Wojciechowska’s cascading, reverberant score for piano adds to a sense of the numinous, of a cosmos in perpetual flux, moving out of darkness, into light, and finally — as Odedra floats and whirls among the lights, extinguishing each one — returning to its germinal, pre-time state.
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OzAsia Festival: Black Honey Company, Hot Brown Honey, creator, musical director, composer, sound designer Busty Beatz, creator, director, choreographer, designer Lisa Fa’alafi, lighting designer Paul Lim, set designer Tristan Shelley, Space Theatre, 26-30 Sept; Contemporary Asian Australian Performance, In Between Two, writers, composers, performers Joel Ma, James Mangohig, director Suzanne Chaundy, visual designer Jean Poole, Space Theatre, 5-6 Oct; Darlane Litaay and Tian Rotteveel, Specific Places Need Specific Dances, choreographers, dancers Darlane Litaay, Tian Rotteveel, Nexus Arts, 27-28 Sept; Aakash Odedra, Rising, Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide, 6-7 Oct
Top image credit: Busty Beatz, Hot Brown Honey, Briefs Factory, photo courtesy OzAsia
The End is a highly unusual meditation on mortality in which a virtual pop star suffers intimations of her coming death. The eternally 16-year-old, 3D-animated vocaloid singer Hatsune Miku (literally “the first sound from the future”) has a huge following in Japan and Southeast Asia, appearing on large screens in concerts and singing to live musical accompaniment. In The End, composer Keiichiro Shibuya, himself famous, and his team emphatically duplicate the concert feel with a big screen and powerful wraparound sound, but lift Miku out of the pop realm into an existentially fraught cosmos. She looks similar to her pop self — skinny, wide-eyed, ribboned turquoise hair flying wide — but the calculated cuteness and sexy teen moves have gone. So have the sexy outfits, replaced with a Louis Vuitton-designed range patterned with large and larger checks in a limited set of colours. Gone too are Miku’s multitudinous songs about love, replaced with recitatives and arias of contemplation and internal conflict. Also missing is the stable animated world that sustains her in manga and anime worlds. Instead, in fragile spaces that blur and fade, she is subject to ominously recurrent transmission glitches. And unlike her in-concert self, she rarely moves with simulated human agility; save when running though outer space, she is frequently still, seen in radically shifting perspectives, often face to face with us, or floating.
Shibuya and team have thus created a Miku who is transparently a virtual human, akin to Skeleton, the android who performed in response to the music of the composer and the Australian Art Orchestra in OzAsia’s Meeting Points: Scary Beauty. And akin too to the replicants in Blade Runner and so many other sci-fi creations, artificial beings for whom sudden awareness of mortality, in the face of their apparent perfection, is overwhelming — hence the play on “perfect”/’imperfect” in The End’s libretto.
The End, image Kenshu Shintsubo
Miku’s self is as unstable as the world around her — other figures appear, evoking other dimensions to her psyche. The End is not a monodramatic opera. Miku’s companion is a cute, tubby cartoon cat fixated on being her guardian, desperately hanging onto their bond as the singer slips from it: another instance of Miku’s removal from her teen world. More demanding is the arrival of a stranger emerging from the deep distance, at first glance another Miku but naked and with a skull face. The cat nervously exits and an exchange ensues between our heroine and her doppelganger to the opera’s end, face to face and then, curiously, by phone. At first Miku thinks the woman an imitator — “Are you on a diet, like me” — but reality gradually takes hold — a dry, musty, powdery odour, which prompts the donning of a gas mask. Miku’s other says, “When in the end they die [humans] smell the most.”
However, rather than being repelled, Miku needs to connect with her effectively dead self to learn about dying, until she is ready to let go of her living self. The two engage in lyrical half-sung dialogues, voice pitches barely distinguished, heightening the sense of interior crisis.
The opera’s stage design lends weight to Miku’s plight. As well as a large forescreen, there are three more angled behind it providing gripping depth-of-field with projected images on each amplifying the play of intense intimacy and profound distance. It’s most powerful when, in a burst of emotional strength Miku becomes a universe-traversing dragon, her face staring out from between the beast’s open jaws as Shibuya’s score thunders with bracing prog rock grandiosity. Elsewhere the screens reveal depthless spaces in which undetailed Miku models or dummy body parts slowly tumble, painfully underlining her artificiality. In a fantasy of an imagined bodily self, we are plunged into Miku, coursing down the oesophagus and up to the heart, a jewel-like sculpture which, stuck with forks, transforms into the singer’s face as she asks herself “Why are you so scared?” and recalls a cut finger which she worries is a false memory.
The End, image Kenshu Shintsubo
The genius of the stage and projection design lies in its creation of an entirely abstract space — a white box, a perpetually transformable tabula rasa for the projections of the artists, Miku and ourselves. Within it floats another box, itself a screen, and within it in turn, the composer-performer, barely visible, the consciousness from which The End emanates.
As Miku’s end looms, running through space as if suddenly free to face death, she yearns nonetheless for connection: “I’d like you to watch me and I will watch you too,” and some kind of eternity: “A melody to sing over and over.”
The cat returns, huge, looming over Miku in a final effort to hold onto her (“You’re much too cute for a human being” and, contrarily, “Remember when we were one? You were much closer to a human being”), but, glitching, floats helplessly away like a balloon. To complete her individuation, Miku then breaks off a phone conversation with her doppelganger but not before the pair entwine, drifting in space, the skull face of her other becoming her own before dissolving into nothingness, the richly layered music speeding with the emotion of union and separation.
Miku appears to be about to take flight but disappears into total whiteness from which dark shards surge as Shibuya’s score with organ churns relentlessly. Miku reappears, floating on her back: head, arms, legs hanging limply — “Do I look like I’m dead or only asleep. It makes no difference for you.” In a series of single utterances she sings movingly of her self rapidly departing — she cannot see, turn, touch, grasp…
In the opera’s last phase the meaning of “you” becomes richly ambiguous – the ‘you’ that is her doppelganger, which is herself; the ‘you’ that is us, her audience; and some other ‘you’ — “You’ll be in my memory forever,” “I’ll scream your name but not be able to call you,” “I’ll no longer have to keep you behind my eyelids.” It’s known that the opera was composed in the wake of the suicide of Shibuya’s fashion designer wife, Maria, adding another layer of emotional response to The End’s sad tale of a puppet given provisional life. Doubtless for Shibuya, as for Miku,”Dying was disappearing for other people. But not for me. Dying was the furthest thing from my mind.”
The script was written with Shibuya by playwright and novelist Toshiki Okada, Artistic Director of the theatre company chelftisch (God Bless Baseball, OzAsia 2016; Time’s Journey Through a Room, Asia TOPA, 2017), an ideal librettist given his incisively spare and quite lateral approach to dialogue, which here conveys the naivety of not merely a 16-year-old, but a virtual one. The limits of Miku’s reality are occasionally underlined with the cat’s report of rubbish piling up in the streets or by the sound of a helicopter thundering over us, but otherwise the singer’s world is a small one if metaphysically big.
The End might work for Miku’s pop fans (the few I saw appeared fully engaged) given the creative boldness of much manga and anime. The composer also works within careful limits, with hook-like recititatives that almost bloom into song and with songs that resonate closely with each other, as if to leave us with one haunting melody, richly and variously textured with beats, electronics, piano, organ, strings and enveloping spatial flow. Miku’s voice (built from an actual one) sits on the borderline of real and synthetic, but inclines deliberately to the latter — complexly tuned and textured by Shibuya and his vocaloid programmer — than to her often quite realistic pop singing. This again gives strength to Shibuya and Okada’s vision of an innocent technical intelligence burdened with the weight of mortality in a work that simultaneously resonates with our own experiences of facing death, our own or of others, at whatever age. Miku invites and warrants empathy in Keiichiro Shibuya’s splendidly realised virtual opera, growing more human the closer to death she comes.
OzAsia: The End, performer Hatsune Miku, performer, director, concept, music Keiichiro Shibuya, original book concept Toshiki Okada, Miku costumes Mark Jacobs (Louis Vuitton), visuals YKBX, stage design Shohei Shigematsu, spatial sound design evala, vocaloid programming PinocchioP, lighting Akiko Tomita; Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide, 30 Sept-4 Oct
Top image credit: The End, image Kenshu Shintsubo
The Australian Art Orchestra — Meeting Points
The Australian Art Orchestra (AAO) is acclaimed for its musical inventiveness and openness to collaboration. Their Meeting Points series, a highlight of this year’s OzAsia Festival, comprised three unique and captivating performances: Seoul Meets Arnhem Land: Ecstatic Voice, for voices and percussion; Cocoon, for guzheng and chamber ensemble; and Scary Beauty, an opera with an android as the solo vocalist.
AAO composer/trumpeter Peter Knight tells me that the AAO’s strategy is to establish “spaces of potential” for musicians from around the world, and for OzAsia 2017 it focused on meeting points between Asian, Indigenous and Western music. Such collaborations, which are workshopped through the AAO’s annual intensive program, produce significant developments in composition and performance. The three works in this Meeting Points series, each of about 35 minutes, are unique and wonderful world firsts.
Bae Il Dong, Meeting Points, photo courtesy OzAsia 2017
Seoul Meets Arnhem Land: Ecstatic Voice
Featuring Bae Il Dong (South Korea), Daniel Wilfred (Arnhem Land) and Jenny Barnes (Melbourne), Seoul meets Arnhem Land: Ecstatic Voice is a unique exploration of the power and the traditions of the human voice. The concert juxtaposes two of the world’s most distinctive vocal practices: Yolngu manikay from Arnhem Land and South Korean p’ansori or street opera. Bae Il Dong and Daniel Wilfred were joined by vocalist Jenny Barnes, whose Western experimental vocal practice recalls Cathy Berberian, and drummer Simon Baker.
P’ansori singers spend years developing their voices outdoors, using techniques such as singing into waterfalls to develop their power. UNESCO has declared p’ansori a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity and South Korea has declared p’ansori a National Intangible Cultural Property. Yolngu manikay is one of the oldest musical traditions still practised, and like p’ansori is about story-telling. Drawing on pre-existing forms and motifs, the three performers alternately sang solo or together, generating a visceral response as we felt the ecstatic power of the voices deep inside us.
Significantly, Seoul meets Arnhem Land: Ecstatic Voice brought out the essential features of both manikay and p’ansori oral traditions rather than creating any kind of diluting hybrid. Heard and seen together, we appreciate how important it is to preserve the forms. The addition of Barnes’ unique oeuvre added to the effect by demonstrating an even wider range of vocal techniques and concepts. Peter Knight told me that there was a natural rapport between the three singers when they began their collaboration, and an organic, spontaneous vocal arrangement emerged. This concert is an exhortation to maintain our significant oral traditions and above all to experience them in the presence of the singers.
Daniel Wilfred, Meeting Points, photo courtesy OzAsia 2017
Cocoon
Guzheng virtuoso Mindy Meng Wang‘s Cocoon, her first major composition to feature the guzheng with a chamber orchestra, is an autobiographical musical journey that takes listeners across half the world. Wang’s enchanting work traces her life musically from her childhood in Lanzhou, which lies on the Silk Road, to her subsequent involvement in the new music scene in London and her arrival in Australia in 2014.
Scored for guzheng, violin, bass, electronics, brass, shakuhachi and percussion, Cocoon shifts through many styles, from the music of the Uighurs of Western China to Chinese royal court music to jazz, and includes field recordings of Tibetan monks chanting. There are monastic gongs and the sound of the kind of frame drum common across the Middle-East. We feel as if we’re traversing the countries that lie along the Silk Road and hearing Asian-inflected Western music along the way. Orchestrated by the AAO’s Jem Savage, Cocoon is wonderfully coherent and engaging musically, despite the frequent shifts in musical style and genre. Starting with the gentle sound of the solo guzheng, a series of musical forms unfold. The sound of the Tibetan horn, produced by the bass trombone, competes with jazz saxophone as if the composer is being pulled musically in different directions. All kinds of musical dialogues develop between instruments and cultures. The bass trombonist, Adrian Sherriff, who doubles on shakuhachi, is outstanding in this performance and his dual role also embodies an East-West musical duality.
Mindy Meng Wang considers that the use of the guzheng, its history spanning over 2,500 years, should not be limited to traditional music. “It has much more potential and I want to explore all its different aspects,” she says. “I use modern composition methods, Western musical instruments, electronic music samples, Chinese folk music, religious music, ancient court music and local opera elements. [Cocoon] seeks true harmony and connection of Eastern and Western music by taking elements of Chinese philosophy and arts into a contemporary context that reflects my cross-cultural life experience.”
The video Silk Road Metaphor, made jointly with dancer Victoria Chu, depicts some of Meng Wang’s travel and research for Cocoon. Cocoon is the first element of what will be a longer work entitled “I am the Silk Road,” a trilogy that “chronicles the past/origins, the present/transformation and the future/evolution.” She says that the first part, Cocoon, intended to symbolise origins, gestation, tensile strength and growth, responds to the ancient Silk Road cultures and ethnic tribes from North West China. Mindy Meng Wang is looking for a new identity where East meets West and for there to be acceptance of the differences between them.
Mindy Meng Wang, photo courtesy OzAsia 2017
Scary Beauty
Can a startling vision of the future be found in an opera? Scary Beauty is a short operatic work for android and orchestra by Japanese composer and pianist Keiichiro Shibuya, featuring an android named Skeleton that has neural networks corresponding to human ones. Shibuya composed three songs to be performed by Skeleton with the Australian Art Orchestra, and developed the work as the next logical step beyond his vocaloid opera The End It is not unusual today for vocalists to be accompanied by electronic devices, but Scary Beauty’s inversion of this paradigm, to require an electro-mechanical vocalist to be accompanied by humans, reminds us that fully autonomous androids may one day be members of society. The opera’s title reflects its dual character — it is both frightening and beautiful.
The orchestration combines strings, brass, piano, percussion and tape loops to produce music expressing the emotions normally associated with opera. Shibuya conducts from the piano, next to which Skeleton stands in red robes and Doc Martins. Skeleton’s voice suggests some human characteristics — it can be soft, loud or breathy — though for the third piece, it’s distorted. The android’s actions are driven by algorithms based on emergence theory and chaos theory giving it control over its limbs and facial expressions. Electronic sensors detect and process the pitch and amplitude of ambient sound, light and movement to generate autonomous and very realistic gestures and expressions. By comparison, the experimental Swiss-designed robot conductor Yumi was not designed to respond to external stimuli. Yumi seems little more than an evolved metronome.
Though by no means a full-scale opera, Scary Beauty is a fine composition that would still work wonderfully if a human singer were substituted for Skeleton. Shibuya has set to music compelling texts selected from Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island, which considers a future world that includes human clones; Yukio Mishima’s The Decay of the Angel, which muses on a deteriorating society, one of his last works before he committed seppuku; and William S Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s The Third Mind, a cut-up novel. The articulation of these texts by an android amplifies these writers’ concerns and the work may be seen both as a prediction and a warning.
Skeleton is the creation of Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro and his team at Osaka University’s Intelligent Robotics Laboratory. The presentation of Scary Beauty formed a central element of the 2017 Australasian Computer Music Conference program as well as the OzAsia Festival. In a discussion session (part of Adelaide’s Open State Festival), the conference’s keynote speaker, Professor Takashi Ikegami of Tokyo University, joined Shibuya, the AAO’s Peter Knight, OzAsia Artistic Director Joseph Mitchell and Kohei Ogawa of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory in a talk on Scary Beauty. The discussion ranged around the future of android development — could an android go beyond autonomous physical and facial expression and develop emotional sensitivity, empathise with humans, demonstrate artistic ability and perhaps coexist with humans on equal terms? In short, could androids replace humans in a post-Anthropocene world? To answer such a question, robotics research must consider what a human being really is psychologically and emotionally and must consider what elements of human society we value and how they might be retained in the presumably inevitable post-Anthropocene era to come. Unless we can define what makes us human, we cannot protect and maintain our humanness.
The AAO’s Meeting Points program demonstrated the potential of music to highlight the most fundamental issues of contemporary life. In a post-Anthropocene world, how would the intangible heritage of Korea, Arnhem Land and the Silk Road be retained and appreciated?
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OzAsia Festival: Australian Art Orchestra, Meeting Points: Cocoon, performers Mindy Meng Wang, AAO; Seoul Meets Arnhem Land: Ecstatic Voice, performers Bae Il Dong, Daniel Wilfred, Jenny Barnes, Simon Baker; Scary Beauty, composer, Keiichiro Shibuya, performers Keiichiro Shibuya, Skeleton, AAO; Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, 30 Sept
With three excellent concerts — a stunning combination of electronic music and dazzling visuals, a biographical portrait of a great painter and a revival of a classic 1960s rock album — this OzAsia Festival covered the widest range of musical and artistic territory.
Regurgitator — The Velvet Underground and Nico
Renowned for reviving great hits, Regurgitator is a rock trio with two regular guests, German-Australian singer and keyboard/synth player Seja, and guzheng player Mindy Meng Wang. 2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the seminal 1967 album The Velvet Underground and Nico and this extended Regurgitator line-up has performed this album many times in different contexts, for example at MOFO this year.
In the musical arrangement they have developed, drummer Peter Kostic uses a kit typical of Velvet Underground drummer Moe Tucker’s set-up, emphasising tom-toms and bass drum, frequently using mallets and making little use of cymbals. The significant change to the original arrangement is the introduction of the guzheng, which adds a sonic and cultural dimension to what by 1967 standards was already an experimental sound. The guzheng’s delightful tone lifts the music out of the New York underground and renders it more universal. Presumably the addition of the guzheng provides the Asian link that prompts the inclusion of this production in the OzAsia Festival. In her contributions to this festival, Mindy Meng Wang demonstrated great versatility, and for her work with Regurgitator she creates a unique vocabulary of sound, adding swirls and gestures to the rock arrangement, playing the equivalent of a guitar solo on one track, and contributing an ethereal headiness that gently transforms the music.
The essential strength and character of the original album lies in Lou Reed’s intense and insightful songs such as “I’m waiting for the man,” and many tracks are now considered all-time rock classics, variously musing on drug addiction, sadomasochism, sexual promiscuity and other aspects of 1960s New York life — themes still relevant today. Regurgitator give a fine performance, Seja engagingly delivers Nico’s three songs, and the final track, “European Son,” in the original version of which the musicians really let their hair down, is an invitation to Regurgitator and friends to do likewise. The audience is delighted.
Music in Anticlockwise
Energetic Hong Kong composer, performer, instrument inventor and visual artist GayBird (Keith Leung Kei-cheuk) produced one of the most optically involving concerts I can recall, as much a visual art experience as a musical one. Working with a team of video, illustration and lighting artists, he uses lasers and a huge LED screen covering the rear of the stage to create a mesmerising cascade of fantasy-inducing visual imagery.
In the first half of the concert, GayBird performs to one side of the stage on synthesisers and voice, creating a web of rhythmic, danceable sound, the music and visuals closely synchronised, creating parallel languages. There are sound samples including one of Stephen Hawking’s computer voice declaring he was born 300 years after Galileo. The screen displays cartoons, abstract imagery and geometric forms, while red laser beams move through the air. This concert bears out GayBird’s statement that, “I don’t divide sound, music, art and technology in my creations, in fact I can’t. I am one person, all my ideas are united as one in my head.”
For the concert’s second half, Zephyr Quartet members were positioned on stage in front of the LED screen while GayBird on the auditorium floor worked at a table of synthesisers, a shallow box with springs stretched over it that he bowed or plucked, and an old manually operated siren. In contrast with the advanced technologies he used in the first half of the concert, some of the devices deployed in the second, never intended as musical instruments, reminded us that interesting sounds may be made from simple means.
GayBird said in a RealTime interview that he chose the concert’s title, Music in Anti-Clockwise, to indicate that he was starting the concert with the future of music and working backwards to early forms, here Haydn’s first string quartet. The version presented here is dramatically reworked and blended with other sounds, perhaps suggesting that our idea of the past is imaginary. The dazzling mix of sound and imagery in this magical concert continued, with added images such as ticking clocks, floating musical notation and keyboards.
GayBird’s performance was preceded by a fine set by Adelaide singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Tracy Chen. Her unobtrusive but sophisticated use of digital technologies to sample and loop her own soft voice and her instruments made for a seductively layered sound. She refers to her creations as ‘bedroom music’ — it can be made at home and has an introspective, melancholic feel, but its complexity and coherence suggest a clear musical vision, perhaps reflecting the direction of future music production. Her gentle sound proved a well-chosen curtain-raiser to Music in Anticlockwise.
Zephyr Quartet, Fairweather, photo Erik Griswold, OzAsia 2017
Fairweather
Legendary Scottish-born painter Ian Fairweather (1891-1974), who spent the latter part of his life in Australia, is revered today as one of our pioneering abstractionists. Dramatically evoking Fairweather’s life, this production combines visual art, music and spoken text, and was developed collaboratively by video artist Glen Henderson, composer Erik Griswold and writer Rodney Hall.
Hall’s narration eloquently captures the central characteristics of Fairweather’s history. The artist spent many years travelling through Asia, particularly China and Indonesia, studied drawing and Japanese language during and after his time as a prisoner in World War I and, later, Chinese visual art and language, also spending some time living in a temple. “China was the nearest place he ever came to home,” says Hall. These experiences deeply affected his thinking and his art. Hall notes that calligraphy, which is central to Fairweather’s art, is “a journey manifested by the hand alone.” In his last years, living on Queensland’s Bribie Island, Fairweather became a scholar-hermit, perhaps in the manner of Chinese antecedents. Such a life story seems surreal: “This is not a life you choose, nor did I,” he had said.
The performance of this 2013 creation is compelling, the images and music subtly underscoring Hall’s text. Griswold’s music is scored for koto, bass koto and string quartet, the opening passages have a Chinese flavour and dramatic passages relating to the war years suggest the psychological disturbance of war. Performers Satsuki Odamura and Adelaide’s much-in-demand Zephyr Quartet are outstanding. At one point, Odamura brushes the bass koto with a small eucalyptus branch, making a soft sound like wind in the island’s trees that is symbolic as much as musical, and she uses the bass koto to suggest swelling ocean waves to accompany the description of Fairweather’s raft journey across the Timor Sea. Griswold’s score for The Raft part 1 (“Epiphany”) is marked ‘hypnotic’ and the music takes us into that dreamy state.
Glen Henderson’s video sets the tone, using layers of imagery in the manner of Fairweather’s paintings. One scene shows an image of the sea through mangroves, the swirling lines of the branches resembling Fairweather’s sinuous drawing. A photographic portrait of the artist can be seen faintly hovering through the branches over the sea like a spirit and it returns regularly to haunt the story.
Following the performance, there is a Q and A session in which Art Gallery of SA curator Tracy Lock introduces the three collaborators and provides important insights into Ian Fairweather’s artwork. Evidently, one painting was found to comprise 70 layers of paint, the layering of imagery becoming a metaphor for the aggregation of life experience. Griswold says that the rhythmic flow of Fairweather’s paintings suggests the flow of music — it inspired his composition and was the genesis of the production. He describes this production as, “a poetic homage to Fairweather… We are trying to create a very immersive experience that will hopefully take you into that psychological mindscape.” Hall, Henderson and Griswold’s Fairweather succeeds wonderfully in this endeavour and is a magnificent portrayal of an artist’s life.
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OzAsia: Music in Anticlockwise, composer, performer GayBird, Nexus Arts, 6 Oct; Fairweather, Zephyr Quartet, Satsuki Odamura, Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, 23 Sept; The Velvet Underground and Nico, Regurgitator, Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, 29 Sept
Top image credit: GayBird, photo Cheung Chi Wai, OzAsia 2017
OzAsia Artistic Director Joseph Mitchell’s third festival featured three superb theatrical works — W!ld Rice’s Hotel, Keiichiro Shibuya’s The End and Niwa Gekidan Penino’s The Dark Inn — making my one-week visit supremely worthwhile, with the bonus of the Australian Art Orchestra’s Meeting Points series of wonderful cross-cultural collaborations. Fellow RealTime writers Chris Reid and Ben Brooker have made clear their praise for much else in the three-week festival that opens us up to works made here and in Asia that expand our sense of what is possible artistically and what we can learn culturally.
Two men, a son and his dwarf father, arrive at a remote hot springs country inn, named Avidya (ignorance), located, a narrator tell us, in Hell Valley. The pair have been invited to entertain the inn’s guests with their puppetry, but it turns out they’re not expected and that the owner is not present. An old woman is unhelpful, though father and son seem unfazed, even when they discover they’ve missed the last bus. The woman relents and offers them a room. Action to this point, and for much of The Dark Inn, moves at a leisurely, often less than everyday pace. The acting is low-key, voices quietly projected. We are compelled to look in on an unfamiliar world with few signs of the present, despite our being told it’s 2013.
The Dark Inn, Niwa Gekidan Penino, photo Shinsuke Sugino, OzAsia 2017
The intricately realistic timber-framed set revolves with cinematic verve from reception to bedrooms on two levels, to a changing room and then a rock-girded, steaming hot spring bath. Seen though a rear window is a persimmon tree, its leaf fall and flowering indicating the seasonal change pivotal to the play’s meanings, first unhurriedly revealed as the characters observe the social niceties; when they don’t, physical and emotional chaos ensue. While first expectations are that the father, Momofuku Kurata, and son, Ichiro, will fall prey to whatever absurdist situation they’ve found themselves in, in fact they will be catalysts for change, some of it already brewing.
The two-and-a-half hour play is not easily summarised, so I’ll follow one thread. A sense of growing unease is triggered in small increments. Kurata and Ichiro find a guest in their room, the blind Matsuo, who believes the hot spring will cure him. His earnest soul-seeking is deflated by the pair, Kurata bluntly hinting that masturbation might help and, before they are interrupted, asking if would he like to be touched. Matsuo wishes he could see the father and son; Kurata says, “I’m horrible, my son’s even more so.”
When father and son are cajoled into performing by two drunken geisha (resting at the inn in the off-season) who have entertained them with a “snappy” shamisen duet, the bright yellow puppet — a little larger than Kurata and with a big head and outsize hands — is slowly revealed. Kurata activates it, lunging about, mounting and being mounted by the creature and gasping with post-coital relief. Everyone’s shocked — the geishas, the bathroom assistant peering through the window, and Matsuo, who doesn’t like what he hears and flees the room. However, his curiosity persists; he seeks out the puppet and, horrified by what he finds, screams and curls up naked in the bathroom. But Matsuo’s already been dealt a blow by Ichiro when he tries to draw the young man into a discussion, in Buddhist terms, about escaping ignorance. Ichiro cuts him off; abstractions will not cure Matsuo. In the play’s climactic scene, Kuratu and Ichiro, about to leave the inn, invade the bathroom, where the guests are recovering from their diverse crises, with the puppet, revealing its huge penis. Matsuo vomits.
Takiko, the old woman, will call Ichiro “lightless” (effectively” ignorant”) for his treatment of the blind man, but come spring, Matsuo has left the inn on which he had become helplessly dependent. Ichiro reveals his own plight — “a life without choices,” he’s unschooled and unable to abandon his father, whom he treats with utmost deference. A rare smile passes between them as they leave the inn — perhaps a kind of ‘mission accomplished’ by two tricksters.
The Dark Inn, Niwa Gekidan Penino, photo Shinsuke Sugino, OzAsia 2017
Each of the inn’s residents has problems to resolve. The elder geisha plays mother to the younger but knows she must let her go, into the arms of a traditional bath attendant, a Nagashi (one of a dying breed), a giant, bumbling sexually repressed mute who has to comically fan his erection when Kurata undresses to bathe and lets down his long black locks. Takiko wanted to become a geisha in the 40s, learned the shamisen but WWII eventuated, she wasn’t pretty anyway and grew old and envious. We know least about the elegant, self-contained Kurata (Mame Yamada), but his liberating provocations are central to The Dark Inn. Ignorance of the body — a form of self-deception — and its needs are as fateful as ignorance of mind. Though not a Buddhist, writer-director Kurô Tanino said in an interview, “the characters are based on 12 Buddhist ideas, such as Avidya, ‘no light,’ which can mean no knowledge or being lost.”
The Dark Inn’s larger picture entails not only the ritual renewal of Spring — the younger geisha and the bath attendant have a baby and the other residents have returned to the world. However, there are no new guests and a new railway line threatens demolition; geishas, bath attendants and travelling puppeteers perhaps barely belong in the play’s 2013. The Dark Inn is neither defeatist nor wilfully optimistic; it is playfully pragmatic.
The production’s pacing is deeply engaging, its incremental surprises and escalating shocks bracing and rich in meaning. The performances are subtly informal and beautifully shaped across the play’s uninterrupted two-and-a-half hours. Set, lighting and sound design are superbly integrated. Director (and psychiatrist) Kurô Tanino’s cogent assemblage of the complex components of The Dark Inn yields a deeply memorable experience in which time is tellingly distended, opening up our attention and incisively putting ignorance to the test.
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OzAsia: Niwa Gekidan Penino, The Dark Inn, writer, director Kurô Tanino, design Kurô Tanino, Michiko Inada, lighting Masayuke Abe, Kosuke Ashidano, sound design Koji Sato, Yoshihiro Nakamura, technical director Isao Hubo; Her Majesty’s Theatre, Adelaide, 3-4 Oct
Top image credit: The Dark Inn, Niwa Gekidan Penino, photo Shinsuke Sugino, OzAsia 2017
We return from Adelaide, bearing delights and insights granted us by the artists whose work we experienced in just one of the three weeks of OzAsia Festival. Singapore’s Hotel, reviewed this week, and Japan’s The Dark Inn, expanded and deepened our sense of time as well as sharpening our cultural awareness. Also from Japan, Keiichiro Shibuya’s opera The End for virtual pop star Miku transcended its pop sources with tragic heft. Reviews of this and The Dark Inn next week. Ben Brooker welcomes OzAsia performances by Akram Khan, Eisa Jocson and Checkpoint Theatre that spoke powerfully to the complexities of gender, and Chris Reid embraces the festival’s visual arts program. Now it’s Sydney’s turn to enjoy the growing Australian-Asian symbiosis in Performance Space’s Liveworks which features works from Japan, South Korea and the Philippines alongside Australian creations, including Justin Shoulder’s Carrion [image above]. Art that unites in a time of division! Keith & Virginia
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Top image credit: Justin Shoulder, Carrion, 2017, photo courtesy Performance Space
At the opening of W!ld Rice Theatre’s Hotel and from time to time between episodes, performers in black fill the stage as if citizens (singing “Rule Brittania” or Singapore’s national anthem), travellers (the nation state’s influx of diaspora) or hotel staff — unpacking their livery or practising routine tasks. Two walls and assortments of furniture draw in to complete a room with two entrances. Changing rear-projected wall-paper and costuming deftly signify eras, as do documentary photographs, film footage and other images, such as for The Good Manners Campaign accompanied by the singing of “Stand up for Singapore.” It’s a space cleverly designed for a close encounter with a culture unfamiliar to most Australians, but in many ways close to home.
Hotel comprises 11 plays, each around half an hour, each with a bracing sting in the tail, all linked by being set in one hotel room à la Raffles and unfolding over the course of 100 years in one nation state, Singapore, from British colonial rule to independence from Malaysia in 1965 and on to the present, and performed in two gripping two-and-a-half hour instalments.
An ensemble of 14 role-changing, sometimes gender-swapping performers virtuosically engage in situation comedy, wild farce, high drama and song and dance. What unites all of these apparently disparate components is an unremitting focus on Singaporean culture in terms of race, class, religion and gender, evoking at once rich diversity and unresolved tensions. What makes Hotel deeply fascinating is its dramatically rich account of the escalating complexity of Singapore’s racial and cultural diversity, unforgettably felt not least in the production’s last scene. But I’ll begin at the very beginning of Hotel and then jump to the end.
Hotel, W!LD RICE, photo courtesy the artists and OzAsia 2017
From first to last: the drama of diversity
In the first scene, in 1915, the Eurasian and devoutly Christian wife of a racist, sexist and bullying English planter is shocked when he delightedly insists they attend the public execution of some 50 Sepoys: Muslim Indian soldiers in the British army who had violently mutinied in protest at being sent to fight against Muslim Turkey. She defiantly refuses to attend, her husband departs, she communicates sympathetically in Malay with a Muslim bellboy who admits a desire to “kill every white face,” gives him a valuable necklace (a gift from her husband a short while before) and, deciding to leave her husband, exits for the Sepoy lines. Her act won’t upset the status quo but it indicates the depth of the tensions that will drive Hotel. Shots are heard, the cast sing “Land of hope and glory” at the end of a scene that commenced with “Rule Britannia.”
The scene plays out tensely, the wife reserved, consistently insulted for being a woman and of mixed race and then nervously frantic under pressure. But in her husband’s absence, a sense of resolve firms. It’s a surprisingly rapid but convincing release, in a scene already focused on power, class, gender and the ‘otherness’ of being Eurasian and, under British rule, Malay. That ‘otherness’ will play out across the hours in many permutations as will the role of language in throwing up barriers or allowing alternative expression.
While this might seem like a thematically complex beginning, compared with what’s to come it’s relatively simple if true to the way most scenes play out: a social binary will be met with a third element, either from within the pair, or from without, in a recurring dialectical dynamic.
In Hotel’s final scene, set in the present — if with an air of prophesy — an elderly man (Ivan Heng, one of Hotel’s two directors) and his wife have installed themselves in the hotel room, with a nurse, as long-term residents. Because he’s ill, management are not keen on having the hotel treated like a hospital. The scene is built around the seemingly well-to-do Singaporean Chinese couple’s resistance to being moved out. As pressure builds, what commenced as comedy — including the wife’s blunt sexual comments and her husband’s curmudgeonly casual racism towards his daughter’s Mauritian husband (who fights back) — turns ever so gradually dark. Under pressure from management, he reveals he’s dying of prostate cancer and asks to see the hotel staff whom he thanks and quizzes about their origins, revealing diversity beyond the anticipated Chinese, Malay and Indian mix and including two mainland Chinese workers who, to his surprise, speak no English. “What’s the need?”, is the response, an indication that Singapore is changing beyond the comprehension of a member of a cultural group that comprises 76% of the state’s population and whose first language is English.
Even the man’s economic standing has been undermined: he reveals that his and his wife’s properties have been sold out from under them by developers, that the couple have tried unsuccessfully to live with their adult children in Australia and returned home to enable him to die in peace and comfort in a hotel room. This revelation tempers our dislike for the man and we’re amused by his allowing the staff to take selfies with him and shake his hand, but it’s his words to them about “home” that cut deep and shift the play’s mood into sadness. Asked why he decided to spend his last days in a hotel room, he says, underlining the many different periods and states of being in Hotel, that the room is “a temporary space” and that “home” is “all an illusion.” He feels, in effect, that his kind are on their way, sooner or later, to becoming the ‘others’ he has mocked. This final scene — typically compact, linguistically sharp and deft at briskly changing the emotional temperature — tautly draws together the thematic threads of Hotel’s rich weave. It acknowledges a persistent preoccupation, as one character in this scene puts it: “We don’t even know what to do with diversity,” while revealing an already arriving future of even greater diversity, something in an era of globalisation we can all recognise, but more overtly experienced in a small nation state. The one connection to the past is a benign Indian woman who has worked at the hotel for 30 years and assures management that, yes, other people have died in the hotel over the decades.
Issues and eras
The nine scenes between the first and the last accommodate a vast range of characters, historical events and issues. In a comic scene set in the 20s, a housemaid, caught out in a hotel guest’s dress, is confronted by a nun and two policemen, little knowing that she’s adopted the role of a woman who has beaten her fellow maid and that the nun, in response to new legislation forbidding the abuse of maids, is following up on a reported crime. In 1935, a scene is built around a spiritualist who anticipates a coming war in the face of British indifference; in 1955, a famous filmmaker, P Ramlee, battles to make a socially conscious film without singing and dancing and focused on Malay culture.
In 1975, in an hilarious drug-fuelled farce (the wallpaper warps) a Eurasian transgender person, Brigid, is confronted with the Virgin Mary, giant walking penises and angels arguing for commitment to one gender or another. It’s revealed that the first sex reassignment operation in Singapore took place in 1971 and that by 1973 identity cards reflected the transition. But Brigid declares love for both her/his breasts and cock and is determined to be a different kind of ‘other.’ This passion is juxtaposed with the sudden appearance from a wardrobe — at the mention of God — of the nation’s founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, railing against men with long hair spoiling foreign investment in Singapore and opposing ambiguity in general. Brigid and the US Viet Vet who provided the drugs have sex, she mounts him, and in a segue we see them celebrating marriage.
Hotel, W!LD RICE, photo courtesy the artists and OzAsia 2017
Across generations: continuity & disruption
Occasionally, characters in one scene reappear in a later one. The perky aspiring film starlet of 1955 reappears, now devoutly Muslim, in 2005, travelling with her businessman son from Malaya, but Singapore is not what it used to be. Worse, post 9/11, her angry son is an easy target for over-zealous security forces and is arrested. Her grandson comments that although his father has no bomb, “the bomb is in the minds” of the Singaporeans. This was the one scene, that although painfully tense, lacked the telling extra dimension common to the others.
In 1945, a Japanese captain, Matsuda, is told by his senior officer that the army is leaving Singapore and that he can bring his son with him, but not his non-Japanese wife Sharifah. The separation is brutally painful, especially when we learn that Matsuda, in act of unexpected kindness, had rescued her from working in a “comfort station,” where women were forced into sexually serving Japanese soldiers. Her anger is unforgiving. In 1985, in Hotel’s most moving and emotionally complex scene, the son, Natsuo, nervous to the point of vomiting and struggling to practice his limited English, has returned to Singapore to meet his unsuspecting mother, now considerably aged and confined to a wheelchair and assisted by her English-speaking grand-daughter who translates for her into Malay. The barriers to communication are many, until Sharifah in anger, leaps up from her wheelchair and yells “Inu!” (dog) at Natsuo, and then a string of other words in Japanese that she explains, “feel like blood in my mouth.” He’s profoundly shocked, falling back as if hit, but persists, offering a recording of his father, who “wanted to come back,” singing for her. In a wrenching exchange Sharifah declares this will be their only meeting and, as he bows low before her, acknowledges him as her son, though she cannot forgive her husband. The full weight of the impacts of war and racism are conveyed in nuanced performances of awkwardness, stuttering hesitancy, misunderstanding, unleashed pain and provisional conciliation.
Another scene, set in 1995, plays out as a classic wedding farce awash with complications around Chinese and Indian intermarriage which, if difficult enough in themselves, are exacerbated by the Chinese bride’s decision to wear a sari for the second stage of the ceremony, to the unyielding resistance of her mother who walks out on the event, just when you expect accommodation. It’s a chilling end to an otherwise riot of contrasting characters — an overly accommodating Indian aunt, a stereotypical gay makeup artist, a sniping Chinese sister of the bride, the wearied father of the bride, an indifferent groom and his understanding mother who comments wryly to her Chinese counterpart, “Yes, the sari is a little too Indian.”
Hotel, W!LD RICE, photo courtesy the artists and OzAsia 2017
Close to home
In many respects, Hotel offers a conventional theatre experience, but provides evidence aplenty that with ambition and vision there is still life in an often tired model. With its two writers, two directors and 11 substantial episodes it’s akin to contemporary television series with their heightened creative teamwork and their appeal to sustained audience engagement. The OzAsia Festival audience met Hotel and its talented cast with unbridled enthusiasm, including the local Singaporean diaspora, some of whom were heard singing along with the national anthem and others, too long away from home, rumoured to have been surprised that the production could get away with the God/Lee Kuan Yew moment.
Although Hotel might not have addressed continuing constraints on democracy, including on the arts (read an interview with leading theatremaker and Director of the Singapore Festival 2014-17 Ong Keng Sen), it was nonetheless disarmingly frank on key matters and admirably culturally self-critical. As our own country increasingly inclines to authoritarianism and struggles to deal with expanded multiculturalism, Hotel’s Singapore feels close to home. OzAsia Festival Artistic Director Joseph Mitchell’s decision to program was bold, apt and timely.
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OzAsia Festival: W!ld Rice Theatre, Hotel, writers Alfian Sa’at, Marcia Vanderstraaten, directors Ivan Heng, Glen Goei, set designer Wong Chee Wai, lighting designer Lim Woan Wen, multimedia designer Brian Gothong Tan, composer, sound designer Paul Searles, The Gunnery, costume designer Theresa Chan; Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide, 28-30 Sept
Top image credit: Hotel, W!LD RICE, photo courtesy the artists and OzAsia 2017
For his third year as Artistic Director of Adelaide’s OzAsia Festival, Joseph Mitchell promised a “large focus on very personal and intimate stories told from Asia“. Two productions exemplify his approach: Filipino contemporary dancer and choreographer Eisa Jocson’s solo work Macho Dancer and Singaporean company Checkpoint Theatre’s two-hander Recalling Mother. A third production, British-Bangladeshi choreographer Akram Khan’s Until the Lions, is epically scaled, but shares with the other two works a theoretical framework that explores the constructed and contestable nature of gender.
Eisa Jocson, Macho Dancer
Performed by young men, often of low socio-economic status, to mixed audiences, macho dancing is unique to the Philippines, a distinctive though largely underground subculture of, especially, the capital Manila’s nightclub scene. Borrowing the iconography of normative Western masculinity, macho dancing performs a complicated deconstruction of gender. Unlike other forms of strip dancing, its movement vocabulary is slow, almost viscid, and heavily grounded. Its soundtrack ranges from American heavy metal to Asian power balladry, with performances working up a palpable sense of camp in the space between.
Eisa Jocson wears khaki hotpants, a black singlet, kneepads, a necklace in the shape of a cross, and cowboy boots — black, with chunky heels and steel tips – which she frequently and commandingly raps on the floor. She makes her entrance onto the thrust stage through a fug of dry ice, accompanied by Metallica’s Devil’s Dance (“snake, I am the snake/ tempting, that bite to take”). Removing her singlet and stripping down to her underwear, Jocson exposes her breasts as the outline of a phallus becomes visible, unsettling our perceptions of her gender. Her body is muscly, athletic. Its energy is concentrated in Jocson’s thighs and legs, and expended in a series of impeccably balanced squats, knee-bends and lunges. We are invited to admire her ‘masculine’ physique, just as Jocson herself spends time flexing her biceps seemingly for her own edification. During a sequence that takes place in silence, she patrols the edge of the stage, fixing audience members with a hard, inculpating stare that suggests the performer’s complete control of the space.
Jocson has written that the work activates a “gender loop,” contradictorily framing the dancer as a powerful physical presence while acknowledging the limitations of this power. Unavoidably situated within macho dancing’s socio-economic context, Jocson’s body remains both objectified and of uncertain social capital due to its transgressive nature. Her stage persona is grim-faced — a mask of dispassionate heteronormative masculinity — but Macho Dancer is a thoroughly playful work, locating joy as well as critique in its subversions. Bookended by aggressively posturing heavy metal and George Michael’s breathy, saxophone-drenched ballad “Careless Whisper,” it could hardly be otherwise.
Musicians, Until the Lions, OzAsia 2017, photo Jean Louis Fernandez
Akram Khan, Until the Lions
Having performed as a child in Peter Brook’s landmark production of The Mahabharata in the 1988 Adelaide Festival, choreographer Akram Khan returns to both the city and the Sanskrit epic with the large-scale dance-theatre work Until the Lions. Khan’s point of departure is Paris-based Indian poet Karthika Naïr’s 2015 collection of the same name — the title references a Nigerian Ugbo proverb, “until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter” — which retells episodes from The Mahabharata from the perspective of various marginalised characters, many of them women. The woman at the heart of Khan’s work is the princess Amba (Ching-Ying Chien), abducted by the warrior Basheema (Khan himself in the original production, here portrayed by the Lengger-trained Indonesian dancer Rianto). Rendered unmarriageable, Amba kills herself and is reborn as the male-gendered Shikandi (Joy Alpuerto Ritter) who, as the “incarnation of penance,” ultimately slays Basheema in battle.
Tim Yip’s set is a vast cross-section of a tree trunk. Prefiguring the battle ground it will become, it appears at first more grey than brown and ash- or bone-like rather than wooden. The trunk’s thick rings suggest deep history, its roundedness the Hindu conception of time as cyclical rather than linear. As the lights rise it is stuck with a dozen or more spears, one bearing the decayed head of an old warrior to which Basheema repeatedly genuflects. Perhaps, in its dead eyes, he glimpses his own fate reflected back at him. During the work’s dénouement the trunk will spectacularly split into three sections, smoke billowing from the fissures, as though Shikandi’s victory over the prince has upended the natural order, shaking the world itself.
Incorporating Western contemporary dance and the classical north Indian form Kathak, Khan’s choreography is varied, emphatic and steeped in ritual. It is also sharply individualised. Rianto’s Basheema is unerringly vertical and straight-backed, an authoritarian figure. His limbs punch out like weapons from a body that moves — in tightly contained leaps and whirls —with military swagger and precision. Chien’s choreography compellingly tracks Amba’s journey from princess to warrior, the angles of her body sharpening, an initial fluidity hardening into something indomitable, almost machine-like. Ritter, meanwhile, registers the strangeness of the character of Shikandi — the progeny of a demon as well as the gender-shifting re-embodiment of the princess — in a series of remarkable disarticulations, limbs at odd angles, crab-walking or on all fours like a dog, scuttling around the stage at speed.
Vincenzo Lamagna’s cinematic score effectively underlines the work’s sense of mythical struggle while four musicians seated around the edge of the trunk provide a mighty wall of percussion, sometimes using traditional instruments, sometimes pounding the stage with their fists. They sing, too, conjuring evocative atmospheres of war, loss and even celebration. If the work’s narrative sense is occasionally compromised by Khan’s febrile kinaesthetics, then its vivid and quietly transfiguring world-building — shaped, no doubt, by Khan’s grasp of our deep-rooted receptiveness to the mythic — is never less than compelling.
Claire Wong, Noorlinah Mohamed, Recalling Mother, OzAsia 2017, photo Jack Yam (Lime Pixels) courtesy of Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay
Checkpoint Theatre, Recalling Mother
During the Q&A that followed the performance of Recalling Mother I attended, an audience member asked writer-performers Claire Wong and Noorlinah Mohamed if, in making a show about their mothers, they had set out to explore notions of gender. They replied that they hadn’t — resisting, I think, the question’s political overtones — but acknowledged that the experiences of women, especially in the realm of labour, were reflected in the stories of their mothers. “We’ve always felt,” Mohamed told the audience, “that the more particular the story, the more universal it can be.”
On the surface, Recalling Mother is an unassuming, simply staged piece of autobiographical theatre. Petrina Dawn Tan’s set comprises two chairs and a back projection screen, its trapezoid shape reflected in the muted, two-tone linoleum that covers the stage. There is no music or, perhaps more accurately, the music is entirely verbal, the work’s text woven from the performers’ interviews with their elderly mothers. Wong’s — who is not biologically related — is Cantonese-speaking and fiery, Mohamed’s Malay-speaking and mulish. Wong describes both as “complex and contradictory.”
Mostly told in the first person and past tense, the work’s storytelling mode is demotic and conversational, firmly rooted in the oral tradition. Layers of theatricality — such as the performers’ occasional slippages into physical and verbal imitation — are gently and sparingly applied. Personal histories are sketched out in relatable vignettes seamed with humour and melancholy (Mohamed’s mother was diagnosed with dementia in 2010 and Wong’s father died in 2016, both events worked into the show over successive iterations since 2006). Quotidian routines, especially those revolving around food preparation — the Malay rice dish nasi lemak, a popular school snack, is especially laboured over — are recalled in loving, fine-grained detail.
For all the work’s lightness of touch, however, the shifting idea of ‘women’s work,’ as shaped over time by culture, class and generational divides, is central to Recalling Mother. Unsurprisingly, it is the mothers who perform most of the unrecognised labour, emotional and domestic. We learn that Mohamed’s mother, an uneducated former metal worker, is illiterate and that her first husband was abusive (“he was no good for us,” Mohamed says matter-of-factly). As the mothers grow old and infirm, the caretaking roles are reversed. At one point, Mohamed, now with a PhD, cradles her sobbing mother in her arms. Elsewhere, Wong traces her adoptive mother’s progression from “elegant, stylish” office worker to an old woman who struggles to get out of bed and watches too much TV. Even in the poignancy of such moments we are reminded of the distant place of men in these stories, an absence that hangs like a pall over these impressively resilient women.
In her introduction, Wong describes Recalling Mother as a project of “honouring and remembering.” At the end of the night we are told the mothers’ names as the cyclorama fills with a close-up photograph of their aged hands, pale and bony, the skin coarse and flecked with liver spots. It’s an image of endurance, tender and tough at the same time — much like the play itself —that speaks to the too little acknowledged work of women, as makers of the home and of the world.
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OzAsia Festival: Macho Dancer, choreographer and performer Eisa Jocson, lighting design Jan Maertens, coach Rasa Alksnyte, dramaturgy Arco Renz, Nexus Arts, 21-22 Sept; Akram Khan, Until the Lions, choreographer Akram Khan, set design Tim Yip, lighting design Michael Hull, performers Ching-Ying Chien, Rianto, Joy Alpuerto Ritter, music Vincenzo Lamagna, Dunstan Playhouse, 22-23 Sept; Checkpoint Theatre, Recalling Mother, writers, performers, directors Claire Wong, Noorlinah Mohamed, set design Petrina Dawn Tan, Space Theatre, Adelaide, 22-23 Sept
Top image credit: Ching-Ying Chien, Until the Lions, OzAsia 2017, photo Jean Louis Fernandez
In our concern with the negative effects of colonialism, we often overlook the enrichment that cross-cultural intercourse can bring. Macau Days offers a glimpse of that enrichment by illuminating the history and mythology of Macau, a 500-year-old European outpost and the first European settlement in Asia. A collaborative work by visual artist John Young, author Brian Castro and composer Luke Harrald, Macau Days includes a book of the same title by Castro (himself of Portuguese, Chinese and English parentage) and Young (Chinese and French-Dutch). All are Australian residents, and both Castro and Young were born in Hong Kong which neighbours Macau. The exhibition demonstrates the human need for travel and migration in personal and spiritual growth.
The beautifully produced and illustrated trilingual book is itself an art object, comprising poems by Castro and Paul Carter inspired by Macau’s colonial history, an introductory essay by Art + Australia editor Ted Colless, and images of Young’s artwork. Castro’s delightful and darkly humorous poems, collectively entitled Macau Days: or Six Poems in Search of a Dish, bring to life six characters he has discovered who exemplify Macau’s history — the Chinese sea goddess Mazu (originating c 960, and whose name may have been the source of the name “Macau”), the Portuguese poet Luis Vaz de Camões (born c 1524), Chinese poet and painter Wu Li (born 1632, an early convert to Christianity following the arrival of the Jesuits), court artist and Jesuit Giuseppe de Castiglione (born 1688), Portuguese writer and Japanophile Wenceslau de Moraes (born 1854) and Portuguese poet Camillo Pessanha (born 1867).
Castro includes recipes that reflect Macau’s multicultural nature and invites readers to prepare their own dishes to recreate the character of Macau on the premise that food is emblematic of culture and identity. He researched his subjects closely and these recipes were evidently the favourites of the six characters — it’s as if we could enter their hearts and minds or become Macanese by eating these tantalising concoctions.
Mazu, Goddess of the Sea, John Young, Macau Days, image courtesy 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong
The visual component of the exhibition, John Young’s outstanding Macau Days series (2012), comprises several paintings in which images resembling photographic negatives or digital prints of old photos are overlaid with coloured abstract imagery. The figure of a woman in these paintings evocatively represents the goddess Mazu. A series of digitally reproduced historical photographs evoke the history of Macau with, for example, images of significant buildings such as Jesuit churches and a photo of Wenceslau de Moraes in Japanese garb with a small child. And there are texts chalked on paper painted with blackboard paint, as if lessons were being learnt (perhaps in a Jesuit school). These texts are personal musings, for example “to the ends of the world to find my anima,” “our souls meet here” and “absolutely foreign — see how I became.” Some of these chalk-on-paper works bear erasures and re-inscriptions, as if thoughts have been corrected. Young’s layering, corrections and juxtapositions symbolise the layering and juxtaposition of cultures found not only in Macau but throughout the world.
Luke Harrald’s meditative sound installation is a 21-minute tape loop of voices reading Castro’s poems in Mandarin, Portuguese and English. Depending on where you stand in the gallery, you hear each reader separately and quite distinctly. In the background are field recordings of splashing water, bells, street noises, voices and horses’ hooves evoking old Macau’s aural character. The whole exhibition is an immersive and enchanting experience, part history and part magic realism, and it could only be improved by adding servings from Castro’s menu.
The crucial point of the exhibition is that our subjectivity determines our response to colonisation, migration and cultural hybridisation. Of Young’s artworks, Castro writes: “Having studied Ludwig Wittgenstein/ you know that culture determines/ the way we see; that a person’s name/ is, has to be, the picture of a situation./ Doubled and tripled we crossed borders/ easily; but now the paranoia of ignorance/ has folded up your tapestry/ and it’s a DNA test for ancestry/ which supposedly clarifies how/ humanity runs in generations/ alongside insanity/ depending on the periodic flood/ that brings on the clash of blood.”
The colourful history of Macau shows how travel and migration are long-standing human traditions, precipitating enrichment and development. As Ted Colless puts it in his introductory essay: “In this spectral and sensual liquidity of Macau — a version of the city not so much groundless but ungrounded: a city (as one tourist brochure puts it) with no flora and fauna to speak of — borders become porous or ebb and flow, and the earnest chauvinism of identity politics can be supplanted by mashups and medleys.”
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OzAsia Festival: Macau Days, artists John Young, Brian Castro, Luke Harrald; Migration Museum, Adelaide, 23 Sept– 8 Oct
Top image credit: Marienbad, John Young, Macau Days, image courtesy 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong
Jeff Khan’s in high spirits about the imminent opening of the 2017 Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art and his programming tells me why. The works he conjures are fantasias, at once beautiful and disturbing, and political provocations embodied in intimate close-ups and works of scale. Liveworks artists are experimenting with contemporary performance, performative installation, lecture-performance, one-on-one interaction, environmental dance, live art and a visual art exhibition that entails performance. Cultural representation in the program includes Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Indigenous and other Australia. An influential Singaporean curator and dramaturg, Tang Fu Kuen, will deliver one of two keynote addresses (a new initiative for the festival), the other by Indigenous artist r e a, a leading figure in Australian new media art. I met with Jeff Khan and asked him to guide me through his 2017 Liveworks Festival program.
What’s your big picture for Liveworks in 2017?
It’s our third festival and we’ve established Liveworks as an Asia-Pacific festival and it feels like that aspect of the festival is really hitting its stride. It features the largest contingent from Asia that we’ve had and a first tentative step into the Pacific with Mark Harvey who’s from New Zealand — not a broad reach into the Pacific, but a start. All of the relationships we’ve been developing with artists in the region have come to fruition though research and Performance Space being present at festivals, platforms and events in Asia over recent years.
LabAnino, Liveworks 2017, photo Toni Muñoz
Let’s talk about those Asian artists. From the Philippines you have Eisa Jocson, who appeared in your 2015 program with Macho Dancer, which provoked strong responses and has just been well-received in Adelaide’s OzAsia Festival.
There are three Philippines-related projects this year. Eisa is returning with a brand new lecture-performance work, Corponomy, in which she’ll reflect on her works and demonstrate systems of physical exercise that transform the body. We also have LabAnino, a collective of Filipino and Australian artists who’ve been practicing for over a decade: Valerie Berry, Paschal Berry, Kenneth Moraleda, Deborah Pollard and the Anino Shadowplay Collective from Manila. Performance Space has presented both of their previous collaborations and hosted them in our Liveworks Lab last year. We’re spotlighting what is a really enduring and very exciting collaboration
Who is the third Filipino artist?
Justin Shoulder, whose new work is Carrion [a post-human spectre that has the ability to shapeshift into multiple forms and speak multiple languages] is an Australian artist with Filipino heritage. Much of his creative development over the last few years has involved going back and forth, first from the Philippines to Australia and recently to Hong Kong and China.
Geumhyung Jeong, Oil Pressure Vibrator, Liveworks 2017, photo Gajin Kim
And from South Korea?
Geumhyung Jeong who was also involved in the Liveworks Lab last year is a solo artist whose work crosses the borders between dance, puppetry, performance art and sculpture. It’s idiosyncratic work and very weird in a really interesting way. She’s an extraordinary performer and all the work is driven by her physicality. In the suite of two works we’re presenting, [she focuses on] the relationship between her body and a series of inanimate objects. Seven Ways, an iconic work and her first full-length production, is a duet between her body and seven very carefully chosen domestic appliances or objects including a vacuum cleaner, a mannequin and a suitcase. These encounters are very charged, highly eroticised and overtly sexual. It’s a unique depiction of a side of human sexuality that we don’t really explore much on stage. Her most recent performance work, Oil Pressure Vibrator, takes this idea several steps further in a performance-lecture that describes her relationship with and her lust for a huge industrial earth excavation machine. She looks back at Seven Ways, the relationships she’s had with objects, explains the rationale and then moves on to this idea of falling in love with the excavation machine and applying for a license to drive one in Korea. There’s footage of her lining up with construction workers of Seoul to test and fail, test and fail, until finally she gets her license to drive the machine so that, essentially, she can “commune” with it.
I wonder what this says about her view of South Korean culture.
I guess because South Korea is so technologically driven by the merging of the human and technology.
And perhaps too an extension of the kind of animism afforded nature in that culture.
She has such a singular vision about this. In Seven Ways she operates all of the inanimate objects almost as puppets in their interaction with her. So she’s performing as herself and the objects.
Who do you have from Japan in your program?
Osaka-based Tetsuya Umeda will present his installation Ringo. He’s a sound and installation artist coming from a long tradition of experimental sound practice in Japan that’s been pioneered by people like the legendary sound artists and instrument builders Akio Suzuki and Aki Onda. Tetsuya is an artist I’ve wanted to work with for a long time. He also works with mundane domestic objects — lampshades, tin cans, Bunsen burners, plants — and arranges them into quite elaborate installations which he activates through performance, where he either sets up chains of cause-and-effect or manipulates objects live to produce quite fantastical light- and soundscapes. There’s a beautiful respect for objects both in Geumhyung and Tetsuya’s practices that re-orient our own relationship to things around us and the world.
I see that Ringo is a ticketed event, but you describe Tetsuya Umeda as an installation artist.
Ringo is a ticketed event in the form of an installation performance. Tetsuya sets up a series of scenarios in a very low key way, wandering through and activating the installations, transforming them to produce quite magical sound and light effects.
Christian Thompson, Purified by Fire from the Lake Dolly series, 2017, image courtesy the artist
Let’s talk about Indigenous Australian artists in the program. Christian Thompson is a highly performative visual artist who’s often been the subject of his own work in quite unusual ways in exquisitely staged and costumed photographic and video works, and now in live performance.
Christian has maintained a live performance practice. I remember working at Gertrude Street in Melbourne and organising a few live gigs where Christian performed punk music/performance art. He also has a Master of Theatre degree from the Amsterdam School of Arts, Das Arts, which he received in 2010. He’s very comfortable in the world of performance but those works are rarely seen or given equivalent recognition. This work, Tree of Knowledge, was originally seen at the Art Gallery of NSW for the Anne Landa Award exhibition in 2012, but performed in the foyer with a transient audience. We’ve supported him to redevelop it into a full-scale performance work and also introduced Christian to Claire Britton who, of course, is a much loved and well-known designer who stands between the visual and performing arts worlds with her practice. She’s coming in as an outside eye to help adapt the performance for a theatre context.
Another Indigenous artist, r e a, a leader on the Indigenous new media front, is to give a keynote address.
This is the first time we’ve had a keynote lecture component to Liveworks. R e a is a pioneering new media artist in Australia and she’s also about to finish her PhD. She’s been doing fascinating research into the relationship between technology and the construction of the Indigenous body. This has obviously informed her own work but is also really relevant to the work of artists like Christian and others of our leading Indigenous artists. Also, r e a’s newer work is [dealing with] the intersection of indigeneity, gender and sexuality — exploring fluid gender identities in indigenous cultures and the transition between male and female, which reflects much of the work we present at Performance Space and the increasing national and international interest in gender and sexuality in contemporary culture.
The other keynote will be given by the Singaporean Tang Fu Koen, a well-known curator and dramaturg in Asia.
He was involved in the early Time_Place_Space creative laboratory initiatives, a really important moment for Performance Space, before my time here. As well as being a dramaturg for artists like Eisa Jocson and Thailand’s Pichet Klunchun, Fu Koen has recently been appointed Artistic Director of the Taipei Arts Festival in Taiwan. It’s always been an interesting, outward looking festival and Fu Koen is certainly one of the foremost curatorial experts in SE-Asian performance practice and how traditional cultures are finding contemporary expression through experimental work. His perspective on practice in the region will be a real boon for the Liveworks audience.
Let’s talk about other Australian and New Zealander works in your program. You’ve just returned from the Proximity Festival in Perth where you’d been one of the provocateurs assisting artists in developing their performances.
Jen Jameson’s Let’s Make Love was one of the Proximity performances. It’s a really beautiful 20-minute encounter between Jen and one audience member at a time, in a real time attempt to generate oxytocin, the hormone that produces the feeling of love, which, one might argue, we need more than ever in the world right now. The capacity to have very intimate encounters alongside large-scale works like Agatha Gothe-Snape’s Rhetorical Chorus or Justin Shoulder’s Carrion is very exciting
Mark Harvey, Three Stages to Turqoisation, Blue Oyster Gallery, 2016, photo Chloe Geoghegan
Does New Zealander Mark Harvey’s work fit as an intimate work?
Yes. Mark is almost like an artist in residence because his series of free performances will happen in and around the Carriageworks precinct over the two weeks of the festival. He’ll set up quite physically absurd situations in which he’ll invite conversation with passers-by about politics. For example, one of his works is called Face-down Projections. He will lie face-down at the threshold of the entrance to Carriageworks and invite you to step on his back so he can telepathically intuit your carbon footprint and then broadcast it to everyone else in the building. In Backward Conversations, he walks backwards for two hours through a space and invites people to walk backwards with him and have a conversation about what they find frustrating or immoveable about the politics of the day. It’s a very disarming way to try to crack open conversations about politics.
Nat Randall’s The Second Woman is both intimate, with its one-on-one encounters, and epic, because they are watched by a large audience over 24 hours.
There’ll be 100 ‘co-performers’ over the 24 hours of the performance. Like Mish Grigor’s The Talk in last year’s program, this is a work by a local artist that belongs at Performance Space and Liveworks. It’s a real thrill for us to present the Sydney premiere of The Second Woman.
Lz Dunn’s AEON impressed our Hobart reviewer when it premiered in the Salamanca Moves dance festival last year and has since been shown in Melbourne.
It’ll be presented in a secret location in the Newtown vicinity not far from Carriageworks. It’s a beautiful walking and sonic experience of nature.
A flocking experience, based on bird behaviour I gather.
Yes, the participants flock. AEON was commissioned by Mobile States consortium which is great for Performance Space to be part of and to be able to present the Sydney premiere before it then goes to PICA.
Rhetorical Chorus, Agatha Gothe-Snape, 2017, Liveworks 2017, photo courtesy the artist
Tell me about Rhetorical Chorus.
We commissioned Rhetorical Chorus alongside The Keir Foundation for the Performa Biennial in New York in 2015. It’s a really wonderful large-scale performance work by Agatha Gothe-Snape based on the hand gestures of Lawrence Weiner, the legendary conceptual artist from the 1960s. Weiner’s text-based work has been a major influence on Agatha’s practice. She chanced upon him in 2011 while in transit at LA airport where they had an encounter in which their hands touched. It was a very arresting moment for her. She was amazed at the softness and sensuality of his hands as opposed to the very hard-edged, masculine rhetoric of his work. She’s compiled a dictionary of Weiner’s hand gestures, which are interpreted by Agatha’s long-time collaborator, performance artist Brian Fuata in choreography by Brooke Stamp and Lizzie Thomson, alongside a choir of experimental vocalists led by local composer Megan Clune and by Joan La Barbara, the internationally renowned vocalist and composer from New York who’s visiting Australia.
And lastly, the intriguingly titled The Future Leaks Out.
Our Program Manager Tulleah Pearce has curated this exhibition, which looks at the future as this contested site and the contrasting utopian and dystopian narratives that we’re currently facing, largely around the relationship between humans and the environment — all of these science-fictive narratives that are starting to become real in our lives. The centrepiece of the exhibition is a huge 10-metre waterfall of mist in the Carriageworks public space by Emily Parsons-Lord [see a video of the artist speaking about the air we breathe]. The waterfall will release distressed plant pheromones into the air throughout the festival.
Literally?
Literally. The pheromone can be chemically replicated.
It should be beautifully disturbing.
Exactly — much like our obsession with the future with apocalyptic fantasies that are both beautiful and disturbing at the same time. This undercurrent runs through the exhibition, which includes works by Angela Goh and Tully Arnot that will be activated at times with performances by the artists.
Thanks, Jeff. I’m ready now to give myself over to Liveworks’ cultural adventuring and speculative questing, the beauty and the disturbance. Bring it on.
Top image credit: Geumhyung Jeong, 7 Ways, Liveworks 2017, photo Wooshik Lee
The 2017 OzAsia Festival’s visual arts program takes viewers into magical worlds of history and legend and worlds of harsh reality. In telling of catharsis, identity crises and soul-searching and of the need for both travel and home, these well-chosen exhibitions reveal much about Asia and about ourselves. I review three of them here and the impressive Macau Days in a separate response.
A place never been seen is not a place
You enter Doris Wong’s installation through a black curtain to find yourself in a place resembling a street at night. There is brick paving with weeds poking through, a litter bin, a street lamp, a phone box and just enough illumination to allow you to navigate. But inside the litter bin is a repeating video of a light bulb glowing brightly and then exploding. The street lamp is upside down and in place of its globe is a small moon. The weeds are painted silver and there are two more videos on large screens, one showing planet Earth rotating and then suddenly being snatched away by a child’s hand, and the other showing a passenger jet also rotating as if controlled by unseen forces. The phone in the phone box rings and when you answer you hear a voice ruminating on why life seems so miserable and how you might move from a negative to a positive frame of mind.
Doris Wong is an established Hong Kong artist whose work has always been strongly conceptual, but in recent years it has exhibited a mystical quality (read an interview with the artist). Her exhibition, A place never been seen is not a place, represents a shift in her work, and it’s accompanied by a small bilingual booklet in which she sets out the thinking behind each of the five works in the installation. Each has a sentence as its title: “A place never been seen is not a place” is also the title of the moon suspended in the inverted street lamp. Wong is concerned with the proposition that “space and time do not actually exist, but are tools to understand ‘reality’.” By offering us a reality that does not conform to our understanding of it, she provokes us to rethink our perceptions. What is the right way up? How does the moon affect our lives?
“You have already heard the most important story in your life” is the title of the phone box component of the installation. It refers to an occasion when Wong was staying in a hotel room and the phone rang. She heard voices, and though the call was presumably the result of a technical fault, she wondered if she had missed an important conversation. Subsequently the event became imbued with mystical significance since it prompted her to question her own awareness of potential communications with inner or other worlds.
A place never been seen is not a place, Doris Wong, photo courtesy the artist and OzAsia 2017
“What lies inside you is not a person, but personality,” is the title of the exploding globe in the litter bin, a metaphor suggesting we are all repositories of discarded ideas. Doris Wong also suggests that some people have different personalities in their dreams. They have no fixed identity; their identity is their own creation. The video of the spinning world grabbed by a child’s hand, entitled “Since you were born, I have realised the universe is full of kindness,” is a reference to the birth of her son, the day of his birth being the only one when the universe seemed kind. The spinning passenger jet, entitled “You choose the safer side,” mimics the spinning Earth but also suggests a plane crash. Wong cites an American hypnotherapist who believes that souls choose their destiny, while the two videos placed opposite each other collectively suggest that supernatural powers control our lives.
Wong’s installation is a stage with you, the visitor, as the actor, inviting you to rethink your beliefs. Her work recalls various New Age philosophies and an essay by Anthony Yung in the booklet discusses the aesthetics of occultism. For me, Wong’s exhibition is about the unreliability of perception and comprehension, and the human tendency to fill gaps in understanding with imaginings. We explain what we don’t understand as being the work of god or some other paranormal force and Doris Wong’s exhibition obliges us to admit to this tendency.
Zhang Kechun, Yellow River series, image courtesy the artist and Chengdu Blur Roof Museum
Shifting Permanence
This absorbing group exhibition, curated by Ding Fengqi of the Chengdu Blue Roof Museum, showcases performance art in Chengdu, a city of over 10 million in China’s Sichuan province. Artists there have been leading the development of performance art in China, and the exhibition’s works dwell on the personal and social impact of rapid social change, urbanisation and evolving personal values and customs.
Tong Wenmin captivated the opening night audience with a live performance entitled A Silent Discourse, in which she grasped a hot light bulb with a hand covered in honey, the softening substance dribbling onto the floor. She then ground charcoal into powder, smearing herself with it. The catalogue quotes the artist as saying, “Language cannot fully express ideas, and sometimes becomes a trap in itself… Through the exploration of the body movement and physical structure, in a specific time and place, we may be able to search and approach the truth, where we can seek peace and retrieve origins.” This view seems to characterise many of the works in the exhibition and the idea of performance art generally.
Tong’s video, Flying Wind (2016), shows her standing bowed forward on a windy, desolate, rocky mountain ridge. Her long hair — barely visibly weighted with stones on the ground and connected by threads to her hair — becomes a part of the arc of the body, a living sculpture until she walks off into the distance. The work apparently expresses the artist’s interest in wilderness and its contrast with the urban environments to which she is accustomed. Wong also showed two juxtaposed videos from her HW Factory Project (2016): Factory Program. Forge Iron shows her in a range of simultaneous screen images hammering hot iron at a blacksmith’s anvil. In Sleep, again in multiple frames, the artist rests, sleeps on and rises from beds made in the factory. These works perhaps suggest the exploitative nature of intensive industrial labour and the use of outdated technologies. Next to the videos are photos of the work produced — the ‘products’ are pieces of mangled iron, suggesting the futile nature of earlier industrial production.
Zhou Bin’s two works are compelling. His Diary (1986-2015) features a video of the artist cathartically pulping the diaries he kept from 1986 to 2015 and converting them into fresh paper, available for reuse, as if he is turning himself into a tabula rasa. The resulting stack of fresh paper is displayed in the gallery beneath the video, symbolically inviting us to overwrite his life. Zhou Bin’s use of traditional papermaking methods speaks of occupations that are disappearing and the video also evokes the erasure of the self in an online, non-paper based world. For his other video work, 4000 Miles (18-23 August 2015), Zhou Bin made a bronze cast of his own head and then dragged it behind his car as he drove 4000 miles from Chengdu to Xi’an, one the city he was born in and one where he now lives, and back again. As the bronze head scrapes along the road, it slowly wears down on either side, leaving only a thin outline of his head in profile. The resulting object is displayed adjacent to the video, the journey and its outcome symbolising the wearing down of the self by the contemporary world.
Li Liang’s work Father 1927.12.03 – 2010.08.27 is a sequence of photographic images of the artist’s father, including images of him as a boy and as a frail old man facing death. The artist was concerned that his father’s life — all 30,219 days — should be remembered as more than the hyphen connecting his dates of birth and death. So, in a painstaking homage, he carefully wrote all the dates of his father’s life in tiny print over the photos.
Award-winning Photographer Zhang Kechun’s Between Mountains and Rivers is a sample of four colour images from a large-scale series that documents changes to the Chinese landscape resulting from development. His documentary photography represents a personal journey and the compositional style and flavour of his work recalls the romantic sublime of European artists such as Caspar David Friedrich, except that here we see humans dwarfed not by virginal, awe-inspiring nature but by an environment disrupted by human intervention. One image is of a group of people gathered in teams beneath a gigantic but incomplete bridge, a freeway that abruptly ends in mid-air — its construction presumably discontinued sometime before. Zhang’s eloquent art comes at a time when despoliation of the planet has reached crisis point.
The exhibition attests to the strength and insightful nature of Chinese performance art and its title, Shifting Permanence, embodies a contradiction increasingly evident throughout the contemporary world. [The exhibition also included the seriously engaging performance artist He Liping who, in four spirited video encounters, delivered in rap rhythm his thoughts on the importance of performance art and the possibilities/difficulties of art/life relationships while submitting himself to a range of bodily challenges including some conspicuous consumption and a marathon smooch in a moving vehicle. Eds.]
Home, Gaybird, photo Keith Gallasch
Gaybird, Home
Hong Kong musician, composer and inventor of musical instruments, Gaybird (Leung Kei-Cheuk), is also a visual artist, and his installation Home, on the Goodman Lawns outside the University of Adelaide’s Elder Hall, is a delightful but telling statement about what home might be. The installation comprises 72 tiny houses of reflective red plastic set on springs on the lawn, their neat rows suggesting tidy suburban streets. The houses are shaped to mimic the roof-line of the Elder Hall and each contains a white toy pig facing the street. Beneath each house is a wind chime, and if you gently push a house the chime rings, representing the sound of a doorbell signalling arrival and hospitality. Gaybird says that his “intention in making new instruments is to explore how to use bodily gestures to create sound.” Home invites us to make sound by activating the houses on springs, and at the exhibition launch, adults and children alike enjoyed playing with the sculptures.
But the work has a serious side. Gaybird says that it is inspired by a visit to Adelaide earlier this year — “It is a peaceful city, well-balanced between urban and suburban areas,” he says. Each little house represents the ancient Chinese ideogram for ‘home,’ a roof with a pig or boar underneath representing the owner’s wealth, security and food. “All that is needed to make a home is a roof and food.” His simple work asks us to think about what we genuinely need to make a home. In the context of this OzAsia Festival, which explores issues of migration and cultural identity in many performances and artworks, Gaybird’s installation asks us to consider the meaning and importance of having a home, something we should not take for granted in our peaceful, welcoming city.
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OzAsia Festival: Doris Wong Wai Yin — A place never been seen is not a place, Nexus Gallery, 7 Sept-8 Oct; Shifting Permanence, Artspace Gallery, 7 Sept-7 Oct; Home, Goodman Lawns, Adelaide, 3-15 Oct
Top image credit: Tong Menwin, Play with the Wind, 2016, Shifting Permanence exhibition, image courtesy the artist and Chengdu Blue Roof Museum
