RealTime E-dition 5 April 2016

RealTime E-dition

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Translation looms large in RealTime this week as our reviewers tackle the relationship between experience and its distillation into art. Is failure of translation fundamentally more likely than success, asks Andrew Fuhrmann, confronted with the strengths and weaknesses of works in this year's Dance Massive. How meaningful is Asia TOPA's invitation for its audiences to witness or enter heightened states in works that blur the line between lived experience and art [image above: Attractor]? Jana Perkovic is disturbed by abstraction not anchored to any palpable materiality in Chunky Move's Anti—Gravity and Luke Goodsell perceives a gap at the centre of Rosie Jones' The Family: a failure to explore the life of the woman who led that destructive cult. Matthew Lorenzon enjoys Chamber Made Opera and the Sichuan Conservatory of Music 's Between 8 and 9, which deals directly and playfully with how we can speak about music. Reviewers are translators too, transforming art experiences into their own art, failing or succeeding in expanding and intensifying the looping conversation that art prompts.

Virginia & Keith

ASIA TOPA: FLOW MAPS & HEIGHTENED STATES A strand of performances in the Asia Triennial of Performing Arts from Yumiko Yoshioka, Pichet Klunchun, TAO Dance Theater, Takao Kawaguchi and Lucy Guerin Inc with Dancenorth evokes states of transcendence, trance and possession, writes Andrew Furhmann, but to what ends?

TRANSLATION AND FAILURE Addressing five works in Dance Massive 2017, Andrew Fuhrmann ponders the challenges of transforming experience into dance, tenuous links with our modern dance past and works too long for their own good.

A SECT SAGA An Australian paranoid sect which, from the 1970s to the early 90s, stole children, indoctrinated and drugged them with LSD, is the subject of Rosie Jones' documentary The Family. The film is strong on imagery, writes Luke Goodsell, but short on nuance.

A SUSTAINING INSTRUMENT Keith Gallasch listens to Tarhu Connections, a CD in which Ros Bandt's playing of a hybrid instrument, the eloquent tarhu, epitomises the album's success in building cross-cultural relationships that will sustain and renew tradition.

ASIA TOPA:
NEW WORDS FOR MUSIC
Matthew Lorenzon is taken with Chamber Made Opera and Sichuan Conservatory of Music's Between 8 and 9, with its evocation of a teahouse in which each table delivers a discrete, harmonious cross-cultural musical experience.

ASIA TOPA: THE WEIGHT OF ABSTRACTION
There's much to admire in Chunky Move's Anti—Gravity, a collaboration between choreographer Anouk van Dijk and Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen, writes Jana Perkovic, but abstraction denies the work flight.

THE LOOP:
BLACK AND WHITE
A painting of a dead African-American, by a white artist in the Whitney Biennial, triggers further intense debate over rights to representation. Also watch Mira Soulio's finely observed film about Australian documentary photographer Robert McFarlane, a master of the black and white image captured in available light.

GIVEAWAY:
TARHU CONNECTIONS CD
This immersive double CD features music, voices and soundscapes of the Mediterranean and the Pacific, brought together through Ros Bandt's playing of the tarhu in collaboration with myriad musicians.

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RealTime E-dttions are published by Open City an Incorporated Association in New South Wales. Open City Inc is supported by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding body, and by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy [VACS], an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments. RealTime’s Principal Technology Partner is the national communications carrier, Vertel.

Opinions published in RealTime are not necessarily those of the Editorial Team or the Publisher.

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