Go, Girl! Bebe Miller talking choreography

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Like the best of modern dancers, Bebe Miller watches movement intently. At her Melbourne workshop presented by Dance Works in June this year, the New York choreographer asked the participating dancers to “take the idea of weight being at risk and allow an interruption to happen.” She wants them to avoid the familiarity of their known dance vocabulary, or its beauty. “How does an interruption become a staccato pattern? Why is that dissolving gesture a continuous thought rather than a break with form?” The dancers struggle with these ideas in their improvisations. Katy McDonald has one foot curved under while another foot is flat, then she flips her body over like a tensile cat. Miller responds with a series of strategies to intervene in the phrasing of movement-hair-pulling, visual or aural distraction, speaking in one ear, manipulating body-parts.

Later in conversation, Miller explains this idea of interruption, as both an aesthetic and political act. She is interested in the ‘civilian body’, a body available to the dancer outside her training but which becomes buried in the habit formation of dancing. “It is only when we know that we have habits that we can use them. Why is the habit of ‘light touch’ always about the same temperature and the same weight in relation to the task at hand. If you change that, then what do you feel? Or resist it? And what if you follow through?” This habit change involves utilising the pedestrian to interrupt the codes they have as dancers.

Political dimensions of being seen as dancers with civilian bodies are linked to interruption. “Studio practices have myths about equality and about mood as if you accomplish what you need to within given rules. But I’m not here to make everything equal. Two men together carry a charge, 2 women, black and white – we live in this world where those things are real so I try to let that be visible.”

I ask Miller where choreography is going in the 21st century? “I think we’re in the middle of a 40 year shift and time is not on our side. I feel there is a path towards relevancy. I went to Eritrea in Northern Africa a couple of years ago for 3 weeks. I’m in a foreign environment and I had this sense of them looking at me intently while I’m looking at them intently. They are looking at someone foreign inside something familiar, so we have a different point of view in terms of intensity. What is that about? Is that something that I can capture in dance? As I work on it, it occurs me to that that difference of gaze is political. It shows up in Ohio, it shows up in Pakistan and Palestine. What seemed like a foreign adventure is in fact localised. So the choreography is about how I can use the home environment, not recreate an African experience. It is not just about race, it is about vibrating in a different way. That is the ultimate test of globalism, can you allow that body vibrating differently to be next to you.”

Her voice in class says “go-girl”and “Yeah! Yeah! “and “oh, hello” when she sees an interruption that vibrates. In watching, Bebe Miller shares this potential for dancing to create physical or psychic change even though she does not know where the choreography of civilian bodies might go in the future.

Bebe Miller workshop, Dance Works, Melbourne.

RealTime issue #51 Oct-Nov 2002 pg. web

Fortyfive Downstairs, once a gallery now a gallery and performance space, hosted a winter collaboration between art and dance, entitled Focus 4. During its season, the space was arranged by placing 4 installations side by side, and nightly cameos in a vestibule. Its audience was led into each constructed situation to bear witness to the dancerly component which brought alive each installation. Dancers and artists integrated their work to differing degrees, with some constructions necessary to the dance, some complementary, some autonomous and others a hindrance.

Stephanie Glickman’s movement bore great allegiance to Michael Sibel’s large, steel sculpture (a conical monkey bars). Glickman sought inspiration from the limitations of bounded space, climbing, weaving, and swinging from steel bars. Here, installation offered an aesthetic puzzle, which provoked Glickman towards a bold clarity of exploration. By contrast, Benjamin Gauci and Louise Rippert seemed to mirror each other: both working in a minimalist sense, whether with white ceramic shapes and flour, or repeated circular movement leaving floury traces. Together, a sense was created of gentle but insistent assertion. Marc Brew’s collaboration with a wheelchair produced some beautiful inversions, where it could have been either chair or body as installation. Brew’s dialogue with his own body suggested the kind of play with structural givens that Glickman found in Sibel’s sculpture.

Glickman, the curator of the show, wrote that the dancers and visual artists did not know each other before working together. As might be expected, such a risky venture is likely to lead to contrast as much as integration. Naree Vachananda’s very personal and moving work was framed by but not particularly connected to Anna Finlayson’s mural collage, whilst Benjamin Gauci’s strong, balletic composition positively crashed through Louis Rippert’s hanging fabrics.

The variety of relationships between artist and dancer taken collectively offer food for thought as to the range of ways in which one form might collaborate with another. Not forgetting that Merce Cunningham’s own option was to combine at the very last minute, allowing different elements—music, lighting, sets-to freely juxtapose.

Tracie Mitchell’s recent work, Under the Weather, was quite different in texture to the above. Although it combined video and dance, there was a sense of an authorial aesthetic, emerging from a single perspective. From dark beginnings, a video triptych blinked and winked, creating a powerful portraiture of urban existence. Dancers emerged from the shadows singly or together, drawing elegant lines. The set fanned out from a recessed centre, suggesting that something was being aired, turned inside-out. Dancers ventured then retreated, hidden again by shadow.

There was a section where each dancer performed solo. Carlee Mellow’s work was striking, precise, quirky, repeated just enough to gain familiarity with her vocabulary. It was also enjoyable to watch Mia Hollingworth and Shona Erskine move through what appeared to be their own material subjected to Mitchell’s careful direction. Sadly, the piece ended before the 3 dancers were able to come back together. So much had been created and established that a desire was born for hiatus and closure. Instead, the piece gently fell into shadow, leaving an opening where before there was none.

Focus 4, Stephanie Glickman & Michael Sibel, Nicholas Mansfield & Andrea Meadows, Benjamin Gauci & Louise Rippert, Naree Vachananda & Anna Finlayson, Marc Brew, and Amelia McQueen, at Fourtyfive Downstairs, Flinders Lane Melbourne, Jul 26 -Aug 4

Under the Weather, choreographed and directed by Tracie Mitchell, performed by Shona Erskine, Mia Hollingworth and Carlee Mellow, music by Byron Scullin, Gasworks, Port Melbourne, July 23-27

RealTime issue #51 Oct-Nov 2002 pg. web

Hold that deadline. Other cultures from ours experience time and the detailing of events, and hence, meaning, differently. In particular, there is a concept of “thick time”, a Balinese term for when events and significances line up in a particularly dense overlay of resonances (John Broomfield, Other Ways of Knowing, 1997). I begin to wonder whether, in improvisation, “thick time” becomes a condition of performance: from the initial, tentative setting-up of an idea, or partnership, through to the layered, richly-confluenced zone of thought and action that looks and feels expanded, hugely spacious, where the span of a single breath is wired to so many options (and organs), words, shudders and slides, that one is not holding, marking time, but that it holds you. Helen Omand says: “The best improvisations are when it seems like the score has already been written in space/time, and the body makes it manifest” (RT 45 p11).

To improvise is to enter a zone approaching the infinite that is yet bounded with finitudes: muscle, step, language, wind. In their finer moments, the most seemingly divergent practices-from Grotowski’s “shedding of resistances” to the classical acterly “training up” to form-also whisper each other’s virtues, hugeness meeting the particular (or vice versa) in multitudinous intimacy. I observe the final session of Precipice in Canberra-not, alas, the fall of the incumbent rulers from their parliamentary spire, but a 4-day improvisation jam, now in its 9th year-and reflect on some of the “givens” of the artform.

Trust. Trotman and Santos in partnership reveal an intimacy that is verbal, physical and structural, with structure a distinct body with its own edges joining in the play. Their interplay seems helix-shaped, diverging, converging, holding their differences in a brilliant interweaving. Santos, glowing-eyed, ‘redeems’ them from the edge of chaos, insisting on the unity of their ‘two becoming one” whilst Trotman falls off a cliff with the other billion into which they have already multiplied. Two gaspingly beautiful moments where their two distanced bodies turn as one.

Ghosts. They show their training, as performers do when they improvise. Trotman and Rees-Hatton through Al Wunder’s Theatre of the Ordinary sharing a tendency to separate words from movement in alternation. Trotman’s words left gasping, arms grasping; peculiar and particular, a quaintly-disjuncted relationship to impulse recognisable as a TOTO influence, yet here ignited with a special resilience and wit. Rees-Hatton belies her maturity with hops and skips, an adult dancer partaking in an all-day lollipop.

Hitching on the glitches. Ryk Goddard plays tag and chasings with patches of light which cut out just as he arrives. An at times harrowing biographic discursion on finding and keeping home, of an identity teetering and lurching away from stable balance. Both verité confession and postmodern artifice, the bravely darkest and most personified piece of the session.

Possible vs impossible, known vs. unknown. Barnes and Bonnar tease out the tango form, decaying, redeeming, querying and quarreling with it as their feet wickedly flick and sashay. A delicious turning-over of a form that already leaves itself open to unturn, tickling at (in)competencies and (in)complicities. His solid body helps her into a backbend, drags her metres across the ground; their roles reverse, she’s surprised to be caught in an impossible expectation to do the same.

From intensified abstraction…. In a butoh-based slaughterhouse blues, Pemberton, O’Keefe and Hunt alternate slack-hipped mimickry of cattle-men with Body Weather incursions into the muscles of slaughtered bovine souls. Blood on the hay, buttocks jammed in corridors. Kimmo Vennonen’s soundtrack veering from literal to a blood-journey through the internal nightmare.

…to dissolution. We emerge in late-afternoon wind and light to Alice Cummins’ silver hair reflecting the agedness and deepgnarled beauty of the courtyard’s central tree. At times her relatively still body seems to sprout from it, at times nearly fall like a leaf, or suspend from within it like a limb; thence dance along its skin, a difference of time and density. Cummins afterwards expresses her consciousness of being the final performance of the weekend. In what way might such consciousness interfere? The show must go on, but performances stop, do they? Cummins’ performance aptly softened the rhetorical edge of the season’s title with a grace and heart that rendered time thick and thin as water.

Precipice, Peter Trotman, Lynne Santos, Lee Pemberton, Anne O’Keefe, Victoria Hunt, Kimmo Vennonen, Sarah Bonnar, Gary Barnes, Ryk Goddard, Noel Rhees-Hatton, Alice Cummins; lighting: Mark Gordon. Australian Choreographic Centre,

RealTime issue #51 Oct-Nov 2002 pg. web

Nightshift 's latest incarnation has increased the work magnificently in scale, complexity and duration, and is magically immersive in Artspace's largest gallery. On opening night, guests disappeared into the darkened space for long, satisfying reveries, wandering amidst the large transparent screens, intrigued by the flickering images reminiscent of peep shows, silent movies and film noir, but uniquely something else-a curious meditation on dance movement and sexuality. Images multiply and enlarge across the space with a photographic intensity and viewers become a shadowy part of the picture themselves in this intimate walk-in cinema of desire. The addition of extended movement passages to the original enigmatic glimpses of McPhee and a more audible and developed sound score confirm Nightshift as a major work in new media arts.

Nightshift, Wendy McPhee & George Khut, Artspace, Sept-Oct 14

RealTime issue #51 Oct-Nov 2002 pg. web

I used to think sound art was about the sound of sound. After engaging is a crash course of events and recordings, I discovered that, similar to more traditional music, a lexicon of noises generated electrically and digitally, has emerged that one can become accustomed to, begin to absorb as naturally as equal tempered tuning. So experiencing a sample of What is Music? events, I came to the (perhaps belated) revelation that more than just being about sonic textures, sound art is often about discerning the (sometimes apparent lack of) relationship between the modes of production and the sound they make.

Saturday night at The Studio, Sydney Opera House, offered a program jammed with different methodologies of making. Jim Denley opened the evening in acoustic mode, playing a saxophone and contact mike. Circular breathing, he created a gurgling drone textured by mouth clicks, tongue tocks and breathy grunts. At one stage the only sound you hear is the scraping of the mouthpiece over his stubble. The performance appears to be an exploration of air within the curls and corners of the instrument, an internal examination of the instrument itself. Joyce Hinterding, tuned us into the ether with aerials, computer and mixing desk. She created an increasingly dense carpet of drones out of electrical hum, tuning into higher tones and buzzes, tapping into slower, loping waves that chopped up the air around us.

Robin Fox and Anthony Pateras launched into a sonic maelstrom, Fox on computer and Pateras virtuosically pounding a small keyboard and activating changes through a breath activated mouth piece. Then just as suddenly the chaos pared back to a respite of a metronome looped and effected. Pateras then took to the strings of a deconstructed piano with kitchen cutlery, chopping and impaling the notes further manipulated by Fox. Toshimaru Nakumura and Sachiko M created a cool, quiet world of machine made sine waves, electrical pings, and pulses. There was no layering, just pure tones introduced for a few seconds and then removed. Binary, on/off. Phantom tones and warm hum of air conditioning. All moments controlled and measured.

Ottomo Yoshihide dragged us back to gritty earth with an improvisation for guitar and record player. He used the guitar to generate drones, occasionally moving into a rock-god lick of suspended notes, pumping up the overdrive, creating loops that hit the torso and kept cycling long after. (I am told it was an Ornette Coleman standard and must admit to ignorance on this one). Finally he threw a cymbal onto the turntable creating a manic carrillion, your head stuck inside the bell. Some couldn’t handle it, others stayed to the bitter end mesmerised or paralysed by its delicate obnoxiousness.

A regular feature of What is Music? is caleb k’s impermanent.audio—this year at PACT in Erskineville, creating a kind of rock concert feel compared to the intimacy of Hibernian House. Ai Yamamoto (Japan/Aus) on laptop (also running visuals) created a dense yet delicate sonic landscape with cascading streams of sound-notes and noises rippling over each other, constantly descending. Her palette of sounds is exquisitely created, concise, crystalline yet full bodied. She manages to produce under-rumbles with no grit in them. It is a stunningly “pretty” sonic universe. Anthony Guerra (Aus/UK) cycled feedback round the speakers, round your brain, with pops and glitches keeping the space unpredictable. He fused the sound into a massive perverse growl, both beautiful and ugly, which eventually pulled back to where it began. Snawkler started with acoustic samples, fingers on the fretboard of a double bass. Their use of samples is like unfinished thoughts of multi-streams overlapping, clashing, overriding other frequencies, a kind of cutup orchestral chaos out of which sonic thought bubbles arise. Their second piece using gamelan samples is a beautiful exploration of glassy and metallic colours. Günter Müller (Switzerland) and Tetuzi Akiyama (Japan) provided an improvisation, interesting in the uneasy differences of sound production. Müller bowed small gongs and metallic objects and played with the overtones, while Tetuzi Akiyama investigated (again) the sonic qualities of an electric guitar—running a metal ruler over the strings, applying things to the velcro strip attached to the body-nothing more than an exploration of the exploration. SEO performed with a joystick, and created sounds that seemed to have lost their video game. Standing in front of the audience, shoes off ready for action, he toggles the stick with full bodied gestures, manipulating loops of hysterical voices and agitated intonations that accelerate and escalate like a car race. I’d be interested to hear works with other sample palettes. Toshimaru Nakamura, played once again, but solo, in a similar vein to the studio night, with simple tones, emphasising the negative aural space—the trains to Erskineville, the sneezes. At the end of a program of such dense sound moments, his work was like a cleansing of the aural sphere.

In only 8 years Oren Ambachi and Robbie Avenaim's what is music? has become a vital celebration of Australian sonic explorations, exploitations and manipulations. After the hangover, activities will continue in dark corners, warehouse and white gallery cubes around Australia, spurred on by the growing sensation that there really is something significant going on here, beginning to impress itself on the Australian cultural psyche and the international scene. Many sonic loving (are we batlike?) creatures await, ears back, for the next instalment.

what is music?,The Studio, Sydney Opera House, Sat July 21, impermanent.audio, PACT, Tues July 23.

Dante Alighhiere’s The Inferno is a remarkably visual work that records the poet’s imagined pilgrimage into the vortex of the damned, phrased in 100 Cantos of 1292-style vernacular Italian poetry. It is the first work of the Divine Comedy trilogy, written after he had been exiled, a victim of the political chaos and corruption of medieval Florence. Hence it paints a vivid picture of Dante’s yearning for the earthly triumph of human potential in an era of deep injustice, corruption and unfettered greed. It’s not surprising then that such a subversive, political allegory still holds much currency today.

It was this model of symbolic retribution that inspired composer John Rodgers to create this modernist, sonic epic for Australia’s national contemporary music ensemble, ELISION. Appropriately they chose to present The Inferno as an installation, placing numerous performers throughout the abysses of Brisbane Powerhouse’s main theatre with grand-scale video projections (by Judith Wright) at each end of their netherworld.

Throughout most of his journey down through the Circles of Hell, the pilgrim Dante had the benefit of the poet Virgil as his personal guide. However, despite such unfettered access to the “voice of reason” even Dante ultimately required further assistance in navigating those deeply complex terrains (provided by Beatrice,symbol of Divine Love).

Anyone who takes on a work like The Inferno is nothing if not ambitious. While attempts at direct illustration are undoubtedly futile, plenty of well-signed guide posts are required to avoid audiences feeling like lost souls groping to “see” horrors in the darkness, such as the Vale of Suicides, the marsh of the Styx or Cocytus, the frozen centre of Hell. Rodgers describes in Real Time 36 (‘Sacred Geometry’, p. 43), how he went about structuring an “architectural” spectrum for audiences, visualising “each instrument’s sound world” as “a microcosm of Hell.” Tactics he employed included electronically generated drones, extreme degrees of distortion and the construction of complex arrays of “multiphonics.’ These were skilfully produced by ELISION’s manipulations of instruments as diverse as slack-stringed violoncellos, bowed polystyrene boxes and water damped Cretales, and, impressively, a flute and oboe cast from ice leading to an audio-visual meltdown. However Rodgers admits in the same article that “most” audiences would miss his numerous Dante-inspired “details”, yet still remain satisfied by a work that does “not need to have any relationship to Dante’s poem”.

Whilst Rodger’s composition offered a generous viscerality it lacked the deep visual sensibilities of Dante’s words. Hence I looked to Judith Wright’s accompanying video text for my guidance, given its significant placement and physical magnitude. Subtly timed interactions of sound and image have undeniable power within new media performance allowing audiences to vividly ‘picture’ for themselves. However with the visuals provided I frequently struggled to conjure up Dante’s incendiary visions of corrupt contemporaries, tortures beyond the pale or indeed much of his imagined geographies.

Suffering therefore from a disorientating blindness, I gratefully alighted upon Murray Kane’s poetic essay in the accompanying program: “‘ How will I recognise Styx’, I asked? ‘Sullen Strings choking on fumes of spite’, he replied matter of factly”.

In the early 90s there was a possie of us all hurtling ourselves through the air and swinging from things, but some of us got a bit tired, a bit hurt, had to get jobs, and it seemed like the Sydney aerial scene went into hibernation. But since 1999 Aimee Thomas and Shelalagh McGovern have been determined to make things, mostly dangerous looking things, happen with their creation of Aerialize-Sydney Aerial Theatre.

Big in Japan was their annual celebration and fundraiser. Described as a night celebrating Asian influences on Australia, the Newtown Theatre was gorgeous decked out like an old music hall with flowing red silks, origami sculptures and a huge scenic backdrop framing the live musicians, Entropic and Deepchild. The majority of the work was a celebration of strength and skill, which the artists had in abundance. Highlights included Suzie Langford’s Cloud Swing routine Tokyo Clouds. Compared to the trapeze this apparatus allows for a gentler physical gesture, making Langford’s death-defying free falls all the more surprising and breathtaking. Susan Mitchell performed an invigorating web spinning routine, Kamikaze, with great strength and precision, and the Urban Spin duo between Langford and Mitchell showed a maturity in their skills and performance presence-they make a good team. Under the Sea, performed by Shelalagh McGovern, was an elegant and gutsy swinging trapeze routine with heart-stopping drops to foot hangs at peak swing, accompanied by guitarist Antonio Dixon and blues singer Mari-Jon Berna, who has one of the most soul-satisfying voices around.

Fortunately, a few of the pieces attempted to push through the showy style that inevitably arises from apparatus and skill-oriented work. Bernard Bru’s Sakura was based around a well developed clown persona and involved an elaborate routine of innovative climbs to the ceiling to release a gentle flow of sand-perhaps a meditation on time and Zen. Playing with the gestural translations of cartoons like Astro Boy, Meika Kiven and Charmaine Piggott pushed the regular trapeze tricks-half angel, foot hang, one armed hang-into refreshingly new shapes and constructions creating an integrated relationship between apparatus and performer. In contrast, Hiroshima by Genevieve Moran, with text by John Hersy, though elegantly performed, did not create a significant connection nor juxtaposition between the physicality of standard ‘tricks’ performed on the lyre (hanging hoop) and the text-one of the difficulties to be worked through when pushing physical performance into more narrative ground.

The most interesting work for me was Simple Terms. Catherine Daniel appeared on stage in simple day wear (no glitter to be seen), looking for her partner. Casually she ran through her complex routine on silks, chatting to the audience, flirting with a boy in the audience. Eventually Jessica Paff arrived and they performed a sophisticated, though still casual routine, on the one silk, continuing the conversation. The underplayed, anti-theatrical nature of the this work was refreshing and suggested a different conceptualisation of aerial performance. I hope they continue investigations in this style.

Big in Japan was a celebration of skill more than of Asian cultural influences. Many of the references were slight, a red sun Tshirt here, a kimono there, which considering the enormous influence of Asian performance training systems (Suzuki, Butoh, Bodyweather) on Australian contemporary performance seemed a little naive. Now that the skills are there and developing, it would be great to see an increased engagement with material on deeper and more conceptual levels-admittedly difficult in such a tricks based medium but something to strive for as Aerialize continue training Sydney performers to swoop, dive and fly.

Big in Japan, Aerialize- Sydney Aerial Theatre, Aug 29-Sept1, Newtown Theatre, Sydney.

A broken tree, each segment labelled with a number. Standing among them Koon Fei Wong silently accounts for each piece on her air calculator. Pale and willowy in little girl dress, the performer is nevertheless powerfully present. Plagued by nightmares, trauma of collective memories, she strives to embody her visions in fragments of language and gesture. The tiniest of wrist actions takes our attention, it animates an arm that floats out from the torso. From the side of the stage Liberty Kerr on cello and Barbara Clare sampling sounds, underscore or interrupt with their own murmuring utterances. Images spill onto the stage. A pile of bodies, dead arms reaching out to be held. Fei chops at her arm, repeats “Long or short sleeves? Or sleeveless?” She stands on a dismembered trunk, “I’m great. I’m terrific.” A proud little smile dances on her lips, in the corners of her eyes, while those same muscles reveal the lie. She speaks of bloodied bones in snow, the colour moving between elements, red to white to brown. In the elusive way of dreams, events drift apart from physical sensation. Remembering her child self as helpless witness to violence, she detachedly describes events in voiceover. Meanwhile her naked body grasps at the sensation in ineffectual movement, shuffling awkwardly on her buttocks from one side of the stage to the other. Finally she falls and falls and falls. And exhausted, she re-assembles the strewn fragments of the tree.

Koon Fei Wong came to Australia from Hong Kong 5 years ago to study Aeronautical Engineering. Thankfully, she lost her way and wound up at the School of Theatre Film and Dance at the University of NSW. Fei was also a participant in Tess de Quincey’s Triple Alice project in Central Australia, a profound experience which triggered some of the thoughts on dislocation and identity she explores so powerfully in this performance.

Teik Kim Pok in generic T, BVDs and white crew socks ponders his place on the map of cultural identity. Whether in Singapore or Australia, clearly being Teik Kim is not enough…”In a past life, I may have yelled ‘Long Live Chairman!’ Today I yell, ‘Long Live (fill in name of Western popstar)’.” And why have his parents only ever called him Daniel, a moniker officially registered nowhere? Taking stock of his upbringing and its effect Teik Kim tosses round possible identities, re-modelling himself, parading for us on a black and white runway. It’s a nicely judged performance, a blend of seriousness and fun that keeps the audience guessing. Along the way, he asks us to take a look at each other, to shake hands while resising eye contact. Finally uncomfortable in the suit, he discards it for a clearer match for his cultural confusions, where else but in the enigmatic persona of Michael Jackson-the black man who could pass for white, maker of his own idiosyncratic moves. Teik Kim flicks the switch to vaudeville and at last, utterly convincing to himself and his audience, with jutting pelvis, single glove, hat concealing features, he slides a slippery moonwalk to “Billy Jean.”

These 2 impressive short works were created as part of Teik Kim Pok’s and Koon Fei Wong’s research as Honours students in the School of Theatre Film and Dance at University of NSW. Both have also engaged with the contemporary performance community in Sydney for the last 2 years with earlier works seen at PACT Youth Theatre, Urban Theatre Projects, Performance Space and Belvoir Street.

Dis(re)membered, performer Koon Fei Wong, sound liberty & bc from magnusmusic, project supervisor Clare Grant; Post-Op Chamber Piece, performer Teik Kim Pok, sound Michelle Outram; Io Myers Theatre, September 25-28.

The paucity of international contemporary dance companies touring to Australia (a handful at arts festivals aside) was brought home by the visit from the UK of the Akram Khan Company and the excitement and dialogue it generated. The company was also resident at the University of Western Sydney and presented different programs at the Sydney Opera House and Brisbane’s Powerhouse.

In her handy summation of Khan’s career and philosophy, “Clarity within chaos” (Dance Theatre Journal, Vol 18, No 1, 2002), Preeti Vasudevan reports that the 28 year-old Khan was born in South London into the Bengali community there, dancing from 3 years of age and beginning with kathak, classical dance from northern India and Pakistan, at the age of 7. At 21 he decided to train in contemporary dance and, subsequently to work at its integration with kathak. Khan says in the interview, “What I’m exploring is kathak, the dynamics and energies of kathak. It is kathak that informs the contemporary.” He conceptualises this classical dance as clarity and contemporary dance as chaotic-not in a sense of formlessness, but, somewhat akin to Chaos Theory, in terms of the invisibility of its borders. “It is an unfortunate misconception that [contemporary dance] has no boundaries. the difference is that you cannot see them…[but] you know [they] are there…”

Khan continues to perform kathak in the UK and India, but his fame has primarily emerged from the contemporary work with his company, a powerful perpetual motion motor whose collective speed reminded me of nothing less than the minimalism of Steve Reich and Philip Glass-with their enormous, continuous flow of notes that for all the rapidity of their playing conveys a transcendent, subtle shifting of states. There are significant changes of pace and form in the 3 sections of Kaash (the 2002 work presented in Sydney), but the overall impression is of a mesmeric totality incorporating intense solo moments (Khan, reciting and demonstrating movement instructions from kathak focused on its gestural vocabulary) and remarkable collective harmony (a precision rarely seen in this country). From within this flow, which like Chaos Theory’s companion Complexity suggests a system working at optimum but ever on the edge, come strikingly memorable moments as dancers rapidly traverse the stage, spin and come to a sudden, curiously unabrupt halt, a sheer stillness, or, a little later, with the rhythms of the movement still in their bodies, an almost indiscernable rocking.

The contemplative blend of unleashed energy and overarching form is embodied too in Nitin Sawhney’s musical composition for Kaash. The dance corresponds closely to its rhythms, ecstatically in the bursts of tabla-driven propulsion. The viscerality of the percussion is layered with sustained notes sounding like they have been scraped from the edges of small gongs and cymbals, sometimes reverberating in harmony with the pulsing, barely stilled bodies of the dancers. It’s a composition that, like the dance, fuses the classical and the contemporary with confident ease.

The context for Kaash is an open performing space forward of a huge work of art by Anish Kapoor-a painting of a framed, huge black hole. In the Kapoor manner it’s often difficult to see where this emptiness begins, the line between presence and absence constantly shifting and blurring, a state amplified by transformations of colour and density wrought by a superb lighting design.

This is no mere backdrop. Not only does it provide a parallel to the shifting energies of the dance, but it also reflects the thematic preoccupations of the choreography. Khann says, “‘Kaash’ means ‘if’ and I am basing it on the concept of Shiva. Shiva in Hindu religion is the destroyer and restorer of order. Shiva in Hebrew means the number 7. Seven is close to the rhythm and music modes of Indian classical that works with energy…What if you put a dancer in an ice cube and then the energy is released when the cube melts? That’s what Shiva is about” (Vasudevan).

Nor is Kapoor’s painting ignored by the dancers. In a work that is otherwise highly formalised the opening and closing moments of Kaash have the kind of abstract theatricality you’d expect from Saburo Tehsigawa. We arrive in the theatre to find a performer gazing into Kapoor’s creation, in turn therefore directing our own gaze, initiating the contemplation that follows. At the end of the performance one of the dancers becomes totally preoccupied with this vast, beautiful but disturbing portrait of sheer flatness and depth, his body swaying left to right, almost as if to fall, to be caught by his comrades in this dangerous reverie. Blackout.

I hope that this visit will inspire a producer or an arts festival director to bring the company to Australia again; in the meantime we can only be grateful to the Sydney Opera House, the Brisbane Powerhouse and the British Council for giving us a rare glimpse of a work of bracing and contemplative totality and cultural resonance.

Fiona Cameron has for some time been one of the most striking presences within Chunky Move, her tall, statuesque pose breaking down into low, complicated, interwoven positions with disarming ease. She has produced several of her own works, notably Looking For a Life Cure (2001), in which she explored the near schizophrenic internalisation of contradictory states within modern life. Her latest project is a pair of duets dealing with urban alienation and the distance between individuals, performed at various informal locations (indoors and outdoors) within Melbourne.

As always with these much in demand dancers, Cameron and partner Carlee Mellow move with such elegance, poise and confidence(as well as with a touch of self-deprecating humour(that their merest physical inflection is eminently satisfying. Cameron is all jagged discomfort to Mellow’s absent-mindedly musing traveller, the knots they tie each other up in taking on a mood of accidental combat. Composer Luke Smiles adds a sense of sonic complexity, jumping from hip-hop loops to hyped techno flourishes, as well as more abstract digital fields and soundscapes (horns, motors, coffee-machines; a cacophony of urban samples).

The dance itself is somewhat slight both in terms of overt content and choreography. It is predominantly the performers’ dramatic nuances that bring it to life. The first piece is an extended joke of how when one is on public transport, one can end up with one’s foot over the ear of a neighbour, despite one’s best efforts to avoid physical proximity. This is a fun little dramatic sketch, but that is all.

The second dance is more provocative, depicting Cameron as a city dweller who has learnt the physical regimes and moves one must go through to avoid chance encounters. To draw on Public Enemy’s hip-hop terminology, Cameron’s character has been rendered “niggatronic,” or robotised in body and psyche (if not race, given that Cameron is white). Like break-dancers, her character moves to the subliminal beat of contemporary, urban capitalism(yet unlike B-boyz, her character (as opposed to Cameron the choreographer) does not consciously manipulate these movements and feelings so as to dramatise her condition. Mellow by contrast seems to follow John Cage’s exhortation to consciously react to the random sounds and textures which surround one in urban life. Not so much stopping to smell the daisies, she pauses to hear the music of the city and pay attention to the other individuals who move throughout it.

Cameron’s dance-theatre scenario of 2 movers who respond very differently to the barrage of Smiles’ sounds encourages such reflections(particularly for those familiar with hip-hop preachers like Chuck D or Kodwo Eshun. It is nevertheless an uncomplicated work in itself, depicting a simple exchange between the characters leading to a comic resolution in which Mellow leaves Cameron reluctantly holding the hands of 2 co-opted spectators. The production was disappointing in the limited way it interacted with or was consciously situated within the spaces it was staged(beyond dealing with the broad theme of urbanity. Overall Inhabited was a thoroughly enjoyable, interesting, short performance which nevertheless did not amount to anything substantial. One hopes therefore that this curious divertissement represents a taster for more impressive full-length works to follow.

“I ain’t goin’ niggatronic; smart enough to know that I ain’t bionic.”
Chuck D, from Public Enemy, Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age (NY, Def Jam, 1994)

Inhabited, director/choreographer/performer Fiona Cameron, performer/co-choreographer Carlee Mellow, co-choreographer Nicole Johnston, music Luke Smiles. Various locations, Melbourne, Aug 2 -Sept 1

Phillip Adams’ Amplification (1999) was an intensely focused study of damaged physicality and desire. His new work, Endling, however is stylistically closer to Adams’ Upholster (2001), employing a jump-cut, mixmaster approach to develop something akin to an absurdist opera. Musical references identify which aesthetic tropes are evoked and assaulted in each of Adams’ scenarios: bucolic neo-classicism for ballet, Modernist dissonance for empty angst, Ligeti for 2001-style fantasies of rebirth.

Adams treats culture and art history as a bazaar, plundering them for ironic details and unlikely, kitsch amalgams. While Upholster is ultimately little more than a choreographically-complicated, funny and sexy divertissement, leaping from the Karma sutra to furniture upholstery, the grab-bag historicism of Endling charts a more coherent and thought-provoking path through the detritus of high and low culture.

Thematically, Endling deals with issues of animality, with the dancers both applying anthropomorphisms to the biological elements they engage with (a fox stole looks back, quizzically, at Stephanie Lake after a brief, sexualised encounter) as well as becoming animal themselves. The early section has an almost hysterical energy, flinging bodies rushing from one scenario to another with a pathological illogicality reminiscent of Lake’s own Love is the Cause (2001). This explosion of themes and movement soon stabilises into a more measured approach however, with Adams increasingly framing and posing his events into lightly moving tableaux.

The comic bizarreness of Endling had me thinking of Grand Union dance theatre or ‘the World’s First Ever Pose-Band’ from the 1970s. Adams has remained close to a maniacally Pop-art sensibility. The Pop reference is also significant in that the humour he develops, while strong, comes from a sense of irony more akin to Warhol’s flat persona than the Chunky Move productions he and several of his dancers have worked on. This is intensely serious play, the characters attempting new rituals for a world where animality-whatever it may signify-is at best attenuated and difficult to encounter. The performers stretch out a massive cowhide between them like a trampoline and rearrange glass-eyed fur wraps upon it, as though testing a form of neo-paganism-but like everything else in Endling (as opposed toAmplification) no desire, satisfaction or ‘primal force’ is evoked. These are rituals which fail to produce a religion. Like Adams’ own approach to culture, the characters of his drama burrow through material without settling anywhere.

Endling can therefore be read as a critique of Martha Graham’s primitivist works such as Into the Labyrinth. Unlike Graham (or even Stephen Page in reappropriating Graham devices), Adams is not suggesting that references such as bullfighting allow us access to a primitive, pre-civilised state. Animality is finally seen as nothing more than a mirror held up to humanity, a projection of human concerns, and not “Nature untamed.” For Adams’ characters, to be animal metaphoricises social marginality, sexuality, or (in a lingering duet between Byron Perry and Toby Mills) homoeroticism. Ultimately the stuffed animals the dancers play with, or the projected footage of the last Tasmanian tiger, preserve a distance from both performer and audience, remaining objects which play in our (human) imagination.

Balletlab, Endling ‘Self-Encasing’ Trilogy: Part #1, choreographer Phillip Adams, primary design Sally Smart, lighting Paul Jackson; performers Michelle Heaven, Stephanie Lake, Toby Mills, Byron Perry, Brook Stamp, Joanne White. Dancehouse: Balletlab, company-in-residence, Melbourne, June 12-16.

The setting is familiar and so are the people. Someone fills your wineglass and asks if you’re having a good time. Faces you recognise stop and say hello, while new acquaintances smile as they pass by. You even look at the art every now and then (just to remind yourself why you’re there). We expect it all to mean something but it rarely ever does.

Memories create the basis for illusion and constructed landscapes offer limitless possibilities. Nothing is ever as it seems in the photographs of Rebecca Ewer. Closer inspection will reveal the truth. Simple scenes are sometimes just that, but reality is always open to interpretation. Watch this space.

Works from Ewer’s The Gallery series have recently been shown in the 5UV window and Adelaide Central Gallery.

The phenomenal growth of communication systems promotes somewhat idealistically the view that geographical and social boundaries are dissolving. However, negotiating interpersonal relationships is still fraught with miscommunication. Contemporary existence relies upon disentangling systems of social, historical, political and personal bias and can leave us subject to preconceptions and psychological instabilities. It is the fragile dynamics of human interaction that tends to undermine our conscientious desire to get along, leaving us, potentially, a bit myopic.

At times then, it seems necessary to adopt a particular viewpoint and defend it and Ricardo Fernendes, writing in the exhibition catalogue on the work of Singaporean artist Mathew Ngui, acknowledges that this can have a polarizing effect. He states: “Everyone chooses his position, be it conniving or rebelling.” The slipperiness and fallibility of systems of communication is demonstrated in Ngui’s cleverly devised installation in Adelaide’s Contemporary Art Centre. As in previous works it is layered with complex metaphors for human activity and the subjectivity of perception.

Precisely planned out in its choreography of materials, Ngui’s installation uses technological devices to negotiate and invert perceptions of the real. Two video cameras on tripods at opposite ends of the room are trained on a forest of PVC pipes inscribed with hand-painted and unintelligible markings. Innocuous looking scraps of timber are placed against one wall and along the gallery floor. When the viewer looks through the video eyepiece the forest of pipes appears as a flat wall and the markings form into a coherent text describing the action of sitting upon a chair. When viewed from a precise vantage point the apparently random bits of wood suddenly coalesce into a chair or rather a perspective ‘drawing’ of a chair in space.

In an empty gallery the PVC and text are coolly totemic. However the static image through the eyepiece is interrupted when visitors pass between the pipes as they navigate their way through the room. This destabilizing of perception is further heightened when the viewer moves to the back room. Here, the relayed wall of text, together with taped sounds from the video cameras, is now projected directly onto the gallery wall. In a performance video Ngui observes, interacts with, and seats himself upon the representation of the chair as seen in the first room. Under surveillance, the viewer has participated unknowingly in the work and becomes an integral part of it.

Multiplying possible viewpoints through the use of multisensory devices and strategically placed clues, Ngui reminds us that reality is a construct, subject to flux and interpretation. Electrical conduits and PVC piping suggest systems of conveyance but interpretation of the objects requires a willingness to ‘see’ beyond the obvious. The viewer is led by recognition and misrecognition of vision, sound and text to investigate the ‘logic’ of spatial and social realms. Trompe-l’oeil illusionism provokes shifts in pictorial space by introducing ambiguous imagery that appears to fluctuate from the real to fictive. Ngui’s work provides metaphors for the perception of multiple physical realities and provides a parallel invitation to explore the complexity of the emotional realm. The transmission of the personal and the emotional are equally susceptible to misinterpretation. Fernendes underlines this emotional capacity in the exhibition catalogue stating, “It is an open space for poetic, logical and metaphysical interventions.”

Mathew Ngui, Tell Me Where I Stand, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australi , July 12-Aug 11

At a LaBasta! gig, someone is deliberately butchering Beckett’s Waiting For Godot with her ultra-dry, self-interrupted delivery. Before the shadow puppets come out, someone else forces a What Is Music? flier into my fist. What Is Music? When is that? Somehow, I get to an under-promoted, but nevertheless packed gig at an old, rock’n’roll pub. Toshimaru Nakamura’s superb No-input mixing board CD is ringing in my ears.

W.I.M? festival co-director Rob Avenaim is first up, making scratchy noises and false-foley work. It reminds me of Pauline Oliveros’ latest CD (In The Arms of Reynolds, Lowlands Distribution, Belgium), but not as good. He drapes his long hair off stage to be replaced by Tetuzi Akiyama, who takes a metal bow with custom microphone pickups on either end to a static acoustic guitar and begins to saw. Zzzz, zzzz. Wow. It all builds to this high-pitched nastiness as he provokes things with his free hand, holding blunt knives and plastic brushes. Almost too many (dis)harmonies. Luv those Japanese minimalists.

Next up is Julian Knowles, having a subdued, fun time behind his laptop—dull to look at, great to listen to. He takes us on a wild ride, from the gritty atmospheres of contemporary digital soundscapes (what would we do without Pro Tools?), then sheets of aggressive, sparkling, scintillating neo-electroacoustics, asymmetrically off-the-beat drum’n’bass, fluttering bass-drones, and more. I haven’t heard such a stylistically expansive palette since Battery Operated toured.

The big deal of the night is up next. I’m not keen. I’m not an Oren Ambarchi fan, his guitar hum is too damn quiet. Same problem with digi-man Phil Samartzis. They’re joined by Günter Müller, who, by rubbing 2 microphones together, or skimming them across cymbals, kicks up quite a din right from the start. Ambarchi and Samartzis respond in kind. Did I just see Ambarchi play an actual note? His guitar sounds particularly dark tonight, ghosting the styles of his peers, while deep, resonant hums emerge from Müller, and Samartzis caps it off with loud, crinkly, micro-exclamations. I remember Pierre Schaeffer’s statement of composing for “the astonished ear.” Well, my ear’s feeling pretty astonished.

After that unexpected delight, Nakamura takes ages to set up. A technical problem? We never know, but an icy draft in the pub is making the audience decidedly restive. When he finally plays, he proves disappointing. Sure, it has a rough aggression lacking in his CDs, a playful expressiveness, but these short phrases seem a bit like pointless noodling. Where are the exquisite, ringing loops captured on CD (No-input mixing board, Tokyo: Zero Gravity, 2000)?

My blood is slowing to ice as the last act, Voicecrack, set up, in the middle of the room, a table covered in cheap electronic doohickies: toys, bike-lights, clapped out scanners, and a heap of photoelectric contraptions. In near darkness they start manipulating the number, intensity and periodicity of light sources flickering onto the light-sensitive devices. A huge wall of industrial noise emerges; the kind of sound that would make Merzbow proud. The Swiss duo’s work fits well into Nietzche’s Germanic ideas about Dionysian chaos uniting life and death. I listen for 20 minutes, but their annihilating sound hasn’t warmed up the pub. I scatter for home before I turn into a pillar of salty ice.

What Is Music?, Corner Hotel, July 16; Waiting for Godot, versioned by LaBasta!, Meyers Place Bar, July 7.

It is opening night at the Schauspielhaus in Vienna’s 9th district. The foyer is packed with vibrant yet reserved Viennese for the second season of Paul Capsis’ Boulevard Delirium. Viennese are a very diligent theatre going lot with the city boasting 45 theatres for a population of 1.7 million. There is no need for programs to develop new audiences or to attract young people—it is a core aspect of a culture that has spawned the likes of Mozart, Strauss and Klimt to mention but a few. The minister for culture, who was in attendance on opening night, is the third most powerful man in Austrian politics. It is not surprising that one of Australia’s most challenging and talented directors Barrie Kosky has taken up residence there as the director. With an annual budget of just under 3 million (AUD), a core staff of 10, a box office income expectation of just 5% and 3 month rehearsal periods he says it’s like a dream come true.

The house lights dim and Capsis appears spot lit in front of a lush red velvet curtain, his burlesque character in total harmony with the theatre’s historic ambience. Top hatted and tailed, he launches into a sumptuous rendition of 'Windmills of My Mind' which segues seamlessly into the wrenching 60s classic 'Anyone Who had a Heart.' The audience is transfixed.

From this intimacy the curtains part to reveal the full complement of the musical ensemble. Capsis is in his element, he is singing the blues-and how! The songs are raunchy, and the Viennese bristle. Relief comes climactically through the heartfelt ballad 'Little Girl Blue'. Capsis then evokes Garland and we are her audience in Carnegie Hall. Kosky’s delicate orchestration allows us an intimate insight into this vulnerable persona. Through classic standards such as ‘The Man that Got Away' and 'Get Happy', Capsis is able not only to interpret Garland but also to add layers through his unique renditions, from pop to punk and back again.

The Viennese swoon to Marlene’s appearance in their native tongue, only to be caught off guard by a strident Streisand attacking them with 'Don’t Rain on My Parade.' And before our next breath, we are praising the lord in a fervor of gospel evangelism.

With a twist of his hair and the placing of a flower, Billy Holiday makes her entrance. Close your eyes and the similarity is remarkable, the characterization sublime.

A Capsis show is never complete without Janis hitting the stage; her reckless hair and loose presence throw us into a free love euphoric Woodstock affair. The audience go ballistic. Capsis and Kosky cleverly exploit this dynamic by catapulting us into a sensational version of Queen’s 'We are the Champions', the poignancy of the rock ‘anthem’ touched the heart and soul of the audience. Capsis exits leaving us chanting for more. We are appeased by a beautifully stark rendition of 'Summertime' before he concludes with the edgy and provocative 'Home Is Where the Hatred Is.'

Broadway Delirium is the culmination of the Capsis experience, combining his favorite characters over the years in a fresh interpretation. Kosky’s clever staging, lighting and direction create a richly dramatic journey, the essence of which lies in the brilliant placement of songs. Backed by a very agile and tight band led by musical director Roman Gottwald, the electric combination of Kosky and Capsis results in a dangerously sophisticated and stylized cabaret. The Viennese loved it.

Paul Capsis, Boulevard Delirium, director Barrie Kosky, musical director Roman Gottwald, Schauspielhaus, Vienna, Sept 6.

I refer to Solrun Hoaas’ “An Australian Blindspot “ in RealTime 50. As the Festival Programmer for REAL:life on film I feel it is important to respond to some of the criticisms raised by Hoaas in relation to the dearth of Asian programming at this year’s festival.

Since its inception in 1999, REAL:life has attempted to redress the balance of anglo-centric programming within the Australian screen culture industry with a culturally diverse program of documentary films in terms of origin, content and style. While I agree that documentaries from the Asian region did not adequately feature at this year’s festival this was by no means due to a disregard for the promotion of the cultural, social, political or personal issues represented through Asian documentary or the styles and sensibilities of Asian cinema. This was, in actual fact, a result of the limited submissions received from Asian filmmakers both internationally and locally.

Out of the 10 international titles that screened at this year’s festival, REAL:life featured documentaries from the USA, UK, Japan, Iran, Romania and France. While most of these films were co-productions with UK or USA-based filmmakers it is important to note that over the past 3 years REAL:life has showcased documentaries from all over the globe including India, Israel, Lebanon, China, Slovenia, Ethiopia, Slovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Taiwan, Cuba, Egypt and many more. The 13 Australian titles selected to screen in 2003 featured culturally diverse stories from the parochial to the international. A number of these addressed issues within the region including the aftermath of the East Timor declaration of independence, the impact of the 1984 Indian Sikh riots on an Indian-Australian family and Korean-American cross cultural identity.

With the growth of the festival, greater resources and better access to international titles, REAL:life looks forward to featuring more Asian documentaries and is currently researching potential titles for inclusion at the next festival.

A focus on the performance of “contemporary classical” or any other kind of current music is not something one generally associates with the major music schools in Australia, some of which still use the label “Conservatorium” to describe themselves. This term implies an agenda of conserving the repertoire of western classical music, principally of the 18th and 19th centuries. Noble as this aim is, the contemporary reality means new approaches to preparing music professionals are being sought across the sector. Professor Nicolette Fraillon, Director of the Canberra School of Music (and now the newly appointed Music Director and Chief Conductor of the Australian Ballet) notes that because “traditional performance jobs are still being reduced in terms of funding and the sizes of orchestras, (graduates) need to be really prepared and creative in a variety of ways in order to support themselves.”
The traditional preparation of a classical music performer is a long and rigorous process. It requires considerably more dedication if you add the skills associated with a variety of contemporary music practices such as the ability to play complex rhythms, to use non-traditional techniques and music technology, to improvise and even to engage with movement and acting. Musical genres are constantly blurring and mutating so it is difficult to know what approach can be adopted to provide the best kind of grounding for the modern musician.

The traditional music school has been forced to reconsider its offerings as the contemporary musical landscape has changed and the relevance of music degrees has come into question from the wider music industry. At the core of the problem is the traditional curriculum. According to Dr Tony Gould, Head of the School of Music at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), “the curriculum hasn’t changed much since I was a student more than 30 years ago.” In the same period, however, the repertoire and required skills have expanded greatly. Gould questions the deeply held notion in the Conservatorium culture that one has to have mastered Mozart and Beethoven before attempting the contemporary repertoire. Stephen Whittington, Senior Lecturer at the Elder School of Music in Adelaide, also believes the curriculum needs to be more flexible and that more interaction should formally occur between the various streams in a typical music school (eg composition, music technology, classical music performance and jazz performance), streams that have been traditionally segregated from one another. For Whittington the undergraduate curriculum is full of subjects that music academics steadfastly believe are core requirements for training a musician. Consequently there is no room to add new subjects such as multimedia as they come into the picture. Whittington asks: “Can you do multimedia if you can’t write a fugue?” The answer is obvious, but the reluctance to let go of archaic fields of study still represents a stumbling block in curriculum reform.

One modernisation strategy gaining momentum is the incorporation of compulsory improvisation training for all students at undergraduate level. Queensland Conservatorium and the University of Western Sydney (UWS) have done this already and, according to Professor Sharman Pretty, the Sydney Conservatorium of Music is poised to follow. Pretty explains that this will be one of the likely outcomes of a large development project at the Sydney Conservatorium in the field of “performance and communication”, a project that “aims to find ways for mainstream classical musicians to break out of the mould and to interface better with the broader community.”

Major music schools have always had to balance their focus of training elite musicians with providing a general training and performance service to the community, but in the current climate the need seems more pressing than ever. A greater responsiveness to the music industry and to other industries being served is also an urgent matter.

For example, Professor Robert Constable at Newcastle Conservatorium reports that there has been demand from the students doing the Church Music strand of the Bachelor of Music degree to incorporate contemporary gospel composition and performance training into the curriculum. Newcastle Conservatorium has also successfully introduced a suite of online postgraduate music technology courses that have mostly attracted school teachers seeking to upgrade their professional skills.

It has perhaps been easier for the small music schools to take a more radical approach to the problem of the contemporary relevance of their courses. At Southern Cross University in Lismore NSW we have completely broken with the classical music tradition in favour of training musicians and audio engineers for the contemporary popular music industry. In this specialist area there is arguably even more pressure to remain relevant to the industry, so we constantly struggle with the appearances of new musical genres and ever-advancing technologies. A few institutions, notably the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and UWS have chosen to embrace the contemporary in a more global sense, combining a range of contemporary styles including the popular. According to QUT’s Associate Professor Andy Arthurs, “there is no one way to play or compose music.” Thus at QUT experimentalism and a diversity of contemporary stylistic performance and creative practices are encouraged. At UWS, Dr Jim Franklin describes a more radical approach insisting that students broaden their stylistic palette. If they come in as rock musicians, for example, they will be expected to engage also with a contrasting tradition such as classical performance, and vice versa. All performance students, even classical specialists, are also required to incorporate sound and/or visual technology into their performance exam projects in a substantial way.

Even within the conservatorium, mandatory engagement with the contemporary is a strategic option. At the VCA, Tony Gould is deeply committed to “correcting the balance between the old and the new.” However, in programming recent Australian works for all student orchestra concerts he expects significant opposition from conservative elements within the school.

In many senses the rise of computer music technology has changed the ball game forever for music schools. Most of the sounds now heard on radio, television and interactive multimedia are predominantly electronic. In much pop music, the only thing that isn’t electronic is the voice. In the nightclub scene people dance almost exclusively to electronic beats. So while the majority of music students are performers it is arguable that the most vital work being done in music schools is in the recording studios and computer workstation labs. Activities range from the production of audio and multimedia artworks to the invention of new methods of digital arts creation and manipulation. Traditional music schools such as the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and the Canberra School of Music have led the way in the creation of software instruments in Australia, and have been joined in recent years by QUT, UWS and a few others. There is understandably more activity in this area going on at postgraduate level where the curriculum is much more flexible.

Despite these advances in the modernisation of curriculum and research there are continual challenges as the technological revolution grinds on. Stephen Whittington notes that at the Elder School of Music there is a new type of composition student who is not concerned with live performance outcomes and often not competent in, or even interested in, music notation. Working with sound entirely in the digital domain is fast becoming the norm in creative music. Whereas a decade or two ago there was a concern that the so-called “musically illiterate” rock guitarist or drummer was not being catered for in the tertiary music education system, we are now faced with a new set of creative practices that bypass the performer altogether. Another anomaly is that no tertiary music institution seems to have seriously engaged with DJing. The DJ is arguably a performer and an improviser but it is difficult to envisage a performance major being created to cover this ubiquitous performance practice.

Although it is impossible to imagine that the music performer will disappear from the musical industry landscape, it is clear that a different breed of musician is likely to emerge who combines a broader range of performance techniques with skills in composition, communication, multimedia and niche marketing.

With the increasingly cross-disciplinary nature of contemporary arts practice, music and other single-artform schools and their host institutions are also being forced to confront their artform ghettoisation tendencies. There have been a number of ways forward including the trend to establish digital arts degrees in institutions that have both visual arts and music programs. This is more viable when the contributing disciplines are in the same location and when strategic decisions to focus on multi-arts and technology collaboration have been made. In recent times the most spectacular example of this phenomenon has been the formation of QUT’s Faculty of Creative Industries.

How music as a discipline fares in these cross-disciplinary conglomerates remains to be seen. At the core of music is live performance, whether it is a string quartet, a jazz ensemble, or a contemporary pop band. Maintaining the performance tradition in the face of the digital arts revolution will be one of the great challenges of music and music education in the future.

Writer Richard Murphet notes in his introduction to Quick Death (1981, in Performing the unNameable, Currency Press with RealTime, 1999) that where most scripts are concerned with “What is it about?” and “Why?” his work focuses “on those thrilling questions—When? and How?”

Slow Love could be seen as an Australian avant-garde classic, enjoying the rare privilege of entering its fourth staging. The text consists of a series of instructions which make up over 100 short, cinematically-framed, enigmatic scenes—mostly without words—which explore various romantic, erotic and affective permutations between 2 men and 2 women. For example, woman 1 sits on a bed and looks right before man 2 rises, topless, from the bed behind her. After blackout, this scene is repeated, but with man 1 walking in on them.

Murphet’s approach opens a rich vein of interpretive possibilities for both audiences and directors. The scenes hang in a dissociated realm where it becomes apparent that both the characters and the audience craft their lives from a limited number of possible actions and outcomes. Virtually all of the worlds sketched by Murphet have been scripted before in film, television and romantic literature.

Murphet’s strongest cinematographic reference is film noir. Chamber Made Opera director Douglas Horton describes the 1983 Anthill version, directed by Jean-Pierre Mignon, as having a “Bette Davis/African Queen” feel, while the cast of the Australian-Flemish co-production (director Boris Kelly; Belgium, Holland & 2002 Adelaide Festival) were clothed in chic, black garb. Horton however has consistently refused to stick closely to extant staging conventions (The Chairs, Teorema). Far from having film noir’s dark, sharply defined contrasts, this production is closer to the grubby, smudged pathos of Ken Loach films. The cast are dressed in drab, loose-fitting, down-market clothes, while the set is reminiscent of a building under demolition. Undressed, mismatched window frames are laced together to produce 2 open work rooms, while a squat, ugly, black wall defines the stage wings. The lighting too exudes lower-class dejection, yellowing mists filtering through, or garish red and blue spots stabbing out like at a cheap nightclub.

The effect is to remove Murphet’s treatment not only from its stylised origins, but also its stylish ones, placing the performance in a world of petty jealousies and fragmented, unsatisfying relationships. Where earlier productions tended to deflate social expectations of romance by the unremitting portrayal of its classy, fictional origins, Horton’s version is a portrait of sad characters whose gestures only barely manage to evoke such models as Davis and Bogart, against which their own lives are unfavourably compared. Murphet notes that where younger casts have played Slow Love as if the characters were beginning their journey into romance, these figures now seem jaded—in Murphet’s words, they are “haunted” by love and its fictional images.

The general grubbiness of the production is also enhanced by the use of cinesonic samples, with grabs from television advertising and other fragments screened onto semi-occluded, on-stage sets, or mulched-out in Stevie Wishart’s live electronic score. The music is indeed the most perplexing element of this production, the sound abruptly leaping from extended string-produced drones (which Wishart creates by reinventing the hurdy-gurdy as an angular, Steve-Reich-style, avant-garde instrument) to beat-heavy drum’n’bass (which seems rather inimical to characters’ moods and actions). Wishart’s score is highly engaging in its diverse palette (almost Enya-like vocals, Laurie-Anderson-style violin doodling, semi-improvised processed samples) but it seems pegged to the cumulative effect of Murphet’s text as a whole, rather than anything in the scenes themselves. The music therefore exists almost entirely parallel to the staging, instead of providing much in the way of keys or entries into the work, or even an overt sonic dialogue with the performance.

What is one to make then of this production overall? I myself was rather disappointed. Not having seen Murphet’s works in performance, I was expecting the sharp chiaroscuro of film noir, “played (as the introduction to Quick Death states) cleanly, clearly and accurately.” Horton and Wishart by contrast have deliberately muddied the look, feel and sound of this aesthetic. Nevertheless, by doing so they produce a work which, despite its drawbacks, demands careful attention to the slight, enigmatic nuances separating ‘natural’ performance from the highly evocative tendrils which link it to romantic fictions as venerable as the Renaissance serenades Wishart briefly drops into. Earlier, slicker takes on Murphet’s script may, in the long run, prove preferable. None of those associated with this production however are content to allow either this script or performance practice in general to remain static. I therefore put Slow Love down as a fabulously brilliant, challenging failure, and fervently look forward to more such works—successful or otherwise.

Chamber Made Opera, Slow Love, writer Richard Murphet, director Douglas Horton, music composition & performance Stevie Wishart, design Trina Parker, lighting David Murray, performers Anne Browning, Beth Child, Mark Pegler, Ian Scott. Malthouse, June 21-29

Recent productions by Hobart companies, IHOS’s Touch Wood and Scape Inc’s Who the Fuck is Erica Price (see review) while stylistically distinctive, shared certain concerns, notably human isolation, if not tragedy, and a non-judgmental view of aspects of mental instability. These bleak topics were countered by spellbindingly good productions, with nuanced performances bringing out the best in script and libretti.

Increasingly, IHOS Opera mentors younger performers through its Music Theatre Laboratory, presenting works-in-progress. These performances are arguably more successful than some of IHOS’s full-scale productions, several of which have been excessive in their attempts to incorporate every trick in the book. The Laboratory, says IHOS, is “a place of experiment, discovery and learning” that gives young Tasmanian performers and composers the opportunity to work with directors and composers of national and international renown.

The program begins with 3 short works, varied in musicality, style and content, but well suited for showcasing the potential of the performers. Butterflies Lost is inspired by a work-in-progress by writer Joe Bugden and is an evocative soundscape set in the Terezin ghetto, the way station to Auschwitz for Jewish artists. Recorded voiceovers include excerpts of Nazi propaganda. Five ragged children play in an elaborate, forbidding set that incorporates broken glass. There’s a strong sense of menace. This is a very moving, very visual work.

Allan Badalassi’s Harmony explores the human potential of healing, incorporating Baha’i prayer text and referencing recent hostilities in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The voices of a 10-person choir soar, their glorious harmonies amongst the highlights of the evening. Rosemary Austen’s Eden’s Bequest sets to music the poetry of Judy Grahn. Solo soprano Sarah Jones performs as a sort of Everywoman, singing a repetitive leitmotif with exquisite clarity and exhibiting a dancer’s physical expressivity. Three female actors represent the ages of woman, engaging in esoteric and symbolic mime and ritual.

The main work, Touch Wood, is a thorough success. Concept and direction are by prominent Finnish choreographer and director Juha Vanhakartano and its music is by Adelaide-based composer Claudio Pompili. Touch Wood is accessible without losing intellectual rigour and largely succeeds in being humorous without trivialising its subject, obsessive-compulsive disorder. It looks, as the program note says, “at the rituals and obsessions we create to maintain our sense of security and draws parallels between them and the superstitions of mediaeval times.” It asks whether we enjoy greater freedom nowadays or if it’s an illusion. Five characters play out their private compulsions and rituals, occasionally interacting in amusing or poignant ways. There are some well realised solos incorporating spoken word and movement. I found the hypochondriac, the religious fanatic and the “compulsive apologiser” particularly entertaining.

The set, lighting and costumes, reminiscent of German Expressionist cinema, are integral to the success of Touch Wood. The performance reaches a musical and dramatic peak with a clever group-choreographed “silly walk” around the stage. The climax is loud, tuneful and exuberant and seems to imply that the human spirit can overcome even impossible odds.

IHOS Music Theatre Laboratory, Touch Wood, Peacock Theatre, Salamanca Arts Centre, May 23-26

In one of the essays from the Liquid Architecture 3 National Sound Art Festival catalogue, Luisa Rausa uses the myth of Echo as a starting point for sonic arts. Echo was banished to a cave to pine for her visually-obsessed lover Narcissus, cursed to return the words of others until she became nothing but an insubstantial echo. Sound has long been associated with such absent-yet-present ghosts, an ideal that reached its height with the extruded tape effects and smudged, crinkly soundscapes of musique concrete.

Although Jeremy Collings and Robin Fox supplemented these venerable tools with contemporary electronic devices, their work strongly evoked this tradition, creating a dense soundscape worthy of Xenakis. Natasha Anderson added inventive, breathy sounds, ranging from incomplete vocalisations, to wind glancing off a flute or gentle recorder notes. These were stripped, banished and contorted by Fox and Collings. The metaphor of Echo or Plato’s cave, of incomplete calls and responses drifting into abstraction, seems apt.

The gritty, spacious soundscapes that are a signature of later, digital processes—what Darrin Verhagen calls “delicate instability”—also featured in the festival. Black Farm for example was a strangely evocative, abstract AV work in which George Stasjic offered garish, cartoon images of the heads of Afro-American vampires and sheep, the camera moving slowly in or out. This was accompanied by Tim Catlin’s open, humming, acoustic world, which, in his words “privileges sonic density, texture and movement.”

The festival overall, however, was notable for its diversity. Bruce Mowson for example has a technologically-dirty-sounding take on minimalism, looping simple, hissy sounds so that his drones become the aural equivalent of op-art. Aural perceptions generate changes in modulation and emphasis where none objectively exist. Mowson’s short festival offering may not have been his best, but it had the elegant simplicity which informs all of his work.

Martin Ng on the other hand produced sharp spikes within an airy, static realm, employing what he described as “the molecular biology of DJing.” Using tiny sonic inversions, he crafted great waves of dense aural assault. Ng performed alongside guitar-pickup manipulator Oren Ambarchi. I confess that Ambarchi’s recent CD left me somewhat nonplussed. Ambarchi characteristically uses extremely quiet sounds and I lack the patience for such excessively hard listening. The live performance began in a similarly desultory fashion, audiences straining to hear anything, but Ambarchi and Ng developed it into the equivalent of an acoustic tenderising-mallet. Ambarchi has a second pick-up on his guitar-neck, and gently tapped it, generating layers of hums. Ng used a similarly cumulative approach. The final crescendo therefore constituted a massive, overdetermined wall of noises. The intensity of this conclusion was compelling—smoke even emanating from Ng’s amplifier!

Several notable AV pieces reworked sonic and visual historic traces. Cassandra Tytler’s My Happiness for example evoked a distressing yet affectionate portrait of Elvis—Elvis young, Elvis fat, Elvis beautiful, Elvis sweaty, as well as his fans—all passing over the viewer’s eye as if through a glass darkly. Light, shade, colour, everything seemed slightly off as Elvis’ voice leaped from one prison of echoing repetition (“Love me/Love me/Love me”) to another. Philip Brophy’s re-scoring of 1980s, easy-listening, rock-videos (Elton John, Billy Joel, Phil Collins) was far less kind to his subjects. Their voices were inverted into screams which Brophy described as possessing “a repulsive yet attractive granularity.” The most revealing aspect of Evaporated Music however was how easily punctured are such fat-cat musos’ conceits. The original film clips which Brophy replayed were crafted to sketch self-important narratives of romance or rebellion. With the voices no longer underscoring this however, these images immediately fragmented—without any further intervention upon Brophy’s part—into a series of meaningless, disconnected shards.

Sonia Leber noted in her paper a similar gap between sounds as historic elements (the recorded voice) and traces (emotion, breath etc) acting primarily through a-linguistic sonic qualities. Her public installations in collaboration with David Chesworth are concerned with gentle interventions in this field. The sounds of dog-owners calling to their pets featured in The Master’s Voice which uses charged or intimate vocalisations to manifest within new social spaces the babble of absent interactions.

Perhaps the most satisfying sonic ghosting of the festival was Hashima. This supremely beautiful study of an abandoned urban settlement on an island reminded me of the haunted visions and sounds of Tarkovsky’s Stalker. The camera switched from largely static shots of layered, dirty walls, to the detritus of people whose lives remained present yet inaccessible, while Jennifer Sochackyi provided an equally haunted score. Gentle echoes, shifts in proximity between the always slightly-removed sound of children, the hubbub of incomprehensible conversations—all became Echoes active within the caverns of history.

Liquid Architecture National Sound Art Festival 3, curators Nat Bates, Bruce Mowson & Camilla Hannan, July 2-20, including Liquid Crystal, North Melbourne Town Hall, July 11; Liquid Vision, Treasury Theatre, July 1; Liquid Papers, Treasury Theatre, July 13-14

Nigel Helyer (see interview), whose sound sculpture Meta-Diva won the 2002 Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award, questioned whether there were any courses in Australia which allowed for the study of sound in proper depth, responded by asking “Is there anywhere that teaches [among other sound subjects] psychoacoustics, soundscape concepts and electronics?” Given Australia’s predominantly deaf visual culture, it is typical that sound not be resourced at the level of other cultural practices.
Sound arts being what they are, a collection of disciplines ranging from post-digital music theory to film soundtracks, live performance to interface hacking, field recording to physical acoustics, it is difficult to find an institution which embodies these in a singular structure. The reality of the practical application of sound is that it is used in a variety of ways dependent upon the needs of individual projects. Yet the sheer variety of applications and their relative potency, especially compared with the ubiquity of visual media, suggests that Australian educational and cultural institutions are unaware of or unable to respond to the need for structures that support and develop the sonic arts in substantial ways. The establishment of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and the new building for the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne, for instance, highlights this emphasis on visual culture. A proposal for a major soundscape studies facility in Melbourne was recently rejected, and funding for sound culture at the level of screen, visual and music institutions continues to be denied. For people wishing to study sound at a tertiary level beyond the superficial offerings of the black box focussed SAE style course, there are a number of institutions run by passionate and committed practitioners who can’t guarantee you a job, but can guarantee a thrilling sono-cranial re-wire.

While it is possible to study a sound subject here or there as part of a more general curriculum, some of the most comprehensive courses in sound in Australia are at Media Arts, RMIT in Melbourne and the School of Contemporary Arts, University of Western Sydney. Media Arts offers workshops in Video, Animation, Installation, Fine Art Imaging, Sound and Soundtrack and lectures in Audio/Visual theory. Students can study any combination of these and can complete sound projects exclusively, if desired, for the full 3 years of the degree. This interdisciplinary/poly-arts model has the advantage of creating a culture of collaboration—sound artists study alongside, and often develop projects with, photographers, film-makers and animators. The staff at Media Arts RMIT include contemporary practitioners Phillip Samartzis and Phillip Brophy, and the department is very much a driving force in the Melbourne scene, having spawned events such as the Immersion surround sound concerts, the Cinesonic Film Soundtrack and Sound Design Conference, the Variable Resistance international sound art events and the Liquid Architecture National Sound Art Festival (see review). Brophy offers some of Australia’s only specialist soundtrack subjects and Phillip Samartzis teaches a series of open ended, workshop and project driven subjects, which see students pursuing their own directions, be they Post-Digital Music, Surround Sound and Immersive Environments, Hip-Hop, Drum and Bass, Rock, Post-Rock or Soundscapes. The course curriculum is intensely student-driven, and syllabus changes for the workshops are a reflection of developing trends and themes in the ongoing collisions between sound, music and media. Anything a student produces publicly (performing and/or releasing material) is incorporated into their assessment and the sound culture of the course is deeply threaded: all the current lecturers in the time-based workshops were once students when Brophy ran the Sound area prior to taking over Theory and Soundtrack duties.

Sound at the University of Western Sydney, headed by the multi-talented and highly proactive Julian Knowles, offers a 3 year, 6 subject sequence in Music Technology which takes students from the ground level up to professional level in music and sound technologies through either a Music Technology major in the Bachelor of Music degree or a Sonic Arts major in the Bachelor of Electronic Arts degree. On top of this they offer Spatial Audio, a subject which is dedicated to the creative potentials of 5.1 audio and multi-channel composition; subjects titled Sonic Landscapes/ Electronic Cinema 1+2 which focus on experimental sound in the context of macro and micro cinema (screen, installation and web); and Pressure Waves and Electric Fields which focuses on experimental approaches to instrument design (soldering iron stuff). There are around 9 specifically focused semester-long sound subjects outside of what you might call more ‘traditional modes’ of acoustic music making. A number of core subjects allow students to work on self-proposed creative projects in an open and supportive environment. It is therefore possible to do a bachelor’s degree where up to three quarters of your subjects see you working with sound in some practical capacity. The remaining subjects are theory subjects which nevertheless allow for sound to be made a focus. Broadly speaking, all sound subjects are available to students in all degrees. There is no rule which locks a student out of a subject due to their discipline base or the degree in which have chosen to enrol. Students are quite heavily connected with festivals: What is Music? (Oren Ambarchi teaches a New Musics subject), Electrofringe, Freaky Loops and regular Sydney series like impermanent.audio and Frigid. Students have also received a grant from the NSW Ministry for the Arts to run gigs and exhibitions in an abandoned drive-in at one end of the campus and have had a partnership with AudioDaze on 2SER-FM.

Another opportunity to study sound within an academic context in Sydney is at the Department of Media Arts at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). The department offers theoretical subjects: ways of listening, culture and sound, music and popular culture which develop a critical approach to listening and historical and cultural contexts for sound; and practical sound subjects including audio production, creative audio techniques, audio workshop (producing experimental features for web/broadcast), soundtrack and installation and exhibition for sound and new media. The philosophy of the course is that sound should be an active and considered element of production—whether it be pure sound or music, or fused with other elements in a soundtrack or installation. The students at the course are active contributors to local film and video culture, various music scenes and some are involved with the more experimental DJ/VJ scene, and with sound art oriented installations and exhibitions. The department has links to 2SER, particularly through James Hurley, the sound facilities manager, and the staff include Norie Neumark who has been associated with Radio National and The Listening Room and creating new media work such as Shock in the Ear, and Shannon O’Neil, whose activities include running the Electrofringe festival, and working in broadcasting, composing and performing. The department previously offered a sound major which, regrettably, was discontinued due to funding pressures.

The Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University, offers a range of studies in sound. In the context of the well regarded Music Theatre and Acting courses, sound students enjoy a highly professional environment. Sound Design is treated as a discipline at the Academy and covers sound physics and speaker placement in all possible environments as well the use of audio to both create and enhance content in theatre, music theatre and film. Most of the lecturers and tutors work in the industry, and class sizes are small, currently averaging 8 students per year. The faculty has 4 studios, 3 digital and one analogue, which are networked and one of the digital studios is designed for surround sound. The Academy has rehearsal and production slots every 5 weeks, and each slot has 3 to 4 productions. The productions are most often theatrical although some include contemporary, modern and classical dance, and the Academy produces 2 films per year. Students put in on average a 60 hour week and are also expected to develop independent projects within the community, often appearing as DJ’s, engineers, and recordists on local productions. The students come from all parts of Australia and a third of these are women.

The usual place of sound, however, is as a module or elective within a larger curriculum of media studies, media art, fine art, new media and communication. At the School of Creative Communication at the University of Canberra, Mitchell Whitelaw lectures in new media, and offers several sound components in subjects in the degree course. Similarly, the College of Fine Arts, University of NSW, in Sydney offers some practical sound segments, and formerly offered a theoretical class The Art of Sound taught by Virginia Madsen, and the Department of Media and Communication at Macquarie University offers sound within its Time-based Arts subjects. The best scenario for these situations is that the lecturer or teacher of the subject has experience of sound practice. The interesting thing about sound’s position within media arts is that although it exists in a fragmentary form, an understanding of how it works will be of benefit in a range of situations, from paying keen attention to the voice while directing, to determining sound stream information to the audience in theatre, from making a video projection sonically effective in a gallery, to understanding temporality and composition for all media in terms of rhythm, layering or spatialisation.

While these and other institutions provide a lively atmosphere in which to study sound, and while sound culture, through live performances, releases, installations and other forms, continues to flourish, some practitioners have concerns about the future overall direction of education in Australia. Julian Knowles, for instance, comments that “we need a new government. People need to value education and intellectual life and start voting for a government which sees these areas as more important than detention centres, border protection and major sporting events.”

This was a special experience. Saariaho is a distinctive composer, often blending acoustic instruments with electronics, often with a dramatic intensity but also an unbroken line of development that separates her from her modernist peers and precursors and aligns her somewhat with eastern European and Russian composers but without their melancholic spirituality. I’d had the pleasure of immersing myself in her Prisma CD before attending the concert. It includes Dawn Upshaw singing Lonh, Anssi Karttunen playing the cello work Pres, and Camilla Hoitenga on flute for NoaNoa. In concert, soprano Alison Morgan managed admirably the sudden shifts from full voice to spoken word to whisper, sustaining the stream of sound that marks the work, faultlessly mixing it with the electronics and recorded voices. Pres is a more intense, argumentative work. I thought Geoffrey Gartner’s attack was bordering on the romantic, but listening again to Karttunen’s slightly more austere approach, I reckoned the difference was primarily a visual one. Witnessing the demands on the player in concert is a reminder of how much the CD experience can be an abstraction of a performance. Gartner’s performance was a fine one, fluent in the gearshifts in the second movement over its propulsive foundation and organic in his approach to the passionate, often moody third. Flautist Kathleen Gallagher’s account of NoaNoa was rivetting, ranging from the guttural to the spoken to the ethereal with ease, and providing some of the most interesting of the acoustic-electronic synthesis in the concert. Harpist Marshall Maguire deftly played Fall, a shorter work with a minimalist insistency that demanded an instant replay. The introduction to Saariaho’s work at the beginning of the concert by musicologist Anni Heino was very welcome. By the way, the Prisma CD (Montaigne naïve, MO 782087) is accompanied by an excellent CD-ROM that includes many hours of biographical and critical information, analyses of individual works as you listen to them, associated imagery, an entertaining opportunity to rearrange a Saariaho work and an eery photo-image of the composer morphing through all the 50 years of her life. Ensemble Offspring have done a fine job of introducing Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho to Sydney audiences with this superb concert.

Ensemble Offspring, A Portrait of Kaija Saariaho, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, July 7

There is a comment that hangs in my head from my time at art school. One of my lecturers, prising his rolled cigarette from his lips, confided to me in a deep voice, “being an artist is like being a cross between an intellectual and a rock star”. The mixture of earnestness and lèse majesté made the equation sound axiomatic. More than any other kind of tertiary education institutions, it seems to me that art school is where home truths and apocrypha blindly coexist. The role of a good art teacher these days is to dispel all the false myths that are woven around art and artists, and to instil in students the skills and the conceptual tools that are behind all good artistic intuitions. The lecturer in question is, alas, neither an intellectual nor a rock star. Academics like this abound in other disciplines, but a more visible concept of testable rigour chastens them. Art schools today suffer from the dreams of virility cherished by some of their staff, and the misconceptions that the outside has of art as a discipline. Art schools of today are both the beneficiaries and the casualties of the fact that art is a practice that cannot be verified. Never forget that economic and social rationalisation is a matter of proof, not truth.

One of the basic tenets of an art education is to make students distinguish between work that is illustrative and work that is critical, that is, ironic. Irony is the essential quality of art once art loses its continuousness with religion. Once out of God’s service, art becomes a mercurial form of play, and it is its sharp playfulness—or to use the philosopher Kant’s famous phrase, purposiveness without a purpose—that makes art so difficult to position. Like telling a joke to someone with no sense of humour, to speak of art as a rigorous practice is usually in vain. Art schools in Australia have been in a parlous state for some time. While experiencing their own hardships, it is not quite the same for schools in Europe whose riches are aligned to continuations with, or strategic departures from, pedagogical traditions and acknowledged mastery.

Signs of the low premium placed on art in Australia are already there in secondary school. Since 2001, art in NSW is only offered at the rudimentary two-unit level. This carries with it significant philosophical baggage, depriving students of the option to specialise and focus, effectively placing art on the same level as home science. It is one of those cases of cultural amnesia that undermines art’s classical parity with architecture, music and poetry. And we might as well bury the fact that the history of art developed in concert with other disciplines of social and political history, anthropology and economics.

Making the study of art still more unattractive is the logic behind the way the results are scaled. The UAI (university admissions indicator) operates according to a median scale which means that someone with a perfect score in art will be scaled down to about 92, whereas more people will be likely to get 95, or over, in something like four-unit mathematics. Yet, according to this very system, if as many people did four-unit mathematics as did art, mathematics would score worse. Art is a liberal subject which means it takes a wider range of students, but now better-scoring students are less willing to jeopardise their final score by studying art. The most intelligent students, however, are also the main performers in art. What puts such squalid policies in operation is the recent romantic myth that art is an expression of innate, essentially unlearnable urges, the province of eccentrics and visionaries tragically ruled by their passions. (We might start by considering that the common beliefs about van Gogh are mostly fictitious.) Unfortunately, a good deal of art is also taught along these lines.

Art schools were also founded on similar prejudices, namely that art is something studied by either the lazy or the emotionally overwrought. (Admittedly art schools are full of students and teachers like this, but they don’t make good art, if they make it at all.) Around 1990 a NSW statewide restructuring resulted in independent art schools amalgamating with universities. Students were enthusiastic, since their degree sounded better and they were also in a more favourable position to shift to other senior university degrees. The staff, (supposedly) practising artists, joined the ranks of academics. The modern art school begins with the Bauhaus (1919-1933), a free and subtle balance of spiritualism and technological logistics geared toward innovations of form that ranged from theatre to painting to design. This legacy, still dominant, can hardly cope with the sort of values that universities impose. In the normative sense, the university is built around the concept of Wissenschaft, which not only means science but also cultivated learning. Art is not science and its learning is not cultivated according to scholastic or rational models.

Throughout Australia, one of the main avenues for university funding is through the quantity of demonstrated research. An academic accrues points depending on books and articles. But the output is stringently vetted: books must have a recognised distributor, articles must be refereed and so on. Non-compliance, no points; the fewer points, the smaller a university’s share of the pie. Until this year, so-called creative labour such as exhibitions (including novels, musical works and the like) did not accrue points. Subsequently, since the staff could not be seen to contribute to the institution in a material way, art schools became an increasing liability, like a handicapped child whose parental love is perfunctory or indifferent. For to field art courses can be up to ten times as expensive as others. Making matters worse, the humanities at large are given proportionately less money per student than more professionally oriented areas.

Despite artists now being able to accrue points, it will be a long time before art schools will contribute materially to the institution as a whole. Oddly enough, a large proportion of tenured art lecturers have been protected by the lack of recognition that their discipline has had up until now. There is an alarmingly small proportion of tenured art staff who are, strictly speaking, regular, active practitioners. Art schools are also more protected than may first appear from the overbearing onus put on universities to make their courses answerable to vocational training criteria. Here is not the place to dwell on the absurdities of such expectations in the realm of the humanities, but in art, precisely because that knowledge is so difficult to quantify, it is easy to diddle the criteria. Being an artist is more an occupation than a profession. In comparison to countries with so-called old money, our art market is meagre and few artists can support themselves from their art. Subsequently, artists service their careers with neighbouring professions, web design, gallery assistance, teaching and the like. Thus to measure the “vocational” success of an art school is best done not in terms of jobs, but how many students go on to become artists; let’s be kind and make the standard 1 exhibition every 2 years. On this score art schools fail miserably.

This begs the question, which is being turned over and over these days, whether art schools should teach students skills or teach the problematics at stake in the whole art game. Either impart techniques without the strategies for manoeuvre, or strategies without techniques. Although most art schools try to do both, most of the staff are themselves divided as to what to teach—and there is now a decreasing knowledge of skills. I know of several students who attended the art school I went to who had to return to TAFE to do foundational courses. It is a perennial concern for prospective students, but not for ignorant teachers. In not teaching them much, they can avail themselves of the myth that they are not constraining the student, letting “creativity” have free sway.

The two most immediate pressures on art schools in Australia are attracting industry dollars and teaching new media. Financially straitened, art schools have to try to service courses which students enrol in for the principal reason that they cannot afford the equipment themselves. This is chiefly the case with new media and time-based art. The only problem here is that the boundaries for this area are far from historically set, and there are but a few people who could competently teach it. And the money for holding and upgrading costly equipment and software is supposed to come from elsewhere—industry—as if industry is a blind and bottomless resource. But art schools are supposedly different from industrial and graphic art colleges. Getting art schools to attract corporations is as ridiculous as trying to get a carthorse to gallop.

Carthorse—or dead horse? Curiously enough, the crises of faith in art schools have been been felt most deeply from within. No other tertiary discipline over the past 10 years has undergone as many face changes as the visual arts. The names of departments in this country’s major art institutions differ from conventional to goofily outlandish, either masking or reflecting what is taught. It is tempting just to say that art schools should be shut down and replaced with selective, localised TAFE-like courses. A writer must know how to write, a dancer dance, a musician play or mix, an actor act. But a good painter, for example, need no longer know how to paint in the conventional sense, not to mention that there is more than one sense of convention. Art schools are themselves a convention, but views are divided as to whether they’re a necessary one.

Julie Kovatseff, University of SA,
Nicotine Traces: the search for the other in the city

Originality is important, and one of the dangers of creative writing classes, for instance, or any critical approach to literature, is that it under emphasises originality. After all, a professor of literature is trying to find a tradition, and influences, which can be traced. People would rather talk about Poe as the typically American genius than as the total kind of lunar nut that he really is. There is nothing typical about Poe: he’s from the moon.
Edmund White

White is aware, of course, that absolute originality does not exist. Yet he knows that it’s the grain of the individual’s voice as it exceeds the strictures of a tradition that is at least one of the thrills of creative endeavour. What interests me, is that it’s possible to be a total lunar nut even while one is channeling an artistic exemplar. Apprenticeship and finding one’s own artistic path can go hand in hand. Hatched offers the proof. And this is also the yearly pleasure of the show, as we find the host bodies that the young artists have invaded gradually morphing into something (nearly) distinct. It is, to go down the familiar Freudian path, a deliciously uncanny experience that highlights the manifold possibilities inherent in every artist’s oeuvre.

Sean Cordeiro’s accomplished $hop & Save, for instance, takes its cue from the Brit duo Jake and Dinos Chapman. Like theirs, Cordeiro’s work is not exactly burdened by emotional warmth. In it, we find a pair of store dummies who’ve been magically turned into a satyr and a centaur. Replete with fake waterfalls cascading in cheesy electronic images behind them, it is distressingly banal. As shopping arcade props meets arcadian fancy, therefore, it draws fascinating parallels between all that Hobbit-ridden mythic fantasy crap and Gucci-style fantasy bullshit; Cordeiro hints that both are about a desire for transformation and that buying into them can leave one petrified like a lump of deformed plastic. $hop & Save is Ab Fab-meets-Tolkein by other means (a severely unsettling pairing) and is a terrifically resolved, if determinedly discomforting, piece.

German artist Thomas Demand makes an appearance in Hatched as host body for David Lawrey. As you might expect, then, Lawrey’s series of photos, Plastic and Cardboard, captures a kind of fake-realness that throws the viewer entirely. They look real but there’s something wrong—like Dorothy’s house after the tornado, shaken, stirred and wrenched from the bonds of the earth, the light is a little off, the seams in the wall and ceiling feel bizarrely stressed and bowed, the curtains suspiciously stiff. Given this, the difference between Lawrey and Demand should be clear: in Demand the violence exists as hidden narrative, in Lawrey we scope the visible scars. In his deliriously pessimistic work, therefore, Lawrey traces the faultlines, the almost gothic heaviness of space, and all the impending implosions that are just waiting to fuck us up and shake our lives into new, probably pretty hideous, dimensions. A nicely paranoid post September 11 riposte.

These are just 2 examples of art education doing its job—providing students with a rich body of works and artists to enter into, to channel through, cannibalise and then spit out. Most of the work in Hatched is in this vein, and it would be pointless to tick off work by work. But this said, the show did throw up a few true Poe-style lunar nuts. To my mind, Julie Kovatseff has to be the furthest satellite. Called Nicotine traces, her work suggests she probably got bored with trains and turned to something a little less salubrious—butt-spotting. Even so, she’s as anal as any clothed capped dweeb as she presents a 1960s style dress with cigarette butts adorning the cuffs and other places, photos of chalk circles where butts were collected and, finally, a map locating their broader positions. With the chalk outlines like crime scene markings she implies the obvious that—and despite her statement that she’s not concerned with the health aspects—smoking may be tobacco-company sponsored suicide. She transcends this banality on another level, however, as the piece becomes a pungent instance of urban archeology; a nicotine stained version of Benjamin’s asphalt botanist, Kovatseff maps the moments where we suck in relief from work or whatever, and hints at an underlying oral erotics that leaves its smoky haze over entire cities.

Also from the moon are Brendan van Hek and Anthony Kelly. Van Hek’s door in its own wooden coffin, Hinge:a joint that functions in only one place, is a wonderfully Wittgensteinean work. Devilishly nihilistic, it is, like all of Ludwig’s best stuff, a piece of packaged uselessness that is both an entry to nowhere and a sign of wasted human labour. Kelly, on the other hand, provides a quirky cold war flashback that has an oddly surreal overtone. Think the setting for a stage version of a Graham Greene novel directed by Robbe-Grillet and you’ll have an idea. Just as a dumb old art fan, I also really liked Midori Oki’s series of small ink drawings, Skin Diving (see page 10), depicting a fleshy nude figure wrestling with its own skin and a small black hole. On the same theme and equally interesting was Winnie Lim’s Felt, a scattering of clothing over the wall.

To use ad-speak, Hatched has something for everyone as it shows a recently birthed art world gleefully taking from their elders what they want and junking the rest. They’re moving on and moving up and many will find themselves in the disturbing position of being host bodies one day. And it might be sooner than they think.

Edmund White is quoted from The Burning Library: writings on art, politics and sexuality 1969-1993, Picador: London, 1994.

Hatched, Healthway National Graduate Show, PICA, Perth, June 7-July 21. Online catalogue and symposium papers at www.pica.org.au/hatched

Aboriginal art is really my expertise. I don’t normally write on subjects such as this but I happened to stumble on a small exhibition, VietPOP, in outer southwestern Sydney, that inspired and positively moved me. Aboriginal art is art made by Aborigines but what was this? Simple affirmations, autobiography of powerful human experiences and vitality, yet from one of the most denigrated youth communities in Australia. Think Vietnamese, think drugs and violent crime. The refugee story, the story of a group of people who have really struggled to become Australian is rarely talked about or given a voice. Maybe it’s the overbearing, fascist, political climate or my own tired state of mind from working in a decaying, surreal academic environment, but I felt I had to write about VietPOP.

The show, involving a curatorium of 7 young artists of Vietnamese heritage, was hung in the Liverpool Regional Museum, a small community cultural space that is a beehive of activity. The exhibition is alive with wit, colour, honesty and pathos. Though there are other Vietnamese artists exhibiting in Sydney (such as Dacchi Dang) this show is, I am told, one of the first (if not the first) to concentrate on young, emerging Vietnamese artists. It is this generation that articulates the changes in the way Australia constructs its ethnic and cultural identity at this moment. A special kind of tension hangs over the exhibition—the effervescent optimism of youth and yet the shyness of an uncertain ability to achieve their ambition. This is a responsibility felt by any serious new rising generation. We want to do the right thing, we want to succeed, we want to honour our parents and our past, we want to make our own statement, we want to determine our own future, we want to be ourselves. The artists are Cuong Phu Le, who is also a community arts officer working with the Vietnamese community, Thao Nguyen, Garry Trinh, Christina Ngo, Thuy Vy, Cat Tien Chuong, and Kevin Vo who collaborated with and provided a counterpoint to Sydney 2002 Biennale artist Jun Nguyen Hatsushiba. In fact Jun’s own students who now are exhibiting themselves are to collaborate in the future with this south-west Sydney group.

Futures and memories. The exhibition appears to be divided into 2 parts that ambiguously, like the lives of the artists, reinforce and yet diverge from each other. The refugee experience is of course central to their lives. It should be remembered that the culture of the West is littered with such stories. The cinema classic Casablanca is a refugee story. A Vietnamese-Australian version has yet to appear. Artists were asked to bring something from their journey, usually a common object belonging to their parents, that had attained an almost sacred, iconic status. Displayed under glass these mundane things resonate equally with sorrow, hope, gratitude and other memories. The parable of the sarong of Thao Nguyen is particularly poignant. It speaks of the escape of her parents and herself as a child from Vietnam. How a Cambodian man they encountered, after selflessly guiding and caring for them to see them to safety of sorts in Thailand, leaves them without asking for payment and is lost to them for ever.

The inclusion of the international Vietnamese-Japanese star artist Jun Nguyen Hatsushiba is interesting. Apparently an email had been posted widely from this group about the time of the Biennale asking, among other things, “What does it mean to be Vietnamese?” It reached a member of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art staff who invited the 2 parties to meet. Jun took to working with this group of ‘same but different’ kin (there’s an Aboriginal expression that says: we are the same essentially but definitely, in minor ways, different). Jun, it appears, has his own sense of responsibility and adventure.

Jun’s life and those of the young artists in fact have meeting points. He was born in Vietnam of a Vietnamese father and a Japanese mother. His work often deals with the experience of being a refugee and of statelessness, and of being Vietnamese in the world, whether you are in Ho Chi Minh City, in Paris, in California or in western Sydney. Yet, what Jun shows is that having 2 cultures and 2 languages enables people to gain insights that they wouldn’t normally. It’s what is added, not what is lost.

The Vietnamese population in Sydney is the largest of any city in Australia and supports flourishing community organisations, religious groups, restaurants, shops and other businesses. Its presence is very much felt. Today there are over 180,000 Vietnamese-born people living in Australia and over 50,000 living in south-west Sydney alone. In 1975 there were only around 900. Of these more than half were babies waiting for adoption. The first refugees arriving in Sydney in 1975 after the unification of Vietnam, were 283 orphaned children who were adopted by families throughout the country. This experience is revealed in newspaper clippings, photographs and other memorabilia in the artwork of Indigo Williams who as a baby was adopted into a very white Australian family. She had also made contact through the same internet survey that led Jun to the group.

The exhibition, despite its seeming lightness, deals with deep issues, the often terrible refugee flight experience, diasporic alienation, of personal identity and acceptance [even if only by your own parents]. Cuong talks of the ‘one and a half generation’—those born in Vietnam before their journey to Australia who have an experience, a memory of the country of their birth, but feel that they have to forge a new experience and a new sense of identity. There are also those who were too young to remember, and those born in Australia. A broad range of homeland experiences, memories and reconciliations exist. Kevin Vo’s almost nostalgic but seemingly detached account of his return visit is different from that of Thao Nguyen who appears to visit Vietnam often.

In a world of dichotomies nothing speaks louder than the senses. Science now tells us that taste is 90% derived from smell, so it is no accident that odours, pleasant and unpleasant, account for some of our strongest, longest lasting, most evocative bonds to people and places. Vietnamese refugees have frequently commented on the sanitised odourlessness of the Australian city environment compared with Vietnam’s rich mix of humidity, spice smells, cooking aromas, decaying vegetation and human life in action. Garry Trinh’s playful logo work I love pho reminds us of the sinister, predatory nature of the globalised fast food industry. In Vietnam the ubiquitous and delicious local and economical pho (a type of noodle soup), though really a breakfast food, can seemingly be found anywhere, 24 hours a day.

In Australia, Aboriginal people describe how animals are at their peak and look their best when they are full of fat. For Vietnamese people the concept of personal image is intriguing. Contrary to Western notions of slim well-being, in Vietnam it is positive to be fat. Some appear to struggle with this in Australia: “All this can be yours. Cars, houses, rich husbands…Life’s not fair, so make it fair”, reads a beauty shop billboard in Thao and Garry’s work. Notions of acceptable or desirable physical attributes and the ability to get ahead in the dominant culture have always had a life in minority cultures.

The exhibition gives these young artists a voice that isn’t necessarily their parents’. Though not denying their past or their roots they are different from the previous generation who often see them as “mat goc” (lost roots) or ‘the forgotten.’ Thao Nguyen’s video piece records conversations between her father and brother where they don’t appear to be listening to each other. Through their voices, these artists reclaim their history in a positive critical reinterpretation that prepares it for generations to come.

Red. Yellow. Colours are read differently on the margins. In the north of Australia, Aboriginal people of mixed descent are sometimes referred to by other Aboriginal people derogatorily as ‘yella-fellah’, or as ‘half a colour.’ In Arnhem Land, these people, who in another context might be described as sophisticated or cosmopolitan, are referred to in Djambarrpuyngu language as “narrani”, bush apple, red on the outside but white on the inside. Like the Asian banana, yellow on the outside but white on the inside. Most probably the appearance of Chinese migrants in the Northern Territory at the time of the gold rush is the source of this term. If an Englishman had Italian and French roots he would be seen as extremely cosmopolitan, intelligent, and be highly regarded. For the ‘other’ a mixture is always recorded by Western writers as a dilution, a loss and a person between 2 worlds, as never belonging to either—something white Australians and Europeans apparently never experience—they are never the ‘other’. They never have to explain or define themselves. This is Kevin Vo’s banana lamp. As Thao Nguyen explained at the opening of the exhibition:

When watching the cowboy movies and John Wayne films, in so many scenes they ask, ‘Are you yella?’. Do you guys know what this means? The Chinese—Asian yellow skinned— migrated to America and Australia during the period of the gold rush and have been here for a long time. They became known for their submissive nature. ‘Are you yella? Are you yellow? Are you submissive and lack courage and tenacity to rise up against me?’ This is what it means…I don’t want to be the next generation of submissiveness.

Ironically in Aboriginal Australia it was these ‘yella fellas’ who, though submissive for a time, came to be the most politically active in leading social change. This exhibition’s participants are also emblematic of change.

What would Australia be without the Vietnamese presence manifest in places like the thriving, amazing market place of Cabramatta? And yet few non-Asian Australians have much contact with the Asian community. Why has it taken nearly 200 years for a contemporary Asian-Australian Art Gallery to appear? Amazingly, in Sydney, the present Gallery 4A’s policy is to deal with inclusiveness which has a broader context. Although there is an emphasis on Asian-Australian artists, they are presented within a mainstream contemporary arts context. And yet this most important cultural centre struggles from a lack of core funding from key funding bodies.

This exhibition in the marginalised south-west of Sydney allows the work to speak to its own community. Largely invisible to the art establishment, the works give young Vietnamese people ideas for expression and being. Attended by over 300 people largely from the Vietnamese community on opening night the show was emotionally and warmly received. The centrepiece of the exhibition was a long banner by Kevin Vo in which each of the artists is portrayed, in political banner fashion, with their own affirmation. Aptly, Kevin Vo’s Superman (it’s hard to be) pop song digital projection, broadcast at full volume, made us aware of how the public act of producing such an exhibition transformed the artists into true Supermen.

Beverley Southcott

Beverley Southcott, Fuel and Gruel (foreground) and Contained Breath (mounted on wall)

Beverley Southcott’s art addresses the alienation of the individual from society and how the interdependence of the economy and the individual, through the cycle of consumption and production, constructs urban life. Her Garden City exhibition included a table at which one must stand to eat, and photos of windows that deny access.

Peter Burke & Robin Hely

Peter Burke and Robin Hely make an excellent duo. Both artists are drawn to witty performative interventions into everyday life that play with our expectations of truth. Burke is known for his alter-egos and fake street tabloid Pedestrian Times, while Hely has become infamous for a recent project at Westspace in which he secretly taped a painfully fraudulent blind date, only to leave us guessing if the angry female subject was in on the game (the whole event given added perversity when publicly broadcast on Channel 31’s weekly art show, Public Hangings).

In their recent show Delivery at Conical in Melbourne, Burke and Hely pose as Starlink Express, a fake courier company. For the exhibition, the 2 artists turned the gallery into a mailroom/depot, creating a major installation of floor-to-ceiling cardboard boxes leaving only a narrow entrance. They even arranged authentic props: a small radio, maps, old beer bottles and newspapers, all as an inventive way of showing video documentation of recent stunts based around the idea of involving the public in a staged art event.

A first video shows the artists dressed in distinctive orange courier uniforms lugging a package around the streets of Oporto, causing confusion among an unsuspecting Portuguese public by trying to deliver a huge, L-shaped brown paper parcel with an illegible address. Hidden inside the parcel, the camera shows the public’s interest in trying to find the owner of the parcel, made all the funnier with subtitles. Pedestrians become performers who freely give directions, help carry the parcel and question the couriers, curious to know what is inside.

Parcel-cam is an innovative trick. As the artists suggest, “the street becomes a lively and engaging performance space for improvised narratives and the mysterious parcel is a metaphor for indefinable content.” On the other screen, the artists are shown attempting to deliver the same parcel to befuddled but helpful recipients at various Melbourne addresses: Federation Square, Gabrielle Pizzi Gallery, Parliament House, the Crazy Horse sex club. On the street, the artists left the parcel with unsuspecting pedestrians—“Hey, could you mind this parcel for a minute while we get some lunch”—before disappearing. It seems we’re used to performances in public now, and some even speculate that they might be part of “some dodgy advertising campaign.” But more than an amusing reality-TV prank, the project becomes a surprisingly touching study in animating public trust. Daniel Palmer

Peter Burke & Robin Hely, What’s inside the box?, Conical Inc. Gallery, Melbourne

Anthony Johnson

Anthony Johnson, Utopia 2002
Sculptor and installation artist Anthony Johnson currently works in Hobart. He focuses on the “non-place”, typified by warehouses, cargo yards and construction sites, as a non-contextual site of transience. The non-place symbolises being nowhere yet everywhere —and the experience of feeling nothing yet everything.

These concerns inform the object-based sculptures and photographs shown at CAST, work meticulously based on equipment and detritus to be found in Johnson’s “non-places”, rendered ambiguous by their construction from incongruous materials such as polystyrene and clear perspex.

Johnson explains, “Despite their generic nature, these objects imply an illogical sense of ambiguity, mimicking the disorientated consciousness of our global village and the utopian quest for the “perfect world.”

Lily Hibberd

Virginia Baxter
For the past few years, the generous collective of artists who live and work at Imperial Slacks have hosted a regular program of performances and exhibitions from independent artists at their gallery in Surry Hills. Alas, Sydney rents have claimed another artist-run space and following the August shows (Look Mum, No Head—a performance/installation night on 2 August and Slacking Off, their final exhibition opening 21 August) Imperial Slacks will close its doors forever.

We dropped in to the gallery one afternoon in May to see Melbourne artist Lily Hibberd’s Burning Memory, a haunting little exhibition consisting of 15 paintings depicting various stages in the destruction of a burning house, each with an evocative title— Vicious Flicker, Collapse of dreams (skeleton). The room is infused with orange, yellow, and white light emanating from the canvases. A musical undertone bleeds from the corner where a video archive shows house fires from newsreels and films such as Hitchcock’s Rebecca. The effect is of something large contained in a small room. A slow and accumulating drama for the eyes and ears that, like fire, fixates. In her catalogue essay, “Wall of Fire”, Natasha Bullock refers to Hibberd as “referencing some of the devices of cinema—still, close-up, distance shot, cropped, blurry and sharp—(to) create a dynamic environment where interacting physical, perceptual and psychological spaces are built, re-built and collapse.” Burning Memory is a peculiarly immersive experience propelled by luminously impressionistic imagery.

Lily Hibberd, Burning Memory, Imperial Slacks Gallery, Sydney, May 29-June 25. www.imperialslacks.com

AFTRS student filmmakers

In April this year I attended the CILECT (Centre International de Liaison des Ecoles de Cinéma et de Télévision) congress at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne. Founded in Cannes in 1955, CILECT is the association of the world’s major film and television schools, with 108 member institutions from 50 countries on 5 continents. The congress was an excellent opportunity to observe how screen teaching practices and philosophies in Australian schools fit into an international context. The 4 key congress themes were “School and Student—The conflict between Harmony and Invention”; “Curriculum Change and Technologies”; “Triangle—the creative collaboration between Writer, Director and Producer”; and “Documentary in the Teaching of Fiction.”

The first of these looked at the challenges of supporting students in their creative endeavours within specific cultural and economic contexts. The Australian film schools, like their international counterparts, deal with this through a variety of teaching models that range from independent and auteur to creative collaboration driven by producers, as well as courses that reflect the models of mainstream television and film production.

Globally, school curricula are responding to changes generated by new technologies. The range of opinion about use of film versus digital media in the training of emerging filmmakers—when, where, how soon, how much—was immense and reflected the way courses develop to match the resources and traditions of each school and the cultural role they play in their community. The Australian Film Television & Radio School (AFTRS) is an interesting example of a national school that has changed over the years to produce graduates who can create innovative work in various forms—television, documentary and new media—rather than just focusing on the traditional training needs of the feature film industry.

“Triangle” explored how curricula can foster creative collaboration. The question of how to create and manage it within a film school is pedagogically challenging and requires the commitment of teaching staff in every department to agree to support the concept and system.

With issues as potent as innovation, cultural specificity, the demands of new media and collaboration all circulating, the choice of where to go and how to get started in a competitive industry can be daunting for emerging filmmakers. AFTRS, the Victorian College of Arts (VCA), Royal Melbourne Institure of Technology (RMIT), Queensland College of the Arts (QCA), Charles Sturt University and Flinders University all offer practical courses with a range of curricula, entry levels and outcomes. I asked lecturers and heads of schools to describe what is unique and innovative about their courses and teaching practices. Here are their edited responses.

AUSTRALIAN FILM TELEVISION AND RADIO SCHOOL (AFTRS)

The full-time postgraduate program is an intensive, hands-on, production course. Students work on productions in their chosen specialist roles (DOP, editor, director, producer, etc) while at the school. Production work emphasises the nature of creative collaboration and assessment requires reflection on the process and collaboration. Teaching approaches include lectures, seminars, workshops and one to one mentoring. The short course program is linked to the full-time program and external students can take up units within it.

The diversity of the AFTRS program is a major strength. Students work on animations, TV magazine programs, documentaries, short dramas, feature scripts and drama series. With 12 different departments (from Cinematography to Design, from Directing to Sound, Visual FX and Producing) AFTRS offers a unique program with its in-depth specialist focus. It is one of the few schools in the world that offers a comprehensive program in Visual Effects Supervision.

Many graduates go on to develop their own production companies and often form teams through the networks they build at AFTRS (eg The Boys, The Bank). A 1995 study indicated 96% of graduates interviewed were employed in the film and television industry. Students range in age from 21 to 40 with 25 about the average. Entry is highly competitive. AFTRS receive several thousand requests for the application form each year which calls for a fairly solid portfolio of written and visual material. About 450 people apply for the 60 or so new places available each year.

VICTORIAN COLLEGE OF THE ARTS

The VCA School of Film and Television courses include a 3-year Bachelor of Film and Television degree, a one year Graduate Diploma in Film and Television, a Masters in Film and Television, a part-time non-award Foundation Program and a series of short courses.

The VCA aims to develop students who can make motion picture programs of high artistic and technical standard at a professional level. The strength of our style of training is that it develops students’ creativity and independence. The VCA School of Film and Television places ideas at the centre of all its teaching and development programmes. Innovation is at its heart.

Programs produced by VCA students have won numerous awards at festivals nationally and internationally. Alumni of the school include directors Gillian Armstrong, Geoffrey Wright (Romper Stomper), Andrew Dominik (Chopper), Aleksi Vellis (The Wog Boy), Robert Luketic (Legally Blonde); BAFTA and AFI award-winning producer Jonathon Shiff; Academy Award nominated editor Jill Billcock (Moulin Rouge); DOP Ian Baker (6 Degrees of Separation); and animators Peter Viska and Adam Elliot.

VCA students come from a variety of backgrounds and ages—some have substantial industry experience, others none. It is very competitive to get into the BFTV. In 2001 we had 203 people apply for 14 places. People sometimes apply several times before getting in to the course.

QUEENSLAND COLLEGE OF THE ARTS
GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY

Established in 1881, the QCA is one of Australia’s leading art and design colleges. Today it is strengthening a reputation in creative arts innovation, offering study across a range of disciplines—Animation, Screen Production, Australian Indigenous Art and, from 2002, a new Bachelor of Digital Design. An interesting feature of QCA has been the close link our film school has made with SBS Independent, producing 5 films in the last 7 years.

The college was annexed to Griffith University in the early 90s and offers an atelier style 16mm film course (the only one in Queensland) separate from the much larger video and media theory courses offered by Griffith University’s Humanities department.

The performance indicators by which to judge film schools are awards and jobs. We take less than 30 students per year, and their employment rate after graduation is high. Films produced at QCA win many awards in creative as well as technical categories. In 2000, honours student Peter Hegedus was invited to the prestigious Dokumart European Documentary Festival in Neubrandenberg, where his Grandfathers and Revolutions won a Highly Commended Award. Widely televised, the film has been seen around the world.

In 2001, 4 QCA graduate films were selected for New York University’s International Film School Festival; Natalie & Tanya Grant’s Ballet Shoe Laces shared the Audience Choice Award, competing with films from 70 countries. These are outstanding results equal to the best of many national film schools around the world from an emerging regional competitor.

FLINDERS UNIVERSITY

Recognising a need for further production training in South Australia, Flinders University introduced a Bachelor of Creative Arts Screen (BCA)in 2002— a 3-year course with an optional fourth Honours year. Prior experience in actual filmmaking is not a necessary requirement but evidence of creative work in visual or written form is, and a short-list of applicants is invited to interview on the basis of this submission. Last year we received 70 applications for a first intake of 14 places. The BCA is designed to be “industry ready”, producing students with sufficient skills to gain employment in a variety of screen/media industries at entry level, capable of gaining additional funding support for independent production, and qualified to pursue postgraduate study in this area.

The practical training emphasises collaboration and the role of the creative team, producing students who can get a foot in the door of industry, can think analytically, critically and creatively, and who understand screen media. Flinders University is an institution which endeavours to encourage innate creativity. Graduates are highly visible in the South Australian film and television industry. Two of the 3 South Australian Film Corporation’s $50,000 Filmmaker of the Future awards and all of the SBS/ SAFC documentary Accords for Australia By Numbers have been awarded to Flinders graduates. In the first few years after graduation many find attachments through the South Australian Film corporation (SAFC) on features and go on to a range of jobs, from project officers at SAFC, to production coordinators/managers, editors, sound recordists, DOPs, producers and directors in television, new media and feature films.

For students aiming for a career in the television industry the following courses may be more suited to their needs.

RMIT

RMIT Media Studies provides a 3 year Television Production major that introduces and develops a broad range of skills relevant to independent and commercial television and film production. Television Production is a Major within the BA Media Studies at RMIT.

The major strengths of our approach are the ways in which students are encouraged to work in independent and collaborative projects. We have redefined production to acknowledge the converging nature of the media industries. Students in their final year are able to develop and produce major collaborative projects that have multiple real world outcomes for converged media environments.

Broad television skills are emphasised, 16mm film production is available as an elective, and television studio experience is also available. Students are encouraged to concentrate on basic skills in the first 2 years of their program and in their third year to specialise in cinematography, direction, producing, sound design, editing, or digital postproduction. There is also the possibility of specialising in networked interactive video.

Our graduates are well represented throughout the film and television industry in Australia and enter the film and television industry as assistants to established industry practitioners, or start their own independent production companies.

The majority of our students are school leavers and there is a broad mix of local (Australian) and international students. Our first year enrolment is approximately 50 students.

CHARLES STURT UNIVERSITY

The 3-year degree course in Television is vocationally oriented. It provides high level craft skills training at broadcast operations level combined with an equal emphasis on storytelling and aesthetics. Students are exposed in first year to the range of craft skills used in television production, from tape ops to directing, single camera to 3 camera multi-camera studio and are expected to identify their craft interests early in the course. The major strengths of this practice lie in the graded approach to skills acquisition and consolidation in the first 2 years.

We only teach within the electronic television environment. However, anything they learn in this course is transferable laterally to filmmaking. The course is a BA (Television Production) with the possibility of Honours (an additional year) and a Masters degree.

We have had a take up rate that varies between 80% and 95% and at least three quarters of a class of 35–40 will be employed upon graduation. We work at this constantly by making our training both relevant to the industry environment, and challenging to future creative possibilities. We aren’t in the business of training ‘button-pushers.’ It’s why you push the button that matters.

Most of our students graduate around age 20-21. Backgrounds are varied, but most have had some exposure to video production at secondary school. We look for students who have a passion for television as an expressive storytelling medium and want people who will take a risk, not just conform to fashion. Television needs to be constantly challenged and I think the core of it all is that we want to train these young people to be employable and challenging in the coming decades.

The paradoxical question of how you teach creativity while training people for an industry that is about commerce and business is constant and ongoing. As are the issues of how many students we should be training, how many graduates will make their way into careers that are (and always have been) highly competitive to enter, difficult to survive in financially and often already oversubscribed.

The schools covered in this article are by no means the only way to get into the film and television. For young people starting out, the CREATE training package on offer in some TAFEs and schools can be a useful place to begin, as can the many undergraduate courses on offer within Screen, Media and Communication departments in universities throughout Australia.

Does Australian documentary programming reflect the turning away from our region that characterizes the last 5-6 years?
A glance at the exceedingly amero- and euro-centric line-up of the last 2 Australian International Documentary Conferences in Adelaide in 1999 and Perth in 2001, as well as the recent touring Real: life on film documentary festival and the REVelation Festival in Perth would suggest this disturbing trend. It is as if our documentary programmers unwittingly have fallen in line with the direction followed by the Howard governemt.

Even more disturbingly, at a recent brainstorming session in Melbourne, there did not seem to be much recognition of the problem or interest on the part of the organizer of the next documentary conference in Byron Bay in 2003 to shift this exclusive focus on films made by North-American and European filmmakers. To invite people from other parts of the world is put in the too hard basket because they are seen to require special attention (They might need interpreters! ) or because most documentary makers in Australia have no interest in knowing how their numerous counterparts in Asia, Africa or Latin-America view their own societies and present their stories. Audiences for their films at the Melbourne and Sydney documentary conferences in l995 and l993, which made laudable efforts to include them, were embarrasingly low.

We seem to prefer and perpetuate the trend among many Western filmmakers to go in search of the extreme, the exotic and unusual, the ‘underbelly of Asia’, to satisfy a Western audience’s obsession with sex and gender issues. Asia is meant to remain ‘the other’ and satisfy our desires. These are the films that rate well in our festivals.

And what of SBS (which laudably screens more documentaries than any other channel) and its programming of works by documentary filmmakers from the Asia-Pacific region? They are virtually non-existent. The World Movie afficionados are catered to with feature films (dominated by Hong Kong movies and Japanese animation), but hardly ever a documentary from the point of view of people who live in the region. Surprisingly, SBS differs little from the commercial channels in assuming that we need to have the real world interpreted to us by Australian, North-American and European filmmakers.

Is it perhaps SBS’ eagerness in recent years to be recognized as a European arthouse channel that drives this programming policy? Or is a multicultural Australian audience assumed to be incapable of understanding other perspectives? For all the variety of faces on screen as presenters, newsreaders etc, the decisions on what we get to see have over the years rested largely with born-and-bred Aussies and people of predominantly Anglo background. One can’t help wondering if that is why they are so incapable of accepting documentary formats and aesthetics that have been influenced by non-Western cultures.

We’ve come a long way in recent years when it comes to recognizing an Aboriginal perspective through film. But documentaries on our own Asia-Pacific region are constantly filtered through the eyes and storytelling practices of Western filmmakers. (Migrant stories, too, are seldom told by people who have arrived here as adults and may have a different aesthetic and way of telling stories.)

A few years ago a series of half-hour films from the Asian region that allowed local filmmakers to tell their stories was hailed as a daring breakthrough. It was, however, produced, selected and packaged by Australian and British producers who were credited with the series. I asked the UK commissioning editor who attended the Adelaide AIDC conference if he would have programmed them had they come directly from filmmakers in Asia. His answer was, “Probably not.”

At the IDFA documentary conference in Amsterdam in l997, a forum was held to discuss a new fund to support Asian filmmakers, and some of the guests from the region had been invited. After listening to the patronizing attitudes of several European broadcasters, a well-known Indian filmmaker responded with disgust that rather than dispense charity, the best thing they could do would be to actually purchase and broadcast films that are already being made by Asian filmmakers.

Film festivals are concerned with bums on seats to survive. But we should expect that specialist events catering to a reasonably informed audience, such as the documentary conferences and Real: life on film, would see it as their responsibility to educate audiences and move us forward into an awareness of the world around us instead of falling into line with the deplorable trend set by the present government.

In his second year as director of the Melbourne International Film Festival, James Hewison has extended his policy of foregrounding Asian cinema. His stated policy is that “this festival should be a representative or even advocate of the region to which we belong.” It certainly helps that Asia is producing the most interesting films in world cinema at the moment.

Hewison has a particular interest in South Korean cinema, aiming to locate it as “an almost irresistible part” of this year’s festival. He describes Korea as “an incredibly energetic film culture, one that takes risks in style and content, and is unafraid to confront its difficult past.”

This year’s retrospective focusses on Kim Ki-duk, a Korean director whose harsh, violent films will generate considerable controversy. Hewison sees Kim’s films as containing “a raw naivete—almost an innocence—but also anger and anguish expressed in his landscapes usually populated by marginalised characters. Like some of Kitano’s earlier films, there are exclamation marks of brutality that give his work striking, visceral impact alongside poetically constructed beauty.”

Like Japan’s Miike Takeshi, Kim works quickly (with 7 films over the past 6 years) and seeks to attain a transgressive edge by emphasising perverse sexuality combined with explicit violence. Like the Japanese new wave “eros and massacre” directors of the early 1960s, Kim’s films try to imagine what the world looks like when repression reaches an unbearable limit. When desire finally emerges, it does so through rape, murder and mutilation.

On his website (www.kimkiduk.com), Kim states his aesthetic credo that “film is created out of a point where reality and fantasy meet.” He claims that his films attempt to access “the borderline where the painfully real and the hopefully imaginative meet.”

The conjunction of pain and reality goes to the heart of Kim’s social critique. His is a world with a pecking order of beatings in which introverted artists and women occupy the bottom rung. Images recur of caged birds, of fish flopping around out of water, of dogs being beaten. The social world is divided utterly and communication is impossible and hardly attempted. In this world, artists are beaten when they show people truthful portraits of themselves.

At their most superficial, the films can often be read as political allegory. Wild Animals (1999) deals with a North Korean and South Korean forging an unlikely friendship; Address Unknown (2001) revolves around the American military presence in Korea; and Birdcage Inn (1998) and Bad Guy (2001) generate their conflicts out of class differences within Korean society.

Underlying these social conflicts, however, is a broader thematic. Kim works with a heavily psychoanalytical model of character. He has a rather hydraulic conception of sexual desire, where repression builds to a point of explosion. Sex is essentially linked to pain and rage in these films. Desire seeks to possess and incorporate its object, and the frustrations in attaining this end only serve to increase its sadistic ferocity.

No failing is so widespread or so dire in Kim’s films as the inability to identify with someone else. His narratives set up these self/other distinctions in order to find hope through collapsing them. The snotty middle-class girl of Birdcage Inn merges into the prostitute who works at her mother’s inn. The artist of Real Fiction takes on the personal history of the actor he encounters at the start of the film. The female protagonist of The Isle appears to dream, but we end up seeing that the dream belongs to the male protagonist. The woman forced into prostitution in Bad Guy stares into a mirror until her image overlaps with that of the pimp who has enslaved her.

As this final example might suggest, Kim aims to shock and offend. His champions invoke surrealism and Artaud in the emphasis on transgression as a means of cutting away bourgeois pretence, of being outside of boundaries. The imaginative leap to identify with others can only come after the embrace of one’s abjection.

After sitting through Bad Guy, however, and being asked to countenance the proposition that brutalisers of women become dependent upon their victims and that being raped and forced into prostitution can put women on a trajectory to emotional growth, you’ve got to wonder whether this is transgressive or just the retelling of a story we already know only too well.

Bad Guy and Real Fiction (2000) are films generated out of post-Laura Mulvey film theory. They both deal with relations of looking as a source of power. A character in Address Unknown asserts that the human eye is the scariest thing. The male protagonist of Bad Guy sets the narrative in motion by staring at a woman and then goes on to watch her sexual degradation from behind a one-way mirror. The male protagonist of Real Fiction can only return himself from the violent fulfilment of his fantasies by smashing in the head of the woman who has been following him with a digital camera.

This points to a reflexivity in Kim’s work that runs alongside his thematic concerns. The obvious analogy for Real Fiction, which was shot in 200 minutes, is Mike Figgis’s Time Code. The most impressive aspect of The Isle is revealed when it is viewed as a technical exercise in which psychologically complex characters are presented without the use of dialogue.

Indeed The Isle, which we saw at last year’s Melbourne festival, is Kim’s strongest film. In paring the drama down to the 2 protagonists, he introduces an economy and an intensity to the film, discarding the stock villains who circle around the few psychologised characters in his films. The Isle is about finding the still point at the centre of life where desire is taken to an end point where it exhausts itself.

Finally, in a year when all of the local festivals were scraping to find Australian films, it is worth posing Korean cinema as a point of comparison. Both countries had feature film industries brought into being and sustained by government intervention. At present, South Korea films have 49% of the domestic box office of their country. The films span a fascinating range from schlock genre pieces (Teenage Hooker Becomes Killing Machine) to national prestige films such as Chihwaeson, to the auteur margins inhabited by Kim. From where I sit, looking at Australia’s 4% of domestic box office, that looks like more and more of an achievement.

1. The debris of a smile

Fergus Daly
In the 1980s, when ‘the Sublime’ was the idea that defined Postmodernism for cultural analysts, Jean-Luc Godard realised it was by working through the idea of the beautiful that truly creative things would begin to happen. Not the Kantian beautiful wherein disinterest before the artwork relieves the spectator of his habits of thought, but a kind of bio-political ethico-aesthetic notion (when asked some time ago what it might mean to be ‘Godardian’, the filmmaker replied that it would be “to defend an ethics and an art”). In this notion, nature would have to be re-invented by cinema and bodies constituted by way of relinquishing their ‘habits of habitation’; both human subjects and the earth would be born in a single movement of life.

Éloge de l’amour, Godard’s first feature in 5 years, interrogates Memory, History, Resistance, Language, Ethical Adequation. Widely touted as his “most accessible film in years”, in reality it is barely penetrable yet deeply moving and stunningly intelligent, and its ‘method’ brings poet Paul Celan to mind: “Speak—but keep yes and no unsplit. And give your say this meaning: give it the shade.”

A one and a two and a three and a four—this count-in, a beginning, is also a count-down, 4, 3, 2, 1—a blast-off! 4 for the moments of love, 3 for the stages of life, 2 for black and white, 1 for monochrome and colour, cinema and video, TV and life, Hitler and Weil, Spielberg and Godard. But in recent years it is the 1 that most preoccupies Godard, ways of being one. Not so much the conventional problem of Singular versus Universal, but a form of the universal that would also be singular.

Godard’s fundamental problematic is unquestionably Ethics: ethical possibilities that don’t have the dead moral weight of established transcendent moralities. Godard’s characters are literally embodied ethical positions. If the human body remains the locus of new forms of resistance to ‘the Program’, then in Éloge the lightness that passes between bodies, in particular those of the vital trio Edgar (Bruno Putzulu), Berthe (Cécile Camp) and the old Resistance fighter (Francoise Verny), reaches a Bressonian intensity. Hence Godard’s invocation of quotations from Bresson’s Notes sur le cinématographe, as well as of Simone Weil (Edgar is composing a Cantata for Simone Weil).

This direct confrontation with the universe of Bresson whose characters are “figures with a movement in which weight plays no part”—to borrow Alain Bergala’s citation of Weil’s definition of grace—has been a long time coming in Godard’s cinema. Not only is there something of the Bressonian model in Putzulu’s performance; also in Edgar’s approach to the actor/bodies he seeks: he seems to want not models—vessels containing the spiritual—but beings carrying the ethical. Is Berthe not the embodiment of values somehow still out of Edgar’s reach? Godard wants not only his actors but his characters, even his documentary subjects, to suggest ethical possibilities. In his version of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens, Godard—rejecting a Grace/Fall duality—rummages through the signs and traces of the city for the meeting point of singular modes of ethical being which would also be universally beautiful.

Beauty is a matter of ethics for Godard. In Éloge it is tied to the theme of adulthood. “I’m not beautiful enough for the role”, Berthe tells Edgar. It is said of Edgar that he’s “trying to be an adult” but to be ‘at one’s prime’ as an artist tends to forego the capacity to capture birth and decay, childhood and old age. Compare Edgar’s inability to see Berthe’s singular beauty with Godard’s skill at creating a context to allow certain bodies or faces to appear on screen. In particular he succeeds in creating a unique sense of intimacy—the appearance of the old resistance fighter woman’s face (in all its History-lined beauty) appears to ‘find its moment’ in a way that is truly overwhelming. In allowing her to exist on screen, Edgar proves to be the film’s true ethical consciousness, or rather, the revealer of a new ethical possibility.

What has changed in Godard in the 35-40 years that now allows this face/body to appear on screen? Something which could never have occurred in the 60s, for example. Maybe it has to do with the eschewal of the ironic for the development of an approach that, in countering the manner in which the ironic announces itself, allows a revelation coming from a completely different place, and a new form of the beautiful.

Éloge de l’amour, as Yonnick Flot has noted, expresses “his way of seeing in adulthood the neutral gear of life, held in suspension by the energy of childhood and the forces of old age.” Here Godard returns to the ontological problem of lightness versus heaviness treated by Leos Carax in his first films, now staged in terms of History—more specifically, the French Resistance. In this context, Godard examines the way in which memory is transmitted from old to young people and the role of cinema in that transmission. Here we witness Godard continuing his search for a specifically cinematic ethics that would also say something philosophically about the present’s relation to the past. The film suggests that there is a certain lightness that passes straight from childhood to old age (from liberty to wisdom), thereby bypassing heavy adulthood.

2. Ode to Something

Adrian Martin
Today, Jean-Luc Godard likes to proclaim that “memory has rights and that it is a duty not to forget these rights.” How does he show this viewpoint on screen? Those in power who suppress historical memory (that means Hollywood, TV, government, capitalist corporations) are villains. And those ordinary people who possess no cultural memory—all those extras in Éloge de l’amour who have never heard of Bataille or Hugo or the inventor of some snazzy car—are simply fools, worthy only of being yelled at. But is it their fault? Godard sometimes makes his viewers feel the same way, like ashamed ignoramuses: didn’t you know that the train station sign “Drancy-Avenir” is also the title of a recent political film? Can’t you recognise all those Parisian sites where the key moments of the French Resistance played themselves out? Didn’t you appreciate the profundity of the citation from Bresson?

Let us return a harsh judgement back upon JLG: “The labyrinth of echoes, the anxiety of influence, the maze of connections without substance, the schizo-circuit diagrams, become unbearable” (Raymond Durgnat). Godard’s films are frustrating to study closely, because they rarely coalesce. As someone who has long been partial to the aura of Godardian cinema, I become fascinated with bits and pieces of Éloge. For instance, the strange scenes of conversation, more dislocated than ever, with lines of dialogue reconstituted on the soundtrack so that they overlap and cancel each other out. Or the sense that (in Peter Wollen’s words), since 1990, Godard has been “reworking his own origins as a classic reference text”: hence the return to Paris and black-and-white, the echoes of Bande à part and Pierrot le fou, the touchingly aged actors from his old films. Or suddenly beautiful, touching images, like Berthe whispering something into Edgar’s ear, something we will never know. Or, finally, that peculiarly Godardian form of fiction: some events that have already happened (but we can never exactly fathom what), combined with the film-to-be-made which cannot quite start, creating auditions, digressions and researches that lead only to business partnerships and personal relationships dribbling away, producing nothing, not movies or money or children…But all this is still not enough to redeem Éloge de l’amour.

My friend Fergus Daly sees and feels something in Éloge that I cannot—or only fleetingly, fitfully. I cannot grasp the film or its logic, and I suspect that it is, ultimately, incoherent. Godard’s artistic and philosophic thoughts proceed by a zany ‘free association’, leaping from one word-play to the next. Do these thoughts ever develop, grow, lead to a satisfying synthesis or resolution? For example, we hear often in this film about childhood and old age being real, genuine life-states, while adulthood is a void. It is a void because adults need social identities (banker, wife, thief), and identities lead to stories, and stories are, for Godard, ‘Hollywood’, thus they are bad. Then we leap up to the level of nations, and history: North Americans are void as people, because they have no real ‘name’, no origin, and they stalk the globe pillaging the stories of others…

And yet we will hear it said, with emotion, that the doleful Edgar is “the only person trying to become an adult.” Is this a joke, or a tribute? And hasn’t Godard spent several decades celebrating everything that is ‘unformed’ and ‘in between’ and uncertain—just like Edgar? As always, Godard vacillates cagily between a lyrical fullness of meaning and an adolescent desire to sabotage all meaning: hence, this ‘ode to love’, in the film’s obsessive inter-titles, often becomes just an ‘ode to something’, or maybe to nothing.

Denying himself most of the pleasures and possibilities of narrative, Godard depends purely on his formal structures to provide movement, mood and pathos to this crazy-quilt of quotes and notes. It all comes too easily to him: the perfectly placed repetition of a few bars of music by David Darling and Ketil Bjornstad; the welling up of an oceanic visual superimposition, combined with a halting, nervous camera-zoom or freeze-frame; the large-scale interplay of the film’s 2 halves, which is almost like Kieslowski; even that old poetic stand-by, the central character on a ‘journey’ (via foot, car, train), across mutually alienated spaces (city and country) and back through the shards of lost time, but mainly on the road to nowhere…

When asked what he looked for in the actors here, Godard replied: “Something, perhaps not much, that was real”. Fergus intuits the grace in these morsels of physical reality. I am frustrated, yet again, by the absence of genuine personality in Godard’s characters, and by his inability to invest their exchanges with anything resembling plausible, everyday emotion. I realise they are not meant to be ‘realistic’ characters, just supports in an ongoing essay/collage. But Godard’s 2-dimensional sketches either serve as an ‘open sesame’ for the viewer—prompting him or her to project all manner of emotions and meanings into the empty intervals on screen—or else they block any kind of engagement. Stéphane Goudet in Positif (no. 484, June 2001) wondered whether “the flagrant gap between the film and its title (‘love’?)” reflects, in the last analysis, “a fear of feeling and an anguish when confronted with the body.” There are still too many vestiges of the old Godardian dance, poetry and musicality in Éloge de l’amour for me to completely agree with that verdict. But I am sorely tempted.

Robert Humphreys is a cinematographer whose credits include David Caesar’s Mullet, a major award winner at the recent Shanghai Film Festival, and Tony Ayres’ Walking on Water which premiered as part of the 2002 Adelaide Festival and will be released by Dendy Films on September 23.

When did your interest in cinematography start? Was it film in general or photography in particular?

You often see quotes from people who work in film who made Super 8 films when they were 10 years old and were passionate filmmakers from the cradle…Well I can’t in all honesty say that’s me…my interest in film came from being a viewer, but it wasn’t until I went to the NSW Institute of Technology in the early 80s that I can say I thought ‘this is the life for me.’ My career path went parallel between stills photographer and cinematographer. I took lot of photos for rock bands, album covers, posters, and some theatrical stills and a little bit of fashion. And at the same time I was filming pop clips and eventually cinematography was much more of a challenge than stills photography.

I actually wanted to be a journalist and it wasn’t until I went to uni and saw the cruel hard world of journalism I realised I didn’t like it…but in the Communications degree there was a filmmaking course and that pretty much took over as the great fascination. I basically spent 3 years watching films.

We watched everything…Godard, Antonioni, Pasolini, Visconti, film noir, and my special favourite, Bertolucci…I think The Conformist is one of the truly great pieces of cinematography and for me that film is a text book.

Yes. The very first Australian film I saw I had to sneak out of school to see. It was The Devil’s Playground, which I still remember in incredible detail, then Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Last Wave.

If you were a photographer you would be able to have a consistent if developing style, but cinematographers work across forms, for very different audiences and directors. How does that affect the evolution of a style?

I think that the cinematographer is not so much an artist but more a craftperson whose job it is to visualise a director’s dream, to visualise words from a page…being an architect is an analogy. I also believe it’s a team of collaborators who make a film, so it’s directors and producers, or writer-directors who have a dream of a film.

I pride myself on not having a recognisable style; every film I do is dictated by the script, and I try to visualise a film. Flower Girl was a breakthrough for me, and also for the director Kate Shortland. It was one of those films that was a melding of styles. Where it came from is interesting. One of the all-time classics for me is Godard’s Breathless. It is still for me the most influential piece of cinema that I can think of, in that it was all hand-held, jump cut, it broke all the rules of editing, and it was pretty much shot with natural light, and it was filmed by Raoul Coutard. In Australia we like to think of cameramen like Chris Doyle as being breakthrough operators who use available light and are freeing the form,. but to me all of those films are Breathless shot in colour.

A lot of my style is based on not being intrusive: I don’t like to look at a picture and be able to see the technology behind it. I don’t like excessive backlight which is what you get in film noir, or camera moves which are designed to take you out of the story. If I have a choice my style is naturalistic. So if you’re in an interior in a house, say, it will be lit from the window, and in Flower Girl there’s only about 2 lights and we researched the locations very carefully to give us that effect.

Colour is everything in this film, and I strove for a really saturated image. If I have to admit to a house style it would be that use of colour! So on Mullet and Walking on Water there is a strong colour palette…it’s controlled by the designers, but what I do is saturate it so it becomes a strong part of the story.

How does that different response to each script connect to your choices of technology?

I’ll receive a script from a director. The cinematographer and the designer tend to be on the project from the very beginning, from first draft or very early. I’ll read it. We’ll talk about the specifics and have broad discussions about films [the director, the designer] like or don’t like, photos and paintings as well, almost anything they think is relevant to their script.

David Caesar talked about Mullet being a Western. It had a classic Western structure…the lone gunslinger/outlaw coming back to the hometown, and David always wanted it to be a big wide-screen experience. There’s little camera movement, the composition is classical, and to that end he made a tape of influences…films like Hud, which has a detached, wide-screen, observational style of filming. For interiors he looked at Drugstore Cowboy. He didn’t want Mullet to look exactly like those films but their influences added something to the discussions.

Then with Walking on Water, [director] Tony Ayres and I looked at a lot of things. We couldn’t settle on anything until it came to 2 references. The first was a film called Under the Skin, photographed by Barry Ackroyd (he works with Ken Loach a lot) and his strengths are to create very naturalistic looking films where the camera never draws attention to itself…everything is quite elegant. But Under the Skin is quite different. It uses long lenses, the camera is quite jerky and uses only natural light…We settled on that as the closest template and mixed it with the work of photographer, Nan Goldin, an American. Her work is incredibly honest, naturalistic, raw and powerful, documenting the death of her friends in the 80s from AIDS.

For Walking on Water we used an Ariflex and for Mullet we used a BL Evolution, one on the shoulder and the other never moved. Some cinematographers are highly technical and others like myself are more intuitive in their relation to the choice of camera. With Walking on Water we used long lenses, and the reason for that was that you can isolate actors in their environment, and so you tend to draw the audience’s attention to their performance rather than the environment. It’s also a good budgetary thing because it doesn’t need huge sets. Mullet was shot on Super 35mm which is standard 35mm blown up to anamorphic format, 2.35 to 1 ratio.

You also shoot for TV. You’re in the middle of Fat Cow Motel which is described as a multiplatform production.

It’s a TV series shot in Queensland, paid for by Austar, and going on air on Austar and Foxtel. It’s a 13 part series where each of the half hour episodes poses a problem which is solved at the beginning of the following episode…a lateral thinking problem, and is often tied up with a mystery in the town.

Yes, I could happily describe it as a cross between Twin Peaks and Northern Exposure. The cinematography avoids the classical Australian soap opera look, and as for the multiplatform side of it, each of the clues that are posed is elaborated on different platforms such as internet, text messages, and viewers register and receive the clues.

Is this the future…technologies altering the narrative, creating an open text?

It’s open in the sense that they’re trying to give people more value…the story on screen is 23 minutes each week, but if you go online there’s hours more.

A story is a story…classical cinema equals classical story. There are always people who will go to the movies to see those stories…even if the home screens get bigger. I still think the movies will be attractive as long as people are communal animals and enjoy that experience.

Molokai: The Story of Father Damian

Jane Mills
A worthy biopic of a real-life Belgian priest (David Wenham) who defied his superiors and risked his life caring for lepers in a neglected colony in Hawaii in the 1870s. A beautiful location and an amazing array of acting talent including Peter O’Toole, Kris Kristofferson, Derek Jacobi, Sam Neill and Leo McKern fail to save this movie from tedium. It becomes a painfully slow race between Wenham and the prosthetics department as bits of his body swell, distort and flake off. The prosthetics win but nowhere soon enough.

Director Paul Cox, writer John Briley. Distributor Sharmill Films. Screening nationally.

A Fun Night Out with Severed Heads

Keith Gallasch
What is striking about Severed Heads’ videos of the 1980s is their visual and aural integrity. That and being well ahead of their time. The manic, tautly rhythmic recurrence of images (within and across the works) and the richly overlaid minimal sonic and musical structures fuse into a singular go-with-it or lose-your-grip ride for the viewer. And it still feels new. This is no grab bag of the makers’ favourite bits and pieces (too often encountered these days). There’s lots of fun (tempered by leering Mexican Day of the Dead skulls), occasional political jabs (CIA, Disney), pop culture plunderings (Max Headroom), lunatic performance art and Tom Ellard and Stephen Jones in concert (some seminal VJing via a homemade video synthesizer). The 1988 Big Car Retread grabbed me like no other. A classic. The projections are big and DVD-crisp. Ellard keeps an ear on the mix by the side of the screen. Ian Andrews’ program essay on the group is a must-read that tells you just who did it and how. Thanks to dLux media arts for screening a significant piece of cultural history where avant-garde and popular impulses successfully met for a while.

d>ART02, Sydney Film Festival, Dendy Opera Quays, June 17 & 19. Other d>ART02 events will be reviewed in RealTime 51.

Minority Report

Keith Gallasch
Minority Report is action picture (Tom Cruise leaping impossibly from car to perfectly rounded car as they speed vertical roads; Tom welded in to a new car on a production line), Twilight Zone spooky what-iffery (seer cops float in tanks of amniotic fluid forecasting murders yet to happen; other cops, like orchestra conductors, wave at screens to conjure murder sites), Blade Runner urban nightmare (including a gruesome eye operation to short circuit iris identification), arthouse (Janusz Kaminski’s enveloping blue-grey cinematography, Max von Sydow’s father figure and Colin Farrell’s edgy Christian DA), murder mystery and political thriller (who controls the data?). Texture this with visual gags, deft sci-fi techno touches in the everyday that yoke the present to a not too distant future, add a great overlay of relishable paranoia and you’ve got a terrific cinema experience—if you like this kind of many-headed beast and you can put aside the weakness of the whodunnit (just another case of American Oedipal irresolution). Unusually, Spielberg keeps his narrative taut and to the point and does some justice, better than most, to the strange vision of Philip K Dick on whose short story of the same name the film is based. KG

Director Steven Spielberg, writers Scott Frank, Jon Cohen. Distributor Twentieth Century Fox. Screening nationally.

Italian for Beginners

David Varga
Reading the Dogme 95 manifesto (http://cinetext.philo.at/reports/dogme_ct.html) evokes a retro-avant-garde nostalgia for that variant of cinematic ‘truth’ that suspectly trades itself above the pleasures of cinematic artifice. Lone Scherfig’s Italian for Beginners, the fifth film in the series, applies the stripped-bare technique of Dogme to triumph the preternatural over the natural, in a subtle and satisfying mix of melancholic pleasure, character based absurdism, ordinariness and desire.

2002 Dendy Awards for Australian Short Films

The 2002 Yoram Gross Animation Award went to Dad’s Clock (director, writer Dik Jarman; producer Sarah Drofenik). Immaculately crafted figures (a man carved from wood, a bird made of precision metal parts) and set (a ribbed boat that unfolds into being) comprise a fantasy world that is juxtaposed metaphorically with the spare, naturalistic telling, by his son, of a father’s journey to death by cancer. The other animations were also excellent. Lee Whitmore’s superbly drawn Ada was my winner, a gentle evocation of old age observed by children as the sunlight through a window gradually colours a room, its inhabitants and our understanding of age. Anthony Lucas’ Holding Your Breath, although narratively awkward, creates an intense, dark, silhouetted industrial world from which a girl ventures out to an equally daunting stretch of nature and a relationship. KG

The tape was in the recorder, and it was a long tape. I knew Nigel Helyer would have a lot to say, because even before winning the Helene Lempriere National Sculpture Award earlier this year, he had been busy. And since taking out that prize he’d been overseas, interstate, here and there, on the move, working on projects, collaborations, schemes and dreams. So I came equipped with my trusty mini tape recorder.

Which didn’t work! Press Record or Play and all you got was a blast of nasty static. White noise is fine in its place, but this wasn’t it. No worry: surely Nigel himself, a technician/engineer/acoustician (these sound artists are such polyglots) could fix the recalcitrant thing. He jiggled, he coaxed, he gave it a whack, he held it to his ear, he looked into its soul—but the rascally machine just wouldn’t cooperate. So there we were, on the verge of discussing the fantastic worlds of sound sculpture, Virtual Audio Reality, Networked Environmental Audio Systems, Biotechnology, Intellectual Property, magnetic fields, cockroach hearing and miniaturisation—and the technology let us down.

Funnily enough, one of Nigel’s themes, once we get started, is the robustness of contemporary audio technology. So, dispensing with my dysfunctional recorder, we begin, using the even older-school technology of pen and paper.

First, what of his prize, the National Sculpture Award, which came with a sum of—dare we be so vulgar as to mention the figure?—$105,000? How did it feel to win? And (questions downloaded from E! Entertainment website) has the money changed him? Is he a big-shot sound artist now? Will we see him in the international jet-set, rubbing shoulders with Brian Eno and Moby?

Nigel was “pleased and surprised” to win with his environmental sound sculpture Meta-Diva, which is now installed in the grounds of Werribee Park, Victoria. Meta-Diva comprises 30 tall aluminium stems equipped with digital audio chips and timers. Standing in a pond, the work requires zero maintenance for at least 10 years. One pleasing aspect was the technology used to run Meta-Diva, so that the win in part “recognises that we should be using solar power more.” He adds that “for the first time we can use digital audio in solid state technology with memory. I’ve become very interested with the idea of being robust. Usually now I’m only let down by third parties [like the tape recorder]. Ten years ago you had to depend on technology with moving parts—tape or CD machines. Now you can expect these technologies to run, they’re much more robust.”

Meta-Diva is a successful, yet relatively simple, example of what Nigel calls a Solar Powered Environmental Networked Audio System. Its playback of sampled nature recordings provides an “almost infinite mix” which listeners can’t pick from nature. This technological rendering of natural sounds fits the 2 environments in which Meta-Diva has been installed: one an artificial lake in Korea, the other the English country garden landscape of Werribee Park.

As for the prize money, it will be invested in new versions of environmental audio work, networks that interact with both people and environment on the model of “emergent behaviour.” Some of this work draws on the Virtual Audio Reality System developed during Nigel’s 2 and a half years at Lake Technology, where he was employed as Senior Designer. Having left his academic position, does he now miss the financial security associated with a post in the Ivory Tower? Existing outside the academy is, he admits, “financially risky—but I’d die faster if I stayed there.” As compensation, he has an Australia Council Fellowship for 2 years, and a host of Visiting Fellow positions at various academic institutions in Australia and the US. One of these, at the University of NSW, will enable further development of Virtual Audio, based partly on Satellite Positioning technology.

So what are the artworks that result from this confluence of research and technology? One is an installation called Seed, which was first exhibited in Phoenix earlier this year, and is currently on show at the Biennale of Electronic Arts (BEAP) in Perth. Seed is a “sonic minefield”, a series of 16 facsimiles of Russian landmines as used in Afghanistan. Each one sits in the centre of an Islamic prayer mat which plays recordings of the 99 names of Allah as well as Arabic music. This work melds the Old Testament rhetoric of sowing seeds—like mines, they “lie in wait for the future”—with the “contemporary disasters of military and ideological conflict.” The visitor enters a “place of ambiguity” within the context of current military and political events.

From October, Nigel Helyer will be Visiting Fellow in the Department of Anatomy at the University of Western Australia. In a lab called Symbiotica—designed to facilitate cooperation between artists and scientists—he’ll be working on a project involving “compound hearing.” This results from research into the animal sensorium, especially that of insects. Spiders, for example, have 8 legs with tiny hairs as sound sensors: a phenomenon known as distributed hearing. But where is all this likely to lead?

“We hear in stereo, with our two ears,” he says. “But other life-forms, especially insects, hear with multiple organs, like legs covered with tiny antennas. In the lab we should be able to plug in things like a cockroach antenna into a listening or sound generating device. I’ll be showing this kind of project in Stanford [where he will be visiting Fellow early next year]. Stanford University is very big on biotechnology. Apparently, you can almost use cockroach antennas as microphones. They’re so well designed that cockroaches can hear us humans. Most insects have poor hearing, but cockroaches have a wide range of hearing.”

Being able to listen like a cockroach presents some interesting possibilities. One other aspect of biotechnology research—the small scale used in the study of, for example, insect antennae—corresponds to a direction of Nigel’s recent art: working in miniature. A project for the School of Sound in London next April involves miniature technology. Called One or Two Things I Know, it uses induction coils in a work of 10 tiny visual pieces drawn from Jean-Luc Godard films. The pieces are so small that you need to look at them with a magnifying glass; in the process, your physical presence affects the magnetic field, which triggers the audio content of the work.

This piece uses an ingenious interface, free of buttons, keyboards and screens. It’s designed, Nigel says, “so you engage the audio without realising it. It’s like a re-enchantment device, where the audio becomes magic. It gives an extra dimension that’s not automatically apparent. I also appreciate the tiny scale. I don’t want to be trapped working in large scale all the time; I like the intimate, hand held scale.”

And why Godard films? This relates to a childhood experience, when as a 13-year old Nigel stumbled across a Godard movie in London’s Victoria Station. It was a cartoon cinema that for some reason was screening Godard! It left a lasting impression, so that when later teaching sculpture to art school students he showed them Godard films to illustrate metaphor. Sadly, his students in the 1990s objected to the films: “They were deeply offended and told me I was sick.” Time to get out of the academy, then.

Nigel is convinced of the potential ensuing from the union of science and art. The omen was there in the town of his birth, which had earlier hosted both Halley (the famous astronomer) and William Blake, the famous mystical poet. Nigel has “grown into the idea that there’s no difference between art and science. Both are to do with creativity and inventiveness. Working with Lake, I found business people very open to creative ideas. They can be generous in the way they do things.”

This fusion of art, science and technology will be advanced in all these projects, as well as the various residencies and fellowships at universities and other institutions. There are other ventures, such as Nigel’s involvement with Polar Circuit, a series of workshops for media artists and theorists initiated by the University of Lapland. And the task of creating an international network of sound artists and theorists. Not to mention the difficult task of re-assembling the complicated installation work Silent Forest for its inclusion in the new Federation Square wing of the National Gallery of Victoria. And did I mention some of his online collaborations, such as Music for Mutants —keyboard standards re-designed (and re-copyrighted) for aliens with extra fingers?

There are other projects, collaborations and ventures, but they can wait for another day. For now, we separate, I with a broken recorder and writer’s cramp, Nigel with a head full of projects and schemes.

Performance Space is elegantly reconfigured into a diagonal wedge, angled screens to the left, wall to floor screen on the right; breaking the hard lines are diaphanous spirals, cylinders, cubes, bending and absorbing projections to their own image. The eye is drawn to the proscenium arch where there is a breathtaking orchestra of equipment—tiered rows of computer screen lit bodies, concentratedly clicking away, live mixing the sound, video images and realtime feeds into the sensory immersion that is Video Combustion—Alpha release. It is hard not to worship at this altar of technology.

An archetypal cybermistress greets us. Slicked-blonde and cold-scary—her whitened naked body projected upon and filmed live, overlaying her prerecorded face—she has been “digitally re-membered.” This apparition in the flesh and machine (Jaqilen Pascoe) is our guide, advising us to question the “nutritional value of our information diet”, a constant reminder of the “meeting between meat and machine.”

The tangible commodity is atmosphere. With 11 video projectors, every surface is textured. Images surround us at 3 million pixels per second, sound pulses the air in our lungs. Transitions are viscous, sections merging and evolving like an organism growing itself. We are kept abreast of the action by screens showing us the score—who’s on first, who did what, what’s over there. Another mode of watching is required, a kind of holistic ambient viewing. However the configuration and size of the space creates a static, seated environment, requiring the audience to concentrate for 2 hours on streams of video consciousness. With so many points of focus it is frustrating to be stuck with a limited viewing perspective. The second part of the evening opens the space up to wandering, but by then the performance focus has dissipated. A larger space would allow an audience to roam this world, to stumble upon the more performative moments.

I try to tease out specificities about sound and image, but they seem fused, like melted electrical cables. Video Combustion is a surge—energy that is absorbed rather than experienced as vision, as sound. Integrating performance into this fusion is the ultimate challenge. Pascoe strikes a balance between absorption and visibility, her spokenword-scapes (created with Wade Marynowksy) and live interaction are cool and slick, her prowling presence arresting, if a little familiar. Working beside and against projections, Momo Miyaguchi achieves the beginnings of a dialogue between image and live body. While the dance pieces of Talia Jacob, Annie Robin and Helen Bergan are thematically focused by video images of classical ballet and live overlays, the dance style is naive and conceptually unchallenging. I offer a thesis: the human body is not that interesting to project upon—the surface area too small, and the body too nullified by mandatory white lycra. The work is more engaging when the live body works actively with projection or is chewed up and reintegrated into image, as in the opening sequence of Pascoe’s face multiplied and affected by her own reprocessed presence. This is where the tensions and fusions of interdisciplinary work become electrifying.

The scale of the collaboration, the mastery and marshalling of technology and the degree of hybridity in Video Combustion are impressive. At the conclusion of the evening Justin Maynard (co-director along with Cindi Drennan) thanks all those who have helped “propagate chaos.” Interestingly, I have seen none—the event is calm, genteel even, bordering on reverent. Perhaps it was necessary to tame the multi-cabled beast for Alpha Release and in its next incarnation to loose the bonds. This beast feeds on hybridity and can only grow stronger through closer connections and knowledge of each artform. Therefore I send out the call to arms—video artists, see more performance—performance artists, experience more new media. Blast through Sydney’s discrete scenes and see everything!

Video Combustion—Alpha Release, produced by tesseract research laboratories and the vidi-yo network, Performance Space, June 22. www.videocombustion.org

Filmmakers routinely claim that movies are performative, that they actively generate and realise meanings and affects in space and time as the images flicker. Filmic projection is therefore eminently suited to accommodating live performance. Does the projection of images alongside a living performer however simply multiply the performers in the space, unnecessarily replicating material, rather than producing a new aesthetic? The Fusion program of multimedia performance seemed to demonstrate that video projection is most effective in live performance as a mobile form of painterly framing and overlay.

The collaboration between video-composer Dylan Volkhardt and dancer Tony Yap for example established that while both are extremely talented artists, little new was created by bringing them together. Yap danced, the projection showed evocative images of stars or a deserted urban construction, but what occurred between them was unclear. Ubique, on the other hand, resembled what Kraftwerk produced over 20 years ago (rotating wire-grid bodies, painted in with simple skins), the unremitting banality and lack of variation in the images actually detracting from a relatively interesting noise-sheet score.

Audiovisual artist Klaus Obermaier and dancer Chris Haring by contrast established a direct relationship between body and image by using the living body itself as the projection screen. Starting with a series of visual gags, D.A.V.E. explored the possibilities of the changeable, plastic body existing within an expanded, virtual realm. Hands were held to the side of the head to allow the illusion of massively distended, praying-mantis-like eyes, or thrust below the pelvis to make it appear the head was protruding from between the legs. The piece often relied on ‘gee-whiz’ black-theatrics and near-flawless illusionism. It was so profligately inventive that it was if anything too full of surprising, spectacular changes. Haring turned around to return wearing an elderly man’s projected skin, then that of an amused young woman; his anus talked (oral lips projected onto different labia); he ripped or pulled at his body, stretching it like India rubber, recalling Robbie Williams’ video Rock DJ.

This videophonic toying was however grounded in Haring’s equally impressive live physicality. In normal side-light he slipped about the floor in a delicately balanced yet vaguely brutal play of weight and gravity which rocketed about his pliable form, dropping into surprising shifts, rolls and articulations—all to the crinkly, swiping-sounds of Obermaier’s musique concrete or abstract breakbeat. Haring was so masterful at the near dislocation of limbs that he barely needed projection to establish a sense of radical fungibility.

Although D.A.V.E.was breathtaking in performance, it is Cazerine Barry’s House which lingers in my memory. House had a stronger sense of clockwork precision, of sharp, funky beats (mostly cheesy 1960s studio music) which set an exact rhythm for the morphs of space which Barry’s character negotiated, from the on-the-beat rotations of a projected house-plan, to lurid ‘primitivist’ fantasies of a rubber-tree-filled garden bearing vaguely sexual overtones. Barry’s work depicted a day-glo suburbia through an at once affectionate yet slightly disturbing reappropriation of 1960s kitsch—Howard Arkley in videochoreography. The video served as an ever changing projected frame or ‘front-drop,’ each tableau pierced by well-defined windows in which Barry posed, or through which she elegantly sashayed.

Though ostensively focussed on the theme of imagining one’s dream home and finding one’s place within it and the community which surrounds it, House also touched on the commodification of day-to-day experience, and the collapse of the separation between private and public space. The desires of Barry’s character were so saturated by the chic, manufactured designs she played with—or which occasionally squashed her into shape—that even her dreams of a lush, jungle garden were immured in representations from 1960s fashion. Any suggestion that “home” is a space where one shuts society out therefore seemed spurious.

In a particularly eloquent scene, Barry stood gesturing like a Monopoly traffic-cop, directing contemporary finance, pointing to lines in the projection which marked the passage of capital from BANK to ARMOURED CAR to PUBLIC. She reached into the screen-space to pull a box of relations to her chest, before shunting money somewhere else—a fabulous comment not only on commerce, but also the maddening complexities of home loans.

In both D.A.V.E. and House, the screen space was left resolutely flat and 2-dimensional, its 3-dimensional evocativeness generated primarily by the physical body it came into contact with, via gestural dialogue in House, or by the body serving as a lumpy screen in D.A.V.E. Ironically, this flattening of the filmic space successfully created a compelling sense of spatial depth in combination with live performance.

St Kilda Film Festival: Fusion: Performances in new media, presented by Experimenta. Works from the program reviewed here: Time Lapsed, direction/writing/producer/video Dylan Volkhardt, choreography/performance Tony Yap, music/sound Nick Kraft, James Cecil, Mik La Vage, Pip Branson; House, concept/performance/video Cazerine Barry, lighting Jen Hector, dramaturgical assistance Nancy Black, concept-development-associate-direction Rachel Spiers, production support Tom Howie; Ubique, sound/video Massimo Magrini (Italy); D.A.V.E. (Digital Amplified Video Engine), choreography/performance Chris Haring, video/music/initial-concept Klaus Obermaier. The Palace, St Kilda, Melbourne, May 29 – 31

halflives [a mystory]

The fixity of the photo album and the diary or chronicle, both print-based memory machines, have obscured just how fragile and momentary our family histories really are. When you start to explore a family’s history you find that there are moments of clarity brought about by recollection which are always temporary and are constantly displaced by new pieces of data. My grandfather was a somewhat vague but fairly fixed character in my mind until about 6 years ago when a woman rang my father and announced that she was his half sister. This new information profoundly reshaped my understanding of who he was. And then the more I looked into the past, the less certain it seemed. The name Gye, which I’d always believed was French, turned out to be Chinese—an anglicised version of Ah Gye. I started to see family as a kind of memory machine whose operations were similar to the computer—moments of coalescence alternating with dissolution as new data reshapes our understanding of our families. This opened up possibilities for thinking about how we might preserve our family history in electronic media in a way that more closely reflects its dynamic nature. Halflives attempts to reflect on the construction of our identities through family remembrance in an online environment. Part genealogy and part theoretical speculation, the site draws on Derrida’s theory of hauntology, Barthes’ reflections on photography and a range of family documents and photographs in order to explore new ways of understanding the past.

The last few years have seen a depletion of university resources resulting in fewer staff, an increase in student numbers, fewer places to put them while they’re on campus and no particular place for them to go after they’ve graduated, and all this within what seems like a constant review process necessitating radical restructuring of whole departments, and a rethinking of their function within and relationship to the communities they seek to be part of. Speaking to representatives of institutions teaching full-time dance courses, I detected a very determined positive stance about these changes with notes of distress filtering through.

Practice: new frameworks

Don Asker, Senior Lecturer and Post Graduate Coordinator at the Victorian College of the Arts is aware of the increasing rate of revision and evolution of courses generally. “A decade ago, there was a sense that a course was what it was, you could immerse yourself in it, and the field itself was quite tangible. But that was rather fanciful, and we are actually in a world that is dynamic and evolving at such a fast rate that there’s no real justification for perpetuating some programs…some institutes are better able to find a foundational core which enables the flexibility for dealing with rapid change and emerging needs. If you’re not in such a place, then you’re constantly involved in setting up new infrastructures and new resources.”

Kathy Driscoll, Senior Lecturer in Dance, University of Western Sydney, discussed the hilariously named “harmonisation process”, a university-wide restructure in which Dance, Acting and Theatre-making have been coerced into a new Bachelor of Performance, Theory and Practice. This was in addition to a simultaneous and thorough departmental review where people were invited to make submissions and students were surveyed extensively. She was concerned about the fragility of the wider tertiary system to support arts practice: “We’re facing this cut in dance, but the whole school—music, visual arts, all areas of contemporary arts at this university—is looking at cuts in staff, about a 30% reduction. That’s so significant.”

Ronne Arnold, Course Coordinator, National Aboriginal and Islander Skills Development Association, comments: “Right now, I’m looking at an assessment report which suggests that a field trip is not an integral part of the course. But really, the field trip is the crucial element. Students get acquainted with the dances here first, and once they have an idea and know the elders who come to teach them, it’s easier for them to go into the community, because they have developed a relationship. Otherwise they’d never go.”

Development of specific cultural identity aside, the push is definitely global, and some institutions have been more successful in attracting a diverse range of students, from those interested in conservative approaches to dance and performance to those who desire more conceptually based collaboratively conceived, multidisciplinary work. Queensland University of Technology epitomises these strategies in its new Faculty of Creative Industries, and exhibits all the buzz words on its website: “QUT’s Creative Industries initiative is driven by changes in the international economic and social environment…The vision is to take the best of what we already offer in the performing and visual arts, computer and communication design, and media and journalism, and co-locate them in an interdisciplinary cluster dedicated to the creative aspects of the new economy…emphasising partnerships, networking, project-based innovation, and flexible working patterns.”

Cheryl Stock, Head of Dance, Queensland University of Technology, discusses the new configuration. “We have 6 different degrees, with 5 core units across all the degrees: Introduction to Creative Industries, Transforming Cultures, Creativity, Writing for Creative Industries and Introduction to Digital Multimedia, and no matter what discipline you’re in, you have to take 4 out of 5 of these components. We have 2 performance degrees (Bachelor of Fine Arts and the Associate Degree); the professional degree (Bachelor of Creative Industries, Dance) where students major in dance but take pathways through various subjects; and a double degree in Education Then there’s the new one, the Bachelor of Creative Industries (Interdisciplinary Degree) where people don’t belong to any particular discipline.

“Dance is fairly dominated by the digital environment. It’s definitely a valued component, but we have to keep reminding people not to forget about live work as well as mediated work. And that creates a problem for dance. With live dance forms, we have students working in the studio, so of course we still have huge contact hours.”

Elizabeth Dempster, School of Human Movement, Recreation and Performance, Victoria University, comments: “There’s a tension between the concern about experiential learning and its value, and the rather economic rationalist view that says wouldn’t it be good if everything was on-line, and funds could be diverted to other areas, away from studios and teachers. In fact some institutions would be under more pressure than we are because they’re even more practice-based. We haven’t chopped the experientially-based work but contact hours are less, due to funding restrictions.”

The VCA (University of Melbourne) and the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (Edith Cowan University) are 2 such practice-based institutions. VCA’s website states that the philosophical underpinnings still lie in studio practice, with classes in ballet and contemporary dance closely interrelated with composition and performance, and increased time in performance workshops. Performance and practice are also central to the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) philosophy, with daily technique classes, choreographic development and regular performance opportunities in a variety of venues. So is nurturing of strong links with professional organisations, companies and other artists, both locally and internationally. Both the Advanced Diploma stream and the BA program have a common year in first year and a core of ballet, contemporary, performance and choreography. While the Advanced Diploma is directed more towards mainstream dance with add-ons like pas de deux, pointe, repertoire, variations, the BA is more diverse and less defining, having been redesigned so that students can pursue individual goals as dance artists, choreographers, teachers or researchers. In the Honours course, students can choose either a research/performance project or audition for the Link Performance Dance Company. The MA in Creative Arts offers students the opportunity to refocus education in one particular art form and expose it to others.

Courses and communities

The social functioning within tertiary dance institutions and the relationship to the communities they are part of can sometimes be a complex weave of mainstream arts practices and non-dominant social values. VU, NAISDA and The Wesley Institute of Ministry & the Arts (WIMA) are 3 such institutions whose inceptions 20–30 years ago deviated considerably from what mainstream dance practice might have dictated. Still most important at NAISDA is the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture. “The component that the students come here for is the Indigenous—that’s primary, but we have a twofold program. Some of our students have never had the benefit of mainstream training so our institution fills that gap; a lot of students who come here also have no connection to their traditional culture, and they want to acquire that knowledge.” Similarly, WIMA offers courses which integrate dance training within a Christian framework. Evelyn Defina (Head of Dance, Wesley Insititute of Ministry & the Arts) comments: “Because of the nature of the college, there’s no competitiveness, no bitchiness. It’s more an atmosphere of encouragement and support, helping students to reach their potential. We offer a lot of one-to-one counselling, which we can do because we are small. That’s part of our brief.”

Elizabeth Dempster describes how the course at the Victorian University was initiated in response to a field of practice which didn’t have much institutional representation, being conceived of as “a platform for dance practices that were situated in cross-disciplinary or visual arts contexts and didn’t come out of conservative dance institutions. It was also giving ‘knowledge about’ and ‘experience of’, rather than expecting people to pop out of the course and be fully fledged artists. Now, it’s hard to decide what that community might be, it’s changed so radically over the last five years.”

Nanette Hassall says of WAAPA’s current environment: “We operate within a number of different communities. The most basic is the small group of independent artists who work in Perth. I spend two-thirds of my sessional budget, which is something like $40,000, on supporting that community. Artists are invited to make work with the students…When I came here, I found Perth very factionalised, and I think what we’ve done has helped to bring them more together, with more recognition of each other’s skills. We’re a kind of meeting place.”

Institutions also addressed questions about their skills base differently, but often discussed a similar convergent core of body-based work functioning alongside a diverse eclectic mix of other work which depended almost entirely on visiting and local artists. VU’s project-based work—8 hours a week—is determined by the visiting artists teaching it. Dempster says, “Strictly speaking it may not be a choreographic or dance approach. It may be a writing or visual arts project. The community of artists we draw on would rarely be from mainstream companies; they’re more the independent artists. And the sessional teachers are artists who have evolved and established their own practices in some way or other. These people are very diverse.

“The course is broad-based, and strong conceptually. Students get really excited by it, but they don’t get 2 technique classes a day. They have to find resources outside to build up the skills base if they want them…I still harbour the idea that you need a body practice in which to ground work, but for various reasons, the body-based work is about a third of the program. We do experiential anatomy, ideokinesis and improvisation, and these function as resources for students whose work may not evolve into a movement or dance-based form.”

At QUT there are rigorous classical or contemporary classes 4 days a week “because choreographers and directors still expect highly trained and virtuosic dancers…Mostly the contemporary styles are release-based because that’s what people teach, and are manifested quite differently with each teacher. All students are assessed similarly in alignment—which is fundamental in first year in both ballet and contemporary. We’re looking at generic attributes of styles, but we like the diversity that casual staff bring.”.

Getting work

Another concern has traditionally been about what students can achieve on leaving tertiary training. David Spurgeon, Faculty of Theatre, Film and Dance, University of New South Wales, has no qualms: “The immediate end is that students are going to be high school teachers of dance. Technique is fine, but we all know there aren’t jobs for dancers. What I’m promoting has a real goal in front of it. Everybody who graduates, who wants to teach and is prepared to travel, has a job. If you don’t want to teach full time, you can do casual teaching 2 days a week, which is better than waitressing, and you can make work.”

Nanette Hassall comments: “There’s no work in Perth, so it’s really important to get them out. But we can’t afford to turn their attention back to the eastern states because there’s no work there either…We encourage students to do overseas exchange programs which include places like Julliard in the US, the University of North Carolina, primarily for students who are very interested in teaching…There’s a lot of international benchmarking, taking the students to perform internationally. This year we’re performing in Dusseldorf at the Global Dance Festival. We’ve been to Korea twice, Malaysia 3 times…We’re also trying to invite at least one guest artist from Asia each year to make a work. Last year Shih Gee Tze came from Taiwan, and he also invited our students to perform with his company.”

Don Asker finds the contemporary VCA culture empowering: “We are getting a broader range of people and we can satisfy a broader range of desires. Within that, we’re making it possible for people to see that performance is changing. There are people working for companies like Chunky Move and Sydney Dance Company, but there are also a number of people seeking work in project environments that sometimes become extremely highly profiled. In the past we tended to have a more hierarchical perception of what was good achievement, but now we’re noticing that vocational pathways are much more complex. People move across them. Goals and aspirations are changing.”

Restless Dance’s in the blood continues this company’s interest in personal biography. The flow of memories weaves around the childhood body and the image of the birthday celebration, an event where the tension between welcome and unwelcome attention is heightened. The celebration of the person is poignantly lost amongst the preparations for the birthday and in group games.

A young man sits quietly on a chair. The other performers interact around him as if he is not there. Later he methodically moves along a row of cupcakes placed across the front of the playing area in a ritual of wishing—lighting the candle on the cake and blowing it out. Behind him daily tortures like the ‘hair brushing ritual’ or the ‘stand in the corner’ injunction are played out. Bodies struggle against each other in pleasure and discomfort. Times of physical achievement emerge—throwing, balancing on one’s hands. The piece moves effortlessly between group sequences, partnering and solos. The performers seem deeply engaged in the pleasure and process of moving.

Memory is constructed as decaying, both in the choice of the old Queens Theatre as venue and in the discoloured, frayed costuming—versions of Sunday best that also pass as retro-chic. The floor of the space is covered with fine sand and the replaying of memory leaves traces on this surface. In the distance, framed by a huge doorway, 4 musicians create swells that circle and resound in the space and then fade. At one stage one of the musicians plays Happy Birthday on water-filled glasses. The sound is slightly off-key yet crystal clear and melancholic.

The past is a strange country, so why and how do we revisit it? There is something in this work about reclaiming the desire to be playful and special. There is something also about pleasure and defiance in the struggle against interference and control by others.

Works in progress from Ausdance’s SA Choreo Lab were presented this year at the Space Theatre as part of the Adelaide Festival Centre’s programming initiative, in-space.

Helen Omand’s Up Front and Naked comprised a sequence of images of states of loss—loss of comfort, loss of perspective, loss of purpose, loss of belief, loss of restraint, loss of self, loss of mind. The unifying element in this associative flow between language, dance, light and video image was the sense that in each event the ‘performer’ was ‘out of place.’ The piece drew attention to the fact that the experience of ‘nakedness’ is perhaps the experience of a mismatch between behavior and context.

Katrina Lazaroff’s Finding the Funk was a solo about dancing. A series of sequences were structured around the contemplation of movement, moving into and out of a tap dance, contemporary, jazz or ‘club’ routine. It was intriguing to wonder what it was Lazeroff was wrestling with, in trying to ‘find the funk.’ Was it a quest for some sort of integration of disparate dance experiences or a more subjective discernment of when her dancing was ‘in the groove’?

Amanda Phillips’ When There’s Only (cinematographer Mark Lapwood) is a delicate and evocative film portrait of intergenerational and intra-generational relationship and dance. It shifts between a contemporary solo by a young woman and a group of older couples ballroom dancing in what appears to be a railway tunnel. The camera moves between couples and we notice nuances of touch and facial expression that suggest a far more subtle dance of desire and rejection as these bodies sweep across the floor. Is this the past travelling to meet the present or moving away from it?

Later we see the elderly men sitting on seats, waiting to be chosen to partner somebody. Their nonchalance and/or discomfort is captured in shifts of limbs and weight. One by one they are lead away until one man is left. He walks through the tunnel, then the young woman appears and they dance. Is he her father or grandfather? Is she his memory of lost love? The older dancers are interviewed on camera. We hear the stories of life partnerships formed or never found on the dance floor. The film poignantly captures the exquisite interplay between love, death, memory and dance and how the past and the present dance towards each other.

Waiting, choreographed and performed by Ingrid Steinborner and Felecia Hick, and filmed by them with Monte Engler, closed the gap between dance and video image through a seamless transference of action from live to video image. The performance built from the video image of a young woman waiting at a train station. This simple game between virtual and live body was so well played it felt like magic. The spatial shifts worked to bring the filmed and live bodies into such a direct relationship that it seemed as if the game was taking place in real time.

Sol Ulbrich’s tender fury began with an intricate sequence of gestures, a conversation between 2 women and a man that becomes barbed. Eventually the 3 break into a fight that travels through space and onto and off screen before transforming into a series of duets. This piece seemed influenced by the possibilities of film—the close-up and the location shot.

Sarah Neville’s Artifacts explored performance as archeology. The jangling of bone on bone accompanied Neville’s journey across the space. Bones unloaded with a thud, she danced. Drawn from Butoh and contemporary dance, her movement appeared deliberately fossilised, subject to a past logic.

Once Bitten, performed by Naida Chinner, devised with and directed by Ingrid Voorendt, was a study on love. It teetered between vaudeville slapstick, physical theatre—tragic comedy. Chinner enters in high heels, arms laden with tomatoes. She stumbles and the tomatoes spill across the floor creating a terrain of ‘bleeding hearts.’ She sings of love, performs a puppet show with the tomatoes and dances the spills of love, the falling down and picking yourself up again, with the occasional high kick. Some hearts get squashed. Chinner’s sweetness and bravado had us rooting for her in this sticky game.

The State Opera South Australia and Leigh Warren and Dancers collaborated to produce Philip Glass’ opera, Akhnaten. The Opera Studio was transformed by Mary Moore’s neoclassical design into a combination of exhibition, library and museum with slides, display cases and reading tables, chairs and a ‘temple.’ The opera begins with the principal singers as visitors to this museum/ library being shown around by the scribe, who is also the tour guide. The chorus enters as tourists dressed in clothes that could be day wear but also ancient costume. The dancers curl their bodies into the space. Their movement is repeatedly arrested. These contracted and splayed bodies become the preserved dead on display.

Various texts from ancient sources, some sung, some spoken, focus the music in each section. In this production each section is presented as a unique display. Warren’s staging is reminiscent of Glass’ music. The groups of performer are interwoven so as to present a unique image for each section.

The singers slide between representing historical figures and students of history or tourists. Their bodies have a held quality. They are careful, respectful tourists and historical characters suspended in time. The dancers create a shadowy play of past creeping around the present that reaches a thrilling climax when they compel the principal singers down to the floor again and again. It is in these moments of interaction that the ordered environment comes alive. Another exciting moment occurs when pages from the oversize books, used to structure the space, are torn out and scattered and the books slammed shut and thrown off their pedestals. This desecration of the pristine order of the space is visceral.

This production draws our attention to the act of preservation. The past is preserved and laid out for us and we, the audience to this past, are held in place, controlled in the present as we view this past. There is something relentless in Glass’ music, a similar obdurateness to that of the display case. I found myself revelling in the High Modernism of the production and longing for excess—the uncontrolled, damage, decay, the living body. It directed me though to muse on the place of the present in the contemplation of the past.

Restless Dance Company, in the blood, direction Ingrid Voorendt, The Queens Theatre, May 8-11; SA Choreo Lab, The Space, Ausdance & Adelaide Festival Centre, May 9-11; State Opera of South Australia & Leigh Warren & Dancers, Akhnaten: An Opera in Three Acts by Philip Glass, director/choreographer Leigh Warren, designer Mary Moore; The Opera Studio, Adelaide, May 16-25; Ausdance [SA], Australian Dance Week 2002, May 11-19

If the first ReelDance international Dance on Screen festival in 2000 had an emphasis on experiment and the arty end of the spectrum, this year’s event is more expansive, taking in social dance, ritual and traditional dance as well as popular forms such as music video.

For curator Erin Brannigan, this choice reflects trends evident in the major dance film festivals worldwide of which there are now around 12. “We’ve got everything from military drills performed in a deathly quiet country field, through a dance ritual set against a bombed out cityscape in Chechnya to the very best dance-theatre by Holland’s Hans Hof Ensemble—in their work R.I.P performers give a physical rendering of adults coming to terms with the death of their parents. In Human Radio Miranda Pennell (UK) films ordinary people performing ‘private’ dances in their living rooms. David Hinton (UK) is best known for his work with DV8, Wendy Houstoun and Russell Maliphant. We’ll be screening Birds, the film that won him the prestigious IMZ Dance Screen Award in 2000—a choreographic study of birds in flight.”

This year Brannigan again teams with the One Extra Dance Company to present ReelDance and coming on board for the first time is The Studio at Sydney Opera House, the venue for the festival, as well as a number of state-based organisations (Dancehouse, ACMI, PICA and the Adelaide Festival Centre) as partners in a national tour

Other highlights of the program include Sean O’Brien’s Sunrise at Midnight made with Melbourne choreographer Yumi Umiumare and inspired by an historic photograph of a troupe of Japanese female performers who toured outback towns at the turn of the century. There’s a chance to see Canadian Laura Taler’s multi award-winning short A Very Dangerous Pastime purported to “dispel the myth that dance is beyond comprehension for the lay person.” And all in 14 minutes. There are also full length documentaries on ‘bad girl’ Sylvie Guillem and ‘bad boy’ Michael Clark who disappeared from the dance scene a few years ago to deal with his heroin addiction.

Dance aficionados of all stripes should get along to Saturday night’s Legends of Tap and Jazz, a full evening of short and longer films from the Cinematheque de la Danse in Paris featuring rare footage of Josephine Baker, the Nicholas Brothers, Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson, Fred Astaire and all those others whose names are not so familiar (whatever became of Buck and Bubbles, Pops and Louie?). Nicolas Villodre from the Cinematheque is the special guest of the festival and will speak prior to the screenings at the free forum entitled Images and Dance: Struggle and Necessity. The forum’s at 7, followed by screenings from 8.15 on.

Recent music videos featuring some of the more radical experiments with dance will also be celebrated. Think Spike Jonze’ film of Fat Boy Slim’s Weapon of Choice with Christopher Walken dancing up a storm or the mockumentary dance troop in his Praise You or Lisa Ffrench’s choreography for Custard’s Girls Like That. These and others featuring Nick Cave, Moby, Madonna, Daft Punk and Blur will be screened, followed by a video forum with directors, choreographers and musicians.

The festival culminates with the finalists in the ReelDance Competition for Australian and, this year, New Zealand dance film and video, followed by the presentation of the Digital Pictures Award and other prizes. This year 60 films were submitted, double last year’s intake and according to the judges, showed an impressive degree of sophistication. The 11 selected for screening are: Arachne by Mathew Bergan and Narelle Benjamin and featuring the late Russell Page; in absentia by Margie Medlin and Sandra Parker (winners of the 2000 competition); No Surrender by Richard James Allen with performer/consultant Bernadette Walong; Sue Healey & Louise Curham’s Niche; Kate McIntosh’s The Gloaming; Tuula Roppola & Ian Moorhead’s Blowfish; Shona McCullagh’s Fly; Rosetta Cook’s Frocks Off; Julie-Anne Long & Samuel James’ Miss XL, Olase’s Dance by Louise Taube and court.(caught) a work by students from the University of Otago’s Dancelab.

ReelDance, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, Aug 2-4 August; Adelaide Festival Centre, Aug 6-7; Cinema Paradiso in association with PICA, Perth, Aug 10-11; Federation Hall, VCA Melbourne in association with Dancehouse & ACMI, Aug 14-17; Star Court Theatre, Lismore in association with Dance Action Northern Rivers, Sept 27.

Despite the odds (funding uncertainties, space shortages and touring impossibilities) an impressive line-up of dancers from across the country will front for this year’s Antistatic dance festival which offers a positively immersive experience for audiences.

The galleries will be jumping with installations. You can go a few rounds with virtual dancer Nicole Johnston in Chunky Move’s interactive dance installation CLOSER conceived by Gideon Obarzanek with new media artist Peter Hennessey. This will be a sneak preview of a work commissioned by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and premiering at its opening in Melbourne later this year. More meditative possibilities on time, space and the performance experience are on offer in Queensland artist John Utans’ installations on second thoughts and immersed, the latter created with dancer Wendy McPhee and sound/film artist George Poonkhin Khut. In NICHE Sue Healey choreographs for 2 dancers and film loop by Louise Curham, and in Bird Talk 1-7, Paul Gazzola (the world via WA) answers, among other questions, “Can a toy bird teach me choreography?” In and around the galleries, in mini-Me the anarchic Jeff Stein attempts to join opposing forces of minimalism and expressionism in the one body and The Fondue Set lead the audience on another kind of dance.

Important at this year’s Antistatic is the presence of emerging choreographers in a program entitled Mobile States which also tours to Perth’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. Artists include Simon Ellis (Victoria) presenting FULL, a dance-theatre work based on the life of his grandmother; Felicity Morgan (WA) unpacking a dialogue on duality in Twosomely; Helen Omand who’s work has been raising eyebrows in Adelaide at events like Fresh Bait and Ignition, presenting her solo Rapt. And if you missed its short season at B-Sharp last year in Four on the Floor, there’s a chance to catch Lee Wilson and Mirabelle Wouters in the sexy Sentimental Reason which offers some new connections between physical theatre and dance.

In the second week, Rakini weaves dance and vocals in Claustrophobia, a collaboration with composer Liberty Kerr; Eleanor Brickhill and Jane McKernan take a close look at self-image in Waiting to Breath Out and Michael Whaites presents Driving Me, his elegant duet with the work of video artist Carli Leimbach.

Works in progress will be presented by NSW artists Nikki Heywood (Body/explosive device) investigating “how to deliver gesture and text to within the skin of the listener: bullet-like”, and stella b dancers Nalina Wait and Katy McDonald collaborate with lighting designer Richard Manner. Brian Lucas (Queensland) works with “a dense format of dance, text and sound” in The book of revelation(s) and Ingrid Voorendt (SA) choreographs Fatigue, a solo for Stephen Noonan in which words push against movement.

On the talk front, in Dances with Screens you can join in a conversation between artists working with live/virtual bodies including Gideon Obarzanek, Wendy Houstoun (UK), Louise Curham, George Poonkhin Khut and Brigid Kitchin (filmmaker on Kate Champion’s groundbreaking Same, same, But Different). In Everyday Dance Erin Brannigan, Elizabeth Dempster and Ros Warby examine some theoretical and performative possibilities of the pedestrian body.

The workshop program throws up all sorts of interesting challenges to the brave dance artist. Special guest tutor Wendy Houstoun, investigating the nature of projection, asks “What rationale requires screened and live bodies to appear together? Voice expert Carolyn Connors wants to know, “What are you trying to say, and are you?” And in Impro Inferno Andrew Morrish asks his charges to jettison the concepts of choreographer, author, director, theme and content to concentrate on “the performer” and “the moment.”

Imagine a bridge, its centre collapsed, swallowed by the river below, and with it the steam train the structure couldn’t hold and the passengers the train failed to protect and deliver. What remains from disappearance, or rather from the appearance of the accident, the catastrophe?

paralla x presents a series of points: marks that make a map. As Deleuze & Guattari suggest, you can enter and exit the map at any place. I sat, and walked, in the space for perhaps 90 minutes and enjoyed the necessary ‘slow time’ of this series of points or intensities. Most of this time I listened to the audio (the ghostly appearance of software artifacts, or a short time made longer) that accompanied panorama a, whilst watching the iterations of birds, the water, the fragments of a bridge (over the River Tay in Scotland). There are tones of the small and the inconsequential, and also of the devastating effects of catastrophe that makes me wonder about the expectations and failures of technology. There is a strength to this ‘work’ of play that lightens the weight of absence and mourning. It seeks neither to solve anything nor to problematise technology, rather to open up the spacings or the intervals within which things take place.

Perhaps the thing architecture and dance have most in common is a necessary primary concern with gravity. Jude Walton worked with dancers and a biomechanist over a period of 4 months, using a range of equipment designed to measure the moving body. The use of augmented video goggles blurred the distinctions easily made between perceptions of inside and outside bodies: the points where the actual and the virtual meet, intersect, and affect bodies and orientations. On a small monitor set back in an angled recess, trace 3 displays lo-hi-tech stick-figure tracings made by sensors placed on points of the body in movement.

Mark Michinton’s catalogue essay, “Dance, chance, dream, scream”, notes the changes to the perceptions of the body in space effected by technological innovations in the 19th century—trains, planes and cars. The shock of speed. Across from the loose pile of fallen poles lit from underneath trace 2, is panorama b. Triggered by movements nearby, a model train engine circles a barren space. Enclosed in a wire cage this could be the interminable state of emergency.

panoptic sphere is a large video wall projection of a dancer (Ros Warby) in a room. The camera records her movements from below the floor and repeats its capture at feet, at thigh, at chest, at head, from above. “[The] size of the image (gargantuan) overwhelms as our imagination tries to construct the whole” (Jude Walton, email). It wasn’t so much that I was overwhelmed by the size of the image—perhaps the now familiar scale of megaplex cinemas has something to do with that. Rather I was made curious about where the body of the dance, or performance, meets the body(s) of the viewer, the gallery space and the image.

Quotation from Cristina Caprioli, Immanent Choreographies: Deleuze And Neo-Aesthetics, Conference, New Tate Modern, September 2001

Jude Walton, paralla x, video and light works installation; panoptic sphere: Ros Warby: choreography, dancer; Jude Walton: camera, editing; panorama: Jude Walton: camera, editing; Nick Von-der-Borche: train table design and construction; Tony Bishop: wire frame tunnel; Jason Keats: model; Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, May 2-June 8

The Age of Unbeauty has a sombre beauty. Musically, from its minimalist beginnings, through glides and subterranean bubblings, through its sad piano reversed against heaving organ chords, its insistently ominous rumblings, it breathes not dissonance or dissent but a fluent angst, resignation even, and is in the end usurped (presumably it had nowhere else to go) by some sentimental Bjork hymning, happiness-to-go. The design is vertiginous. At the back of a deep space a huge wall, like a parquet floor viewed from above, stands as if about to fall. Performers standing on their hands dance against it, the world upside down. Hidden doors open. One reveals a naked man and woman forced painfully against a perspex barrier, looking like a Renaissance painting of Adam and Eve banished from Eden, but with nowhere to go, only this purgatory. To be purged of what? Until near the end of the work, the beauties of the place are austere, danced duets and trios that speak not of union and sensuality but of bodies locked in furious combat or exercising en masse as if to exorcise…what? It’s a world where the mass divides and turns on itself with a finely articulated cruelty—those who are now the other are naked or masked and manipulated like puppets, beautifully, with apparent compassion but a dangerous grip. This is a world where the blind lead the blind, their suit trousers down around their ankles as they traipse again along the wall. One man (Dean Walsh), a kind of Everyman, or rather no man, because he doesn’t fit, totters awkwardly through this nightmare unable to break through to connect, occasionally complicit, only once eloquent and beautiful as he dances the wall, as if to scale it, and, at the end of the performance staggers to the forestage and collapses, presumably finished. Around him are couples whose entwinings no longer seem knotted, but supple and responsive, but…too late? The performance has ended but the wall, as it was at the beginning of the performance, becomes a huge screen filled with faces of diverse ages and cultures and Bjork bjorks on and on. Poor old Bjork to be put to such use. It might have seemed a radical gesture a decade ago, but here it irks with more sentimentality than irony, as if, like Luke Smile’s score for the performance, Stewart simply couldn’t conjure optimism, only in this addendum. Conceived partly after September 11, The Age of Unbeauty has some sense of topicality—a single strand of barbed wire hangs high across the stage, beneath it, as the performance begins, figures stand or sit in groups, or alone, watching, waiting, perhaps like refugees. They regroup. Time passes. They shift. It’s a potent image. Soon, however, the nightmare speedily engulfs them and is only ever distantly evocative of the specific unbeauties of our age. The Age of Unbeauty is a powerful work, even if it short circuits itself from time to time, and even if it feels less coherent than it should. Its dark vision might have seemed less loaded and the dynamics of its finale more complex had it foregone its cinematic ending. As ever, the dancers are superb, meeting Stewarts’ theatrical and choreographic demands with verve, bringing beauty to torment, one of art’s strange but necessary conditions.

Australian Dance Theatre, The Age of Unbeauty, devised & directed by Garry Stewart, choreographed with the company, dramaturgy David Bonney, design Stewart, Gaelle Mellis, Geoff Cobham, costume Gaelle Mellis, sound design Luke Smiles, lighting Damien Cooper, video artist David Evans. The Action Pack Season, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, June 26 – July 6.

Upholster is, as Phillip Adams states, a choreographic upholstery. From the intricate warp and weft of the movement to the larger patchwork of dance genres, across multiple references to fabrics, coverings, home-decorating and domestic environments, Adams takes a lateral, comprehensive and humorous approach to his theme.

With the proximity afforded by The Studio venue, the choreographic inventiveness, speed and sophistication is thrilling. Duets, trios and quartets fill the space with single figures appearing peripherally only to disappear again before pulling focus. Moving from podiums at the back of the space onto futon-like mattresses on the floor, sexual partnering and playful tussling inspire a choreographic frenzy of inter-weaving limbs and bold positions—thighs wrap around hips and dance partners kiss in a refreshingly frank representation of sexual intimacy.

On their feet, the dancers eat up the space in more clever groupings, or strut across the stage to take up new formations. The inventiveness continues with our attention drawn to both the large movements through space and the articulations of limbs, hands, fingers. The flow of this style of choreography is interrupted by 2 episodes. Knitwear provides Adams with a finicky and intimate choreographic device as the dancers button themselves into their own and each other’s cardigans. The tone of this sequence is in perfect keeping with the ‘cardy’ as an object associated with domestic cosiness. The second episode features Michelle Heaven in a deft characterisation of a shy upholsterer drawn into a fantasy world of floating lounges and sensual awakening. This section is well-crafted and entertaining, and clearly fits in with the themes of upholstery and the sexual liberation associated with the 70s though the shift in performance style requires a leap of faith from the audience.

The score provided by ‘turntabulist’ Lynton Carr drives the performance with psychedelic rock & roll, searing guitar riffs and funky rhythms. References to 70s music, fashion and ideals add other aesthetic/thematic layers to the texture of the choreographic fabric, and at times threaten the subtlety of the broader theme. The costuming is an example of this; a blend of singlets, lairy loose pants, chunky Y-fronts and pleated Dervish-like skirts for the boys, cardigans, frilly knickers and 50s frocks. The schizophrenia suggested by this is not necessarily a bad thing, and the plethora of styles, fabrics and patterns is appropriate to the theme. But the second half in particular accelerates and fills with so many references that the ending left me feeling unsatisfied—a promise that had been registered in the first half left unfulfilled.

The dancers are a group of individualised performers, rare at a time when youth and physical facility seem to dominate our dance stage—not that these dancers lack either. A variety of body shapes and personalities carries Adams’ work off in style, with stand-out performances from Stephanie Lake, Brooke Leeder, Gerard Van Dyck and Michelle Heaven. The Studio also felt like the perfect venue for this ambitious and style-savvy work.

Phillip Adams’ BalletLab, Upholster, choreography Phillip Adams; performers Michelle Heaven, Gerard Van Dyck, Stephanie Lake, Brooke Stamp, Ryan Lowe, Kyle Kremerskothen, Brooke Leeder; turntable composition Lynton Carr; décor/costumes Dorotka Sapinska; lighting Ben Cobham & Andrew Livingston. The Studio, Sydney Opera House, June 26-July 6.

Since the 1960s at least, the body as raw material for art, as a canvas or screen, as a site for artistic exploration, as a kind of (anti-)performance in real time, has generated insight and alarm, especially where it’s been the artist’s body and the means have been endurance or invasion, often by cutting. There are many forms of performance art, even if they are rarely encountered these days in Australia, but in Europe what has become a tradition, or perhaps unfinished business, is still well and truly alive and provocative. Some of it is coming to Australia.

Zane Trow, Artistic Director of Brisbane’s Powerhouse Centre for the Live Arts, met Nikki Milican at the 2000 Adelaide Festival of the Arts. Milican was there as part of the New Moves (new territories) venture with the festival and the Australia Council. The Choreolab workshop in Adelaide was the precursor to some 30 Australian choreographers and dancers participating in the New Moves (new territories) international dance event in Glasgow shortly after. In 2002 Millican invited 2 of those artists, Lisa O’Neill and Cazerine Barry, to participate in new territories, a celebration of new choreography and performance, incorporating New Moves, Scotland’s international festival of contemporary choreography, and The National Review of Live Art, a unique annual event which has been running since 1981—and since 1984 under Milican’s directorship. NLRA is focussed on performance art, contemporary performance and time-based art, all under the Live Art banner. Trow had attended the 2001 event and commissioned the works by O’Neill and Barry that Milican picked up. Now it’s his turn to bring several British artists, Milican, Lois Keidan of the Live Art Development Agency and a Glasgow arts journalist to Brisbane in October for the next stage of what he hopes will be a growing pattern of exchange and market development.

The NRLA is exemplary, says Trow, in providing infrastructure for performance: “It has done so for 20 years and you can feel that resonance…It brings together the young and the established and creates an energy.” The variety and richness of the performance forms Milican presents is evident in Edward Scheer’s report on the 2002 event in RealTime 49 (see also www.newmoves.co.uk). The festival featured over 200 professional artists from more than 12 countries across 4 continents. For his small but intensive 3 and a half day first-time program, Trow is focusing on performance art (as opposed to theatre-based contemporary performance): “I’m a lover of performance art because it is so anti-theatrical, so casual and off-handed, and it continues to investigate time, space and the body in significant ways.” He thinks the NRLA has been invaluable in nurturing performance, creating a safe house for the development of risky work, commissioning new work for many years and spawning offshoots like the London-based Live Art Development Agency (www.liveartlondon.demon.co.uk), an organisation which receives funding from the British Government and allocates it to the performance community (a model we should be giving serious thought to in Australia).

Australian performance artists have not been able to sustain careers focused entirely on their practice in the way that UK and European counterparts have done for over 20 years. Trow would like this issue debated, especially as he thinks that Australian performance artists are as good as any, more eclectic and often with a different sensibility with regard to the body, hence the acclaim for Lisa O’Neill’s idiosyncratic performances in Glasgow. It’s been a long time, he says, since the 1994 celebration, 25 Years of Performance Art (RT 5) and the appearance of Anne Marsh’s Body and Self: Performance Art in Australia, 1969-1992 (book and CD-ROM, OUP 1993). While names like Mike Parr, Jill Orr, Linda Sproul and Barbara Campbell have currency, and venues like Artspace are committed to occasional performance art events, the form is not prominent and careers are provisional. In Glasgow in 2001, Trow relished meeting artists “who are still ‘crazy’ and have careers as performance artists…appearing in Vienna, London, New York, and are recognised, and survive as artists and teachers in their field.” Trow also thinks that the NRLA “tells you a lot more about Britain than the RSC and Oasis.” The performers he’s bringing out, he says, offer a snapshot of British culture.

Given Milican’s enthusiam for Australian work, Trow sees the exchange with the NRLA as creating “a pathway into Europe in a different way from the Australia Council’s Performing Arts Market and the big arts festivals.” He’s also encouraged by the likes of Daryl Buckley, Artistic Director of the ELISION new music ensemble, who has successfully worked with a group of European producers to create an international audience for his company. For these producers, Millican and others, like Maria Magdelena Schwagermann (formerly of Berlin’s Hebbel Theatre and now Artistic Director of the Zurich Arts Festival), Australia is a hothouse of artistic creativity and distinctive inventiveness.

Trow describes the NRLA at the Powerhouse as a mix of installation, performance, workshop and dialogue. Performances will also be presented in Perth by Artrage (the longtime fringe festival is now under the new artistic directorship of Marcus Canning; see interview in RT#51). Trow is hoping that the visit will provide an opportunity for Australian practitioners to come and meet their British counterparts. It’s also an opportunity to hear from Milican and Keidan just how live art is nurtured, regarded and archived in the UK. The NRLA has a close association with Nottingham Trent University which has recently digitised 20 years of documentation of UK performance art. It could also be an opportunity to hear about the Contemporary Theatre Practice course at Glasgow’s Royal Academy of Music & Drama—Milican is Chief External Examiner. Lois Keidan (formerly Director of Live Art at London’s ICA) will speak about the NRLA, the Live Art Development Agency, curation and government arts policies and the support for performance across Europe. Mary Brennan, a mainstream journalist and passionate supporter of contemporary performance will address the media’s relationship with art.

Trow describes Michael Mayhew’s work as “extreme.” A preoccupation with death and decay is realised in a “durational work in a coffin in which he damages himself with glass and creates puppet icons of the body.” Mayhew has been creating works since the mid 80s, travelling “through the disciplines of dance, theatre, large scale and site-specific.” He is currently Artist in Residence at NRLA. In the notes provided on the performers, Mayhew writes that while in Australia he will search for a sister he has not seen for 38 years, and “I hope to travel to the desert to play with fire.”

Richard Layzell, says Trow, is “very anti-theatre”, “one of the first to stand in the street with a cardboard box on his head.” His “sustained anti-performance” has included a lecture on varieties of ducting tape “delivered in a bad 70s safari suit…funny, but real and with no theatrical pretense.” His work is “a mix of video, spoken word and meaningless gesture…so well-formed, a well-honed meaninglessness developed over many years.” Layzell is a member of Rescen, a research group of performers, composers and choreographers based at Middlesex University. For NRLA at the Powerhouse, Layzell will present Performing Everyday; it’s about “process, making, not performing, the art of cleaning, personal history, the Japanese aesthetic of wabi sabi and Layzell’s alter ego.” An intriguing aspect of Layzell’s career (which includes international performances, a widely seen interactive installation and several books) is his role as Visionaire for AIT Ltd, an arts-industry crossover company established in 1995, “recently voted in the top 5 companies to work for in the UK.”

Kira O’Reilly, whose work Trow sees as having kinship with that of Mike Parr and Stelarc, invades her own body in acts of self mutilation. He describes the work as demanding, as “monumentally beautiful and very considered”, “asking the most difficult question…how far can art go? Far beyond questions about voyeurism and ‘is the theatre dead’? It is a work of art, not self-abuse.” O’Reilly might perform (the demands of the work preclude an early decision); she’ll certainly talk and show videos of her work. She writes: “Making direct and explicit interventions in my body, I have bled, scored and marked and scarred by way of investigating the unruly and chaotic materiality of my substance and the disparate narratives at play within. This action begins where words fail me.” A 1998 graduate in Fine Arts from the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, she has been the recipient of a grant, a visual arts award and 6 commissions.

George Chakravarti’s video installation, Shakti, fuses images of the Mona Lisa and Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction and creation with that of the artist himself. Born in New Delhi, Chakravarti was raised as a Catholic but also came under the influence of Buddhism and Hinduism from within his family. He writes: “Shakti integrates painting and performance and delivers it as a time-based medium. An hour-long piece in real time, Shakti is viewed as a painting. I see the piece as a self-portrait, placing myself as the hybrid figure…I question my own identity and experiences of gender, race and sexuality, originating from the East and located in the West.” Based in London, Chakravarti is currently completing his Masters Degree at the Royal College of Art.

The 3 and half days of the NRLA in Australia at Brisbane’s Powerhouse promises to be intense and provocative, another (hopefully ongoing) significant addition to Brisbane’s burgeoning contemporary arts scene and a great opportunity to gain insight into the nurturing, funding and proselytising of performance in Europe. Most of all it’s about meeting and witnessing the work of leading British performance artists. To add to the frisson, you might think of enrolling in Richard Frayzell’s performance workshop, “which will explore communication, the irrational and the state of ‘not performing’. This is suitable for all ages and abilities, no previous experience is necessary.”

The National Review of Live Art, Brisbane Powerhouse, in partnership with New Moves International, Oct 15-18. www.brisbanepowerhouse.org

Innana’s Descent

There’s something eerily right about being taken beneath a Masonic Centre (appropriately a bunker of a building in Sydney’s CBD concealing sanitised ancient male rituals) to see a performance about a Sumerian goddess of about 5,000 years ago whose various manifestations (Ishtar, Astarte, Isis etc) place her somewhere in the long transition from matriarchal to patriarchal cultures. Her moon goddess journey into the underworld to confront the dark self of winter and death (her sister Ereshkigal) before emerging to regenerate the world requires her, as ruler of the solar year, to sacrifice a male, the shepherd king, the man-bull Dumuzi (from an earlier time when shepherds could become kings and kings were ritually slaughtered). There’s a curious pleasure in seeing this ritual enacted, especially when we are cast in the role of tourists visiting an archaelogical dig in an underground carpark. Here we are transformed from observers into witnesses as the performance slips from site tour (with lectures and projections) into ritual, sometimes hovering between as the workers in the dig appear as gods from the waist up, their grubby shorts and boots below, and battered car hubcaps and number plates are labelled and held aloft like sacred icons.

Our progress is brisk as we move into the harsh lights and dusty hubub of the wonderfully constructed site (designer Joey Ruigrok, sculptor/prop maker Shigeyuki Ueno, lighting Richard Montgomery, sound/music Felicity Fox, Gene Gill) with its wall charts, projections, table displays, industrial rumble and rattle, the manufacturing of objects (for the tourist trade?) and the droll chief archaeologist (Katia Molino) who will be our guide. She’s a likeable eccentric in love with the erotics of the dig (“excruciating as a slow striptease”) and divulging some of her own rituals—she collects the underpants of 147 men she’s slept with to date as well as purchasing round glass paperweights that recall their testicles). She also explains the fragmentary nature of her discoveries and of the goddess narratives, and muses, like any good postmodernist, ”Do you take fragments for what they are?” However, the tensions rife among the workers on the dig, without signal, become those between the gods they are symbolically (and later literally) exhuming. One of them (Chris Murphy) becomes Innana in a serio-comic boots’n’all expression of desire: “Who will plough my vulva, who will water my lettuce?”

From then on the sheer strangeness of this ritual world enmeshes us as we are marshalled about the site, watching Innana in a small wagon sharing wine with her increasingly drunk Father-King (Michael Cohen) and divesting him of his glittering royal apparel from top to bottom (including, of course, his worker’s underpants). After Innana ropes in the man-bull of her dreams (Dominique Sweeney), 2 thuggish and brutally competitive guardians (Cohen and Carlos Gomes) drive a path through the audience, divesting her of those same objects as she is drawn to a opening in the site wall, a projection that transforms into a spiralling journey into the vulva-underworld of her fearsome sister (Yumi Umiumare, magnicifently poised, cackling gutturally). Innana disappears. We are lead deeper into the underworld, the next floor down, and seated in a circle for a demonstration. The archaelogist makes a small cut in the mummified goddess, unaware that the demonic sister hangs below on the same gurney. A hand slips out of the cloth, Innana emerges. However, Ereshkigal will not release her without sacrfice. Innana seductively traps the horned Dumuzi (he’s enjoying a beer and a bit of country music) as the line between the fantastic and the real again emerges. Innana’s pudendum flowers with lettuce, a moment equally serious, comic and other. Life is restored. The archaeologist worships her alabaster statuette of Innana, a private ritual. The big, satisfied audience heads for the overworld, chatting, bemused, enthused. We’ve been somewhere deep in our white psycho-cultural history with its perplexing middle eastern origins, heading home to dig out our copies of Totem and Taboo, The White Goddess and those feminist histories of matriarchy.

It’s been a long time between shows, and earlier works were flawed despite some impressive moments. Theatre Kantanka prove themselves with Innana’s Descent. The structure of the work, the physically brave, focused performances, the totality of invention in design and audience management reveal a maturing vision. There are still challenges: the dialogue is simply not of the same calibre as the rest of the work and the realisation of the one conventional character, the archaelogist, seems incomplete. Katia Molino’s performance, as always, is a fine one, however her relationship with Innana as scripted seems more ironic than intimate, just as her private rituals seem trivial beside the cultural and psychological riches of the Innana stories. The audience is immersed in this other world, but the archaeologist seems largely immune to it and what it might mean for her. Having established her preoccupations so clearly it seems a pity that they have nowhere to go. I craved an encounter between the archaeogist and Innana, some more substantial act of identification. In another, imagined version of Innana’s Descent, the archaelogist, not one of the site workers, becomes Innana, at least somewhere in the unfolding ritual. Complaints aside, this was an enjoyable, sometimes disturbing experience, a work that demands to be kept in repertoire.

Four on the Floor

In Legs on the Wall’s latest and invaluable ongoing collection of new works by company associates and guests, it’s Alexandra Harrison as performer and director in Together and Diffusion who impresses with a challenging presence and some bold inventiveness. Like Sentimental Reason (Lee Wilson and Mirabelle Wouters) from last year’s B Sharp program and Brendan Shelper and Tina McErvale’s Bumping Heads (Next Wave 2002), Together (director Rowan Machingo, creator-performers Harrison & Machingo) displays a scintillating choreographic sensibility fusing dance and physical theatre in a tense couple scenario of power shifts and in-and-out-of-sync emotional phases. In Diffusion, although rather slightly resolved, Harrison packs the performance with physical distress, erotic manoeuvres and a deft use of the vertical in the tiny theatre.

Pussy Boy

Christine Evans’ fable about a boy who wants to fly but whose only flights in the end will be those of fancy, even lunacy, is tautly constructed, ably directed (Chris Mead) with an eye to suspense and clarity, and finely performed. Ben Fountain as the boy is quietly curious. His tyrannical father (Chris Ryan) just as quietly imposes on the boy his misanthropy (built on mysogyny) via physical threat (from the same hammer and nails he wants his son to master) and example—casting out the old woman (Clare Grant) who lives with just too many dogs in the same building. A policeman and a policewoman, a kind of bitter-sweet chorus, watch the action like indifferent minor gods who might occasionally empathise but know they have no real power and who are more interested in each other in the end. Ryan and Grant, both from Sydney’s contemporary performance scene, bring distinctive presence to the work, a stillness and restraint that suits the poetry of Evans’ text and the intimacy of Belvoir St Downstairs. The live musical score for cello is fine in itself but too heavily underlines the misery of the tale. Evans (My Vicious Angel), now writing from the US, again proves herself a master of construction and spare, evocative dialogue in a quasi-fantastic setting.

Kicking & Screaming New Writing Theatre, B Sharp, Downstairs Belvoir St Theatre, June 20-July 7.

The Waiting Room

Works like this are important at a moment when Australia is evincing an insular meanness on the one hand and global gung-hoism on the other in an ugly allegiance with the USA. For the converted, who know these issues only too well, the work is a theatre experience that confirms convictions but, given the distance the government has calculatedly put between us and refugees, also puts emotional flesh on the bones of abstraction. The Waiting Room, from Sydney’s Platform 27 (director Richard Lagarto), but premiering in Melbourne in collaboration with the Melbourne Workers’ Theatre, is a gruelling experience on at least 2 counts. The first is its explicit enactment of life in one of Australia’s detention centres. A large projection screen, a clutter of video monitors (multimedia by Rolando Ramos) at floor level and a large, ominous mobile, transformable frame (set design Sam Hawker) collectively evoke a concentration camp in the Australian outback, aided by Liberty Kerr’s melancholy score, played live, and Stephen Hawker’s shadowy nightmare lighting. The screens also carry images evocative of harsh journeys paralleling the story-telling of the performers as refugees, as well as the ludicrous Australian Government video with its shots of dangerous fauna aimed at deterring asylum seekers. The construction of The Waiting Room epically alternates the Kafkaesque tale of a distressed traveller, personal stories of refugee flight and dramatisations of escalating detention centre cruelty with moments of pure agitprop satire of government and media. All of this is admirably performed, sensitively and often with physical and vocal verve by Wahibi Moussa, Steve Mouzakis and Valerie Berry multiplying themelves into a host of characters ranging from depressed children to John Howard. The second count on which this show is gruelling is overkill. The understandable anger that drives The Waiting Room constantly threatens to overwhelm it, to suck everything into an agitprop vortex—everything is known, worked out, pre-judged, performers become virtuosic machines, their personalities dissipated, some scenes are hectoringly simplistic, a number feel redundant. There is nothing here that cannot be addressed by judicious editing, some opening out of the best material and a fresh look at some of the scripting (by many hands) now that the play has had its first run.

The Waiting Room is a confident step forward for Platform 27. Trades Hall, Melbourne, May 15-June 1

Talking performance training is like finding yourself in an alternate universe, the familiar suddenly becomes a terrain of possibilities, bristling with unmapped spaces, virgin forests, alien influences, new performative species. Explanatory metaphors fill the air, time and space seem different here. The inhabitants speak of perceptual fields, of performance as thought and about having to learn to sit with ambiguity and uncertainty. Protocol demands you not mention the psychology of motive or the actor’s relation to story, certainly not until a lot of other things are addressed. In this world, the practitioners of contemporary performance and teachers in acting schools and performance-making courses are responsive to both the performer’s complex needs as a body, and to a new world where ways of being, holding space, the very desire to perform and the need to speak, if at all, are pivotal. Here performers are proud of their autonomy and the capacity to collaborate, occupy theatres, galleries, streets, sites, and interact with communities, across cultures and cyberspace. This world is a wilderness, new and uncharted, but like all such places it has its own proliferating laws, methodologies, possibilities and those poly-linguals who speak its languages. The university and the actor training school can be found here too, adapting to the artistic, intellectual and job market demands of the new performance species. They are also instigators, these artist-teachers and fellow travellers, opening out notions of acting and performance. While the very idea that universities should teach contemporary performance is alien to some, Mark Minchinton, actor, dramaturg, lecturer (Faculty of Human Development, Victoria University) proposes that the terrain he and his fellow teachers have opened up (and sometimes fight to preserve) within a university is a “wild space.”

Minchinton says that the 3 year Bachelor of Performance Studies is about performance-making but it is not strictly vocational: it’s for thinkers, makers, performers who are encouraged to “think the performance”, a performance not rooted in traditional forms. He says, however, that the course is excellent preparation for theatre and dance, or, alternatively, for established performers re-thinking their craft. Minchinton himself teaches performance skills, in particular what he calls “performance ethics” explored through team work and collaborative projects mixing first, second and third year students. Individual projects also emerge, especially in the final year when the focus is entirely on making works. By turns the work, he says, is exhilarating and nerve wracking because you’re always asking, What am I doing?” His answer? “Creating and preserving a wild space, re-describing it and protecting it…playing with the university structure…establishing an ethical relationship with it, striving to not be dictated by it.”

The nature of the collaborative projects is up to the artists who teach in the course. “We depend on diverse sessional staff as a guarantee against insularity.” Teachers include Elizabeth Dempster (see page 30), Jude Walton, Margaret Cameron, Margaret Trail, Chris Babinska, and Minchinton himself. Graduates go in many different directions—Pia Miranda into film (Looking for Alibrandi) and theatre (eg Benedict Andrew’s demanding production of Fireface for Sydney Theatre Company), Domenico de Clario into performance art and heading a visual arts department (Edith Cowan University, WA), others go on to further study and training at RMIT in fine arts and multimedia, and the VCA for theatre or dance.

For Bruce Keller, writer, performer and teacher, University of Western Sydney, the Theatre Making (formerly Theatre Theory & Practice) Bachelor of Arts degree is about all kinds of performance—site specific, community, cross-cultural—and alertness to new developments. The course combines study and practice. Keller says that students usually arrive with a rigid notion of theatre. He tells them however, “We’re here to mess with your minds,” opening them up to possibilities, to appreciate the diverse range of performance practice to be found in Sydney. In a university with adjoining music, dance and fine arts departments the cross-disciplinary potential is rich. Keller’s particular pleasure is watching for student epiphanies. He explains that most students when they enrol know that they like the arts, but are not sure what career they want, unlike, say, those students who are accepted into this university’s acting course. It might take a year or 2 of making work before a student hits on what they want to become—that could come from performance, lighting, sound, production management, a community project… Sometimes, he says, it comes out of a very demanding experience. Many students will go on to become teachers, taking with them an expansive and subtle view of performance. What the students gain, he says, is confidence, openness and ideas. Through off-campus projects as part of the course they work with communities and interculturally. These and other experiences provide professional links and industry contacts. Like Minchinton, Keller is emphatic about the value of sessional teachers drawn from Sydney’s performance community: “Students often don’t know it but they’re getting the cream of the Sydney performance milieu.”

Writer and director Richard Murphet runs the performance-making course at the Victorian College of the Arts within the Drama School. It is a 1 year Post-Graduate Diploma in Animateuring (or a 2 year Masters) in collaboration with the Dance School. Murphet sees no polarity between theatre and performance, believing it a continuum entailing “deep, interpretative acting skills.” What is central, he argues is “the figure in space and how text, image, structure, multimedia relate to the performer.” Rather than character it’s “the revelation of presence” as demanded not only by contemporary performance, he says, but the plays of Maria Irene Fornes, late Beckett, Caryl Churchill, Jenny Kemp. For the postgraduate animateur performance-making course, it’s all about “what’s going on in the space”, not the story: “Narrative is only [Hitchcock’s] McGuffin…it’s what’s between the actors that the audience gets off on.” What has to be asked is “what is the grain of the voice?”, “how do you whisper a movement?” The animateurs do 3 or 4 projects involving a solo performance, participation in a production directed by Murphet, facilitation of a work involving first year actors and an independent project of their choice. In these activities the students get to work with composers, choreographers and other artists. In their courses they are taught by Lisa Shelton, Tanya Gerstle, Robert Draffin and Murphet. They observe scene classes with Lindy Davies (page theatre article) and “pick what they want.” Graduates, he says, get work everywhere, with theatre companies, venues, in regional arts, directing, facilitating, performing.

I was curious about what a director expects of the trained performers she works with. Jenny Kemp has produced a unique body of work in Australian theatre that makes very particular demands on her performers who have backgrounds in acting, dance, voice and movement. She has worked recurrently with a number of performers and, significantly, regards them as her collaborators. Kemp articulates her expectations precisely. “Rhythm and timing are to do with intuition. Sometimes they are automatic in a performer, but not always. They have to be nurtured.” There is also the challenge of balance between the vocal, the physical, conceptual and spatial kinaesthetics of performance. “In a very general way”, she says, “tradition leans on the voice. Therefore the text is attended to and not the space” the performer finds herself in. In rehearsal, the performer “has to find a place, a world in which to stand, to inhabit…and must respond to the text spatially. The response should not always be that the performer speaks. Again this is to do with timing which is a kind of umbrella over all the elements of performance.” Kemp thinks that the worst scenario “is a homogeneity of rhythms in a group of actors…They each need their own sense of rhythm and character.” Another expectation is for performers “to sit with uncertainty and ambiguity, to be able to deal with contradictions within the rehearsal process, within their character, within the play. They must accept that a director will make mistakes and will change her mind.” Similarly, they must understand that contrary actions can be played in a character: “It’s obvious, but the actor must sit with complexity and contradiction, must embrace pluralism and difference.” Because the work is group-based, the performer also needs to be patient and tolerant, to keep working when not paid attention or when things are difficult, to have “a certain degree of autonomy.” A key expectation is to “hold form during performance. It’s a standard requirement but it’s not always understood. If the trajectories are strong it always helps.” I ask Kemp about younger performers she’s worked with recently: “I felt the training and the talent…There’s somehting palpable when someone arrives with training. It’s also about curiosity. It has to be there. Sometimes [it’s there] despite the training—which is sometimes developed for something else…It’s about how an actor relates to surfaces and depths, the inside and the social.”

Margaret Cameron is a writer and performer and has been a sessional teacher at the Victoria University for 7 years as well as at the VCA. At the former she teaches voice to first year students, “But not in terms of technique. It’s about the need to have a voice, of finding the need to have a voice, to go straight to the point about articulation. I ask the student, ‘Tell me something exactly.’ The more difficult it is to speak of something, the more interesting it is.” Like Kemp she sees the working group as made up of different qualities. “A performance is many perspectives in a space. The next premise is that space is created by perceptual practice…the intersections of those perceptions. A stage is a frame, a point a view, a window…” Cameron describes our usual state as like having a hand pressed against our face: “you have to push it away to create a space, a performance space in which to play. There is no play without space, no articulation of bits, no movement.” The process then is about “ways to practice perception” and in this she has been influenced by Deborah Hay, the American dancer and teacher she has worked with. After creating the desire to speak, Cameron procedes on to movement, to using the “invisible muscles…breaking every movement into a trillion pieces” by asking questions with no answers and afterwards asking the students to tell her what they felt, their own feedback. “They come back to language as if new. You put yourself in a place of observation minutely, otherwise there is no space. This is about thought and the body as thinker. Thought is the ability to endure ambiguity.”

For Cameron, the unversity “has been an amazing assistance. I use it to work. The university and my students are my collaborators.” At the end of the course? “The students are alone with it”, with what they have learned and become.

There’s a growing tendency for theatre and performance studies departments that are not primarily training oriented to include a practical component to offer students some sense of what it means to devise, produce and perform in a work for an audience and how that relates to what they’ve been studying. Clare Grant, former Sydney Front member, solo performer and actor teaches in the Theatre, Film & Dance Department, University of NSW.

She declares: “There’s nothing to study unless you’ve done it.” Her focus is on performance making, offering students alternatives to the character-based, cause and effect narratives of conventional theatre. Students opting for performance making include those in theatre, performance studies and film, or studying combinations of these for their degree. The Workshop Exercise course, for example, planned in conjunction with other courses, and, choosing from a range of performance types, culminates in a public production. Grant says that if she’s directing, the outcome is “not group-devised”, but “comes from individual imagery,” yielding a multi-layered performance. She amalgamates the individual performances into the finished work. One goal is to develop an awareness in students of “how to present the present moment” and she encourages students to “learn how to work without creating subtext.” Although Grant is not formally training students to be performers, her aim is for them “to be confident and hold the space”, “to look good in that space” and “to have a good experience.” Autonomy is important: “they create the material, they know what the task is.” Students go on to teach, to work with PACT Youth Theatre, a few go to NIDA or the VCA, some to directing, some to postgraduate work on performance.

Sydney performer and a founding member of Version 1.0, David Williams was a Theatre Theory & Practice student at the University of Western Sydney in the 1990s. He contributes his commitment to performance in part to the inspiration of a teacher, Yana Taylor, who insisted that students see contemporary performance, “work out what is” and brought artists from the performance scene to classes. In a course where students were introduced to an electic range of disciplines and “made work within loose parameters”, there was a sense, Williams says, of being able to make choices and to follow a form or an idea to see how you could go with it. As the course progressed “a set of principles for performance, not a style, emerged”, a sense of how to be, to occupy space, alternatives to being a plot-driven character. At it’s best, he says, the course encouraged openness and exploration and interdisciplinary relations with other university departments. There were moments, however, when performance making students felt like the poor cousins of those in the acting course. Some students sought extra-curricular training at a time when Open Season at Performance Space and Contemporary Performance Week at Sidetrack offered short term but critical opportunities for performance and development. Williams laments the passing of these events. The challenge on graduating, he says, was how to develop a practice, rather than a string of projects. PACT Youth Theatre, then directed by Chris Ryan provided the opportunity to perform in directed works and, in response, create one’s own. Williams spent 5 years training in Suzuki with Meme Thorne. Nowadays, as is happening across Australia, it’s improvisation at the Omeo Studio, says Williams, that’s providing a foundation for his practice.

This brief visit to a new otherworld of performance teaching and its nexus with changing attitudes to actor training is a small sample of the many more university departments who are opening up their own wild spaces.

On a chill Melbourne May morning over coffeee and tea in the Hairy Canary bar, the Snuff Puppets’ Pauline Cady and Andy Freer speak with a shared conviction that takes the edge off the chill and from time to time fires the arts conscience. After a decade of work (and well before that with Canberra’s legendary Splinters) their vision has lost none of its heat, however quietly, if insistently, it is spoken. A mix of artistic sophistication and political bluntness resonates in the work. A Snuff Puppets’ event is a curious combination of the raw and the cooked; there’s a rough-hewn immediacy (so vital to outdoor performance) and careful crafting—even the wildest of their giant, lumbering puppets has to be made for manipulability and a long performing life.

Pauline joined Splinters in 1985, Andy in 1988. After working on the company’s Cathedral of Flesh at the 1992 Adelaide Festival and driving back to Canberra, Pauline and Andy, with another Splinters cohort, artist Simon Terrill, decided to go direct to Melbourne instead. They’d been “doing puppets” since 1988 within the Splinters framework, but now they felt an urge to make it an entirety, to step right away from working with language. Pauline declares, “one look from a puppet can convey the whole of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’.” The Splinters years had been invaluable—the visual arts underpinning of the shows, the constant re-working of audience-performer relations and being part of something that was “so fringe, so underground.” However, inspired by the American Bread & Puppet Theatre and the British Welfare State company, the incipient Snuff Puppets wanted to reach larger audiences. The question was where, the answer was—on the streets, appearing without warning (“hit & runs”), sometimes as part of protests, sometimes as “fixed site shows with, say, the city as backdrop.”

The street shows could “disrupt traffic, scare children and drive parents away”, but they could also generate a classic pantomime relationship between puppets and audience. Pauline recalls in Adelaide people protecting the Cow from the Butcher (The Dancing Cow Show). There is a roughness to the puppets that their creators feel is “an antidote to Disney”, to a sanitised view of the world and the neat animations that purvey it. They love the open streets, but fixed site shows “offer more control over every element of the work.” The goal is to get the audiences they attract on the streets into a performance site that is still outdoors—“our ideal is the outdoors, it’s so beautiful to be out.”

Snuff Puppets have other audiences, ones that become collaborators. These are communities of many different kinds. It’s an area of work Andy and Pauline see “as having huge potential. We have so many offers we could do People’s Puppet Projects back to back.” These have taken them to Arnhemland (with a timetable spread over 2 years including a component this August), Singapore, China and Japan. On these ventures they “push the handmade aesthetic versus the slick” but also find that their own palette gets bigger. This can entail some amusing creative compromises—Japanese participants wanting to do kangaroos and Snuffies (as they are known to fans) attracted to Edo period art, doing “huge carp with other puppets inside and crazy geishas.”

“Fetishisitic” crops up several times as Snuff Puppets describe their relationship with their creations. It’s meant in its sacred rather than psycho-sexual sense. “The puppets are built from scratch with rough methods, but with a lot of attention to skin and look, very woven…A puppet is an object you love, it’s precious…You keep fixing them up. It’s a natural thing to do…There’s an element of such religiosity, of the god in the mask.” Snuff Puppets are fervent proselytisers. “We are spreading our attitude to puppets, their roughness, openness and accessibility….People recognise things in puppets.”

If these puppets have such power, why then the name Snuff Puppets? Originally it was an exhortation, as in “Kill the puppets!”, “Kill the standard concept of puppets”, show the workings, reveal them in daylight.

Performing locally, touring internationally and running community projects all compete with the creation of new work. It seems this gets harder and harder but a new work is “created or kickstarted every 12 months.” Careful scheduling is vital so that the puppet builders have ample time, performers can be given new challenges, and new shows can be run in properly. Balancing income generation and the demands of creativity is a challenge, but Snuff Puppets are undaunted. A trip to Bath (UK) in April for a puppet festival was inspiring, helping lift their profile, and they now have the support of a Belgium-based agent who will not program them into shopping centres. Wherever their work takes them, their commitment is still to intimate performance and to working the streets.

Snuff Puppets’ recent work includes The Water Show (2001), “an allegory of a pristine world, inspired by Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights.” It’s a work that combines parade, spectacle and a workshop for 100 people. As beautiful as photographs from the show indicate that it is, almost a decade on the company can still have an almighty effect, attacked in The Sun Herald by Andrew Bolt over their pagan contribution to the Moomba Parade, the newspaper’s front page shrieking “Family Fury at Shock Parade.”

The company is the head tenant of an old army drill hall in West Footscray, part of an arts centre “in one of the poorest communities in Australia. The council and the Big West festival do a great job for the community. We’re staying.” When not at home they’re in Singapore followed by Arnhemland, Japan and China, sometimes working in 2 teams at the same time in different countries.Then it’s back to Melbourne for Wicked, a festival for children at the Gasworks Theatre (Sept 26-Oct 6), and some thinking about a brand new show next year, called Snuff Puppet Club, a night club run by puppets. Sounds like dangerous fun.

As Australia’s only full-time puppet company for adults (and the whole panoply of modern families) and as wickedly funny ideologues for puppetry that is political, communal and downright strange, the Snuff Puppets occupy a very special place in Australian culture.

Ryk Goddard worked with Melbourne’s the accidental company receiving critical recognition for works like Imagine a Life, superfluous man, Teapot and Fifteen Words or Less. He was appointed Artistic Director of Salamanca Theatre Company in 2000. This company, established in 1972, has a reputation for theatre excellence and innovation, most recently under the artistic direction of Deborah Pollard, producing over 100 contemporary theatre works for young people. Since Goddard’s appointment, Salamanca Theatre Company has changed its name to is theatre ltd. Promotional material for is theatre can be read as both a statement of intent and a question: is theatre: experimental, is theatre: site specific, is theatre: improvisation.

is theatre ltd reflects our new role in Australian Theatre. Thirty years of theatre in schools has not produced new generations of theatre-goers. Another reason for the name change was that people couldn’t distinguish us from the Salamanca Arts Centre. The new name positions our company as always questioning itself and the ways we develop, promote and present performance experiences.

Contemporary performance is happening now. It’s work that is made by people in a particular time with an intention that’s relevant to that time. Whether it’s text-based, experimental or devised, my sense of whether it’s contemporary or not is to do with the intention in making the work. All new work or experimental work is supposedly contemporary. I live in permanent fear of contemporary performance trying so hard not to be things, that it ends up not really being anything at all. The result is work that can be amazingly insipid and lacking in courage and vision.

We’re not performing shows in schools any more. Our research and engagement with young people indicates that participation is as important as watching. is theatre is shifting philosophy and practice away from theatre-in-education to a contemporary performance practice that moves away from serving schools to serving young people. We are working directly with students in schools through participation and putting on outside shows that young people can come to. What’s desperately needed in Tasmania is things for young people to do that are relevant to them, and in spaces where they have a sense of ownership.

We’re aiming to present work where the given is the environment. With Freezer we wanted to enhance and expand people’s expectations of the dance party environment. A dance party is an existing valid culture. There are powerful dynamics in the space that are really interesting. We wanted to align ourselves with that and open it out further. I like work where the artists have to work hard for the audience to have an interesting experience. That makes the world bigger, richer and experienced in a new way.

Blink, Eat Space, Fashion Tips for Misery, Boiler Room, Freezer, flip top heart and am.p are names you’ve devised for theatre training programs, improvisation laboratories and site-specific performances in 2001 and 2002. What future projects excite and push your boundaries as Artistic Director?

In the biggest sense I’m excited that I finally had the courage to place my performance practice at the centre of the company. Everything we do is connected in some way to improvisational practice. This main-streaming of improvisation seems to be happening everywhere and I feel in step with the times. White Trash Medium Rare is the first show I’ve done for years where I fully understand why I’m doing it. It’s a performance installation supported by Australia Council New Media Arts funding. We’re looking at issues of white identity and every artist involved has their own voice and their own practice.

At the end of July I’m participating in the Improvisation Festival of Melbourne, before MC-ing Sydney’s Big Sloth at Performance Space and then performing in Canberra’s celebration of improvisation performance. Between August 22 and 25 is theatre will host Boiler Room, a participatory multi-artform event. Artists from dance, theatre, music and the visual arts will facilitate workshops and show existing work. On the final night the artists will create a performance that combines and advances their skills. Boiler Room will happen at is@backspace.

For many Hobart theatre audiences The Backspace is a familiar environment that has sustained a lot of theatre practice. You’ve been instrumental in refurbishing and revitalising it as is@backspace.

is@backspace is Hobart’s dedicated contemporary performance space. It’s a new multi-use, flexible, 100 seat performance venue. The space is available for hire to develop and present contemporary performance. You can’t innovate in a town without an audience base and space for artists. We’re thrilled because is@backspace is booked out for the next 6 months. It’s a space to nurture yourself as an artist in a low-risk environment.

is theatre, Boiler Room, teaching & performing Ryk Goddard and Helen Omand; music creation Josh Green; dance improvisation Jo Pollit; multi-media Sean Bacon; musician Tania Bosak. is@backspace, Hobart, Aug 22-25.

The Studio got off to a good start with its first 6 month program, quickly establishing itself as a popular haunt for all sorts of live arts fans—sometimes it felt like each show attracted its very own tribe. It’s generally agreed that the contemporary arts scene has been enhanced by the presence of this comfortable and accommodating venue at Sydney’s premier location and its energetic support of Australian artists through programming, commissioning and co-producing.

If volume is what it’s about, The Studio has the goods. At the launch of Program 2, the management proudly stated that while there were 92 performances between July 2000 and June 2001, by June 2002 they’d counted 173. Given that most of these were short seasons, it’s amazing that Executive Producer Virginia Hyam and her team look as perky as they do. The new program suggests no rest is in sight, save for the 5 week season of The 7 Stages of Grieving. By the end of 2002, 104 independent artists, 5 small to medium companies and 17 music groups will have appeared at the venue.

A welcome new element is The Studio’s hosting of ReelDance Dance on Screen Festival in August (preview, page 32). And while the Dance Tracks programs might have had teething problems, it’s good to see a commitment to continuity in Dance Tracks 3, this time The Studio teaming with the Breaks of Asia Club as part of the Asian Music & Dance Festival, August 14-18. (Incidentally, don’t miss the visit by the acclaimed Akram Khan Company from London who’ll be performing their work Kaash at the Drama Theatre for the festival, August 20-24). Later in the year, in Dance Tracks 4, guest musicians are Endorphin and French DJ, BNX.

It’s great to see a classic of contemporary performance given a new outing. With Deborah Mailman’s current TV popularity, The 7 Stages of Grieving should be huge. Same goes for Donna Jackson who impressed with her Car Maintenance Explosives and Love at Mardi Gras a while back but hasn’t been seen in Sydney since. Her Body: Celebration of the Machine is part of the cultural program for the Gay Games. Hanging onto the Tail of a Goat created and performed by Tenzing Tsewang (RealTime 43) is a small but significant work originally previewed at Performance Space, premiered at Melbourne’s Gasworks and now given a welcome Sydney season. Premieres include Legs on the Wall’s foray into the primal world of sport, Runners Up, and Wide Open Road a collaboration between 2 youth theatres, Sydney-based PACT and Outback, based in Hay in south-western NSW.

The Australian Composers series features the work of 2 contemporary artists. Drew Crawford presents Lounge Music, an intimate evening of works chosen from his theatre and dance compositions, electronic works, opera, cabaret and concert music. And in Over Time Andrée Greenwell orchestrates her engaging collision of popular, experimental and operatic musics.

There’s jazz and fusion and some top notch stand-up in the form of Sue Anne Post (G Strings and Jockstraps) and Lawrence Leung (Sucker, winner Best Solo Show, Melbourne Fringe) and some quality acts in the exhibition space including Christopher Dean, Clinton Nain (responding to The 7 Stages of Grieving) and Mikala Dwyer.

As with Program #1 there’ll be hits and occasional misses in Program #2 at The Studio, a lot of creative risk-taking, and plenty to argue about afterwards at the ever inviting Opera Bar. Importantly, it’s all presented in a spirit of generosity and celebration of Australia’s contemporary culture. RT

You get your first job after drama school and you’re told, ‘Remember your lines and don’t bump into the furniture.’
Anonymous actor

The craft of the actor has been nurtured in Australia for the past 20 years by a number of tertiary institutions. The National Insitute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), West Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA), Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), Theatre Nepean at the University of Western Sydney (UWS), the Arts Academy at the University of Ballarat, and the Drama Centre at Flinders University are among many institutions that offer tertiary training in the craft. Since these schools are relatively young in terms of the history of Australian tertiary education, their overarching vision and curricula have been formed by their staff. It is difficult to imagine the holistic and passionate approach to actor training that one finds in these drama courses occurring with the quite same intensity in other arts disciplines. Peter Kingston, Head of Acting at WAAPA, expresses it in this way: “We talk amongst ourselves every week, every day, about what we’re doing.” But how does this “productive and generous self-indulgence” prepare graduates for an acting career?

In actor training there is a strong sense of a genealogy of method, a philosophy of theatre that is passed on to students. And something else—passion. When asked about their own training, all of the practitioner/teachers I spoke to were glad of the opportunity to speak about what had ignited them, to recount the story of finding their own sense of self within the art form. It is interesting to note that all the teachers of acting I spoke to had trained at a tertiary level in drama school—some as performers, others as directors.

In the courses I surveyed for this article, all have a curriculum built around movement, voice, acting, improvisation, devised work, singing, film and television skills, production projects and the creation of a show reel for graduates, often with a performance day for agents. Despite the overall commitment to a ‘total approach’ to training, there are some philosophical variances within the schools. At the VCA, WAAPA and NIDA there is a cohesive approach to actor training, guided by the Head of Acting at each school. In my conversations with 7 teacher/practitioners, I was struck by the depth of their commitment to the notion of the individual’s journey through the training, in preparation for the twisting path of a career as an actor/theatre maker. This personal connection, which Lindy Davies, Head of Acting at VCA, describes as “detached intimacy”, is exemplified in the question she put to herself when she was formulating the Acting Course: “How do I create an atmosphere where people feel safe?”

Peter Kingston says that he and his colleagues strive to deal with students “in a mutually respectful way, expanding their potential and our resources inside a laboratory, a rehearsal room.” Professor Julie Holledge, Director of the Drama Centre, Flinders University in Adelaide, also describes a holistic approach to the training of actors: “It is essential that an actor’s training balances the intellectual and the expressive, the intuitive and the analytical.” Kim Durban, Course Co-ordinator at the Performing Arts Course at Ballarat University, says: “The tool of the actor is the self, and the training is to sharpen and change and challenge those qualities of self as they are applied to the materials of theatre—time, space, body, silence, word, image.”

Lindy Davies has formulated a very specific method arising from her experience working at the Pram Factory in the late 60s, and training with Linklater, Brook and Grotowski in the 1970s. While working in Peter Brook’s company, she resolved for herself an apparent conflict between the contact-release work of Linklater and the discipline of Grotowski. “The form was the key to it all—it was the crucible that allowed the other elements to happen within it.” These experiences have been the foundation of her method in the last 7 years as Dean and Head of Acting at VCA. “We have a very radical approach to acting at our school. We don’t decide how we are going to say it or do it. The interpretation comes from the actor’s perspective—it happens kinaesthetically. We work to find the bridge between trance and language.”

Peter Kingston is in his 5th year as Head of Acting at WAAPA. Having trained at NIDA as an actor, he is inspired and challenged by the task of training actors. He muses that he and his colleagues in other acting courses are essentially doing the same thing, instilling in students “the importance of collaboration and that a truthful experience shared by the people making the work is the fundamental work.” Peter is eloquent about the state of ‘not-knowing’ at which point he encourages his students to begin. “What I bring to it is all that I don’t know. The group creates a fury of private investigation which spurs the work forward.”

Tony Knight, Head of Acting at NIDA was “thrown out” of NIDA as a student in the 70s and then went on to train at the Drama Centre in London. He says that the course at NIDA is “an intensely practical course—any theory happens on the floor.” As an acting teacher he draws heavily on the later Stanislavskian physical action method, where the action is played first, with the emotional/psychological territory taking care of itself. He believes that “acting always has to have an emotional and psychological approach”, but does not have time for any emotive indulgence from his students when they approach a character.

At Flinders, Ballarat and Theatre Nepean, the courses tend to be centred round a wide spectrum of skills, and the desire to expose students to all aspects of theatre. There is also an emphasis on theory and history to counterbalance the practical training. There is a heavy emphasis on ensemble work, so that students have the opportunity to write, direct, design, source props and costumes, raise funds, promote the work, in addition to performing. Julie Holledge was trained at the Bristol University Drama Department. “I was taught that actors require both a rigorous intellectual training and a highly disciplined physical training if they are to be expressive performing artists.”

After graduating from Bristol, Holledge worked as an actor and director in the alternative and experimental theatre in Britain for 10 years before moving to Australia. Unusually, the course at Flinders is a 4-year program resulting in an Honours degree. Holledge explains, “At Flinders there is no artificial separation between the body and mind, emotion and intellect. Our degree programs prepare our graduates to be creative, articulate and adaptable artists in whatever area they work.”

The question of how to prepare students for careers as actors is a common theme for teacher/practitioners, with acting courses often forced into review by university curriculum boards. Kim Durban says, “I am currently in a time of Course Review, so I often ask myself ‘what must a training artist know?’ I know many older actors are concerned that traditional theatre knowledge is disappearing. I sometimes wonder whether the old repertory system did a better job. However, where a university course can have value is in its connection to theory and research.”

Terence Crawford, Head of Acting at Theatre Nepean at UWS, trained as an actor at NIDA, and rejects the notion of a hegemonic method. “A method can be a bit of a lifeboat for actors to cling to, rather than just being happily ‘at sea’ on stage.” He teaches his students to think critically “before and after the act, but in the act, to lose their heads.” He believes there is terrible confusion about acting methods, with actors often not understanding that a method is for rehearsal, “not for going on stage. I teach methods toward acting, methods of rehearsing. I am very wary of anyone who says that this is a method and it will apply to all circumstances. As far as I’m concerned, such people have closed the book on creativity—have lost the humility which is the key to acting.”

After graduating, Crawford worked closely for 3 years with John Gaden at the State Theatre Company of SA in the 1980s. “John exemplified for me something I have continued to explore as a teacher: the connection between basic decency and acting.” This interest in the ‘ethical health’ of the actor has stayed with Crawford as he works with his students. “Good actor training is training for life—a kind of productive and generous self-indulgence. You’re there to look at yourself and learn about yourself in order to give, in order to be generous to others, to an audience.”

What does the world require of actors now, and how are they prepared for it by the academy? Tony Knight says “Most students who graduate from film and drama courses are going straight into film and television because that is the dominant market in Australia. The industry changes so quickly. What we have to do is get them ready for how the industry is now and for what they want to do in the future. We have to help them strike the balance between being an artist and becoming a commodity.” Kim Durban believes that the focus of today’s acting students is very different to those she trained with at the VCA in the early 1980s. “When I went to drama school we ridiculed the mainstream, looked down on TV and burned to be significant/alternative/ authentic. But now I have noticed a trend of leaning towards ‘the centre’—that many young and talented arts workers yearn to be discovered by the larger companies, to cross over. They are not committed to Howard Brenton’s “petrol bomb through the proscenium arch.” A visit to the theatre is often beyond their budget, on top of petrol for a 90-minute drive from Ballarat to Melbourne, in between working to make a living. They are far more likely to be writing a film-script and producing it on the weekends.”

Lindy Davies and Julie Holledge also speak about the need to balance the artist’s identity with the need to earn a living. “Actors today need to be trained in the skills necessary to earn a living,” says Holledge, “and for the most part these are connected to television and film. On the other hand, they need to be trained as performing artists who can push the boundaries of live theatre and attract new audiences even if this work, while sustaining them creatively, will never sustain them economically.”

Tony Knight has a big and hopeful vision for his graduates: “I want them to finish their training with the eye of a poet. I want them to show us new things. The baby boomers are going and something new will be in its place and I just hope they’re ready for it.”

Despite the focus now in acting courses on ‘survival skills’ to assist the graduate as they strive to enter the industry, all the teachers I spoke to agree that something more than skills and showreels are called for. The ingredient an actor needs to survive an unpredictable career is the ignition point, the passion that their own teachers began with. Yana Taylor, Head of Movement at UWS, wishes to inspire in students what Brett Whitely called “a true love for the difficult pleasures of the artistic life.” She believes that these ‘difficult pleasures’ “give you a view that enables you to move from job to job.” It seems that what everyone is assisting young actors to find is the indefinable thing that Terence Crawford calls “faith in the self”, and Peter Kingston “the spark of genius”, and Lindy Davies “something bigger than themselves” and Tony Knight “the eye of a poet.” In the end, perhaps it is the personal vision discovered, questioned and honed as a student that gets people through an acting career, and helps them to remember their lines, without bumping into the furniture.

Front: Samantha Chalmers, Allyson Mills, Anthony Johnson, Steve Hodder, Michael Angus Back: Jodie Cockatoo, Shellie Morris, To the Inland Sea

Having only just returned from a road trip across the Barkly, driving for hundreds of kilometres through a sea of yellow grass stretching from horizon to horizon, flat as a tack for as far as the eye could see, the notion of an inland sea is both credible and evocatively appealing.

What is not so appealing is the notion of another piece of theatre based on the heroic exploits of some misguided white male out to pit his manhood against this country’s heart of darkness, searching for a personal holy grail. This focus was obviously not behind the Darwin Theatre Company’s most recent production, To the Inland Sea, based on Charles Sturt’s ill-fated 1884 expedition. The DTC team charted quite a different trajectory across this well-trodden territory.

Conceived and written in the NT, this ambitious project was billed as “a fiction based on Sturt’s epic journey, during which he carried a whale boat on a wagon through the desert”, searching for a mythical inland sea on which to launch it. With this compelling story of folly and disappointment as a starting point, writer-director Tania Lieman, co-writer Gail Evans and Indigenous composer Shellie Morris also intended to tell the story of the Indigenous guides and traditional owners of the country being ‘discovered.’ As well. This post-colonial approach is par for the course these days in Darwin, as is the exploration of multiple histories and ways of seeing.

In To the Inland Sea Sturt’s linear, historical narrative is interlaced with a contemporary story of another lost soul, a young Aboriginal boy dealing with issues of dislocation and alienation of another kind. These stories run in parallel throughout the production, interweaving past and present, reality and dream, and interior and exterior perspectives.

A giant video screen provides the backdrop for much of the action and dominates the stage. On a huge scale, vast landscapes, endless sand dunes and flocks of birds stream past as Sturt’s company becomes ever more mired in the desert. During the contemporary scenes the landscape imagery is replaced with the face of the Aboriginal boy, filling the space with anger and pain.

This psychic link between the 2 stories is alluded to in the opening words of the play, “everyone’s on a journey”, spoken by the Aboriginal boy’s mother, sitting down painting her country. Some journeys are physical and some are spiritual. Not all lead to the goal we seek or necessarily to redemption.

Another link between the narratives of past and present is made by the chorus: singers Shellie Morris, Jodie Cockatoo and dancer/vocalist Samantha Chalmers. Morris’ beautiful and haunting music was a highlight of the production.

The usual DTC style of physical theatre dominated the more conventional narrative. There was an abundance of energy and action amid all the drama as well as choreographed set pieces such as a fictitious ‘last supper’ featuring a cast of explorers pontificating about their exploits, including a ragged Wills, like Hamlet, holding a skull.

Unfortunately as the production continued I felt I was drowning, being overwhelmed by altogether too much going on. There was never enough breathing space amid all the colour and movement and technical whizz-bangery. There were beautiful, poignant moments but too rarely the possibility of savouring them. This was a pity because otherwise To the Inland Sea was an enjoyable production with all the right elements: great ideas and visuals, energy, points of cross cultural contact and risk-taking.

Darwin Theatre Company, To the Inland Sea, Darwin Entertainment Centre, June 11-22

Erica Price is a solitary dreamer and i industrious sex worker whose monologues reveal desperation for companionship. Her daily musings, including a mantra that ends, “…I ask myself: Who the fuck is Erica Price? And what is her price?”, allude to neighbourhood friendships that will never eventuate for her. A motif that begins, “When the Revolution comes…” refers to all manner of improvements and happiness that the increasingly delusional Erica needs to believe in.

Some of her clients are in love with her, some are self-absorbed, but they still want her reassurances, or her platitudes, for that is all she offers them. All 7 male clients are played by Lucien Simon, who is able to imbue each with a distinct persona. He conveys the hypocrisy and selfishness of several of these characters with particular skill. Subtly and empathically played by Marisa Mastrocola, Erica is vulnerable and determined, funny and sad as she descends into disillusionment bordering on the catatonic.

With Mastrocola’s pose and body language at the play’s conclusion exactly as they were at its beginning, director Tania Bosak implies that the action has come full circle. Erica is back at square one, having achieved nothing, and still longing for a life that will never eventuate. This confronting play could easily become too bleak but, finding moments of comedy, director and performers hit the right note.

Scape Inc., Who the Fuck is Erica Price, writer Sarah Brill, director Tania Bosak, Peacock Theatre, Salamanca Arts Centre, June 20-29; Carlton Courthouse, Melbourne, Aug 7-17.

The fallen-from-grandeur blend of architecture and streetscape of the historic Queen’s Theatre offered an apt historical and geographic metonym for the performance of Despoiled Shore MEDEAMATERIAL Landscape with Argonauts. Derived in part from a text by GDR playwright Heiner Müller, MEDEAMATERIAL is the latest production from a theatre ensemble of Flinders University Drama School graduates calling itself The Border Project. According to program notes, the ensemble aims to chart and map the future language of performance by exploring the interface between live performance and multimedia technologies, thus testing the boundaries between audience and performer.

While some familiar with the draughty venue and its hard platform seating came with cushions, woollen blankets, gloves and beanies, others caressed their glasses of Hardy’s in an effort to keep warm in the cavernous void of a minimalist performance space designed to represent “an urban wasteland where humankind has decimated and abused the natural landscape.”

More physical challenges were to come. The relentless amplitude of synthetic music beat incessantly, producing a searing soundscape like a techno time clock ticking towards death. It raked the skin and tore into the wrecked recesses of consciousness. The complex, cerebral text interfused references to the globalised technoculture of American popular culture (the banality of basketball and Big Macs) with a condensed version of Euripides’ Medea (the ominous effects of power, jealousy, betrayal and violation). These segments fused into a middle space of comic relief, referencing the disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain and giving a luminous, stuffed dingo central positioning on stage in a darkly comic, John Clarke-inspired interview (with the dingo).

The final segment segued from the shadows of German expressionism and film noir to the decimated landscape of modern times. In the last scene, Jason, our damaged argo/astronaut, emerged from the void as television monitors flashed NASA film clips of the explosion of the Challenger space craft. All this, from Greek tragedy to 20th century eco-disaster, in 45 minutes.

The technically adept performance had its strengths. Particularly well realised were the enactments of actors’ identities and desires as the extensions of television images, as well as the evocation of a theatre-of-death psychic landscape rendered through the menacing music, the cacophony of accents, and the pastiche of images from German expressionism. The performance lost some of its impact to screeching sounds, halting, overwrought and sometimes frenetic speech and pronounced breathing of the actors, and the near hysterical pitch of sound and media landscapes in the final segment. The company holds more promise than it delivered in this instance.

The Border Project, Despoiled Shore MEDEAMATERIAL Landscape with Argonauts, writer Heiner Müller, director/designer Sam Haren, performers: Katherine Fyffe, Cameron Goodall, Ksenja Logos, David Heinrich, Amber McMahon, Paul Reichstein, Alirio Zavarce; Queens Theatre, Adelaide, June 20-29

Sydney University’s Sir Hermann Black Gallery is currently hosting an exhibition of works by notable photographers working the documentary format. A collaboration with Stills Gallery, the exhibition showcases a wide range of approaches to the form. One image is chosen to document the work of artists who more usually exhibit in series or essay form, among them, Ricky Maynard’s huge and confronting portraits of Wik elders; Stephen Lojewski’s suburban enigmas; Ella Dreyfus’ stark depiction of a body in transition from male to female. Trent Parke is a remarkable young photographer who’s recently be accepted into the Magnum Photo Agency for a one year trial period before final nomination, the first Australian photographer to get the nod. His Dream/Life series is represented here with a luminous image. Also featured is Narelle Autio’s photographic poem to leisure, Not of this Earth depicting richly coloured and textured aerial views of people relaxing beneath Sydney’s Harbour Bridge. In all there are 19 great photographers including William Yang, Lorrie Graham, Jon Lewis, Peter Milne, Donna Bailey, Jon Rhodes—every one of them worth a look.

RePRESENTING the REAL, Documentary Photography 2002, Sir Hermann Black Gallery & Sculpture Terrace, Sydney University till 17 August.

In response to considerable demand, our annual feature on the teaching of the arts in tertiary education has been expanded significantly this year to cover 8 artform areas—music, sound art, visual arts, film, new media, dance, theatre and contemporary performance. We’ve decided to focus on the training of the artist at a time when issues abound about proliferation of courses, competing methodologies, limited job markets and the commercial challenge to art’s integrity.

The essay on visual arts aside, where the issue of what art schools really do is tackled provocatively by Adam Geczy, our reports survey the practical training courses Australian universities have on offer. Our writers have interviewed lecturers, many of them also practising artists, about their teaching. Sometimes they speak on behalf of their schools, sometimes about their own practice.

It was clear from many of our respondents that limited funding, escalating class sizes and threatened course closures continue to be a serious challenge to staff morale and the effective training of artists. However, our focus is largely on what the various schools offer regardless of the conditions under which they operate.

There are a number of trends that emerge in these reports, some have been with us for a while, some are new, all are reaching new levels of intensity. Almost across the board there is a desire to generate in students the capacity to collaborate, for both the practical and ethical advantages of cooperation (even in feature filmmaking where the ideal of the auteur has persisted for so long). Autonomy rates highly, not as individualism but as the capacity to be self-sustaining, to create work alone or in teams rather than waiting to be employed. Not a few courses promote adventurousness, in terms of keeping up with new developments or in challenging convention. And in an era when artforms are transforming and electronic media converging there is a great emphasis on flexibility and multi-skilling.

Some departments pride themselves on having industry connections, on being part of network clusters, of providing in-course opportunities to students in the commercial world. It is here that some tension is felt over the apparent pragmatism of the “creative industries” approach as art gives way to the broader notion of creativity, and the demands of commerce, for example ‘to entertain’ or provide ‘content’, threaten to dominate. Conversely, commercial and subcultural developments in the wider world of music require an academic response, as Michael Hannan argues, that recognises there will be a variety of serious musician for whom traditional training will have little value. This adjustment is symptomatic of a wider phenomenon, the evolution of artforms and, particularly, their engagement in multimedia and new media. If some lecturers ask that their students learn to “sit with ambiguity” as part of their becoming artists, then the ambiguity that surrounds artform developments is something that teachers also have to sit with.

While most schools claim good employment results for their students, the jobs issue is nonetheless a vexed one, particularly in visual arts and dance. Our report notes the global approach to employment by at least one Australian university dance school given the almost total lack of work available in this country.

Whatever the challenges, many lecturers spoke with passion about their teaching and their concern for their students. There’s a desire to create a safe place in which students are emboldened to think, to create, to collaborate, to accept challenge and, in turn, to challenge.

The death of a dancer: Russell Page

In a year already too burdened with artist deaths, we were deeply saddened to hear of the passing of dancer and actor Russell Page on Sunday July 14. We saw him dance a few days earlier in Rush, the work his brother Stephen choreographed for Bangarra Dance Theatre’s new program, Walkabout. As ever, Page danced with conviction, elegance, power and a unique dancer’s language. He will be missed. KG VB

At last Melbourne has got a festival where local artists—there’s a lot of them in the program—receive deserved prominence side by side with some unique overseas and interstate productions. It’s the first of Robyn Archer’s 2 Melbourne Festivals. The second will be about the body—in dance and physical theatre. Perhaps she’ll get the guernsey for a third festival given that she’s already forecast it to be about voice, as in opera and music theatre.

This one is centred on text ie language in performance. If you’re expecting a season of nice plays, forget it. Archer’s choices and her vision of text in performance are as wide-ranging and provocative as you’d expect from her Adelaide Festival programs. She deals a blow to the myth that postmodernity has been the ruin of language. Here it comes embodied in dance, puppetry, music, physical theatre, installation, multimedia, contemporary performance and, yes, plays, but what plays! From Berlin’s Hebbel Theatre comes Total Masala Slammer, Heartbreak No 5, an erotic adaptation of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. There’s The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, adapted by Michael Gow from the novel (QTC/Playbox), and the Pinter version of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (VCA). The profoundly disturbing, not-to-be-missed Societas Raffaelo Sanzio make their first Melbourne appearance with Genesi, from the Museum of Sleep. Ivan Heng’s 140 minute solo performance about power and gender, Emily of Emerald Hill (writer Stella Khon), comes from Singapore. The 150 minute virtuosic adult marionette work, Tinka’s New Dress, has Ronnie Burkett creating and voicing 37 characters. Argentinian writer-director Frederico Leon presents one of his plays and a mini festival of recent Argentinian cinema. A handful of very intimate performances designed for small audiences include the Canadian STO Union & Candid Stammer Theatre’s Recent Experiences, 3 works by US actor-writer Wallace Shawn (My Dinner with Andre) performed by local actors, and IRAA Theatre’s Interior Sites Project, an all night stayover theatre experience. Gertrude Stein’s Dr Faustus Lights the Lights (St Martin Youth Arts Centre) gets a rare airing, and Daniel Schlusser, Evelyn Krape and sound artist Darrin Verhagen take a tough new look at Medea. And there’s more, from Five Angry Men, The Keene/Taylor Project, NYID, Chamber Made Opera, Back to Back Theatre, Company in Space, Arena Theatre Company, Joanna Murray-Smith & Paul Grabowksy, Helen Herbertson, Trevor Patrick and work-in-progress showings from others.

From Sydney comes Kate Champion’s impressive dance theatre work Same same But Different and Sandy Evan’s Testimony, a powerful and beautiful big band, multimedia tribute to Charlie Parker to a libretto by Yusef Komunyakaa. From Berlin there’s Uwe Mengel’s murder mystery installation, Lifeline, where you can become an active investigator. From the Kimberley region of Western Australia comes the passionately debated Fire, Fire Burning Bright; premiered at the 2002 Perth Festival it’s the story of a massacre presented by an all-Indigenous cast. There’s also a visual arts program (featuring Susan Norrie and Nan Goldin), a National Puppetry & Animatronics Summit and a timely national symposium on “The Art of Dissent.” In the past there have always been a few shows to draw interstate visitors to a Melbourne Festival, but this time you can feel the pull of the whole program, a unique opportunity to see an impressive display of Victorian performance talent in the context of distinctive and provocative international productions and a theme of the reinvigoration of language in and through performance.

Dancer Wendy McPhee and film/sound artist George Poonkhin Khut share an interest in sexuality and memory. They began their collaboration on their new work, Nightshift, by looking at peepshows, karaoke bars and feminine desire. McPhee says: “I wrote a lot of the text. George designed sound and the installation environment. The meeting point was the medium of video. The bulk of the work is in the editing and sound design. We did one video edit together but we had 7 hours of material which is a lot of looking at yourself! My main concern was that the emotional quality of the performance be kept and not dissolved. I think it’s a very intimate installation even though the images are projected floor to ceiling throughout a vast space. The intimacy is reinforced via the soundscape which evokes a closeness of whispers, pulses and floating sounds of bar room singing.”

Nightshift Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery July 13-28; Artspace, Sydney Aug 22-Sept 14

Michael Riley (Wiradjuri/Gamilaroi people) is one of the most idiosyncratic and inventive of contemporary artists. He explores Indigenous issues in non-literal ways, working through curious juxtapositions that make us look at the Australian psychic landscape in new ways. Riley’s distinctive body of photographic and film works will be celebrated at the fourth Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at Queensland Art Gallery opening in September.

Asia Pacific Triennial 2002 focuses on a number of artists who have made significant contributions to the contemporary arts internationally since the 1960s and each will be represented with a comprehensive group of works. Says gallery director Doug Hall, “The exhibition creates a context in which we see works by these senior artists, alongside artworks dealing with similar ideas and themes by other regionally significant, but lesser known artists.”

Artists to be represented are: Montien Boonma (Thailand), Eugene Carchesio (Australia), Heri Dono (Indonesia), Joan Grounds (USA/Australia), Ralph Hotere (Aotearoa New Zealand), Yayoi Kusama (Japan), Lee U-fan (South Korea/Japan), Jose Legaspi (Philippines), Michael Ming Hong Lin (Taiwan), Nalini Malani (India), Nam June Paik (South Korea/USA), ‘Pasifika Divas’ (Pacific Islands and Aotearoa New Zealand), Lisa Reihana (Aotearoa New Zealand) Michael Riley (Australia), Song Dong (China), Suh Do-Ho (South Korea/USA) and Howard Taylor (Australia).

Hall comments “The selection of artists reflects key themes, including the impact of the moving image on the visual culture in the 20th century, the persistence of performance as a key form of cultural expression in contemporary art, and the capacity of contemporary art to explore the complexities of globalisation.”

The survival of the term ‘new media’ confounds the 20 years the technology has been around in art and design departments of the tertiary sector—the term survives possibly as the ‘old media’ users resist a technology with which they are not comfortable thus prolonging the redesign of courses and the redefinition of tertiary education within the era of digital media. The AFC/ABC on-line documentary broadband initiative recently demonstrated that government cultural administrators still think it’s a matter of converting filmmakers to ‘content providers.’ Though the education industry is at last moving away from imposing such conversion upon the mature student, it is the younger students who are often best equipped to absorb the potential of digital technologies and utilise them outside such notions of educational progression.

In an attempt to harness the many, often conflicting possibilities of information technology, there has been an exponential growth in public and privately funded tertiary level courses and subjects, particularly in arts, design, information and communication departments over the past 10 years. Only some of the issues are discussed in this article. Marketing courses, until the dot com bubble burst, had not been difficult and the income from overseas fees formed the financial bedrock of many an enterprise.

For many reasons education has more recently become accepted as a lifelong process affecting all those who care about extending their knowledge of the world and even acquiring new skills, experiences and thoughts about it. The formal system of subjects, courses, assessments and qualifications have been augmented by centres, institutes and various research units to attract the validated research dollar as part of the dynamic development of a technology and arts practice still possessing the properties of the rhizome.

Innovation

Hybridity is increasingly encountered in the arts, and in the convergence of previously distinct communication industries. With such a flux, how do tertiary media arts course managers strike a balance between providing vocational skills and developing creative and aesthetic options within the contemporary discourses of commerce, design and the fine arts? Where providing competency training has been widespread, incorporating recent technologies into existing courses and curriculum has marked the secondary stage of realising digital medias’ specificities.

Martyn Jolly, Head of Photomedia at the ANU School of Art in Canberra says, “We have tried to integrate the teaching of new technology as quickly and as closely as possible into our existing curriculum. The distinction between the ‘traditional’ and the ‘new’ means much less to our students than it does to us. Specific vocational skills are redundant in 2 years. If you teach new technology ‘workshops’ isolated from the rest of the curriculum, you end up with really clichéd, superficial gee whizz results.”

Josephine Starrs at Sydney University’s College of the Arts aims “to familiarise students with the language of new media arts, some history of the area and the contextualisation of interactive media within screen culture.” A broad approach to the subject in the tertiary sector usually includes a general first-year introduction to the visual arts, then becomes more focussed as options and electives are taken, as course strengths are identified. Starrs says that “students are asked to give seminars on current trends in digital cultures incorporating virtual communities, tactical media, mailing lists, moos, computer games, and internet radio. We examine different conceptual approaches to making use of the ‘network’, including issues to do with browsers, search engines, databases, shareware, social software and experimental software.”

At the Faculty of Arts, Victoria University, Sue McCauley and Michael Buckley “do not tie course content to industry requirements as these are constantly changing. Rather we try to get students to critically engage with content issues for specific projects…industry placement for final year students is a part of the academic program.”

The new Faculty of Creative Industries, Queensland University of Technology indicates the pedagogic direction now beginning to show using teaching technique and program innovation specific to the perceived potentials of digital media. Keith Armstrong, a freelance multimedia and multiple-media producer and artist, lectures in the Department of Communication Design where the broad curriculum, as opposed to the mouse-jockey paddocks of the computer labs, is likewise central to the program, but with performance added. “We draw widely upon multidisciplinary sources and get the students off their computers wherever possible, lead them through simulation games and exercises set in contemporary environments. For narrative-based works we model through role-play where possible and development through interpersonal dialogue.”

“We insist on lateral approaches, reward risk, develop marking schemes that take account of short term failures…a potent means for making students realise their deeply important role as designers/artists working within communities evolving within designed environments… [We] insist they can write text fluidly and cogently, persuade them that reflection is almost always a vital design tool, [teach them to] recognise, critique and steer well clear of multimedia’s endless seas of entrenched clichés…[and] force deceleration so that they can listen and reflect more effectively and work slowly towards ideas of substance.”

The School of Visual Arts, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts within Edith Cowan University is perhaps an appropriately named setting for a wider reappraisel of the approach required. Students are regarded rather more as researchers who bring with them a vision and, in collaboration with the department, develop it employing what the head of school, artist Domenico de Clario [see page 37], describes as a “perceptual matrix”, encouraged during the early part of the course. Design, installation, sound and video then form the mentored streams into which the cohorts move, having access to a shopfront gallery in downtown Perth which, in accommodation above, houses an artist-in-residence. As with several other institutions, cross-overs with Information Technology and Multimedia faculty courses are being carefully negotiated, as well as closer links with community groups and the facilitation of community services, de Clario having acquired a old cinema building 2 hours out of the city.

Resources

Is it a constant fight to retain a workable budget? “Yes, yes, yes!” was the reply from one of the teachers, as all areas and departments skate the peaks and ravines of the bean counters’ graphs. Alisdair Riddell of the Australian Centre for Art and Technology at ANU, while supporting cross-departmental sharing of subjects, has great difficulty meeting the demand that this creates. Most faculties have specialised marketing officers to promote what is on offer as well as seek out what prospective students are prepared to pay. “Relatively speaking, income from overseas students allows access to good equipment” is how another correspondent described it, though the interests of the students in this area, following some disgraceful scams, are now protected by the CRICOS Provider system and new Commonwealth legislation.

“One of the greatest challenges in integrating new technologies into current pedagogical practices is explaining to those in control of budgets that the technologies classroom is inevitably more time-consuming and expensive than the format of lecture/tutorial.” Lisa Gye, Lecturer in Media and Communications at Swinburne University of Technology goes on to point out: “For example, in a number of subjects I teach, students engage in a moderated discussion list about new technologies. Most academic workload models are not designed to account for the time that is spent reading and responding to such a list. Last year, the group discussion for Issues in Electronic Media averaged 30 posts a week with each post running to approximately 300 words. Until workload models do reflect these changes, academics are going to continue with pedagogical strategies that are less time-consuming, like essay production, regardless of the relevance of the strategy to the content of taught material.”

Research grants and graduate fee income help support on-going postgraduate programs and the creation of a cultural area within the Australian Reasearch Council (nonetheless tied to the long-standing traditions of ‘investigation’ in science circles) have begun to increase the options for the development of digital media methodologies.

Antagonisms

Ted Snell is the Chair of the Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools (ACUADS) and in a recent advertising report he states that for some graduates “…their degree provides direct access to a range of professions such as design, fashion and the new (sic) digital technologies. Each year these new graduates leave art and design schools with the skills to contribute to the economy and to maintain their on-going redefinition of our community.” The arts, it seems though, still need champions. Following some recent comments made by the Prime Minister, Snell goes on to conclude that “We are fortunate that they now have the trenchant support of our senior political leaders…”

Though faculties or departments in institutions have been encouraged over the years to seek links or intern arrangements with commercial companies or not-for-profit cultural centres, it is within cross-media teaching centres rather than places of employment that the breakdown of barriers between vocational and non-vocational pursuits exist.

Martin Jolly argues that “art and commerce are no longer antagonistic—they closely inform each other. The distinction for our students is much less relevant than it is to us. But it is always hard to get commerce interested in what we are trying to do because they are working on really tight margins and struggling to keep up, just like us.” Keith Armstrong is wary: “Of course there shouldn’t be and aren’t antagonisms [but the] constant push for ‘entertainment’ as a key goal within outcomes and the sidelining of art as a viable vehicle for research [has] something to do with a lack of understanding of the histories and convergences of art and media practices.”

Mike Leggett is a curator and artist currently teaching Media Arts at UTS. UTS’s Megan Heyward was interviewed in RT#49.

Image note: Student director Leigh Scholten, worked with 27 fellow students under the guidance Helmut Stenzel, University of Ballarat, to make Promotional Use Only, an interactive CD which won the Gold Medal, Art Directors Club 81st Annual Awards, New York 2002.

The Brisbane and Melbourne International Film Festivals consistently feature strong lineups of new films coming out of Asia as well as retrospectives (see “The ferocious eye of Kim Ki-duk”). In Sydney, fortunately, we have the Sydney Asia Pacific Film Festival, now in its third year, a relatively small but tenacious and ambitious festival whose goal is not only to open up Australian audiences to Asian films but also, laudably, “to promote the professional development of Asian Australian filmmakers and actors and their presence in the local film and television industry.” Launching this year’s festival, Sharon Baker from the Film and Television Office of NSW (FTO) reminded us that the FTO had been involved in a visit to China by 20 filmmakers and, also, that the Australian feature film, Mullet, had won Best Direction at the recent Shanghai Film Festival. The time is ripe for joint ventures and growing cross-cultural awareness. This year’s SAPFF features 15 films from 9 countries and includes a new print of Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously. Festival-goers also get the first Australian sighting of Zhang Yimou’s Happy Times. As Festival Co-director, Juanita Kwok, advised us it’s a substantial change of direction from the filmmaker’s historical approach to Chinese life. This contemporary drama borders on whimsy in its fable-like construction but its sharp social observations about dreams and realities in a newly capitalist society bring it to a complex ending. Although the focus is on film from China, others range from full-on Bollywood (Heart’s Desire, partly shot in Sydney), to a Thai western, animation from China and Hong Kong, a Vietnamese reflection on war, Japanese avant garde director Takashi Miike’s Dead or Alive 1 & 2, and the first new Australian film in this festival’s brief history, China Take Away, Mitzi Goldman’s account of writer and physical performer Anna Yen’s family life. The Short Soup film competition includes finalists from across Asia and Australia, and 2 seminars on Australia/Asia co-productions and the pressure to go mainstream and desert one’s origins promise timely debate. Cinematographer Christopher Doyle is the festival’s special guest—Gallery 4A will exhibit his photomontage works. This is a rare opportunity for Sydney audiences to participate in the growing Asian-Australian film dialogue.

Sydney Asia Pacific Film Festival 2002, Directors Juanita Kwok, Paul de Carvalho, Dendy Cinemas, Martin Place, Sydney, August 8-17.

The best thing about the 2002 Next Wave festival is that it lives up to its name. It’s rich with a present tense sense of a confident culture (often defying the youth label with very adult responses to the world) but moreso of a future tense of possibilities and potential, most evident in the proliferation of multimedia, new media, sound and site works, with very few conventional artworks or performances in sight. This is a Next Wave springing from a coherent vision which is not surprising given Artistic Director David Young’s background as composer and creator of innovative multimedia music installations and performances.

The calibre of the some 70 programmed works ranged from the utterly raw (7, under-written, under-directed, but vigorously performed by Swinburne University Indigenous Arts Course students) to the half-cooked (Y-glam’s My Brother’s a Lesbian, a script with potential, some very good performances and a misleading title) to many that were consummately professional—eg Speak Percussion, Chris Brown’s Mr Phase, the excellent dance program at Horti Hall and many of the visual arts and new media works. This mix of standards is part of the festival’s character, as irritating as it can occasionally be, and is indicative of Next Wave as a testing ground, the festival as laboratory, working with the untried, the emerging and with communities venturing into the arts. Most of the works turn out well, for example, for example, Glowshow. The huge, internally lit inflatables spelling out Shipwrecked and Humanity, beside and across the Yarra, made for an impressively contemplative work from the Visionary Images team working with disadvantaged young people and artists. Risks are taken, the rewards are many.

This Next Wave was free, a significant gesture if you think about how expensive the arts are today, let alone the financial demands of forking out for numerous tickets for a festival. Bookings were largely taken online and a percentage of seats for performances kept available for walk-ups. It wasn’t long before the word was out and shows were packed, most notably the dance program and PrimeTime (a mix of serious and kitsch entertainments at North Melbourne Town Hall) but also the one night stand by Speak Percussion in a new music program. Next Wave staff and volunteers acquitted themselves admirably in handling the crowds.

There’s little to criticise about the 2002 Next Wave, but it does need to take a very serious look at is its opening ceremony. There was nothing about it that reflected its demographic or the works to follow over the next 10 days. Okay, there were Colony’s angels and the matching soundtrack with its young participants, but the speeches beforehand, delivered to a largely older audience, were dry and inherently patronising (how many times were the audience told to get out there and enjoy), directed at youth, for youth, but not of youth, but certainly of sponsors. In the same way festival also crucially lacks a physical centre, somewhere artists, media members and audiences can gather at any hour so that the works seen can be talked through, contacts made and future collaborations made possible.

RealTime was part of the 2002 Next Wave program. Editor Keith Gallasch worked from the Express Media (publisher of Voiceworks) office with a team of 9 writers (6 from Melbourne, 3 from Sydney) in their mid 20s to produce daily responses to festival works online and in limited print editions at festival venues. What follows are 45 responses to the festival from the RealTime-NextWave writing team (Ghita Loebenstein, Katy Stevens, Vanessa Rowell, Leanne Hall, Jaye Early, Clara Tran, Even Vincent and myself) and other contributors (Kate Munro, James Kane).

For better or worse, meat pies, football and throwing the odd shrimp on the barbie have become synonymous with all things ‘Aussie’. However, in a cultural melting pot as deliciously varied as ours, the search for a collective identity is neither useful nor relevant unless it begins with difference. The Viet Boys from Down Under is a play which explores the alienation and frustration that comes with not fitting into the fair-dinkum-jolly-swagman stereotype, or being wholly comfortable with one’s Asian heritage. It asks the perennial question: What does it mean to be Australian?

Having never been conflicted because I am part of two worlds—and not knowing many Vietnamese-Australians who are confused over issues of identity—I found The Viet Boys’ heavy reliance on cultural stereotypes in its search for answers somewhat uninspiring and cliched. Rather than challenge archaic notions of what it means to belong to eastern and western cultures, the play inadvertently perpetuates the very same attitudes it so obviously has problems with. Bong’s initial reluctance to become romantically involved with Brad because he is a ‘half-caste’ and not suitable for dating Vietnamese girls is truly cringe-worthy. Renditions of the theme song to Burke’s Backyard and the Vietnamese nursery rhyme Kia Con Buom Vang (The Yellow Butterfly), no doubt serve as easily recognisable pop culture signposts to a racially diverse audience and good for a chuckle, but fail to offer any meaningful discourse.

What saves this Vietnamese Youth Media project from becoming yet another tale of identity crisis turned up to ten is its strong and clever use of humour. Whether perversely ticklish and black, such as when Smithy hires a prostitute to act as his surrogate mother, or light and daggy, as in the case of a karaoke performance of Jason and Kylie’s forgettable classic 'Especially For You', there’s sure to be comic relief around the corner. The play mitigates the serious side of self-futility and depression with its ability to make us laugh, and in the process, manages to capture feelings that are both intensely subjective and universal. Before The Viet Boys, I never imagined that an Elvis Presley impersonator singing 'Are You Lonesome Tonight?' had the power to simultaneously hit me in the guts and rub my funny bone with equal force.

With a budding romance, a story of both broken and realised dreams, martial arts scenes and corny karaoke thrown in for good measure, The Viet Boys is nothing if not a colourful array of musical and multimedia delights. Pre-recorded video images are used as an extra narrational device in the telling of the characters’ individual stories, often times running concurrently with the live performances. Ray Rudd gives a solid performance as the aspiring kung-fu film star, while Hai Ha La shows she is comfortable alternating between her 3 contrasting roles.

Go see The Viet Boys for its entertainment value. Although it doesn’t push any boundaries or delve into unchartered cultural territory, the play does offer a perspective on what it’s like for some Vietnamese youth living in Australia. You might not come away feeling any more enlightened, but you will be uplifted. That’s a promise.

The Viet Boys from Down Under, co-writer/director Huu Tran, co-writers/performers Dominic Hong Duc Golding, Rad Rudd, performers Khanh Nguyen, Hai Ha La, Christie Walton; Vietnamese Youth Media, Footscray Community Arts Centre & La Mama; La Mama Theatre, Carlton, Melbourne; 2002 Next Wave; May 15-26.

If Colony, with its angels winging spectacularly of the Victorian Arts Centre Spire was just too ethereal or kitschy an experience for you, Christian Thompson’s Show Me the Way to Go Home, in the George Adams Gallery beneath the spire, provided a neccesary earth. Slide projections on 4 large screens right-angled against each other, fill the space. The slow pulse and dissolves of the screenings create a semi-cinematic space of recollection. Christian Bumbarra Thompson (Bidjara/Pitjara people, Carnarvon Gorge, south-west Queensland), resident in Melbourne since 1999, has re-enacted elements of his childhood on the land he grew up on and photographed them as a series of movements. A woman looks in a mirror as she applies makeup, lost in her reflection. We see her from various, intimate angles. A young Indigenous man in a military outfit stands to attention. He salutes. He looks into the distance. A woman, she appears to be white and is dressed as a nurse, watches Indigenous children at play. A large, handsome woman, brightly dressed and with flowers in her hair seems to sing in a darkened space, a club perhaps. These performances are inspired by photographs from the Thompson family album: “I guess you could say I am trying to recreate and savour the very elements of my past that have conditioned me to be the type of aboriginal person I am…I am a long way from my blaks Palace, from my country, but every day I try to be there spiritually…” (Catalogue dialogue.) According to a wall plaque, the soldier is based on Thompson’s father and the nurse his mother. Show Me the Way to Go Home is a lyrical work, quietly, thoughtfully engaging and memorable.

Show Me the Way to Go Home, artist Christian Thompson, curator Kate Rhodes, George Adams Gallery, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne, Next Wave, May 18-July 14

By combing the working processes of 2 traditionally opposed mediums, documentary filmmaking and visual art, Simon Price and Simon Terrill have set out to challenge perceived divisions. Their exhibition thematic becomes: Where does the seamless conduit of a freeway and its implied utopia lead us? Their answer? To a world where space is a transition zone and identities become less grounded and more anxious. By adopting the distinctive perception of hitch-hikers, both artists embarked on a deliberately lateral journey from Melbourne to Darwin and along the way recorded their random experiences. The exhibition reflects a space where the 3 zones of the highway (human, machine and landscape) meld together to create unique relationships and multi-layered realities. The result is an exhibition divided into 3 rooms comprising sound, sculptural kinetics, the still image, a diorama—and the formation of an anxious reality.

Entering the first room you are greeted by a speeded up monotone voice describing casual encounters of the everyday…a cigarette…a dog…a car. A hurried succession of flashing vertical lights project onto a cube-shaped construction made from metal. Thin opaque material hangs in the cube receiving a succession of vertical lights. These seem to correspond to the pace of the voice. The work creates a chaotic and disjoined reality, by describing an uncertain narrative that weaves its way through a unknown landscape.

The second room consists of a video recording of 2 men projected onto a large wall space. The film is muted and plays in slow motion—its manipulation creates an eerie almost sinister atmosphere. Afigure sits in the foreground while another engages in a game of table tennis. Both are oblivious to the gaze of the camera recording, in detail, their every move. They appear to be detained, locked in a serious bout of navel gazing. The identities of the men are unknown and the viewer is left to form their own narrative of their reality. (The film is in fact of two British backpackers passing time whilst attempting to find relief from the intense Darwin heat.)

The third room consists of film, a diorama, and sculpture. One screen captures the ambience of the silent roadside vigil of hitch-hikers eager to be picked up—an exploration of the roadside universe takes place. What we see is a roadhouse late at night as a truck passes without any consequence, its headlights illuminating a kangaroo represented in large sculptural form. This image is then sharply juxtaposed with one on another screen of what appear to bespectacular blue glowing intersecting lights from an LSD trip. The camera slowly tracks to hundreds of frantic insects drawn to a roadside light. Situated inconspicuously, towards the back of the room, is a miniature 3D diorama replicating an aerial-map view of a fibre-optical landscape dissected by a piece of road implicitly symbolic of the exhibition’s journey theme.

The exhibition succeeds in creating a particular, anxious reality where the concept of space—both the literal floor space and gestalt of the hitch-hikers’ point of view—becomes a transition zone left open to audience interpretation. Or, as Simon Price explains, “ A zone where people can build their own narrative.”

Human/Machine/Landscape, artists Simon Price & Simon Terrill, fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne, Next Wave; May 17-26.

Through the smoky haze in a twilight space there are people with no names and eyes that don’t seem to see. This place lies beneath words and thoughts, and if you are looking for sense there is none to be made. Ghosts, the raw, concentrated people before you are walking the edge of a precipice, waiting to be startled, recoiling at the slightest movement.

When they sit in chairs they fall backwards, looking at an absent sun, the backs of the chairs arching their spines, conjuring grasshoppers rubbing between skin and ribs. They flap, they gasp, necks straining, fish caught too far from the cooling sea. They sit bolt upright, breath drawn loudly to the back of the throat, flight in their bodies and eyes.

A clamour of music issues a loud invitation to dance. A man romances his battered suitcase across the room, fixing it with a besotted gaze before stopping to laugh at its Pandora depths. Around him a mad circus of movement revolves without pattern. Two men, with stature and dignity, hold each other firmly and waltz majestically around the room. A girl in a full-skirted dress is hounded by her double pecking fretfully at her hem; still others dance in a whirligig of hysteria. Everything in this place is reduced to neurosis, carbon-copied so many times it becomes a tic, a spiralling cocoon that you can’t break out of.

She embraces him, folds him with tender arms into the smooth hollow of her neck. And then she grabs him by the hand and flings him headlong into the wall, where he is pinned loudly before sliding limply and heavily to the floor. She lifts him gently, letting him melt childishly against her chest, and then throws him brutally at the wall, over and over in a merry-go-round of love and hate. But soon she infects even herself with this madness and they both hurtle together violently, animals in a cage. They could be trying to escape unseen terrors, or they could be trying to enter a Paradise just visible through the glass, but maybe they don’t know what they are doing at all.

If I bind your face in cloth, making you deaf and blind and dumb, and remove your clothes to shame you, are you still human? Or will you roll across the floor, willy-nilly, handcuffs clenched behind your back, scaring those don’t want to see you too close? Will you prance angrily in your high-heeled shoes, flicking your bangled arm out in frustration so many times it becomes nothing more than a compulsion?

There is a man with a granite face, wearing a silky grey dress with heaviness and dignity. He carries a metal bar in his powerful hands, rolls it across the floor with the soles of his feet. He could be by your side in a split-second. Behind you, someone is walking slowly past your chair, trailing audibly against the walls and softly brushing your clothes.

People tilt and swerve, running to clap up against each other in a cymbal crash of skin, grappling like wrestlers, colliding like old lovers. It’s not possible to know who is a protector and who is a predator. You can smell their sour sweat as it trickles fear.

Peel yourself gladly from this unrestful dream and relax. Unfurl your fingers, set your heart ticking metronomically. Rise to the surface and feel the breath held in the small of your back, tucked under your ribs and around your stomach. Breathe again.

Journey to Confusion #3, Not Yet It’s Difficult & Gekidan Kaitaisha, Dancehouse, Melbourne, Next Wave, May 18-22.

Intercultural theatre projects have explored diverse artistic and social practices since Peter Brook and Suzuki Tadashi in the 6os and 70s. Journey to Confusion #3 is a performance research project from Melbourne company Not Yet It’s Difficult and Tokyo’s Gekidan Kaitaisha. The cross cultural partnership began in 1999 with a season of Confusion #1 In Melbourne and subsequent work in Japan.

In Confusion #3 the companies create a unique time-in-space through intense physicality, prepared movement and various tensions. Neither company has banished their cultural viewpoint in the search to find cohesion. Instead of attempting to reconcile their contrasting body vocabularies they are, rather, observed. The juxtaposing of the performers’ histories and techniques strangely clarifies archetypes and symbols. Many of the solo moments within the piece characterise situations more associated with one culture than the other.

Through stillness, movement and voice the performers generate a palette of textures and tones. It is not necessary to grasp a single unifying thread, but rather embrace the confusion of humanity beside humanity. Confusion #3 begins as the silhouettes of 10 figures enter the space in a haze of mist. Their features are undefined, their identities ambiguous; they are also gagged. The long and slow silence forces me to observe the speech of the body and I become aware of a quivering energy present despite the calm. In Japanese theatre such as Butoh and Noh, performers move as result of the inner landscapes they create. It is this that I can feel penetrating the space between the performers and audience.

Confusion #3 is personal and political, subjective and global. There is very little by way of design, and only a few minor props—the power bestowed in the technique of the performing body activates the transformation of the space. Whilst the structure appears to be fixed, a lot of the actions, rhythm and pathways are dependent on improvisation. About a third of the way through the performance a number of the motifs have been articulated, including repetition, transformation and a suggestion of phantom pain. These return later in the performance.

By the end of the work there is an undeniable sense that the performers are trapped; hostages to the space, their bodies and their cultures. In an early sequence that builds to the point of audience discomfort, a performer flings himself against a wall. Another performer helps him up and then flings him straight back against the wall. This duet is repeated over and over with the whole company. It then implodes further as all the performers slap themselves against the stark white wall. I shudder as I watch the room fill with bodies trapped in repetitious assault on each other and themselves. Over this plays a country and western ballad with the lyric “In a world of my own” which doesn’t quite drown out the sound of flesh hitting walls.

With smeared lipstick, naked flesh, handcuffs, 10 dollar bills and dirt, agonised screams and spoken abstractions, Confusion #3 has all the elements of avant-garde theatre. It is rare that a performance has the intensity to leave you at the end of the show with quaking knees. It is not an easy to watch. This is no tame exploration of the body in performance and that is a good thing.

Journey to Confusion #3, Not Yet It’s Difficult & Gekidan Kaitaisha, Dancehouse, Melbourne, Next Wave, May 18-22.

In a festival high point, a young, curious audience packed the VCA Dance Studio 1, to hear Speak Percussion, 4 about-to-graduate VCA musicians with an impressive program, Argot: A Transient Vernacular. It boldly combined the percussive purity of Takemitu’s Raintree (serene perspectives on rain drops) and Robert Lloyd’s Boobam Music (a fast, loose-limbed, virtuosic rendition by 2 percussionists on 8 bongos) with new works layered with samples and dance and classical music from young Australian composers Brett Anthony Jones (Pauah Fayliah Bacchanaliah, alternating riff-driven passages and demanding unravellings) and Peter Head (You are here: Rubik’s Cube, an intriguing use of staccato CD cut-ups against minimalist rows ). Alan Lee’s Artikule, an etude, the third Australian premiere, is built from mouth sounds made into microphones—clicks, trills, pops, various breathings. A corresponding dance trio explored the pleasures of the tea-cup. This was a generous concert, the works augmented by dance (a little old-fashioned) and thematic projections (strange morphings of a tea cup into a foetal scan into a cell). Finally the musicians and composer-electronic artist Harry Arvanitis (all dressed like laboratory scientists in white plastic coveralls) created an epic drum’n’bass & ambient improvisation. We could have danced to it, but locked in our seats we had to wait a long time before the work (a little too heavily earthed by 2 drum kits) took off…and it did. It’s interesting to note in the Jones, Head and impro works an inclination to orchestral volume and intensity (thanks to the layering in of recorded sound)…a new romanticism? Speak Percussion are surely makers of the next wave. As they write in their program notes: “Argot is a hybrid arts event…where elements of the concert hall will evolve into those of the Rave.”

Argot: A Transient Vernacular, Speak Percussion (Justin Marshall, Eugene Ughetti, Minako Okamoto, Rory McDougall with Harry Arvanitis), sound engineer Tony Mite, choreographer/installation artist Glenn Birchall; Dance Studio 1, Victorian College of the Arts, May 24.

“Turn off the telly, see it live”, screams the promo for PrimeTime. And so they flock from lounge-room to theatre, mouths wide-open, remote controls in hand, ready to feed on their daily dose of primetime television trash.

Modelled on an evening of TV, PrimeTime follows the episodic structure of a night ‘in’ with the box, complete with live ad breaks and an old-school TV host, Lawrence Leung, who sits somewhere between the clichés of Burt Newton and Ian Burgess. His jokes are rehearsed and he holds up cue cards telling us to ‘laugh’ or ‘cheer’, and one where we must gasp, ‘Oh, how postmodern!’ Oh, how very post modern indeed. Except the night as a whole lacks the self reflexiveness that hallmarks postmodernity. Instead PrimeTime is a parody of the episodic nature of TV programming, providing a clever shell for what is in essence a variety show. Sourced by Lally Katz, the acts are all produced independently so the quality of performances varies greatly. On this particular night the best was left for last.

“Svila (Silk)” is promoted as a “haunting sound and song” performance by Anna Liebzeit. Centred around stories of her grandmother’s life in Novisad, Yugoslavia, her father’s immigration to Australia and her own journey to Novisad, the performance is half chanted, half spoken, half sung. Wrapping together fragments of memory, conversations with her father, stories of her grandmother and her own stream of consciousness, Liebzeit has a gift for capturing experiences and relaying them through sound and song.

Springing from beat-driven spoken word to an earthy bluesy sound accompanied by acoustic guitar, Liebzeit has a voice with the same unadultered quality as Kasey Chambers. There’s something in the way she sings that conveys recollected pain. Her voice alone could carry the show if she had the confidence to stand still and let us simply listen. Desperately in need of a choreographer, her stilted movements detract from the power of her voice.

After a slapstick ‘ad break’ by Andrew McClelland PrimeTime took a dive into serious melodrama with “Shrunken Iris” by Kamarra Bell Wykes. Captioned “fragments of an addicted mind”, the performance has Iris studying drug addiction through an addict, Lexi, and her subconscious, which constantly plagues her. Dressed as a devilish femme fatale, this ‘devil’s advocate’ follows Lexi through moments in her life from losing her mother in a crowd, to watching her father beat a wombat to death with a sledgehammer, Lexi’s subconscious entices her towards and sometimes away from self pity, blame and hatred. It provokes and damns her. Both Wykes and Suzanne Jub Clarke give strong performances although the program doesn’t make clear which roles they play. Direction by Jadah Milroy is nicely considered and there were a number of ingredients, including monologue, narration, movement and sound which blended together purposefully.

Unfortunately I can’t say anything more about Iris because of the teenage ‘domestic’ that was occurring in the row in front of me. At times their ‘performance’ completely drowned out what was happening on stage, an ironic interruption considering the domestic distractions that usually interrupt an evening in front of the TV.

If one of PrimeTime’s aims is to take postmodernism and media consciousness to the cleaners, then the star of tonight’s show was undeniably “Mr Phase”. Starring the indefatigable Christopher Brown this piece of “commercial theatre” is a collage of standup, monologue and physical theatre. Devised by Brown and Thomas Howie, Mr Phase is a vehicle for comic warfare against all that is kitsch and disposable in the fourth estate.

Brown’s performance is a complete montage of media iconography. From the contents of Nutrigrain cereal, to a meditation on love-”the reason for it all”—or the lack thereof, he is cocky, languid and brave. He performs part of his monologue in his underwear and recycles punchy media-speak in an excellently crafted script. “Passion has no volume control,” he professes during a meditation on sex, and then offers “be baked not fired” as sound ad-savvy advice. An excellent sound design by David Franzke helps to match the show’s fast pace with style and fluidity. Brown has definitely got it-Rove’s stage presence, Adam Spencer’s wry cynicism and the slapstick sillies of Adam Sandler. Keep your remotes on hand, it won’t be long before we’re seeing him on primetime.

PrimeTime, May 20 performance, North Melbourne Town Hall, Next Wave. Season May 17-25 includes other acts.

There is mind chatter in their bodies that aches to get out. It crawls their skins, making their hands snap at each other’s limbs. Snap and cling. Snap and cling. They pull together, a foot hooked in the crease of an arm, then fling away, discarded and banished.

Bumping Heads is a physical conversation between 2 people. Their words are confessional and passionate, violent and funny, possessive and intimate. Tina McErvale opens in a solitary arabesque, arms curved over body and leg pointed behind. She leaves and Brendan Shelper arrives, preening and punching the air, preparing us for the words he wishes to define himself with. She returns and coaxes her body into movement, quirky, supple and shy.

Then they are on the floor, rolling over one another, rolling through the curves of each other’s bodies. Hugging and clinging, never letting go. Giving caresses, taking them back and throwing them away. The soundtrack giggles, squeaks and foghorns, teasing the bodies and encouraging whimsical games. She flies through the air, taut, poised and balanced in delicate curves around him, through him, over him. She flies until she is literally standing in his hands-raised above his head. Don’t breathe. Let the chatter stop as the moment is held in a silent pose.

He is contorted, standing on his head. She strolls past obliviously, reading a magazine. What must we do to get the attention of the ones we wish to talk to? As an object of manipulation, she lets the magazine dance through her fingers and across her torso, flicking and patting it, until it too ‘speaks’. He steals it and taunts her, making it hover like a paper bird, full of things to say, until bang!… she shoots it dead.

They collapse into movement again to the romancing sounds of “Roxanne”. They repeat the same roll, throw, catch sequence, saying the same things again and again and again. “Come lie with me,” he says patting the ground next to him. She follows, they argue and she turns to leave. “I’m going,” she taunts, twisting horizontally through the air as he runs to catch her and bring her back home. Romance and games again and again, until he stops running after her and she falls flat on the floor from her elevated twist.

They tell us stories. They confess. She will give up cigarettes today. He remembers being hit in the face at school. He does what his body wants him to do and is made to laugh, cry, lie down. He is made to undress and fall in love with a beautiful body. It is hers. The same happens to her. His story is told through her body, manipulated through an omniscient voice. She undresses and runs around the playground, telling a remembered tale of playground love. She laughs, cries and lies down. “Tell me how beautiful I am,” the voice demands. And she does, almost naked and stripped of physical deception. It is him she tells this to.

They bump heads, colliding into each other in a sting of physical contact. Thinking the same thoughts, saying the same things, hearing the same sounds.

Back to words and humble caresses. As before they are on the floor, rolling over one another, rolling through the curves of each others bodies. Hugging and clinging, never letting go. They dance across one another, speaking in lithe, weightless tongues, their final words spoken in union and balance. He stands on her shoulders. A deafening pause. Don’t breathe. Let the chatter stop as the moment is held in a silent pose.

Bumping Heads, director/creator/performer Brendan Shelper, co-creator/performer Tina McErvale, Horti Hall , Next Wave, May 22-26.

Girls aren’t supposed to like comics, so where does that leave me? And comics aren’t supposed to be smart, literate, or beautiful either. I wonder how people can still believe that? Someone I quite respect once looked at me puzzled as I had my head buried in a mini-comic and asked, ‘Didn’t you study English literature?’ This was supposed to be a thinly veiled slight on myself and my reading material but in fact it showed up the abuser as a regressive reductionist who evidently hadn’t moved into the 20th century (let alone 21st) with the rest of us.

The Comic Book Lifestyle exhibition and accompanying Silent Army Anthology are prime examples of where self-published comics are situated within contemporary artistic and literary practice today. Since the comic form is really a multimedia one (in the purest sense of the term) it possesses unique qualities to communicate and represent the personal, the outrageous, the intimate and the imagined. The exhibition multiplies this already manifold means of representation through incorporating the sources of the exhibited works—found objects, letters, scraps, scribbles and clippings are located within the same space as the artworks. These artworks evoke their humble origins by being scrappily taped to the gallery walls—postscripts and after thoughts still in place on the borders of the illustrations.

The Braddock Coalition/Silent Army are 3 comic artists who seem to live and breathe the form, hence the exhibition title I suppose. The work (and scribbles, letters etc) expresses an obsession that refuses to die or subside, a compulsion without escape. Perhaps this is the mark of a committed, if mad, artist or creator.

The exhibited works are largely focused on the personal and autobiographical rather than the fantastic and imaginary so lauded in mainstream comics. The visual style is also deliberately distinct from the mainstream styles which proliferate—they are more closely related to commercial illustration than the archetypal comic form spread across comic store shelves. This style and commitment is also realized in the recently launched Silent Army Anthology featuring the work of 20 “comic book veterans” of the small press persuasion. This Express Media publication is a creatively engorged collection of work from in/famous players in local comic art. The breadth of artwork and narrative style is considerable and impressive, ranging from the grotesque and abject (Glenn Smith) to the quirky, cute yet disturbing (Keiran Mangan) and everything (that can be drawn) in between. As always I loved Amber Carvan’s work, not least because her confessional tale of a broken childhood friendship expresses an intimate and unmediated style which I find charming and affective. Matt Taylor’s hyperactive tale of puppets on rebellion is a hilarious, yet chilling tale. The collage work of Tim Danko is a lucid reminder of the popcultural origins of the comic, maintaining aesthetic quality throughout.

The exhibition and print anthology form an impressive collection of the quality calibre and range of alternative comic artistry in Australia today. If nothing else they should certainly trouble the conservative opinion that deem comics ‘trashy indulgence’, and hopefully they will encourage many to seek out the obscure and the wonderful that populates the local comic scene.

Comic Book Lifestyle, Linden St Kilda Centre for Contemporary Arts, St Kilda, Melbourne, April 18-May 26; Silent Army Anthology, published by Express Media, info@expressmedia.org.au, www.expressmedia.org.au

Stylishly, sculpturally designed and lit with rich dense colour, making deft use of masks and projections and with the techno-technical crew in view, Rawcus’ production of their own devising, Designer Child, creates an otherworldly space that hovers between an inexplicable nightmare and a blunt satire of a genetically modified future. A mother-to-be is faced with the hard-sell of the genetics industry, subjected to physical probing and quizzed relentlessly and patronisingly about her ideal child. Her retorts are wickedly droll, belying any sense of her limited capacities. The dream of calculated perfection is countered with the potential (so evident in performance) of those who have disabilities but have their own distinctive intelligences, skills and personalities. Nonetheless, despite the mother’s anxious repudiation of what’s offered (from men with genius, strength and height, but with the odd flaw—haemorrhoids or hay-fever) and the show’s other swipes at the likely blandness that will come of uniform perfection, she is still tempted, her hand reaching out at the show’s very end, like God’s in the Sistine Chapel, to that of the specimen on offer, a new Adam. Like the recent news reports of a deaf American couple wanting to have deaf children, the complexities of Designer Child are sometimes unsettling. In a different way so is the script: the TV gameshow format is very creaky, the roles for the ‘able’ performers are bland, and some scenes, while internally rigorous, don’t fit the whole at all comfortably. The work is not as sophisticated as that of Back to Back Theatre, but it is the company’s first major showing, and like its subject matter, it’s all about potential rather than perfection. There’s much to admire in the ensemble playing, in the clever devices designed to integrate and maximise the range of company skills, and in the support for the project from Theatreworks and the City of Port Phillip (one of a Next Wave’s community connections).

Designer Child, devised by Rawcus, director Kate Sulan, set & costume Amanda Silk, sound design Katie Symes; Theatreworks, St Kilda, Melbourne, May 19-26.

“Since we were children our Elders have told us ghost stories,” write the curators of Ab-normal, Daniel King and Gail Harradine. “These stories told us of our ancestors coming back to look over their grandchildren, of hairy men that would come to take the children, of old women that have the legs of an emu, seen on lonely desert highways at night.”

The 4 Indigenous artists in Ab-normal blend life stories and ghost stories, traditional Indigenous spirituality and post-contact experience (just who are those hairy men that come to take the children?). Stories give us insight into culture and Ab-normal relies on the transmission of knowledge and history through a strong sense of family. The stories in this exhibition are passed particularly through lines of women, grandmothers, aunties and mothers.

Paola Morabito-Tang (Wemba Wemba people) prints black and white photographic images onto giant sheets of paper. I couldn’t help but sneak a feel of the paper’s silky edge between thumb and forefinger; the textures of bark, gnarled wire, and pale grass are so strong. The 4 prints depict fences and trees filtering white, eerie light through palings and branches. The title of each work indicates the spirit layer of each piece; we search for kerratety kurrk (women’s bird), the goon dog, and ngatha murrup (little man). My favourite features a sagging wire fence in the foreground, a tangle of overgrown trees, and a house as hazy as memory in the distance. Ngatha murrup is deep in the shadows, a messy biro scribble. He is the most difficult to find, making this work the most intriguing.

Gary Donnelly (Gunditjmara) paints soft, simple landscapes, infused with a sense of power. The folds of red hill and sky are mysterious and suggestive of a presence, or perhaps an absence. His work is inspired by the stories of his mother, which serve to warn and protect. ‘The Messenger’ reminded me of just how dark it can be in the bush at night; the canvas is a thick inky navy, the stars diffuse behind clouds and the owl that brings sad news sits in the tree hollow, eyes sunk back into the night.

Craig Charles (Yorta Yorta/Mhutti Mhutti) offers a series of small abstract square works, brittle and toffee-like in texture. The series moves from rich glassy rose reds through amber to warm brown, referencing the “red eyed mooky man”. They have a number of layers; torn Easter egg wrappers create lines, like window bars. I could only connect Charles’ work to his story of being trapped in front of the telly, watched by his Nanna Th e torn lines evolve into shapes that made me think of boats and leaves. Perhaps this is the space of play, as Charles sneaks from the lounge room to join the cousins out the back.

Mandy Nicholson (Wurundjeri) has the most distinctively indigenous painting style in the show, employing traditional motifs of southeast Australia. Mindi, the Devil Snake, has a fat red body looped around itself, and a dangerous flickering tongue. Nicholson uses symmetry, fine lines and design to illustrate Wurundjeri stories. Again, these teach rather than simply entertain, “Mindi was always on the lookout for any people who wander from the safety of their camps and families.”

These very different artists indicate the dynamism of contemporary Indigenous culture, and engage the spiritual aspects of experience without reifying or idealising Indigenous traditions. King and Harradine hope that this exhibition gets its viewers a little bit ‘windy’, a little bit scared. At first I found it hard to feel spooked with classic hits cranking in the gallery space whilst I scribbled notes for this review. But I decided to stand with each piece again. I found that ngatha murrup was watching me from the dark before I found him, that the owl touched a deep sadness and that Mindi fixed me with that glittering gold eye. Aaaaiiieeeeeeeee.

Ab-normal, Ghost stories from young Indigenous artists, curators Daniel King & Gail Harradine, Dantes Upstairs Gallery, Fitzroy, Melbourne, Next Wave; May 14-25

On the plane heading to the inaugural REV festival at the Brisbane Powerhouse, I read about Frank Zappa's appearance on the Steve Allen show in 1963 (The Wire 218). Pre-moustached, a young and serious Zappa was scheduled for the 'kook' spot to teach Allen how to play a bicycle—how to make a flute of the seat support and thrum its structure. Perhaps the only thing that could have made Australia's newest music festival for 'new sounds and new sources' even better would have been a bit of Zappa wafting around the cacophonous halls of the Powerhouse.

The REV festival (Real Electronic Virtual) is the result of a partnership between Brisbane Powerhouse and QUT Creative Industries Music @ QUT, executively produced by Andy Arthurs and Zane Trow under the artistic directorship of long time instrument innovator and performer Linsey Pollak. Focussing on experimental musical instrument making, it featured over 40 artists making a diverse range of works in both acoustic and digital domains, not only offering the opportunity to see the works of prominent international and Australian artists but also serving as a public outcome for the masters students of the course of the same name offered by Music @ QUT. Over 3 days, every nook, crevice, (even bannister rail) of the Powerhouse was alive with talks, workshops, installations, whooshes, doings, tweets and bleeps.

The molecules of music

The international drawcards for the event were David Toop (UK), scanner (UK), Bart Hopkins (USA) and Phil Dadson (NZ). All made presentations about their history as sound makers. Hopkins and Dadson are primarily acoustic instrument makers, scanner primarily digital. Having played just about everything over the last 40 years, it was Toop's role to act as a kind of conceptual glue between the two methodologies. It was a very strategic move on behalf of the organisers to allow 2 methodologies so often thrown into schism to exist side by side, encouraging audiences and participants to make rhizomic connections.

David Toop provided a laid-back wander through his work over the past 40 years with audio samples from Bo Diddley, his own wild improvisatory work with Bob Cobbing and Paul Burwell, Whirled Music (made up of all things spun and whizzed through the air), up to work he has just recently finished using organic samples and computer manipulations. He posed the question that forever floats in the air at these events—is there a crisis in the live performance of sound and music due to technology? (See Keith Armstrong, and Joni Taylor on Analogue2Digital, RealTime 48.) Interestingly the debate never got off the ground in a formal sense, even in the scanner and Toop 'odd couple' forum 2 days later, but became an ongoing discussion among artists and audiences at the fabrique evenings where computer technology came to the fore. (For more on Toop see Greg Hooper, for more on fabrique see Richard Wilding and Keith Armstrong.)

Bart Hopkins is an instrument maker and founder of the experimental music musical instrument (ExMI) magazine and website. In his first session, he conducted a weird and wonderful journey through the work of some international instrument makers. Of breathtaking sonic and visual beauty was the Bambuso Sonaro made by Hans Van Koolnij-a huge bamboo flute-cum-pipe organ with the most haunting sound. Kraig Grady from LA has invented a whole new world and culture, Anaphoria, to provide a context for his new tuning, music and instruments . The long string instruments were also particularly fascinating. Played by vibrating the string longitudinally, requiring extraordinary lengths of wire, the action is full bodied, creating a kind of choreography. The most beautiful audio and visual example was Ela Lamblin's suspended singing stones, producing a stunning, sustained, almost pining sound. I would have loved to have seen video footage of the bodies in action. Hopkins also took us through mouth musics, using ceramic multi chambered pipes (that talk an underwordly language), metal musics, glass musics, even water musics. He completed the journey with Jacques Dudon's light music-a kind of light version of the pianola roll. Using a photosonic disc, photocell and synthesiser, the light shining through the patterns on the disc switch the photocell on and off activating the synthesiser. The patterns on the disc alone are very beautiful, the sound created a highly detailed electronic esoterica. It was a glorious journey through magic sounds and imaginations.

Hopkins also chaired a “brainstorming session” along with Phil Dadson and Craig Fischer (an Australian instrument-maker) for the discussion of burgeoning ideas. Although there was not a flood of new instrument concepts, the discussion was a hotbed of excited technical speculation, with the seed of one person's idea catapulting across the room to cross-pollinate with the work and ideas of another. As someone grappling with the physics of sound production I found it fascinating.

It is inevitable that at every gathering of artists there will be the discussion of marginalisation of certain sectors of the arts and the dearth of funding for these areas, and it found its home in this session. The flipside of this argument, tentatively raised, is “what's wrong with being on the margins, that's where all the good stuff happens”. However the discussion was artfully refocussed by Linsey Pollak suggesting that REV was a positive example of how to show critical mass to funding bodies, and a way of gathering new audiences. It was also in this session that the acoustic/digital argument came closest to erupting, as the suggestion that large companies had stopped developing new instruments—primarily traditional orchestral instruments—was countered with examples like Yamaha's heavy investment in computer-based R&D.

One of the artists whose opinion was frequently sought during the brainstorming session was Peter Biffin, who has long been developing coned stringed instruments in an attempt to minimise the size and maximise the vibrations of the sound board. These instruments were on display for the duration of the festival, and each evening, assisted by percussionist Tony Lewis, Biffin performed a mini-concert. Talking us through various developments, from his encounter with the Chinese erhu through to his own cone based tarhus (of all shapes and sizes), he played detailed pieces on each to exemplify the rich variations of sound. Due to the east meets west (and I mean country &) nature of the instruments, the music often had a gentle, haunting quality reminiscent of the beautiful collaboration between Eddie Vedder and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in Dead Man Walking. Biffin's approach was informal and educational, simple and satisfying.

Phil Dadson presented an all too brief retrospective of his work with From Scratch, the New Zealand ensemble that has been making exhilarating, rhythm-based performance on original instruments since 1974. Much of the work shown (on video) incorporated huge instruments made out of pvc pipes struck with rubber mallets (or thongs, hence the colloquial 'thong-a-phone'). The sound is bold and bassy, full of wallops of air. Dadson describes his interest in new instruments as a search for “sounds with a bit of magic.” Based on political concerns in the Pacific and incorporating spatial and sculptural elements, the work enters intermedia areas, often site-specific, and more recently incorporating interactive video elements. Some of Dadson's solo installation work includes huge playable sculptures in a coastal sculpture garden in New Zealand where he is also planning a playable fence and a gorgeous gallery installation involving 5 tonnes of landscaping material to form a massive foley tray. In her introduction, producer Fiona Allan informed us that she had not been able to bring all of From Scratch to the festival due to the usual budgetary restraints, but from this glimpse of their work it was a great shame. There is a new audience that would appreciate this dynamic and ever evolving performance group.

Even the Kitchen Sink

The main showcases of the festival were the Diversi Concerts A & B. Presenting the work of the established instrument makers, the concerts were well planned to combine the more conceptually difficult work with more populist models, allowing audiences to get a taste of something new. Diversi B was a user-friendly all-star experience including a Graeme Leak retrospective, Greg Sheehan, Bart Hopkins, Hubbub and cameos from Linsey Pollak. Leak is a virtuoso. His work is very performative, sometimes leading it dangerously close to cute, but forever surprisingly innovative. Playing the contents of his briefcase he DJ'd with a zipper, scr-scr-scratched with a business card across his facial stubble, and beatboxed with a pencil against his cheek. With the assistance of percussionist Greg Sheehan, he even played the kitchen sink, and made a tuned percussive instrument of a fishbowl of water on which floated wooden bowls. This instrument reappeared in the masterful piece by Leak and Pollak called The Lab. Posing as scientists they constructed the instruments before us-blowing air under the wooden bowls to tune them, and accurately filling testubes to create a well tuned glass panpipe. Rather than loosing its mystery, seeing the process of tuning and tweaking these ad hoc instruments enhanced the magic and appreciation of the Leak & Pollak artistry.

Bart Hopkin presented his instruments in an appealingly simple and humble way. His creations are variations and manipulations of those already known, like bizarre cousins: a derivation of the clarinet made of open piping with a piece of sprung bent wood, to block air, created haunting slides and nuances; the cat face, a kind of thumb piano with different lengths of metal poking from it and big whiskers for ultra-boing bass; the multi-chambered wind instrument producing harmonies with itself; and the rocking horse zither called Polly, tinkling like an alien music box, accompanied by Pollak on his reed based saxillo. Hopkin's creatures are almost familiar yet produce mesmerising otherworldy timbres.

Less otherworldly was Greg Sheehan playing a variety of early childhood toys. I was reminded of Hopkins earlier in the day stating that his new instruments can never be truly tamed. These toys certainly had a mind of their own. There are moments of rhythmic interest and ingenuity, but it seemed generally haphazard. However Sheehan is a beguiling performer who worked the crowd well. I would be interested to see Sheehan and Toy Death—the Sydney group who use all manner of battery operated toys-have a play-off. That would get the analogue/digital dialogue going.

The final act were the festival favourites, Junkstas, playing the airbells-coke bottles inflated with a bike pump. When struck and shaken they produce clear ringing tones. The team of Hubbub music perform an energising body percussive choreography that literally sings, awe inspiring in its simplicity.

The Diversi A concert was a little more varied, and for me a little less satisfying, starting with Totally Gourdgeous, a folk band that play instruments made of Gourds—guitar, bass, drum, violin and more. They joked that they were the Britney Spears of the festival, amazed at the fact that, in the pumpkin-coloured clothing and silly hats, they for once were the most conservative thing on the bill. The folk tunes were well performed, and the instruments beautifully made (on sale in the foyer), however I found their abundance of joyful cheesy personality (yes, I'm a Sydney cynic), a little overwhelming. They are difficult to place among the experimental work of Phil Dasdon and Jon Rose but the concert series was called Diversi after all.

Dadson's work was pared back compared with that seen earlier in the day on the From Scratch video. His primary instruments were singing stones-flat stones that change tone, and almost chatter according to how they are cupped-and a long stringed instrument (relying on sympathetic resonances?) with various playing modes. In order to accompany himself he used a small fan with a an attachment on the blade hitting the string at semi regular intervals, creating a drone. The considered pace and space within this performance drew it close to a meditation.

Diversi A also included more performance-based work such as Amber Hansen, who belly dances while triggering samples from her chain and metal adornments-a shimmer of the hips sonically translated into a cavernous rattle. A well integrated performative concept, it will be interesting to see how far she can push it. Unaccompanied Baggage involved an elaborate setup of taking sound samples from the audience and activating them with triggers on the floor. Two dancers create movement phrases and build the work into a collaborative improvisation. Structured like a masterclass or workshop showing, the work was interesting, and while I'm often one to beg “show me the score”, I almost had too much of it in this performance. For some in the audience it was certainly an education, for others, just a little bit too much information.

The taste of walls

When I was 4 I announced to my parents that I didn't like my piece of toast—that it tasted like walls. It became a family expression for something that was bland. Biospheres: Secrets of the City, tasted kind of like the monolithic walls of the Powerhouse on which 3 artists' large scale images were projected. I appreciate the ambient aesthetic—catching things out of the corner of the eye, the edge of the ear. I appreciate finding things in banality (hell-try having a conversation with me). I simply found the work under-developed. The soundtrack, a collaboration between scanner and I/O (aka Lawrence English, also curator of the fabrique events—see Wilding and Armstrong) had interesting
text-u-real moments—samples of what I assume to be taxi drivers around Brisbane, the bleeps and bustle of a hospital ward, and a very nice moment of an old man telling his family history that had been effected to delete fragments of words, leaving you grasping for what was lost. But it was the relation of sound to projection that felt unformed, whether that be sympathetic or antagonistic.

One wall involved video that was partially obscured by the pyrophone (fire organ), creating texture washes. The centre wall had a series of slides of the minutiae of street signs, and projections of graffiti. I like the concept of walls projected onto walls, but wanted more substance to them—more like the scrawled message 'free' on one of the images—and more of them. It seemed like a limited palette. The Flash animation by rinzen was more rewarding, with a kind of screen saver mesmeric effect imposed over grey silhouettes of buildings made of chunky shadows and hollows, with bright flashes of street sign symbols. I feel like an opportunity was lost to let the walls of the Powerhouse seep out through the projections, really drawing our attention to 'familiar and mundane yet unrecognisable' referred to in the publicity hype.

The gesture of sound

A particular success of REV was the installation component, including the Roving Concerts, where an audience was guided through the space to different pockets of performance. The highlight for me was David Murphy's Circular Harp, a large semi spherical instrument strung according to geometric patterns. Looking a little like a masonic ritual (speculation only), it was played by three people (Murphy, Leak and Sheehan). The motion of hands crossed over and bodies circling created a beautiful synthesis of sound and physicality. The sound was appropriately light and ethereal, the trio constantly improving on the composition over the 3 days. But even more impressive was the integration of sound and video. A ball of mercury and 2 bowls (one with suspended aluminium dust, one with bronze dust) were placed over speakers, so that they responded to the vibrations creating wonderful textures and patterns. All perfectly circular these visual representations were layered and x-faded over a birds-eye view of the played harp. A video artist suggested that the interface was too simple, that so much more could have been done with the image, but for me it was the simplicity and connectedness of sound and sight that made the work so exquisite.

As Hopkins had suggested in his presentation, the beauty of innovative instruments is the gestural choreography required to play them. This was particularly evident in Stuart Favilla's Light Harp. Tracing virtual strings with lights and lasers, the instrument acted as a controller to produce samples. Favilla has developed a deft action of caressing invisible strings to produce both finely controlled and chaotic moments of improvisation, accompanied by Joanne Cannon on her leather Serpentine Bassoon wired up with and light, touch and movement sensors. (See also Greg Hooper on the Roving Concert)

The issue of gesture also arose in the demonstration performance [de]CODE me—a work in progress by Lindsay Vickery. Wearing a motion sensitive suit, the dancer has control over some basic parameters involving midi samples and video manipulation. Vickery admitted that it was still very much in development, and limited by software foibles. It was interesting to see the movement limitations it placed upon the dancer Katherine Duhigg (scheduled performer Melissa Madden Gray being unable to attend). It has potential and raises many questions as to new media integration with live performance and issues of the mediated body.

The Devil went up to New Farm

The concluding concert for REV was Hyperstring by Jon Rose. Having never experienced Rose's improvisations for midi activating violin and bow, I was filled with an almost manic joy—much like Rose himself. He prefaced the concert with words to the effect, “if you don't like what I'm doing at one time, hang in there because I'll soon be doing something different.” Like a hot whirlwind from hell he ploughed through his bag of tricks—similar to a car radio being tuned—creating fast and furious chaos punctuated by occasional moments of simplicity: a rumination on the place of the banjo; a glacial sample storm with minimalist melodic line. Rose is all fingers and toes, wiggling and jiggling and tickling every possible sound out of his instrument from rubbing the back of the violin with a wet finger to blaring speaker feedback like a vintage rockstar. He must have felt like one when the flock rushed him afterwards to talk. It was a glorious sounding out for the festival. (That's if you don't include the unofficial jam session on the Hubbub's Sprocket percussion machine that was still going when I left at 1.30am Monday morning.)

A joyful noise

Making noise brings out the child in us all. There is a certain naivety that even my cynicism is insufficient to quash when it comes to the production of beautiful noises from unlikely things. The real success of REV was not only the bringing together of diverse music and sound makers, focussing on new instruments and offering a level playing field for experimentation, but also, as most of the events were free and interactive, introducing audiences to new sonic experiences. Given the ongoing challenge to get audiences for new work in Australia, the positive effect of REV, with the Powerhouse bursting with clunks, clangs, whirls and whispers, and the showcasing of a myriad of innovative sound generating methodologies, cannot be underestimated.

Epilogue: Changing the metabolic rate

In the final moments of the scanner/Toop discussion, “Wave form style versus liquid breath technique”, attempting to grapple with the ongoing argument of performance in sound, an older woman began to describe her own work. She spoke of making installations in 4 dimensions, engaging the body within the sound by changing it's metabolic rate, forcing it to slow down and attend to detail, by using gravel or painting images on the floor. Zane Trow then introduced us to Joan Brassil, a significant Australian artist with a long commitment to performance as part of visual and sound art. In one brief description she managed to distil the arguments about the performative in sound down to the simple principle of involving and effecting the body in space, slowing it down to listen.

Early on the Saturday morning, my hotel began to play itself—becoming a musique concrète creation—water rushing through stereo pipes, handrails thrumming, bedsprings creaking. In my semi-conscious state I started to review the soundscape. I felt at that moment that I had made John Cage a proud old sound pioneer. Maybe even Zappa too.

REV festival April 5-7: Sound Body, David Toop, April 5 ; Who's doing What?, Bart Hopkins April 5; Brainstorming, April 5; Made from Scratch , Phil Dadson, April 6; Wave form versus liquid breath technique, April 7; [de]CODE me, April 6; Peter Biffin and Tony Lewis, April 5 – 7; BioSpheres: Secrets of the City, April 5; Hyperstring, April 7; Roving Concert April 5-7; Diversi A & B April 5 & 6, fabrique, April 5& 6, Brisbane Powerhouse Centre for the Live Arts.

Activist artists continue to pursue the refugee issue with an intensity that reveals how deeply recent events and continuing struggles have affected and divided Australian communities. On a recent visit to Sydney, I was fortunate to meet with activist and artist for social change, Deborah Kelly. Kelly is a key figure in the Sydney-based collective, we are all Boat People—comprising visual artists, writers, media, web and lighting designers, video activists, an architect, and an IT expert. During our conversation, as a suitably ominous-looking thunderhead accumulated overhead, she talked about the complicit role of mainstream media in the creation of ciphers, faceless beings on whom we can project our worst fears and imaginings. Images released pre-election of pixilated faces and aerial shots of hundreds of huddled bodies on the deck of the Tampa seem to have presented Australians with a new tabula rasa for demonisation and hate. Moreover, the detachment of the Woomera and Port Hedland detention centres from population centres, and thereby from immediate consciousness, has laid the ground for a conflict of mediated imagery.
The inquiry into the ‘Children Overboard’ affair revealed that orders were made restricting the kind of photographs that could be taken by naval officers documenting the event. The simulacra released by the Howard government were cued by an image history and visual language that samples, enlarges, cuts, recontextualises and frames. Over the course of the last century, contemporary artists, designers, printers and advertisers have exploited the particular qualities and degenerative idiosyncrasies of mass-produced image-making. The obscured ‘Children Overboard’ photograph of partially submerged figures can easily be recognised as a deliberate fabrication.

Although the artifice revealed by the inquiry was undeniable, the government’s merciless PR machine continues to barrel along, churning out spurious imagery and rhetoric. Another indicator that we have fallen foul of our most disturbing (and Orwellian) futuristic predictions is the proliferation of ‘Ruddock-speak’ as coined by Robert Manne writing in the Sydney Morning Herald. “For [Ruddock] a broken child has suffered an ‘adverse impact’; people who sew their lips together are involved in ‘inappropriate behaviours’; refugees who flee to the West in terror are ‘queue jumpers’.” The latest of these bite-sized and easily imprinted crisis-euphemisms is ‘refusees’ which, besides distancing asylum-seekers from the legitimate status of refugee, carries the multivalent meanings of rejected and unwanted and most horrifyingly, of refuse and waste.

How, therefore, can activist artists possibly offer alternatives to the machinations of a government whose extreme policies of mandatory detention for refugees are largely accepted by Australians? Teri Hoskin, an artist from the Adelaide-based volunteers in support of asylum seekers (v-I-s-a-s) suggests, “Artists know how images work, how they make meaning, and are tooled up to both make images and disseminate them. Artists can open up the debate to a depth that mainstream discourses couldn’t and wouldn’t…I also think that artists are perhaps more willing to take risks, and have an understanding that life is essentially heterogeneous, rather than essentially homogenous with deviancies that have to be fixed.”

From a Perth perspective, the interstate connections made by artists through forums, events and conferences over the past 12 months have had far-reaching effects, enabling long-term associations to be forged and dialogue to expand around activist art practices in Australia and overseas. These have included Newcastle’s Electrofringe (part of This Is Not Art, September 2001); dLux Media’s TILT (Trading Independent Lateral Tactics, Sydney, October 2001); Elastic (Adelaide, March 2002), and the Art of Dissent (Adelaide, March 2002 and Melbourne, October 2002). These brief and often inspirational connections between artists and the larger community are bolstered by the strong electronic social change networks provided by groups like v-I-s-a-s and Octopod (Newcastle).

Artist collaborations, and actions undertaken by groups including we are all Boat People, also offer a serious alternative to political party alignment over the issue of Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers. Where the slippery territory of ideology can factionalise groups and deter people from joining an action or protest, the practices of some artist collectives emphasise inclusivity and the power of the individual to join and do something with their unique skills. Deborah Kelly says, “Our message is a simple one, and we think it says something all Australians know and understand. The only difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is circumstance. Our government has shown no compassion, and certain elements within the mainstream media have deliberately perpetuated the myths about refugees…In response, we have decided to spread our own message of unity and compassion…the strategy of the SWARM. A thousand small actions, lots of individuals doing something, anything. The message gets out, but more importantly, it gets into the minds of ordinary Australians.” During our conversation Deborah Kelly emphasises we are all Boat People’s mission to keep their ideas mainstream: “We have no interest in being marginal”.

Kelly and her collaborators are responsible for the creation of the tall ships/boat people image that identifies Australia’s colonial history and implicates all but our Indigenous peoples in its simple message. The distribution of this non-copyright artwork via flyers, downloadable PDFs /jpegs, and through a Perth T-shirt company, has enabled wide distribution across Australia. The actions of the group have ranged from large-scale projections of the tall ships image on iconic landmarks or at arts events to community activities resulting in the creation of a flotilla of 3,301 origami boats (one for every refugee in detention, on and offshore).

Their most recent actions have proved challenging and potentially litigious. On the eve of the Budget announcement, Kelly drove to Canberra to project the tall-ships image onto Parliament House, a site where protest is illegal. As Peter Costello announced an increased allocation of federal money to ‘Border Protection’, Kelly and her Canberra Boat People network were surrounded on the lawn by Commonwealth Police. Previously, on Good Friday this year, the group chartered a boat in Circular Quay as a roving, floating projection booth following the swift shut-down by security guards of several land-based attempts to project on the Sydney Opera House. Before the group had even embarked, the boat was boarded by Commonwealth Police who threatened to revoke the captain’s commercial charter license if any projections were made on prominent sites. The protected status of Sydney Harbour as a commercial tourist zone forced the group and their audience of 155 supporters to project outside Circular Quay onto an abandoned navy vessel.

While the anti-copyright, tall ships image has allowed we are all Boat People’s message and networks to extend as far as Perth, v-I-s-a-s have worked in a different way to bring artwork out of the Woomera Detention Centre and into an international forum. Drawings by children detained at Woomera were collected by arts worker and v-I-s-a-s prime mover Serafina Maiorano following the September riots last year. These works, depicting water cannons used against detainees by guards in riot gear, are currently being exhibited by Amnesty International at a United Nations meeting in Geneva. Although the works cannot be attributed to a particular person or place, the v-I-s-a-s copyright and web address is accessible to those wishing to discover more about refugee detention in Australia.

As an artist-initiated group, v-I-s-a-s organised part of the opening parade event for the Adelaide Fringe where participants were encouraged to adopt the symbol of a Refugee Freedom Key in opposition to the image of barbed-wire fences that has come to represent mandatory detention in Australia. “Open your heart…an invitation to all South Australians to take peaceful action to express humane opposition to the injustice asylum seekers face in this country. The punishment of people who are in search of refuge contradicts the most basic of human rights…rattle your keys…so that in time it becomes known as a refugee freedom gesture”. Aside from its public activities v-I-s-a-s hosts a particularly active website and a listserv that offers insights into the actions of other groups, with regular updates from the Woomera-based Refugee Embassy bus manned by activists Dave McKay and Ross Parry.

From Melbourne, artist and university lecturer Danius Kesminas travelled to Woomera with a group of predominantly exchange students from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong where they attempted to “revive the long standing tradition of Australian landscape painting and watercolours”. The title of this collective work, accompanied by photo-documentation, was A Soft Touch: Woomera Detention Centre Eyewitness Accounts, referring directly to one of the most quoted myths of Australia’s so-called ‘soft’ border controls. The work was shown at Kuntlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. Danius explains “the thing to remember is that in German consciousness the 2 most significant places in Australia are Sydney and Woomera”.

In Perth, road signs are changing at the hands of Mickie Quick, who is converting benign ‘Refuge Island’ signs to Refugee Island, with the supportive male and female figures altered to a man with a gun leading an unarmed female. I spoke with Mickie Quick about his provocative culture jamming in relation to criticism that has been leveled at outspoken writers such as Philip Adams for conflating Australian Detention Centres with the concentration camps of the Holocaust. While this kind of statement can divide opinion, Mickie explains that his work is based on the sentiments of hate and xenophobia that are growing in Australian communities, leading to almost dismissive ‘just shoot ‘em’ attitudes. It’s certainly a difficult time and place for irony. Inaction resulting from self-censorship and fear of reproach also seems to be a significant factor for those who continue to be silent about the plight of asylum seekers in our country. As Teri Hoskin of v-I-s-a-s articulates, “It points to a certain paralysis of action when activism (as physical protest) is seen as the only possible response”.

we are all Boat People, www.boat-people.org
Download the tall ships/boat people image and stickers, and spread the message.

v-i-s-a-s, http://v-i-s-a-s.net [link expired] Join the mailing list. The drawings by children in detention at Woomera can also be viewed on this site.

Artists for refugees, artistsforrefugees@hotmail.com A Perth-based collective of art-workers who recently staged the Artists For Refugees benefit concert with proceeds going to CARAD, Coalition Assisting Refugees After Detention.

Show Mercy, www.showmercy.info [link expired] The Sydney-based Rights Campaign for Asylum Seekers recently staged the Show Mercy Concert in support of asylum seekers.

Australia is Refugees, www.australiansagainstracism.org
A schools project devised by founders of Australians Against Racism, writer Eva Sallis and designer Marianna Hardwick. The project will involve year 6 and 7 students in writing the stories of refugees in their families and communities.

The Art of Dissent, www.artofDissent.com
A national symposium for artists and community activists working at the frontier of social and cultural change. Now calling for speakers: Melbourne Festival 2002, Storey Hall, RMIT University, Oct 14-16.

This Is Not Art/Electrofringe, www.thisisnotart.org/ [updated link] A national festival staged in Newcastle of young writing, music, new media and digital arts.

Digital Eskimo, www.digitaleskimo.net
A global network of digital media professionals, they work with “socially progressive organisations.”

Isle of Refuge, exhibition, curators My Le Thi & Ashley Curruthers, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, early 2003 & touring. Featuring work by refugees and their children, and émigré artists including Imants Tillers, Savanhdary Vongpoothorn, Guan Wei and Anne Zahalka.

News from Nowhere,
9am Mondays,92.1 RTR FM, Perth. Presented by anarchist & performance artist Mar Bucknell as an alternative to and critique of mainstream news.

Mobile Refugee Embassy. Support Dave McKay and Ross Parry in Woomera as they lobby government and attempt to provide legal and moral support to detainees.

We’d long been primed to expect ‘no pot of gold’ at the end of the Report into the Small-To-Medium Performing Arts Sector set up by the Cultural Ministers Council (10 state and federal arts ministries). Even so the report made for disappointing reading, thin on analysis, failing to recognise very real issues and proposing predictable solutions to a barely defined problem. Representatives of the Australia Council (Ben Strout, Executive Director Arts Development) and the NSW Ministry for the Arts (Kim Spinks, Project Manager, Theatre & Dance) who spoke at the recent SAMAG (Sydney Arts Management Advisory Group) forum in Sydney (Australia Council, May 27), guardedly welcomed the report. Each drew out the positives either in the report or by-products of it. Spinks spoke of the value of the data collected and how, for the first time, it allowed for some serious comparisons of arts strategies and spending within and across the states. Although sympathetic to artists’ expectations, Strout welcomed the report while pointing to a few of its problems: the unhelpfully large sample (when it comes to a thorough analysis) and the report’s claim that the sector was in surplus. He explained that this was partly the result of the project-based nature of the ‘small’ component of the sector and the requirement that they show a surplus in order to remain viable candidates for future funding. This often means, as we all know, that artists seriously under-pay themselves and are forced to stint on other project expenditure.

Fiona Winning, Artistic Director of Performance Space and the third member of the panel, expressed the feelings of the sector. Earlier she had described the report as akin to a misdiagnosis—“It’s as if we went to the doctor with lung cancer and were treated for bad breath.” Winning argued that in an era of quantitative rather than qualitative analysis it is very difficult to find the language with which to turn the argument for funds to issues of aesthetics and creativity. But, she said, a way had to be found and that the report had to be the starting point for improved funding.

The report clearly and repeatedly acknowledges that the small to medium sector is the source of innovation in the Australian performing arts. It stresses that the sector is seriously concerned about its capacity for continued research and development. However, since the report can’t quantify innovation, it throws in the towel and resolves in the direction of better business planning, “clarifying government expectations of the sector”, and improved inter-government communication, as the way out of what remains, in the document, an undefined problem. As audience and panel members recalled, in the 90s sponsorship was going to solve everything and look where that got us. Now, just when the sector needs a significant injection of funds, we get business plans and better communication. As important as these are, especially if a ‘whole government’ approach to the arts can be developed, they cannot deal with the diminishing capacity of the sector to be the nation’s creative laboratory.

For her assessment, Winning said she was drawing on the discussion at the May RealTime-Performance Space Forum, Size Matters, which focussed on the needs of the small to medium performing arts sector. Company representatives and individual artists spoke about the difficulty of conveying what they believe is a critical situation, at very short notice, to an inadequate questionnaire for the enquiry. It was revealed at the SAMAG forum that the compilers, adding insult to injury, had reported having to do a lot of “hand-holding” in talking artists in the ‘small’ category through their financial responses. In this context there are no surprises in the report. It seemed simply that the document was good in bits, that the statistics would be useful and that artists should start learning the pragmatic language of politics (as someone suggested). Perhaps we should call this the Arnold E Newman Report: What, me worry?

Our guest at the Size Matters forum was Sue Donnelly, General Manager, Arts Development NSW Ministry for the Arts, who explained the workings of the Cultural Ministers Council and the beginnings of the report in a call from then Victorian Arts Minister Mary Delahunty, responding to demands from her constituents for action for the majority of arts activity not covered by the outcomes of the Nugent Report.

Donnelly explained why there was no immediate source of new funds available and why the Small-To-Medium Report was different from Nugent. “All the states contribute to the Cultural Ministers Council… It’s a nominal amount of money. The Commonwealth puts in half, the States put in the other half and because NSW is the largest state it tends to put in 28% of the funds. So they don’t have a huge kitty. There’s probably about half a million dollars at any one time…The Nugent Report was slightly different from other reports that had gone to Council. It had come through the initiative of the Major Organisations Fund at the Australia Council and it also happened to have a banker at the head of the Fund at the time, Helen Nugent, who went on to lead the enquiry and who lobbied very hard. When she set up this report she wanted to have some money at the end of it. And she knew the right people to talk to. …When all the ministers came together to finally talk about the Nugent Report, everything had been pretty well signed off.”

The fact that the Small-To-Medium enquiry had been conceived without financial imperatives was news to some. This lead to a discussion about what the current challenges were, for example the splitting and multiplying of current funding sources, each with their own criteria, means of funding and less and less application of the arm’s length principle. Anna Messariti (Playworks) spoke of attending a recent meeting where the current ‘funding formula’ was described as “a 2-headed monster, with the Australia Council at one head and the Minister’s discretionary funds at the other.” The speaker (a highly paid consultant) went on to suggest that last year the latter exceeded the former. Chris Hudson (Erth) talked about this issue in relation to the Major Festivals Initiative: “There are no guidelines for the application. No public avenues that I know of to approach this funding program and, basically, from what I can tell, it has to do with how much one can supplicate to the festival directors of Australia.”

Another issue raised was the phenomenon of small companies needing to operate as if they were large companies in their dealings with international festivals and promoters. This schizoid behaviour affects a large part of the sector. In 2001 RealTime edited and produced In Repertoire, A Guide to Australian Contemporary Performance, a booklet for the Audience & Market Development Division of the Australia Council for international distribution. Of the 70 mostly small companies documented, half had already toured internationally and often extensively. Mobile small to medium companies carry Australia’s reputation, character and innovations with them overseas. This is acknowledged by the report but is not enough to warrant additional support.

Some speakers saw a major problem for the sector in the way funding is constructed. Companies are tied to break-even project funding which doesn’t allow for long term artistic and business planning and, critically, any protection against fallout from risky ventures. There was a sense that the sector was constantly being encouraged to be sound but not given the means. Kate Dennis (Theatre Kantanka) said, “A lot of us have been working in the sector for 15, 20 years and we can’t give as much as we could when we were 20. There’s something about that whole business of applying for funding and not being able to ask for budgets where we’re allowed to put some money aside for cash reserves, and build up some security for our future.” Chris Hudson added provocatively, “I don’t think it’s really size we’re dealing with here. I think we’re dealing with conservatism…a lack of support for art perceived as risky or unusual.”

There was also a widespread feeling that as funds remained largely static and were heavily competed for, artists and companies were being judged not on their body of work but on the success or not of their last show. The concept of the project has taken over. It doesn’t matter how far you are down the track, the work is still treated as a one-off. “And the irony of this”, said Michael Cohen (Theatre Kantanka) “is that for some companies you can get more money by having that project existence than if you apply for program funding. You’re actually safer being on that edge. It’s a savage irony actually.”

The discrepancy between state and federal funding criteria was an issue for many companies present. Amanda Card from One Extra Dance described the dilemma of 2 totally different responses to the producer-model under which her company currently operates: “The thing I find really frustrating is that when we apply for funding from the Australia Council, we’re asked as a small sector organisation (we’re still project funded) to deal with the word “innovation” all the time. And yet triennially funded companies in the dance sector are not asked to respond to that word. They’re asked to respond to the notion of development of audiences, long term strategy and so on. So the people with less money are expected to do the innovation while those with more resources—and in dance that’s the people with the solidly booked 6-8 dancers employed for 12 months of the year—are not.”

Other issues raised about the impact of limited funds included artists leaving the sector (Rosalind Crisp: ”People give up. It’s too hard. And that’s a huge loss”); life below the poverty line (prominent artists in the room admitted to living like this all their lives); the exploitation of artists (Anna Messariti: “The situation is now critical and the further exploitation of artists and artworkers in this sector is ethically unsustainable”); the erosion of vision (Caitlin Newton-Broad: “a shrinking of our capacity to be intellectually engaged and to be refresh ourselves creatively”); and the wholesale demise of permanent ensembles in the sector (Michelle Vickers, Legs on the Wall: “For years the company had 4 artists and was generally creating shows with casts of 4-5 which meant that they were able to keep up a certain level of physical skill and also of physical language.” Now the company hires from project to project.)

Rosalind Crisp read from Omeo Dance Studio’s submission to the enquiry describing the personnel in this largely non-funded organisation as having “developed our skills as administrators, promoters and producers increasingly in conflict with our desires to simply do our work as artists. However, the net return from both endeavours is simply not enough to support a paid administrator and the prospect of queuing for one at the funding bodies is not encouraging.” She went on to say, “The growth of my work and the studio means that I’m now even more stressed than ever—artist, collaborator, choreographer, dancer/performer, publicist, producer, administrator, teacher, studio cleaner, mentor, caretaker, artistic adviser, board member, reporter to Cultural Ministers Councils and last but not least, partner to another artist. All I can say is Help! The critical challenge is survival.”

At the end of the RealTime-Performance Space forum, it was felt that while the huge aesthetic, political and geographical diversity of the sector gravitated against forming a lobby group, nonetheless pockets of activity, an email list and further open discussions could be used to find ways to apply pressure to governments to recognise the deleterious struggle that belies the apparent successes of Australia’s innovators in performance. The subsequent release of the report makes this all the more urgent.

See also full transcript of the RealTime-Performance Space forum Size Matters. The Report to Ministers on the Examination of the Small-To-Medium Performing Arts Sector can be downloaded from the DCITA website: www.dcita.gov.au/cmc/stand.html [link expired]

By the third week in March every second year, Adelaide is a city no longer throbbing, but in the throes of Festival detumescence. Arts exhaustion notwithstanding, tickets for a bus tour—by night, through this city’s heart, by Madame Ivana—proved scarce, stimulating a brisk black market at the Fringe bus depot. Whether this represented an opportunity to experience the romance that only a relic from Tsarist Russia can provide, or the frisson of rubbing up against Adelaide’s soiled underbelly, who can say? But whatever each passenger’s desire, all this— and more—awaited on the bus line from Hell.

Once aboard, the formidable Madame reminisced, gesticulated and cooed as the bus travelled to Colonel Light’s Vision, Adelaide’s ‘highest point.’ Resplendent in rabbit, with gold accessories offsetting her taupe toque, and just a little stoked—“Dahlinks”—it soon became obvious that Madame was less Slavic princess than sleazy pretender from Sydney’s Northern Shores. “Vulgar” was hissed by local matrons in the middle row; a word equally suited to Ivana’s young ‘consort’ Vladimir, who bullied us off the bus Soviet style, lined us up under Light’s monument, and forced Madame’s ‘food of love’ (oysters and cheap shots of vodka) down our throats.

From here it was all downhill as the tour entered its Descent into Ugliness. Forty-nine passengers, agog with apprehension and terror, passed sad, stuffed figures hanging off the Rosemont’s verandah, only to be confronted with Red Algal Bloom in Phillip Street’s nasty Saville Apartments and the Remand Centre. But alas! The Boulevard of Hope (West Terrace) provided no solace; only acres of aluminium, tacky car showrooms and the gigantism of BP’s green and gold multi-nationalism casting a ghoulish glow across the entire precinct.

Hydroponic Melancholy (the residential south) stood witness to the relentless swathe of what is euphemistically referred to as ‘development’; streets once full of heritage buildings since razed and replaced by schlock apartments and anally aligned standard white roses. Their ubiquitous matchbox balconies became bathetic under Vladimir’s torch beam. And on it went, into Vladimir’s Night—all besser and brutality—with passengers craning their necks to spot just one old building. Around the corner was Memories of Chernobyl (King William Street) and “the grand avenue of central Adelaide”, with “public art adorning the median strip”—for Ivana, “expressions of joy and freedom,” and for Vladimir “shits on sticks.”

The Bourgeois Façade (around Hutt Street) revealed further nifty ways to pave over parks and obliterate history, but it was the Prophylactic Veneers of Pirie and Waymouth Streets, which proved the tour’s undoubted highlight. Here, amongst bleak and bland 70s buildings, the entire bus spilled out into eerie dimness to experience the jewel of Adelaide City Council, the Topham Mall Car Park. Another regimented vodka break, a group photo opportunity and on into the night, celebrating more car parks and the Doors to Nowhere along Light Square. “Such a pity”, someone remarked, “that Adelaide’s Lord Mayor couldn’t be with us tonight.”

We were now on the home run and as a glorious climax, the Festival Centre loomed ahead like downtown Kabul, with its guts bombed out and barbed wire everywhere. “Oy Vey”, clucked Ivana, “A symbolic wound cutting through the heart of your cultural icon. Don Dunstan where are you now—we say shame Adelaide, shame!”

Perhaps this Festival-Deficit stood as architectural metaphor for this year’s festival. More likely, it’s typical of a new architectural aesthetic rampant in South Australia which recalls that 50s ‘heritage’ a concrete-and-brick-veneer(eal) generation was so partial to—if it’s old, bulldoze it; if it moves, shoot it.

This truly was the Imperial Tour of Shame and mercifully did not include Adelaide’s inner suburbs. Now resembling mouths full of bad teeth, countless old homes are being demolished to make way for faux heritage follies and what is affectionately known as ‘Tuscan shit.’ Indeed the Soviet mouth comes prominently to mind, as millions of citizens had their teeth routinely pulled and replaced by stainless steel dentures—an effect not unlike the stainless steel, self-cleaning dunnies smack in the middle of Victoria Square.

On this brief excursion, interstate passengers were genuinely shocked and delighted by Madame’s revelations. Like most tourists, they knew Adelaide is an economic slum, but one dignified by ‘culture’, ‘charm’, and a strong architectural heritage; that same image relentlessly promoted (along with grapes) by State tourist campaigns. We locals—dismayed about Adelaide’s cultural future, having recently lost so much cultural past—nevertheless saw a new vision of tourism emerge on this very coach. That is, a niche market exposing and celebrating the fabric of ‘Today’s Adelaide.’ Call it ugly, but hey, it works, it’s entertaining and it makes a buck. Grab a seat now though; my undercover agent Dmitri advises that tours are filling up with City Councillors and Ministers of Tourism, Heritage, Planning, and, of course, the Arts, as the city’s buildings come down.

Your City is Ugly: A Tour of Adelaide with Madame Ivana, devised by John Adley, Chris Barker, Julianne Pierce, Katrina Sedgwick & Daryl Watson; Adelaide Fringe 2002, March 12-13.

One of the hits of 2002 Next Wave was Christopher Brown’s virtuosic performance as Mr Phase. Phase is a kind of Kaspar Hauser for the 21st century, an innocent nurtured on the language of advertising and able to slip into the personae of media stars like Ali G with unconscious ease. Or, as the writers put it, “Just like the kid who grew up with the apes. But instead he grew up with the ads.” The half hour performance was co-written with technical director Thomas Howie and directed by Margaret Cameron whose meticulous approach to language is written all over Brown’s realisation of the dense, lateral text and its demanding gear changes. Mr Phase should travel, and a longer version would be welcome.

“If one of the aims of Next Wave’s PrimeTime was to take postmodernism and media consciousness to the cleaners, then the star of tonight’s show was undeniably Mr Phase. Starring the indefatigable Christopher Brown this piece of ‘commercial theatre’ is a collage of standup, monologue and physical theatre. Devised by Brown and Thomas Howie, Mr Phase is a vehicle for comic warfare against all that is kitsch and disposable in the fourth estate. Brown’s performance is a complete montage of media iconography. From the contents of Nutri-grain cereal, to a meditation on love—‘the reason for it all’—or the lack thereof, he is cocky, languid and brave. He performs part of his monologue in his underwear and recycles punchy media-speak in an excellently crafted script. ‘Passion has no volume control,’ he professes during a meditation on sex, and then offers ‘be baked not fried’ as sound ad-savvy advice. The sound design by David Franzke helps to match the show’s fast pace with style and fluidity. Brown has definitely got it—Rove’s stage presence, Adam Spencer’s wry cynicism and the slapstick sillies of Adam Sandler. Keep your remotes on hand, it won’t be long before we’re seeing him on primetime.”

Christopher Brown is a writer-performer who graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts Drama School in 1997. He has worked with Arena Theatre Company, with the Other Tongue Theatre Company, and in film and television.

Mr Phase, performer-writer Christopher Brown, writer-technical director Thomas Howie, director-coach Margaret Cameron, sound design David Franzke, video design Adrian Hauser, choreographic assistance Cazerine Barry; PrimeTime, May 17-25, 2002 Next Wave.

Neil Roberts was a wonderful artist. He made works that were imaginative, challenging, playful, and always thoughtful. His art is lyrical and elegant, but in its spare beauty there is strength and integrity. All those qualities of his art were so absolutely present in Neil’s life, and in the way that he related to the world and to all of us. He was a wonderful artist because of that—he was true to himself in his art making. And he was a wonderful artist because he saw himself as part of a community of artists, and because he made us see ourselves that way too.

Neil came to the Canberra region nearly 20 years ago, in 1983. How lucky we are to have had him here for so long. Klaus Moje, the inaugural Head of the Glass Workshop at the Canberra School of Art, invited Neil to join him in a program of innovative, adventurous teaching in the workshop, and in his two years at the School, Neil had a profound effect on his colleagues and his students. Though he subsequently chose the sometimes precarious life of an independent artist, he always had a strong commitment to teaching and was an important mentor to countless artists, many of whom are here today. Neil had been trained as a glass blower at the Jam Factory in Adelaide and then at the Orrefors Glass School in Sweden and the Experimental Glass workshop in New York. His practice shifted over time from that of an artist who worked in glass to a sculptor whose practice describes a kind of unfolding, a cycle of collecting and reflecting, forming bonds between objects, between objects and language; re-making, re-thinking, taking chances.

When Neil and eX de Medici turned the old glass factory in Uriarra Road, Queanbeyan into a studio, home and the sometime gallery Galerie Constantinople in the late 1980s, it became a focus for exciting and idiosyncratic art and for the huge network of friends and colleagues who lived in the region or visited from interstate and overseas. A visit to the factory was always a treat, whether it was a performance night, the opening of one of those fugitive 3-day exhibitions, a special party for a friend, or just a lazy afternoon with cups of tea in the sun. Neil’s working space tells so much about him—his love of ordinary objects, his sense of order, his respect for tools, for objecthood, for the thingness of things. In the last few years the space was transformed, and the zone of comfort that he and Barbara Campbell created there seemed like a natural evolution from his space to their space.

As well as the richness of his life and work at home, Neil was an artist out in the world. He keenly sought knowledge, adventure, and exchange with colleagues in Australia and overseas. His many rewarding professional experiences included artist’s residencies at the Australia Council Greene Street studio in New York, Art Lab in Manila, and the University of South Australia Art Museum. Neil loved and thrived on his engagement with artists, writers, curators, academics and any other curious people and his experiences with them, and with their work, were distilled into his thoughtful, beautiful art. A Filipino friend said about the work Neil made in response to his time in Manila that, “maybe it takes an outsider to realise the treasures inside ourselves”.

Everyone here, and others mourning elsewhere, has a special relationship with some particular work of Neil’s. For me, at ARX in 1989, when I saw Neil’s brilliant neon words ‘Tenderly, gently’ writ against the Perth skyline of the butch Bond tower and the corporate madness of the times, I knew I was seeing something special. It was an exquisite and poignant work of art. In a very real sense his work was always about masculinity: its culture, its rituals, its nonsense, and the fantastic possibilities of its transformation.

Neil’s art had that kind of arresting impact on many people. Flood Plane, his commissioned work for Floriade in 1990—an irrigation machine on Nerang Pool, strung with neon words from an Adam Lindsay Gordon poem, was breathtaking. And his work for the Canberra Playhouse, with its delicious play on words, is a constant source of delight for city strollers. Neil was enormously respected and valued in his adopted town and region, and he was the inaugural recipient of the ACT Creative Arts Fellowship in 1995, and the Capital Arts Patrons Organisation Fellow in 2000. Neil’s survey show last year at the School of Art, The Collected Works of Neil Roberts, elegantly curated by Merryn Gates, re-assembled some of his most poetic works; works which resonated with the gentle wit of Robert Klippel, and the formal grace of Rosalie Gascoigne, both artists he admired enormously. The Collected Works were about found, and lost, objects—in these, as in everything he did, Neil looked for the human traces in things, the fragments which reveal things to us, the unseen possibilities in history and in our own stories.

Many people have treasured objects given to them by Neil—postcards, toys, badges, photographs, rolling pins, words, and letters, and will forever treasure the dialogue they had with him over years. His genuine curiosity, attentiveness and compassion made him a unique friend. My son Frazer, when confronted with the awful reality of Neil’s death said “I didn’t think it would happen to someone I know, who carried me on his shoulders”. That feeling of disbelief has been echoed across the broad community to which Neil belonged—he carried many of us on his shoulders, lightly and cheerfully; he gave us huge support, in times of grief, and in times of hope. He valued people and he loved his friends, and we valued him and loved him too—an exceptional, stimulating and inspirational artist, and a lovely, gentle smiling presence.

And we had reckoned on him growing old, and always being there, carrying us on his broad shoulders.

Neil Roberts died accidentally on March 21, 2002. This eulogy was delivered at his funeral. Deborah Clark is the Editor of Art Monthly.

He left his shoes neatly arranged. The clothes had all been collected from the dry cleaner. Very particular books were left turned face down at very particular pages. (Kundera, Arendt, Brautigan). There was no note. Colin Hood put his affairs in order and took his life on the night of the 20th of March 2002. He was 45 years old.

The hardest thing about the suicide of a good friend is respecting their decision. One can only judge by the traces left behind, but it seems that Colin made up his mind to free himself, finally, from suffering.

Colin’s suffering was of the most abstract kind, but no less painful for that. It should really come as no surprise that a man so capable of loving others freely came to that capacity for generosity out of direct experience of a life of suffering; of life as suffering.

Colin will not suffer any more. And although I miss him terribly, although I feel direct and terrible loss to my own life from his passing, there is a sense in which this pain and loss on my part is a selfish feeling. What’s really most important is that Colin will suffer no more.

Sometimes I would see him at a party or a function—he led a very public life—but then I would notice that he had slipped quietly away. And sometimes I would wonder if Colin was alright or not. I believe it may have been some small part of his intention to free his friends from their concern.

I loved Colin. As a lot of people did, I think. And I think he truly loved his friends. He was always a point of connection between people. Communities came together through him and because of him. Colin always gave me the sense that love and life were possible. This was his gift. This is his gift, still.

He had such a wide range of gifts for people. He was a beautiful dancer. If Colin was up and dancing then the whole room was threaded together with his sensuous joy. But in addition to his physical presence, he was a listener. He heard people. He heard not just their gripes and schemes, he heard their being. He always gave the impression of being capable of responding to your experience of your existence, even if you were not at that moment capable of responding to it yourself.

Colin was a perceptive and cultured and intelligent man. When he wrote, he wrote well and perceptively. He saw through the pretensions of self-promoters and the perverse logic of institutions.

If there was a space in which real art or culture was being made, Colin unfailingly supported it. He worked away behind the scenes in art, writing and performance with patience and care and with little concern for reward. He was indispensable.

Colin was many things to many people: friend, lover, comrade. But he was also the favourite funny uncle of a very large, very dysfunctional urban family. Colin showed many people the path toward creating their own way of life, usually just by example. From his little apartment in Kings Cross, he created a whole way of life that I, for one, feel privileged to have shared.

The last time I saw him was outside Kings Cross Station on a bright, warm morning. And I prefer to think that whenever I return to that old neighbourhood where we all laughed and cried and beat ourselves against the edges of life, he will be there waiting for me with a smile and a kiss and a hug, and his quiet but powerful sense of being in the world.

Colin Hood and RealTime

Keith Gallasch & Virginia Baxter
Colin Hood was one of the original team that worked on creating RealTime in 1994 and 1995. He co-edited several issues, wrote incisive and demanding reviews, proof-read and concocted marvellous titles for articles, and contributed significantly to the energy and sense of purpose and fun (there was a party with every edition) that was so needed in those early years when RealTime’s demise always seemed imminent. He was not good at keeping meeting times, but he’d turn up at all hours on our doorstep (home was the RealTime office) with copy, gossip, ideas.
We are saddened by Colin’s passing. We honour his intelligence and his passion, and regret that in the end his restless spirit could not find a home among the living.

Janet Merewether is a screenwriter/ director and curator, and a designer of motion graphics and film title sequences for feature and documentary films. Her short films and videos, including the recent award-winning Cheap Blonde and Contemporary Case Studies, arebeing screened in Australia and internationally at a wide range of mainstream and experimental festivals, including the 2001 New York Film Festival. Her design work has featured in The Boys and The Diplomat. She lectures in Design and Experimental Film at AFTRS, UTS and UWS, and has just returned from travelling with a program of short experimental films by Australian women directors, Eye for Idea, which screened in Tampere (Finland) and Berlin.

I saw very few films in childhood. I can only remember the Marx Brothers and Jacques Tati. As a high school student I took myself off to the WEA (Workers Education Association) Film Group, so my first film experiences were not commercial cinema but sitting there as a 16-year-old seeing Godard, Eisenstein, an Esben Storm film; a whole mixed bag of Australian and European art house films, and later Surrealist and Dada cinema at art school. I didn’t grow up watching American cinema at all.

I didn’t set out to make films. I did a one year design course at AFTRS after art school where I’d been working with computers as design tools since the early Macs came out in 1985. I started to see the potential of the camera as a design tool, playing around with multiple exposures and the design and animation processes within the camera. Making video clips, I explored the use of an Oxberry Rostrum animation camera and realised it was an interesting bridge into making films which worked on an intensely visual level. During an exchange with a design school in Paris I spent a year in the Cinemathèque/ Videothèque, viewing screenings at the Pompidou Centre and video art installations. It was a huge education in classic cinema—directors such as Agnes Varda, the French New Wave, Bresson; contemporary American video artists like Gary Hill and Bill Viola. I developed a very different vocabulary of films as my reference points and thought about film in a much more sculptural way. Unable to make an installation work as a major project at film school, I spent 6 months working with the Oxberry animation camera on a stills-based animation, shot with actors, and exploring the possibilities of working with slides, cut-ups and rear projection (A Square’s Safari, 1992).

What I wasn’t seeing in international avant garde or experimental work was a history of women (Maya Deren aside) working with experimental forms or using language in a different way. Political thought or pure abstraction in avant garde cinema is wonderful in itself, but although I was interested in the visual and aesthetic explorations they were making, I wanted to work with performance and language and comedy. In a lot of political or left wing cinema comedy is demonised as trivial, and I take comedy quite seriously.

Across 10 years of stylistically varied work, comedy is the continuum. Tourette’s Tics (1994) is based on some of Freud’s case studies—ideas about hysterical women. I remember in the research project becoming incredibly depressed and upset by the material—the cocaine treatments and the pathologising of women’s bodies as diseased—it’s very intense and upsetting. Yet somehow, in a perverse way, Tourette’s Tics became a comedy. This also happened in my latest film, Contemporary Case Studies (2001)—a script with big, current, pressing issues for women and men. Even if I’m making something serious it often comes out as comedy. I don’t seem to have much control—it’s probably how the Dadaists worked with comedy.

With Cheap Blonde (1998), I was interested in the idea of a game, of using a very limited number of materials—I have 12 words and one image of a woman, and the image is a very short-looped section but the background changes. I gained permission to use the image of the cheap blonde from a company at a trade fair who were selling chroma key broadcast equipment. I’d been planning for a while to use the sort of imagery that you find in TV broadcast equipment trade shows. I’d often seen the models hired to sit on motor bikes. For the Sony stand, for example, you’d have lines of TV executives testing out new cameras on hired blondes. The assumption is that the blokes are the ‘tech-heads’, that the viewer is male. I’ve always struggled with that neutralising male gaze because it’s never my perspective, and I constantly found that I became very engaged with looking at men as they are looking. Also, I was interested in how illusions are built up in films and broadcasting. The illusion in Cheap Blonde is presented first—a woman in front of a waterfall. It’s only after a while that you realise she’s shot against a blue screen, that there’s probably a fan blowing her hair, and the constructed nature of the image is exposed. I was drawing a parallel in the soundtrack where there’s a similar construction demonstrating the artifice of cinema: the sentence, “A famous filmmaker said ‘Cinema is the history of men filming women’”, is repeated 22 times, as the 12 words are rearranged.

I was interested in the strangely subtle shifts of meaning in language. I used a synthetic voice in order to demonstrate the emotional qualities to be found in computer-generated voices. The sampled voices weren’t without emotion, and I wanted to know whether we listen differently according to whether it’s a male or female synthesised voice. I found the sound of the computer voice quite mesmerising, and the looped image of the woman was quite mesmerising as well. It sets up a strange conflict—even while we intellectually critique the blonde woman selling us a product, shampoo or a camera, we’re still drawn in by the gesture of the image.

In Contemporary Case Studies: An unromantic comedy, I wanted to work with performers again, in a proper studio, construct an ambitious mise en scène, construct a stage design. I wanted the artificial look of showrooms. Contemporary Case Studies is a showroom of emotions where each section of the film contrasts documentary, fictional and experimental genres in a very artificial, highly stylised space to cut out any attempt to read it naturalistically. The non-professional actors’ performances allow for ambiguous readings. I’m responding to the world, to texts, to media, or following models like language lessons (Making Out in Japan, 1996) and then playing with structures. Purely working with the visual quality has never been enough. My work is often included in mainstream festivals—they actually want new forms in Edinburgh and New York. Australian audiences don’t get a chance to see new work due to lack of distribution, with the exception of SBS.

Both these activities give me a way of working with other people. Through my titling work I can stay abreast with new technologies, work with other directors, and participate in the mainstream industry. The program I recently curated (Eye for Idea for Finland and Berlin) featured work by women filmmakers from the late 80s and early 90s crucial in making Australian cinema known (eg Jackie Farkas’s Illustrated Auschwitz). Coming after the feminist essay and documentary films of the 70s, these short, formally challenging films have won awards all over the world, but are already lost to viewers here. They play with the formal qualities of cinema and extend it to critique social, political and gender issues—a very different avant garde from the Ubu group in the 60s who were parodying or making purely aesthetic experimentations. Meaning can be communicated through the image—the current state of filmmaking treats the image as the window and not the producer of meaning.

You can’t sum up a festival like Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) in a short space. Better to mark out a few current questions and suggest ways the films help us think them through. While HKIFF is under pressure to maintain its position as a leading Asian showcase, there is so much to be discovered about Asian cinema that one could happily spend several festivals playing catch up.

Every year we ask the same questions of Hong Kong’s commercial cinema: are the glories in the past, and/or is it about to take over the world? This year’s key exhibit is Stephen Chiau’s Shaolin Soccer. It’s been snapped up by Disney, and while some Canto-fans find it too internationally accessible, what could be more central to Hong Kong than the search for fresh combinations of saleable popular elements? Here the mix involves splicing together soccer, kung fu and digital effects. As the program notes point out, “martial arts fiction has been a powerful tool with which the Cantonese people deal with modernity.”

The most impressive Hong Kong film (and winner of the FIPRESCI Prize) was the animated feature My Life as McDull. It uses diverse animation styles and cute Hello Kitty type figures to contemplate the way bullshit about the magic of childhood leads to an adult life of quiet disillusion. It’s a strongly local film, but also a fresh take on what lies beyond the end of freshness.

While Hong Kong’s art cinema was represented primarily by an Ann Hui retrospective, the most interesting achievement was Fruit Chan’s Hollywood Hong Kong. Chan’s movies always stem from such obviously good ideas. In the most incisive architectural juxtaposition since Psycho, this film brings together new high-rises (felicitously named Hollywood Apartments), with the shantytown at their base. The story deals with a prostitute and a family of fat men who sell pork. Flesh—source of fantasy, pain, and profit—constitutes us and keeps us weighted to the ground. The symbolism in the title marks out an opposition that structures contemporary life: the world of transnational consumer fantasy and the physical, historical world.

If a major theme in Asian cinema is the disparate pulls of past and present, the festival exemplified this with its Cathay studio retrospective. Chief attraction here was the 1960 musical, Wild, Wild Rose with Cathay’s main star, Grace Chang, as a nightclub chanteuse. You can trace a straight (though broken) line back to the 1930s Shanghai melodramas of Ruan Lingyu, where the strong, fallen woman throws it all away for some weak-chinned guy, not man enough to recognise the magnificence of her degradation.

Grace Chang was all over this retrospective. How can a musical called Mambo Girl not be great? Grace has the moves and the knitwear. She concentrates on the stylish shuffle sideways rather than the Great Leap Forward. She mambos and cha-chas through a digressive story that includes visits to nightclubs to watch acts like ‘Margo the Z-Bomb.’ Is it fanciful to imagine a print of this film finding its way into Mao and Jiang Qing’s compound, and in their horror, the seeds of the Cultural Revolution are sown?

Cathay’s comedies, such as The Battle of Love, Sister Long Legs, and Our Dream Car are full of stylish young things with new, western commodities. You might need a neo-realist film to clean your palate afterward, but they mark an important claim by the Chinese for a right to the conspicuous consumption that was for so long the prerogative of the coloniser.

Mainland Chinese films are also grappling with rapid socio-economic transformation right now. Several dealt with economic migrants to the cities, employing a style I’ll call International Chinese Realism (none of these films will probably be shown in China) comprising grubby settings, long takes, minimal non-diegetic sound with the atmosphere track brought forward in the mix. The characters are always cold, and the main reason they go to bed together is to get warm. Wang Chao’s The Orphan of Anyang was the highlight of this group with its minimalism and bold angular compositions. It builds strong intimacies out of long moments in which characters silently share noodles.

As Asian youth culture increasingly looks towards Japan, you wonder whether the Japanese are up to the job. This year’s innovation is the ennui of young Japanese. We know the straight world is boring, but now rebellion is boring too. Toyoda Toshiaki’s Blue Spring is a postmodern Zero de Conduite, taking schoolkid cool almost to a point of catatonia, and the title of When Slackers Dream of the Moon tells you all you need to know.

Suwa Nobuhiro’s H Story similarly abandons narrative as an endeavour too weighty for these times. It starts as the record of an attempt to remake Hiroshima Mon Amour. It’s a clever conceit: a film about the making of a film which is a remake of an earlier film about the making of a film. More an exercise in the failure of signification than a comment on it, the film has to be endured, but it repays the effort through its subversion of any certainties about cinema.

Korea was the breakthrough cinema last year, seizing half of its domestic market, so it was disappointing to see so few Korean films at the festival. Kim Ki-duk, the focus of Melbourne’s retrospective this year, had international success with The Isle. His heavily allegorical Address Unknown confirms the way Kim builds his films around characters in impossible positions. The only options are to re-imagine the world or to destroy yourself, and ultimately the maintenance of the social order relies on the way we find it easier to grasp the second option.

While there were important political films such as Tahmineh Milaneh’s The Hidden Half, the best of the new Iranian films returned to the territory of childhood. Abolfazl Jalili’s Delbaran is a triumph of bold simplicity about a young Afghan boy who works as a gofer in an Iranian border town. It is a celebration of those who keep things running in a world which constantly breaks down. It is a cinema of long takes, simply designed performances, golden light and gentle humour.

Tsai Ming-liang’s What Time Is It There? closed the festival. Like Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang, Tsai is a minimalist, but a minimalist who wants to be liked. While he uses long takes to explore time and space, he ultimately wants to make his characters readable in terms of psychological pathologies. The characters act out cleverly constructed scenarios of loneliness, grief and alienation while the tone resolves into one of cruelty.

Finally, why should we be interested in Asian film? One answer is that we watch films for the pleasure of learning something new, both about cinema and about the world. For a country whose cinema has so few options open to it, Australians should appreciate the formal and industrial diversity of Asian cinemas.

Over the last 4 years, the REVelation International Film Festival has gradually built a distinct and cohesive identity by offering a vibrant diversity of independent films. This has always been a festival that celebrates the sub-cultural fringes, the bizarre and the eccentric as much as it caters for serious film buffs. This year’s mix of short and feature fiction is complemented by a generous selection of documentaries, a sample of which fell into my hands to preview.

Fans of Jan Svankmájer’s idiosyncratic style will be excited by the prospect of his recent feature Otesánek (Little Otik) in which a dark Czech folktale is the template for a fabulously perverse tale of desire and the unreality it inserts into the everyday. A barren couple’s craving for a child becomes displaced onto a tree root (dug up and fashioned into a proxy child by the husband). When the latter becomes animate, it develops an insatiable appetite to feed its monstrous growth. Engaging and distinctive, this meditation on the subterranean aspects of desire filters Svankmájer’s black humored take on the complexities of adult life through the child’s view.

Of an extensive and diverse selection of documentary film, a definite highlight is Monteith McCollum’s superb Hybrid. This surprising film reveals the passionate lifework of Mid-Western corn farmer Milton Beeghly in his quest to interbreed different strains of corn to create the kind we are familiar with today. Slowly evolving, and shot in grainy black-and white, Hybrid features subtle time-lapse images and delightful stop-frame animation to augment exploration of its subject and of the ramshackle spaces of the aged farm. The lyric treatment of the taciturn Beeghly reveals a devotional relationship to the land. His work is a quiet hymn which opens up a sense of self conditional on the cycle of organic time and natural wonder. Intimate, witty and insightful, this gem of a documentary portrait eclipsed its category to receive the Grand Jury Award for Best Feature at the US Slamdance festival and the Fipresci Critics Award at the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam.

Three of the other documentaries that featured in my sneak preview were polished productions from the US. Arisman: Facing The Audience (dir. Tony Smith) presents an engaging profile of graphic artist Marshall Arisman in his exploration of the mysterious and darker aspects of humanity. The speed and flow with which the artist demonstrates his working method in the studio, is augmented by his amicable dialogue and tales of extrasensory perception (he claims to see auras) which descend from his grandmother who was a medium. The camera examines Arisman’s complex imagery carefully, sensitively mapping out his painting and sculpture in a way that encourages a sense of getting inside the works.

The Hotel Upstairs (Daniel Baer) opens a window onto the lives of a handful of the 20,000 long-term boarders who live in residential hotels in San Francisco. Frank and sensitive depictions of the former reveal not only the range of lifestyle values, but also the dignity with which these have-nots have redefined the American Dream through ad-hoc community and coexistence.

Money For Nothing: Behind the Business of Pop Music (produced by the Media Education Foundation) offers a revealing glimpse into the current state of music distribution. It focuses on the future implications of the vertical alignment of production, distribution and retail into the Big Five Corporations of the mainstream music industry. Narrated by Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth) and featuring interviews with independent artists (Ani DiFranco, Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna, Michael Franti, Public Enemy’s Chuck D), Money For Nothing teases out the dilemma for creative artists in this corporate ‘massification’ of music production. Cogent and highly satisfying.

Australian documentaries also make a firm showing in this year’s festival. My sample included the early days of internet trespass with Kevin Anderson’s In the Realm Of the Hackers. This locates the thriving hacker community of Melbourne as world centre of the scene in the mid 80s. Here it unearths the story of teen hackers whose dedicated prank penetration of high-level computer security systems eventually forced the Australian government to create legislation to define computer crime. Despite an over dependence on ‘dramatic recreation’ as visual material (ostensibly in order to protect real identities), this is an intriguing look at those mythic, formative days of the information economy.

Rainbow Bird and Monster Man (Dennis K Smith) presents the harrowing tale of one man’s trial for murder. It is also a revelation of his struggle to survive a childhood decade of hideous physical and sexual abuse in the ‘bad old days’ of the 50s, where social taboo rendered his dilemma inconceivable and hence invisible. The frankness and sensitivity of testimonial is compelling, and the camera captures the complexity of its subject with due respect and maturity. Also heavily ‘recreated’, the imagery none the less provides some rewarding moments amidst the hard-going narrative.

Shannon Sleeth’s short The Meat Game offers a snapshot of workers in a rural farming town with only one main processing industry: the meat-works and abattoir. It’s a gentle, amicable portrait of one key family and features discussion with the workers about what the work means to them in their own particular context.

This year’s REV festival is shaping up to be a very satisfying mix. Given the diminished state of independent showings in Perth, film fans would be crazy not to check it out.

The REAL: life on film festival has grown bigger and broader over the past year and now bills itself as “Australia’s Premier International Documentary Festival.” The previous focus on human rights and social justice is still there but it’s been joined by a few other topics—art and design, music, culture, history, environment and identity—which makes for a fairly broad agenda (although I guess it still leaves room for some wildlife docos). This year’s program toured Melbourne, Sydney, Perth and Adelaide and drew impressive attendances, with some sessions sold out. There’s clearly an audience out there for new documentaries, a consequence perhaps of the boom in DIY filmmaking and so-called reality television. We’ve all become REAL junkies.

Overall, the selection of films demonstrated that while the human rights component of the festival is still as strong as ever, there’s some way to go before it can justifiably claim to be a showcase for contemporary documentary making.

A key feature of REAL: life on film is the emphasis on locally made films. About half of the documentaries are from Australian filmmakers and it is here that the social justice agenda is most explicit. These films tend to follow a fairly narrow range of themes such as land rights and Indigenous stories (Fight for Country, Stranger in My Skin, Jetja Nai Medical Mob, Nganampa Trespass); or working class culture and the debilitating effects of poverty, drugs and crime (The Meat Game, The Woodcutter’s Son, Staying Out, Kim and Harley and the Kids). Mix in some autobiography and family history (My Mother India, Mick’s Gift, Welcome to the Waks Family) and that pretty well covers the bulk of the Australian component.

That doesn’t mean the films themselves are uniform or uninteresting—though it feels unfair to single out any particular film for comment because they all work in their own context. They are all passionate, painstakingly crafted works produced by dedicated filmmakers. There is a steady, insistent awareness of the issues involved, and it is obvious that the subjects and topics in front of the lens have seeped under the skin of the filmmakers, bringing forth committed, strategic interventions. They are documentaries that matter.

What it does mean, though, is that if you want to explore the effects of race and culture, class and politics, then the Australian documentaries in the festival fit the bill. If you want to find out about female Japanese wrestlers, or a lesbian, folk-singing Tupperware salesperson, or Romanian subway children, or just listen to some Bluegrass music (bearing in mind that these films are also about race, culture, class and politics), then you have to look overseas.

The other aspect of the locally made material is that it tends to be somewhat homogenous in form, a consequence of its intended audience. Most of the films are about half an hour or an hour long, designed to fill a slot in a particular documentary series or schedule. At times, the festival felt like a preview screening for the SBS/ABC documentary departments. This is inevitable given the current realities governing the commissioning and production of local material but again, it meant that the longer format, which brings with it certain advantages, was left to the overseas films.

A film such as Runaway (dir. Kim Longinotto/Zib Mir-Hossein), for instance, benefits simply from being 87 minutes long rather than 27 or 55 minutes. Runaway needs that extra space to work in because of the manner in which it allows the subjects—Iranian teenage girls staying at a refuge—to tell their own stories, and then stays with them through various encounters with their families until the point at which most of them disappear from view through the main gate. Voice-overs, precis or scene-setting context are not provided, so the only information we have to go on is whatever the young women reveal, as well as our own understanding of Iran and Islam, however patchy or ill-informed that may be. This challenges our impartiality in judging what the girls should do—stay at the refuge or return to their families? Thus, while we can acknowledge the bravery of the girls in challenging the social order and seeking to escape, we also have to accept that we can’t tell what is best for them. A highly poignant film that works because of its openness and semi-detachment; we can’t help wondering about the girls’ fates precisely because that is how we are left—there’s no neat closure, no emotional safety net, no way of knowing.

The other notable aspect of REAL: life on film is that, in a festival which places culture at its heart, the most significant omission is documentary culture itself: its history, genres, practitioners and ideologies. Questions of form and style, rather than just content, are elided, and no space is provided for experimental work, docu-drama or mockumentary. The idea of what constitutes documentary film therefore appears self-evident, which might come as a surprise to some people. In particular, it would be interesting to see the REAL element of the festival given a really good shake-up. At the very least some acknowledgement needs to be made that problems of representation, objectivity, engagement and so on are day-to-day issues for documentary film makers, not something that can be taken for granted. This is particularly important at a time when there is clearly a desire, a hunger among audiences for factually driven representations, not to mention an awareness of media manipulation and the manner in which reality is produced.

For the record, there were 4 winners of REAL: life on film awards announced at the festival. My Mother India (dir. Safina Uberoi) won the Odyssey Channel Award for Best Documentary; East Timor—Birth of a Nation: Rosa’s Story (dir. Luigi Aquisto) won the SBS Award for the Promotion of Cultural Diversity through Film; and Welcome to the Waks Family (dir. Barbara Chobocky) won the Award for Excellence in Documentary Filmmaking. And Kim and Harley and the Kids (dir. Katrina Sawyer) won the Award for Excellence in Documentary Filmmaking.

REAL: life on film, Melbourne, May 3-8; Sydney May 9-15; Perth, May 16-18, and Adelaide, May 23, 25 & 27.

Martha Ansara has been making films since 1971 and of the more than a dozen films she has made, 3 titles were still lodged with AFI Distribution, the distribution arm of the Australian Film Institute. Janet Merewether has been making films for over 10 years, and has made 7 short films as well as some video and music clips. She also had 3 films in active distribution with AFID. They are just 2 of the hundreds of filmmakers whose 1500 titles made up the AFID collection. They are now concerned not only with the practical details of retrieving their films and associated materials from the AFI’s Melbourne headquarters, but with the much more worrying problem of finding another distributor.

This is because Australia’s only national screen culture body has had to close down its distribution service. This, despite being the largest distributor of Australian short films and documentaries, and one that has seen the wide dissemination of work by Australian filmmakers to a variety of hirers and purchasers for nearly 30 years. The Australian Film Commission (AFC) announced 2 years ago that it would no longer fund AFI Distribution because it believed that its users came mainly from the educational sector, which should therefore take responsibility for the service. The AFI has tried to operate without government funding for the last 12 months. “We actually did very well,” says Marketing and Development Manager Jason Cook, “but just not enough to keep going without any subsidy.”

The AFI is currently preparing final royalty statements and sending them out to filmmakers along with a letter explaining the situation. “The filmmakers will get all the brochures, stills, and correspondence related to each title, and we’re including a listing of all distributors who might be interested in taking the films, along with other alternatives, because we do believe the films should remain visible and accessible”, Cook explains.

Martha Ansara recognises that older films such as hers may have a problem. “The activity on my films was in dribs and drabs—but it adds up! Everything was in place at the AFI for those films to keep making sales, year after year, but would another distributor be prepared to set that all up again? There are a number of films, like mine, that aren’t new, but still have an active life. For an acquisitions officer at an educational institution, what will they do now whenever a film comes up for renewal, or a tape dies? Will they have to track each filmmaker down? And will the filmmaker have kept their original materials?” She believes that small unsubsidised distributors can only afford to be interested in immediately rewarding markets, and will only take on newer films with such possibilities. “They really won’t be concerned with issues of preservation and long term availability.” She’s now debating whether to try and distribute the films herself, or join with filmmakers in a similar position and perhaps establish a website.

Janet Merewether is not so concerned about her own films, “I do a lot of distribution work on them on my own, anyway,” she explains. What really worries her is the loss of a centralised source of information on filmmakers and their work. “There must be a central point—even if it’s a database—because filmmakers move around a lot, and there must be a way of finding out where they are, and how to get their films, or where their original materials are kept. I was curating the program Eye for Idea (short work and inventive documentary by women filmmakers in the 90s) for this year’s Tampere Film Festival (Finland), as part of its Australian retrospective, and I found it very hard to track down some of the makers of the films I wanted which were not represented by the AFI and several of the films were missing. These were films I knew, because they’d been well received at various festivals and had won awards in the last 5 years, and yet they had disappeared. If it’s already hard to track down award-winning, recent films, how much harder is it going to be with the AFI gone? Surely someone should be responsible for maintaining a complete record of Australian production?’

Jason Cook believes that older short films still have a life because of new technologies and the opportunities they provide, such as broadband, compilations on DVD and the possibility of being used as a support to a feature on DVD. “The problem is that although there are a number of opportunities in the market place, often a particular distributor may not be exploiting all those areas, so filmmakers may have to deal with more than one distributor,” he explains. Likewise, would a client who wants to buy large numbers of films from the one agency, confident that they are getting a good range of films of similar quality, “be prepared to deal with a number of different distributors with a few films each, or even worse, a number of filmmakers with only 1 or 2 films?”

Back in the early 70s the filmmakers who were making that first rush of short films and documentaries realised how important it was for their films to reach the audience. As low-budget production, funded through various government agencies, gathered momentum filmmakers formed the Sydney and Melbourne Filmmakers Co-ops and became actively involved in the distribution process. From 1975, the latter was supported by the AFC. After the closure of the Co-ops, the AFI became the main distributor of Australian work. Its collection included early short films by many famous names, an important collection of films by and about women, many documentaries, films by Indigenous filmmakers on Indigenous issues, and work from the students of Australia’s film schools.

AFC Director Kim Dalton doesn’t see any great cultural importance in the ending of nearly 30 years of continuous AFC funding of distribution. “I’d rather say that the AFC reacted to a situation over 25 years ago, when it was approached by Australian filmmakers. It was the best way to get those films seen [then], and the AFC continued to support it while it was. What we have done is withdrawn funding from one organisation. But the AFC is still very actively involved in making sure there is a range of exhibition and distribution mechanisms for short films and documentaries [including] festivals, screening events, regional tours.”

He argues that smaller distributors: short film specialists like Flickerfest, and libraries like the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, are already home to a number of film collections, and should pick up many of the titles. “There was, in fact, an enormous level of complaint and disquiet about the AFI, whether or not it was deserved. I’m sure there are some very interesting and energetic small distributors out there who, now that there is some space, will do good work. The AFC has not washed its hands of this area of activity—we’re talking to people, and listening to proposals. It’s an area that is organic, dynamic, and changing—I’m convinced that the majority of the films will still be able to be seen.”

Andrew Pike of Ronin Films, one of Australia’s oldest independent distributors, believes there is still a role for a subsidised distribution service. “The distribution of such a wide range of films, and particularly short films, just isn’t commercially viable, and can really only be carried out if it is part of the cultural strategy of the funding bodies.” Ronin will pick up a number of films from the AFI,” but they will have to fit in with its almost entirely documentary collection, mainly marketed to the educational sector.

Bronwyn Kidd says that Flickerfest has been distributing short films in Australia for 4 years, selling mainly to Eat Carpet and to a small educational market. “We’re putting together a first catalogue of about 20 titles for the overseas market. We’ve been getting a lot of interest from overseas broadcasters over the years, so we’re taking advantage of that. The overseas market is much bigger; many international broadcasters in both Europe and Asia have short film strands, and there’s an educational market, with libraries wanting an Australian representation. We see it as an extensive and growing area. There’s a lot happening with cable channels, where the audiences are bigger and seem to be looking for alternative entertainment. It’s complementary to what we’re doing with the festival, and similar to what a number of overseas short film festivals do.”

However, she doesn’t see Flickerfest as taking on many titles. “We’d see a manageable catalogue as being about 70 films at any given time, and I think most filmmakers are aware that their films have a finite life of about 3 years. It’d be no good us taking on any films that had been in the AFI’s collection for several years.”

Several agencies are working to guarantee at least the preservation of the titles from the AFI collection, and to ensure that the films are accessible. Filmmakers are being made aware of their options, whether or not the film is picked up by another distributor. Films can be lodged with ScreenSound Australia, Australia’s national archive, and even if ScreenSound already holds the film, it may be interested in acquiring additional prints for preservation or viewing purposes. However, “we neither want to, nor would we be able to replace the AFI’s distribution service,” insists ScreenSound Director Ron Brent “and I’m concerned that the large majority of the films won’t be picked up by any other distributor.” The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (formerly Cinemedia), home of one of Australia’s largest film collections, which lends films to registered borrowers (mainly film societies, educational and community groups), had been one of the AFI’s largest clients. Collections Manager Simon Pockley explains that ACMI is neither a distributor nor an archive, but a lending collection. “We do want to make sure that as many as possible of the short films from the AFI remain accessible,” he adds.

“If the film is to be available through ACMI, who sells the film to them now?” asks Martha Ansara. “And who handles any requests for a new print?”

This is a confusing and worrying time for filmmakers. “I’ve got a project in development,” says Janet Merewether, “but I’m already spending so much time on distribution, in contact with festivals and sales agents, that I can’t get on with my filmmaking. What will happen to Australian production if that happens to many other filmmakers?”

“Where is the filmmaking community in all this?” asks Martha Ansara. “The only way we had a distribution service in the first place was because of filmmakers’ action and lobbying. Where is the pressure now?”

Released within months of each other, Panic Room (David Fincher) and The Others (Alejandro Amenábar) share an obsession with the darker side of domestic life. These films reverse the traditional association between home, stability and security, emphasising instead entrapment and danger. They join a long list of films where the home transforms into a jail, confining and controlling its inhabitants. This list includes Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965), with its evil apartment where white walls trickle blood and sprout hands that grasp and threaten to engulf its inhabitant. Another is Robert Wise’s ‘deranged’ Hill House in The Haunting (1963). Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), is a more recent example of menacing Gothic architecture. The Overlook Hotel is haunted by the restless spirits of the Indian burial ground beneath. The interior is designed like a labyrinth; it has elevators that gush blood and a ghostly inhabitant who transforms from an alluring beauty to a vile corpse in the blink of an eye. The most significant link between all of these films is their representation of the domestic space as uncanny: things are not as they first seem and most alarmingly, people are not as they appear.

Originally Nicole Kidman was to star in Panic Room as well as The Others, until a knee injury forced her to abandon the project just 2 weeks before shooting commenced. She was replaced by Jodie Foster who brings a quiet resilience to the role, recalling some of the more tenacious female characters in recent American cinema like Ripley in Alien (1986) and Sarah Conner in Terminator 2, Judgement Day (1991). As the central character of the Gothic drama, Nicole Kidman is perfectly cast. Her porcelain skin, seemingly untouched by sunlight, combined with the stiffness of her body, express a reserve vital for a narrative that is sustained by her denial. Resplendent in a deep blue, impossibly well-fitting knitted jacket, Kidman’s character appears as a nostalgic reinvention of the coolness of Greta Garbo or Ingrid Bergman.

The retrospective impulse is most evident in the homage to Hitchcock featured in both The Others and Panic Room. Each director produces a version of Hitchcock’s famous circular shot designed to replicate Alicia’s (Ingrid Bergman) bleary eyed vision as she wakes and tilts her head, struggling to focus after a night of drinking with Devlin (Cary Grant) in Notorious (1946). By recreating this shot, both Amenábar and Fincher restate Hitchcock’s concern with the problem of vision. Do the protagonists see clearly, or are they hallucinating? Disorientation, doubt, hesitancy and disbelief are staples of the Gothic. This occlusion of vision is facilitated by a distinct lack of light in The Others where windows are barricaded and doors kept locked. With its muted tones and interiors sheltered in darkness, this film is as close to black and white as is possible in mainstream cinema. Panic Room also limits its color range to steely greys, blues and whites, with more darkness than light in its climactic scenes. Both rely on darkness and off screen space to suggest menace, both manipulate point of view, systematically revealing and concealing information, raising apprehension when the familiar becomes unfamiliar.

Amenábar’s The Others develops suspense by questioning perception. Characters are defined according to those who see and embrace the ghosts, and others who resist the presence of the supernatural. In The Others, this split is represented by a gulf that separates Grace from her 2 children and the trio of ‘new’ servants. While the children interact with the ghosts, Grace remains in denial until the final moment when the connection between the spirits and the home is revealed.

In the Gothic, the haunted house is almost a character in its own right. In The Others, the mansion is obsessively controlled by Grace with curtains drawn and each door locked before another can be opened. Amenábar highlights this by amplifying the jangling sound of skeleton keys on the soundtrack. According to Grace, her children are ‘photo-sensitive’; they have an allergy to light where exposure will result in suffocation. Isolation is emphasised further with Grace’s pronouncement to the servants that the house does not have electricity, nor does she own a radio or television: silence is prized above sound. This is a mansion that is haunted by loss: the loss of childhood and the loss of companionship. Grace reveals that her original servants vanished “into thin air”, and she waits for her husband to return from a war that ended long ago.

The mansion imprisons its inhabitants. It is surrounded by a dense landscape making transit difficult, if not impossible. When she attempts to find help beyond the limits of her estate, Grace becomes disorientated in a forest thick with fog. The most resonant image of The Others frames Grace between the iron bars of a front gate that imprisons her family. Whilst her body is confined, her eyes search the distance. This picture of feminine incarceration is an archetype of the Gothic genre, the visual expression of quiet desperation. A similarly tightly framed image of Meg is used in the promotion of Panic Room. Her head is horizontal and her wide-eyed expression suggests alarm whilst a blurred menacing character hovers behind.

Panic Room establishes a sense of claustrophobia and questions vision right from the opening credits. Set on the Upper West Side of New York City, the credit sequence is a montage of images of tall buildings—mostly anonymous—framed to fill the screen with grids of windows. Gigantic white letters form the opening credits, hanging between the buildings as if by magic. This clash of text and image gives the supernatural a familiar context, introducing a sense of the uncanny.

The house itself is an immediate problem: it is referred to as an ‘emotional’ property as if it were alive. In his monologue introducing the house, the realtor Evan calls it a ‘townstone’: a hybrid of the townhouse and the brownstone, extremely ‘uncommon.’ Its vertical design makes movement within difficult. The winding staircase is steep and extensive and the house contains an ancient elevator, replete with an iron grid gate. A wall of screens recording video from strategically placed static cameras flattens and fractures the space into a collection of low-resolution black and white images. These are contrasted with Fincher’s more flamboyant representation of the domestic space. Adopting an impossible point of view, the mobile camera glides throughout the space, travelling into keyholes, between rooms, through walls, floors, even deftly slipping through the handle of a coffee pot.

The most compelling space in Panic Room is the secret chamber. This room is discovered by default when Meg notices an anomaly in the dimensions of a room. The panic room is concealed in the negative space of a smaller room. It functions as asecure space for millions of dollars worth of bonds concealed in the false bottom of a safe, but it also offers refuge from home invasion. The panic room chills Meg and she acknowledges the potential for entrapment when she asks her friend, “Ever read any Poe?” But the point is lost on Lydia who replies, “No, but I loved her last album.” As the mother and child shelter within, the space takes on a sinister dimension, a possibility anticipated by Sarah who insists that live burial doesn’t happen quite as often as it used to. Immured within, Meg and Sarah are subjected to an array of assaults (including gunfire and asphyxiation) which threaten to transform the shelter into a tomb.

The house in Panic Room eventually becomes a refuge for Meg who transforms the space into an obstacle course. She denies the burglars access to vision by turning off lights and smashing the surveillance cameras with a sledgehammer. In the darkness, the focus shifts from the eyes to the ears. Meg tracks the progress of the burglars by smashing a mirror and listening for the burglars who crunch the glass underfoot. The roles are reversed and hunter becomes hunted as Meg regains control of the house.

The cinema is the perfect vehicle for domestic Gothic dramas. It is the only medium that has the ability to reanimate the dead or to depict menace within seemingly harmless environments. Like the Gothic, the cinema questions vision by producing a hesitancy between the real and the imagined. Panic Room and The Others offer compelling representation of the uncanny by defamiliarising the most familiar space of all, the home.

Storytelling

Liz Bradshaw
Foucault, I think, makes it clear that the exercise of power turns every/man into a despot; that there is no such thing as consent. Solondz agrees. Storytelling is nuanced, visceral filmmaking on the interdependence of racism and misogyny. The two vignettes expose the ugly corollary of ‘freedom and democracy’ rhetoric in all its brutal grotesquery. Sophisticated commentary on the American nightmare, and the truth/fiction ruse.

Writer/Director Todd Solondz, distributor Roadshow, currently screening nationally.

The Hard Word

This should really be called The Hard Work in recognition of the tremendous effort put in by all involved; the actors act like actors, the cinematographer films away from beginning to end, the sound man delivers the sound loud and clear, wardrobe and make-up make well-considered contributions, even the stunt team puts in with some neat driving and tumbling. Everybody pulls together, plays their part. It’s a team effort, a tribute to the skill and craftsmanship of the local film industry. All that hard work, all that dedication to the task and still the damn thing just sits there, refuses to fly, take wing, soar above the collective perspiration and professionalism of those who made it. A turkey is a turkey is a turkey.

It feels like a script that doesn’t cohere, leaving great gaps in its credibility without summoning up enough energy to make us leap those gaps. The characters are ‘characters’ sewn together from cast-off characteristics; crims with consciences, corrupt cops with none, a sleazy lawyer and a sultry dame. There are too many scenes in which lines are batted back and forth like ping-pong balls—all veiled menace and double-crossing entendre—and just about as exciting. Still, it’s filmed in Sydney and Melbourne so there is plenty to look at, and it’s a great film for spot the actor: Paul Sonkilla plays a cop, Kim Gyngell plays a crim. It’s lovely to see. There are some curious interludes too, such as a couple of male fantasy relationships between 2 of the criminals and women (a female prison psychologist and kidnap victim) that go nowhere and contribute little—so why are they there? Gratuitous or what?

Much of the pre-release publicity with The Hard Word focused on the ‘return home’ of Australian actors (Guy Pearce, Rachel Griffiths) who have worked overseas. This draws inevitable comparisons between the American way of doing things and the Australian way, and perhaps alludes to a wider anxiety about a loss of identity; Australia being seen as little more than an exotic location, an inexpensive Hollywood sound-stage. In the film itself, there is a constant urge to assert a certain Australian-ness; indeed, what defines it as Australian more than anything is this need to define itself as Australian. The conservative nature of this identity reveals itself in the rather time-locked feel to the film, drawing on a pre-Wood Royal Commission era of hardmen and brutal killings, an Australia of Big Things and Kellyesque gangs, larrikin humour and lots of red meat.

Writer/director Scott Roberts, distributor Roadshow, currently screening nationally.

No Surrender

In a dramatic reversal of one of cinema’s favorite tropes, the pursuit of the terrified woman, the subject of No Surrender’s gaze, an Indigenous woman (dancer Bernadette Walong), wakes to find a camera (our point of view) prying between her thighs. A violent chase ensues, rich in night time colour, strange locations and hand-held urgency until the woman’s spirit is unleashed in an ecstatic dance. She turns on the camera with fists, kick-boxing knockouts and flame, the shattered lens flickering to faltering readouts. No Surrender exploits digital possibilities to the painterly max with slo-mo strokes, sudden zooms and deft super-impositions. In a cinema with wrap-around sound, as at the Popcorn Taxi Sydney premiere, music and sound design stunningly amplify the immersive quality of the cinematography. It’s a rare experience for the audience being cast as the baddy. No Surrender won Best Experimental Film at the 2002 Annual ATOM Awards for Film, Television; Radio & Multimedia, has been shown on ABC TV, and has been selected to screen at the 2002 TTV Performing Arts on Screen in Riccione, Italy, and the Commonwealth Film Festival in Manchester, England.

Writer/choreographer/director Richard James Allen, composer Michael Yezerski, sound designer Liam Price, director of photography Andrew Commis, editor Karen Pearlman. The Physical TV Company in association with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. 12 minutes.

Baise-Moi

Barbara Karpinski
A post-punk, part-porn splatter movie. Baise-Moi, roughly translated, means ‘Fuck Me.’ Vilified by the French, first-time director Virginie Despentes was not deterred. Baise-Moi is the collaboration of visceral ex-porn star actors and Eurotrash underground voices. If raw, uncut, bleeding and not so prurient pussy terrifies you, keep your pusillanimous self at home and watch store-bought porn where all the chicks are much more obedient, and blonde. Go girls go.

Writer/Directors Virginie Despentes, Coralie Trinh Thi, distributor Potential Films, banned after initial release in Australia.

of day, of night

Megan, your new interactive work of day of, night follows on from I am a Singer, the CD-ROM which you completed in 1996. Like other artists with a fascination for a field that has been called “interactive cinema”, you continue to examine the operation of memory and the construction of identity in the subject. The latter is a woman who “has lost the ability to dream and has set herself the task of re-learning.” The way she achieves this is with the collaboration of the other subject, the ‘user’, who navigates the work. Could you outline what a typical series of encounters might be?

The tasks involve firstly collecting found objects from various locations in the day environment—from a street-market, river and café. Imagining the objects’ fictional traces and histories, and arranging the objects into a kind of cabinet. Upon completing these tasks, the user/audience gains access to the night area of the work, where the objects and their stories collide, transmute and create new meanings in a regained/re-imagined environment of dreams. of day, of night is part narrative and part game, part memory and dream. Fundamentally, it explores intersections between new media and the nature of dream experience.

There is a dualism here, in both works, where the subjects—the woman in the piece and the user or navigator of the work—observe or are observed, constructing a personality through the encounters that are made and the stories that are told. How would you distinguish between what happens for the individual audience member encountering memory and identity in the cinema, and in your work?

As the audience moves through the work, there is a gradual slipping away of the prominence of the woman, Sophie, and a growing emphasis on the objects and their traces, histories, intersections and juxtapositions. The dreams of night do not represent an individual psychology as such, but rather are a set of interweaving stories comprising aspects of various cultural rather than strictly personal identities. All of these are refracted and reconfigured, by and through Sophie to create new stories and meanings within night. I think it’s revealing that some of the earliest and most deeply embedded conventions within cinema involve the depiction of memory and dream sequences including fades to white or black, colour effects, specific approaches to set design and mise en scene, the use of compositing etc. Fragmentation, multiplicity, association, juxtaposition, collision: these are all qualities of memory and dreaming that are shared, for example, by hypertext.

Influences

Much of the experimental work with narrative and hypertext has occurred on the internet, on listservs, MUDs and later websites. Were your ideas aided or helped by these discourses or do you see your influences lying elsewhere?

Though I am familiar with listserv and MUD narratives, my influences are more from experimental cinema, literature and hypertext. My work always starts with the writing. In researching and preparing to develop of day, of night, I immersed myself in a range of works concerned with dreaming such as Breton’s Communicating Vessels, Sontag’s The Benefactor, Moravagine’s anthologies of literary dreams, and Jungian archetypes. I revisited early Surrealist cinema and literary games, the wonderful Dreams That Money Can Buy, dream sequences from classical cinema—although the dreams within of day, of night are very different to these expressions. From a new media perspective, I looked at a lot of hypertext, in particular writers like Shelley Jackson, Michael Joyce, Deena Larson and more recently Talan Memmott. Intermingled with this was research into visual style, music, objects and the locations to be used within of day, of night.

Beyond the hard sell

Before entering the area of new media technologies in the early 90s, you worked and taught in the advertising industry. Did this provide you with an identifiable set of skills or experiences which led you towards what was known then as the hyper-linking of text, narratives, images and sound?

Advertising desires the immediate, unquestioning, and spectacular. The layering and association inherent in new media and hypertext involves work by an audience—associating ideas, making room for or reconciling multiple viewpoints, exploring an environment that may reveal its stories over time, not necessarily immediately. These qualities are anathema to advertising. Advertising is also an environment of very strong professional gender stereotyping, where invariably men were allowed to have a creative vision, and women were the enablers of that vision. I didn’t know of a single female director, but at least 70% of producers were female. A reaction against these kinds of entrenched gender inequalities in the traditional media industries has probably contributed to the embracing of new media by female artists, and the range of female voices in this area.

The limits of broadband

CD-ROM-based work over the last 10 years has probed, essentially, the potential for affecting the experiential substance of an interactive encounter with a work. Option-taking is a requirement for the work to have meaning. This is at variance with the dynamics required for making a linear drama or documentary narrative succeed. However, you have been lecturing on new media at the University of Technology, Sydney since the mid-90s in an area shared with film, video and sound production. Though the course has recognised the benefits of overlapping specialism and the continuing convergence of production media and dissemination channels, what conclusions have you reached concerning the convergence or divergence of the aesthetic dimensions of linear and non-linear work, for the audience, rather than the producers? For instance, has your current research into broadband delivery of media rich content (video and sound) indicated that as a delivery system (using ASDL telephone and cable connections), broadband will address the distribution issues that have so affected the availability of artist’s CD-ROMs? Or is there a more fundamental issue concerning the audience’s reluctance to engage with interactive artefacts unless they appeal to the gamer instinct?

I believe audiences are engaging with a wide range of works, sometimes almost imperceptibly, other times provocatively. From interactive installations and hypertexts, to certain expressions of traditional media—feature films that play with linearity or point-of-view, or the participatory elements of reality television. What is clearly an issue has been the lack of distribution opportunities for interactive works. However, it should be remembered that commercial interactive work has also proved very problematic.

And while broadband technologies supposedly offer the potential for distribution of media rich interactive works, they also present some serious barriers. That is, the added complexity and expense of the production process for broadband delivery (after shooting and editing, compressing, coding, hosting), and the specialised marketing required to actually get people to visit your site. It is clear to me, through observing new media art and from working with students, that there is a desire to write, read and communicate in ways that are increasingly complex, which involve linkages and associations across ideas and texts, and which bring together text, sound, moving image and participatory elements. This is worth holding on to.

of day, of night has been exhibited in the Experimenta Waste program (October 2001), Stuttgarter Filmwinter (January 2002), the Fusion program, St Kilda Film Festival (May), and will be exhibited at ISEA 2002 in Nagoya, Japan (October). It was shortlisted in the new media category of the 2002 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature.

One of my favourite images of the becoming-second-nature of digital literacy, concerns the story of the San Francisco lawyer addicted to playing the computer game Myst, “The only problem was when I began clicking on things in real life. I’d see a manhole cover and think, ‘Hmmm, that looks pretty interesting’, and my forefinger would start to twitch”. At this moment of unconscious, involuntary action, our lawyer manifests the precept that everything in the world is data and everything is connectible. To live in the world is not enough. One must now make the world a database (DB). The image of wandering through the street, processing information into new, unpredictable relations is the paradigm of an emergent way of living in the world. Digital literacy and hypertextual consciousness are some of the names given to this new sensibility. If we were able to ask our lawyer to describe his view of the world, he would probably respond by saying, This is what it feels like to be a wireless apparatus…a streaming consciousness always on the avant-go.

Conceptual art Ebook-happening in site-specific performance environment with literary figures nomadically wandering through an open field of relational aesthetics. Or: composing a network. That’s as good a way of describing Filmtext (2001), Mark Amerika’s most recent experiment in net art, coming on the heels of his influential Grammatron (1993-1997) and Phon:e:me (1999)—as any. Commissioned by PlayStation. Exhibited as part of Amerika’s 2001 retrospective at the ICA in London, Filmtext is ostensibly a game-space, an online story world based on the premise, what might it be like living in a post-apocalyptic desert of the real. The mise en scene of this world is a rather arid landscape of dormant volcanos that act as interfaces or portals into an alternative way of looking at and sensing this apparently barren world. As with most computer-based games, there are levels to be moved through, subject to the achievement of competencies and the completion of tasks. The fundamental logic or literacy of all computer games—seek, find and use—becomes a conceptual logic of understanding, a forging of wholes out of the relation of parts. As we move through the levels as meta-tourists, we quickly realise that we are in fact riders (to use William Gibson’s term), digital hitchhikers, vicariously streaming consciousness through someone else’s point of view. It may be, for all we know, that San Francisco lawyer. But we learn that he has a name. He is the Digital Thoughtographer. He is a desert apparition, a trace, an incipient identity only glimpsed in silhouette.

Surf-sample-manipulate. In using the idea of an ambient game-space to track the movements of a nomadic alien life-form, Amerika has inventively elevated the computer game to the level of a performative manual of DIY electronic subject formation. Instead of scoring points, play at becoming a network, a data-sphere, or a cyborg. In Filmtext, Amerika re-defines Claude Levi-Strauss’ notion of the bricoleur for the digital age. Amerika’s Digital Thoughtographer is a composite of listener, reader, user, finder, seeker, jack-of-all-trades. A nomadic figure who wanders through the contemporary media-scape and makes do with whatever is at hand in the name of literacy, he/she also brings the shadow of other media, of other ways of conceiving the world through media, of conceiving the world as media. Far removed from the static eye of Renaissance optics, the Digital Thoughtographer is reminiscent of the ‘kino eye’ of Dziga Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera; the peripatetic flaneur of Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud; the jump-cut-edit-as-you-go aesthetic of Jean Luc Godard, and the reality media of anyone who can get their hands on a digital camera and some editing software. Rather than being overwhelmed by a bombardment of disconnected information, the Digital Thoughtographer creates new forms of meaning, new gestalts forged out of the logic of relational aesthetics. Consciousness, artistic composition, even the humble art of reviewing, can be redefined as digital remix.

Expanding the concept of writing. Mark Amerika has variously described his work as “unclassifiable writing” or “literature’s exit strategy.” In his work we find the concept of writing pushed to extremes. As an alien life-form, the Digital Thoughtographer stands for writing as it was imagined in classical times. That is, that which is from afar, inhuman, yet capable of altering what it means to be human. As “techne”, an art for ordering the world into meaning, it converges with our current media and in the process transforms them. The last thing one could call Amerika is an apologist for post-literacy, since his work represents an active demonstration of what writing might look like as it transcends the printed page. Not restricted to the word, writing now includes time-based media, animation and the database. In this, Filmtext is a compelling response to the calls from philosophers such as Jacques Derrida to put into practice an integrated audio-visual-pictographic writing. In combining the language of film and inscription, Filmtext is an expression of our ‘post-literate’ culture.

Filmtext, Mark Amerika, E-media Gallery, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne April 14-May 4

Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History, eds Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson, Alessio Cavallaro, will be published October 2002 by Power Publications and MIT Press.

Perth’s digital biennale

BEAP 2002, The Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth, is already laying claim to being “the premiere electronic arts event in Australia.” If size matters, then BEAP already looks like the biggest of Australia’s smattering of digital arts events. As for how much of it will be about art, that remains to be seen. It’s the wide-ranging art-science-technology-education brief that BEAP has assigned itself that helps make for the size of the event, a reflection of the breadth of the impact of new media on older disciplines and the making of new art. Like the 2002 Adelaide Festival’s conVerge, with its focus on the much vaunted science-art nexus, BEAP promises a scientific bent. Paul Thomas, Director of the Biennale, has announced “that the inaugural thematic focus for BEAP is LOCUS—where we believe consciousness exists. This idea is being expanded through the developing biological relationship to consciousness, contrasted with the external input of the computer generated or augmented realities and their effects on consciousness.” It’s not surprising then that Consciousness Reframed, an annual international conference on its 4th outing, will be held in Australia for the first time and as part of BEAP. All the Biennale’s exhibitions will focus on aspects of consciousness: Immersion, at the John Curtin and spECtrUm Galleries, “explores our relationship with concepts of external virtual realities”; BioFeel, at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts “explores emerging relationships between art, biology and consciousness”; and Screen, at the John Curtin Gallery and other venues around Perth, “will focus on the relevant aspects of cinematic realities.” Other events include forums tackling developments in the relationships between art, technology, biology and consciousness; ethical questions of using living systems and biological technologies; current pedagogies and future possibilities of spatial practices in the arts; cinematic realities within the digital domain. BEAP 2002, July 31-Sept 15, http://www.beap.org

Big bad broadband?

Megan Heyward argues in her interview with Mike Leggett that “the added complexity and expense of the production process for broadband delivery (after shooting and editing, compressing, coding, hosting), and the specialised marketing required to actually get people to visit your site”, pose serious challenges for artists. The AFC, in association with the ABC, are much cheerier. With a series of capital city forums (Hobart and Darwin excepted), they plan “to inspire and encourage filmmakers, television producers, digital content creators, interactive media producers, animators, web designers and other creators of screen content to develop projects for broadband delivery.” Perhaps more inspiring is the announcement that funds will be available 2002-4 to help create interactive programs for broadband delivery. Less inspiring is the requirement that these innovative works “be designed for audiences or user groups in the areas of children, youth and education.” That’s going to leave a lot of artists out of the loop. Remember Creative Nation’s fatal splurge on the CD-ROM with many a turgid educational product. Doubtless, however, many an artist will be curious to hear what the AFC & ABC think broadband’s got to recommend it. The seminars will outline the Broadband Production Initiative and screen examples of interactive content.

More than a digital playground?

dLux media arts’ 5th d>art opens at Sydney’s MCA with a performance by Wade Marynowsky (Apocalypse Later) and the premiere of Mari Velonaki’s Mutual Exchange # Throw. There’ll be 2 forums: Debra Petrovitch and Danielle Karalus will ‘walk’ audiences through their CD-ROMs; and Nigel Helyer, Marynowksj and Velonaki will discuss experimental media—“digitally enhanced playgrounds or tools to reflect the magnitude of current affairs?” Seventeen screen works will be presented as part of the Sydney Film Festival before touring nationally. A Fun Night Out with Severed Heads (June 17, 8.45pm & June 19, noon) could turn out to be the highlight of this year’s d>art, with clips and tracks from this seminal underground music and v-jaying group. The d>ART02 web gallery will be launched June 13, housing web works from Canada, Australia, Germany and USA. d>art02 features gesturally interactive installations by Sophea Lerner (The Glass Bell, a giant touchscreen with water running down), Nathaniel Stern ([odys]elicit, viewer movements trigger stuttering text onscreen), and Mari Velonaki’s Mutual Exchange#Throw (soft satin ball interfaces with projected characters as targets). d>art02, from June 13.

The big, diverse one

Celebrating the diversity of film culture, the 2002 Melbourne International Film Festival has themed itself Crossing Borders. An astonishingly diverse festival, it is screening 350 films—international features, documentaries, animation, short film (in serious competition and with a welcome trio of retrospectives), music on film—and presenting Sideshow 02’s collection of works incorporating digital media. As part of Sideshow, American new media pranksters, Damaged Californians, will present Alternate Routes, an online project that recreates/re-imagines/perverts your holiday from the photos you (bravely) submit. Go to the festival website for a sample of the project and entry details. This year’s featured filmmaker is Korean Kim Ki-Duk whose entire output will be screened. An interesting companion for this tribute will be the New and Emerging Asian Women Filmmakers program. Also screening will be the best of Rotterdam Film Festival’s Tiger Awards for innovative debut features (the festival’s director will be in town). For fans of SciFi, the B-grade the bizarre, old and new, there’s Strange New Worlds, Journeys Into Alternate Fictions. A rare treat will be a focus on comedy: There Goes the Neighbourhood! Humour On Film. Just as Ingmar Bergman (who could make comedy as well as fuel the dark side of Woody Allen) is being reassessed after a critical quiet patch, comes Northern Lights—New Scandinavian Cinema: From Bergman to Dogme95. And there’s a youth program: Mach 2. Faced with so much diversity and such cinematic riches, the agonising challenge for film lovers is to make up their minds just what to see. Melbourne International Film Festival, 23 July – 11 August.

Pulling in the filmmakers

Short film festivals are proliferating, prizes are multiplying, ambitions are soaring and winners are setting out on the ever expanding international festival circuit in search of careers and markets..and more prizes. The mix of festivals encouraging short filmmaking is remarkable, ranging from the jokey to the niche to the eclectic, supported by local councils, screen culture organisations, arts festivals and minor and major film festivals. Sydney’s Metro Screen is a great nurturer of the art as part of its day to day activities. For its Kaleidoscope Short Film Festival this year it’s pulling in the punters with the promise of great rewards. Perhaps the burgeoning and increasingly competitive festival market requires a greater wooing of filmmakers. Or maybe it’s just that talent deserves reward. Metro Screen is calling for entries for its short film festival where the selected filmmakers compete for a 16mm filmmaking package and a share of $40,000 worth of funding in 11 award categories. Fifty independent films will be shown over 5 nights, September 30-October 4th, competing for the judges and audience awards. The entry deadline is August 16. Enquiries: 02 9361 5318

Why (he asks, uncomfortably aware the question’s recycled but nonetheless valid) would you use the web but not exploit it? Why choose it as just a distribution conduit, or a drawing board on which to blu-tack galley proofs of intransigently print-oriented work, or flatly-static (A)4-square table-of-content-ed variants on the magazine or anthology? If there’s no functional click or imaginative synergy between text and medium, or genre and format, why would we read (really read, focused and immersed) onscreen? Is poetry, for example, as she’s spoke in online journals, oxymoronically better suited to the pristine purity of stark black type and Sunday-arvo-bookshop browsing?

On the Mary Poppins medicine principle, let’s start with Blithe House Quarterly’s special Australian edition of queer short fiction, which has the chastening virtue of eliciting such terrific writing (exuberantly better than any recent print collection) you almost, very nearly, kinda don’t mind that it’s all static full-screen, left-right-top-down blocks. Okay, so Deborah Hum’s Reading Jack, with its clipped, jump-cutting, punny, garrulous, James-Ellroy-word-jazzy reflexive home-road-movie homage to Kerouac; and Benedict Chiantar’s modular riffs with psychosexual noir, multi-path narratives (‘press Escape to continue’) almost howl for illustration, dramatisation, chunking, the fluid volatility of links and nodes, something, anything, more than a few horizontal dividers (Mangrove: resuscitate, we need you!)—but the stories are so damn good you get wrenched into it anyway.

This mostly holds true for Divan, run by intrepid Box Hill TAFE students. It’s developed exponentially since its 1998 inception with a revamped design, is much expanded in size and range of styles, voices and forms, new facilities (annotated links, a forum, archives), plus a portfolio of well-known poets like MTC Cronin, Jordie Albiston, Ian McBryde, Alison Croggon, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Dorothy Porter and Susan Hawthorne. It’d be unjust to attempt a survey or identikit of the remarkable, consistently tensile strengths of the poetry itself. But there are no graphics, no framing, no fancy formatting. It’s all stripped bare, letting short lines, brief stanzas, enjambment and crisp imagist vignettes do any rhythmic and visual work, mental rather than remediated.

Ditto 3rd Muse, a monthly journal into its 20th issue with a grumpy editorial, a black-on-grey brutalism, emphasis on highly-selective quality and crystalline forms (Kick the Sonnet Habit Before It’s Too Late by Richard Jordan is a satiric metapoem on this very same)—plus a determinedly international contributors’ list. These are both excellent journals, while OzPoets is more like an extensible resources database; tautly organised, featuring individual poet’s work on a semi-regular basis, offering intensively-used workshops and forums, an events calendar, critically-framed index of links, poetry readings (RealAudio), reference tools, and an interactive venue for poetry submission, review and commentary.

The screen-as-mimeograph-print-aesthetic gets even more literal in Soup, as much a lo-fi corporate brochure as a journal; determinedly dilettantish and mid-90s in its anti-design, collapsed into an inert (if often enjoyably varied) archive, it is a Lego-logic directory of snapshot Oz-poet samples/ads-for-books (as with Siglo or other mainly-print mags). Rehabilitated somewhat by the use-all-screen-real-estate format of some of the poetry, which is sprawlingly concrete and architextural even when defiantly ASCII (eg Kieran Carroll).

By this stage I was panting for a scanned photo, even a gif animation, so a revisit to Overland Express was a happy relief. Witness the shift towards the interactive and web-workable in their more recent issues, particularly the hypertexted interview, plus Tim Danko’s gorgeously-Eeyore Flash animation, and the palimpsestic faux-po-mo high-irony text-image collage by Paul White sending up the very rhetorical questions with which this review opens.

John Tranter’s jacket (still going strong, still a great read) has an unOedipal rival in Brentley Frazer’s Retort (motto: ‘think forward answer back’) which is equally compacted, similarly slickly micochippy in minimalist but striking design, also cites Australian work in a lattice of international and heterodox contributors; and is likewise bristling with links, interviews, reviews and contextual articles (e.g. Burroughs meets Baudrillard). But against jacket’s historiographic sensibility and elegant thematic clustering, Retort pits a feral diversity and a growly avant-gardist manifesto against “the established cult of ignorance consensus idiocy.” Again, a la Tranter, there’s so much jack(et)-in-the-box-folded into this Salon-stylish mag that an afternoon goes languorously by on any one issue. It offers downloadable posters, both a public and a subscribers’ forum (threaded articles, comments, meticulously organised, laid-out and archived, startlingly practical, surprisingly engaging), extensive archive, dynamic newsletter, daily updates, serialised novella, featured artists (e.g. Shannon Hourigan’s sumptuous velvety Se7en-gothic doll Photoshoppery), eclectic proliferating links, a fashion and style section, spoken word and mp3 performances (Mary the Robot reads Linguistics is the Opiate), excerpts from new books, a Brisbane poetry gig guide, and Bjork’s new online video. The poetry is sinuously sharp, its readership is exploding, its sense of connection to (and interaction with) an active community of writers, readers, artists, designers etc is strong and productive—and it’s got that early-hours-nicotine buzz performance poets specialise in. Full of unwhimsical surprises. Yum.

Overall, this crop of Oz journals offers little that’s very hypertexty, interactive or multimedia but lots of engaging writing. The web addict in me got gently exasperated, the writer got enjoyably envious, the avid reader got more than satisfied.

I was standing with Lucy Orta and her husband and artistic partner, Jorge Orta, discussing the heart-like sculptural objects that were being made by the Fluid Architecture Workshop participants. Lucy and Jorge were bending over a dozen hearts on the floor when Lucy quickly straightened, accidentally thumping the back of her head against Jorge’s forehead. Moans of shock and pain came from them both as they assumed head-rubbing positions, followed by a terse exchange in French. It was a moment when fluidity froze and an artistic practice seemed distilled in unintended ways. Is this an art of the unforeseen encounter?

Lucy Orta has gained increased international exposure in recent years for her Refuge Wear and Nexus works that have employed the aesthetics of high-end outdoor clothing and adventure equipment to negotiate issues of refuge and homelessness. These works have involved varying degrees of participation by members of such communities, whilst Orta has driven the works’ conceptualisation and representation. After exhibitions in recent years at Melbourne’s Australian Centre for Contemporary Arts, Sydney’s MCA, and the Art Gallery of West Australia, the City of Melbourne invited Orta to undertake a residency project as part of their Community Cultural Development Program. This was a significant commission from the City Council’s Arts spending, and given the risk of unknown outcomes, one boldly undertaken.

Fluid Architecture took up residence in the currently disused, former military Drill Hall at the northern end of the city, and utilised it as the site for making, discussing, displaying and performing artwork over 3 weeks. Orta intended Fluid Architecture to create a “space in which ideas flow and evolve freely, constantly changing and fluctuating”, but it was also clear that some form of culmination communicable to a broad audience was desired by both Orta and the City of Melbourne.

So begins a project located to ride the tension between infinite process and fixed product; between ‘anything-can-happen’ chaotic idealism and ‘but-what-are-we-doing?’/’this-is-what-we-are-doing’ pragmatism, and between self-determining participative processes and imposed representations of participation. Questions of locating the project along old axes—of community art/contemporary art, art/design, and the rhetorically useful/ experientially useful—were beside the point as the project invited one to encounter its many tensions.

A number of elements were introduced by Orta to shape the fluidity. Firstly, 2 themes around which to explore making work: ‘nexus’—the Latin word for link—a theme which runs through much of her oeuvre, and ‘heart’—a theme Lucy and Jorge have been jointly exploring. Secondly, a core collection of collaborators was invited to participate and draw in other people. Core collaborators were: community artist at Carlton Housing Commission Estate, Geoff Kennedy, musician Tim O’Dwyer, documenters Catherine Acin and Nicholas Sherman, architect Dylan Ingleton, cultural theorist Nikos Papastergiadis, performer/ choreographer Daryl Pellizzer, and myself as artist/industrial designer. And thirdly, Orta had requested that a silver caravan (inferring temporary habitation and immanent mobility) be brought into the work-space, and that a large pin-up style wall be erected, on which to collect evidence of the process as events unfolded.

From there, the greater fluidity of the process commenced. A diverse collection of people dropped in, joined in and pissed off over the weeks. Traces of their presence were left by RMIT University students of Fashion, Industrial and Interior Design, and Sculpture; by residents from the Carlton housing estate and the St Vincent de Paul’s Ozanam Drop-In Centre; and by Victoria University of Technology (VUT) Festive Arts students. Those people who were brought into the project by one of the core collaborators were inevitably those who felt they could belong there, whilst one-time, off-the-street drop-ins or group visitors provided a constant source of variable influence. Levels of comfort with the situations people found themselves in were in constant flux.

One of the most successful workshop activities was on the first day when a range of people let their apprehensions fall aside, and formed pairs with strangers to create a physical device to link 2 bodies together using cords, fabrics, web-strapping and click-clips. VUT students explored the resulting Nexus works via improvised performance during the closing event. The musicians continuously recorded, processed and re-distributed 4-track sound, varying from calming/alarming heartbeat effects to the stream-of-consciousness ravings of Johnny Shakespeare, to the heavenly-aspiring gospel voice of Tupie—both big characters from the Carlton Estate. A shy guy walked in off the street and within 10 minutes had intimately entangled himself in webbing with people he’d never met before. Kids, pensioners, groovy students, down-on-their-luck blokes and warm-witted artists got into making organ-like heart shapes—all ultimately orchestrated by Orta into Arbor Vitea: a tree of life suspended in silver from the Hall’s ceiling. Designers, jewelers, architects, engineers and Orta wrestled over converting a symbolic heart-organ shape into a large, steel wire framed structure. The result was a sketch-line-like object that a performer writhed within and kids climbed all over at the closing evening.

There’s no doubt that a project exploring fluidity can frustrate expectations for clear direction and purpose, but this is to miss the potential. In an Australian political climate where fear of strangers is too easily provoked, encountering other people in a new situation and exploring ways of coming together has a timely resonance. The encounter is real and symbolic: its awkwardness can be avoided or it can be recognised with a thump on the head. Fluid Architecture picked up threads of Orta’s practice and unraveled them a little further. In the process, people were inspired to generously participate while others were unclear about owning the product of their labour. What is clear is that the practice prompts us to encounter it. And its effects in Melbourne? The Ortas encountered unexpected new links. Who can speak for others?

The door to Artspace is obscured by a horse float (renovated), its internal mini-bleacher facing a TV screen, its distorted faux white cube annulling the pragmatics of its construction, both façade and delayed entry. The Trailer Project (Claude Leveque & Valerie Mrejen) suggested location and movement and it struck me that all the work in the exhibition was concerned with place, not only geographical or chronological, but the location of an aura, an auratic space.
The trailer, a strange, quasi-absurdist object, seemed elusive, to perhaps lose something in translation, in its dislocation from its own conventions. This tangible disjuncture and pause in signification, becomes a qualifier for the imagery on its internal screen, begging the question: where do we locate the work?

Detritical Vibration (Mark Brown) is complex: addressing the intersection of the object and the image; sound and sight; past and present. A flaky epidermis, peeled from some industrial site, and stirred by the vibration run through the apparatus like a soundtrack, becomes a metonym for architectural space and the span of time. The apparatus itself is seductive: tripod, suspended box, tiny camera on a mike stand; almost complete without the accompanying live feed to the opposite wall. The sound is the centrepiece. Distilled noise, its rhythm and tone reaches out, if in a minimalist way, to the sounds of Glitch, to percussive timbre, to the crash of construction. And I think percussion always bypasses the intellect in some way. This highly focussed installation is then transferred to a screen: an instantaneous movement and echo.

Terra Incognita (Maslen & Mehra), made of generic variations on the enlarged sections of map-like topology and giant white semi-transparent blades of grass, seemed to leave too little incognito. Lit at each corner by rotating coloured pulses, the light cast strong shadows on the walls and drew the space into the work, creating an ambiguous space. The pulses set up a rhythm, a heartbeat, a measure of time. The blue-white light made the work glow with an eerie, snowscape quality; this ‘making strange’ was its high point, lending it an almost sci-fi aura, and raising questions of location and belonging, artificiality and the real, what it is to be human.

When the pulses turn green or yellow however, a certain theatrical space dominates, a hybrid of stage set and Xfiles cornfields, falling toward kitsch in the best, most serious sense—an intense overcoding, leaving no room for the viewer to work with ideas of landscape (that already most loaded and overdetermined of Australian cultural objects). This overcoding suffers under the weight of its multiple signs, with too many and too similar interpretative clichés; as though grass was always green, and sunrise and sunset the warmest of glows; as though the island metaphor were animated by proprioception, or we could be mirrored or critiqued by the various body sized forms. The work relies on these metaphors to animate it, but there is something oddly representational at work that closes off the more provocative readings for which it held the potential.

Finally, the 3 ‘screens’ of Dead Flow (Adam Geczy & Thomas Gerwin) each present the viewer with the barest of narratives; the stylised edit of the passing of time and the entry and egress from the frame. A European train station, the no man’s land of departure and arrival, and its local counterpart—brighter and sunlit—recognisable if you are familiar with the city. The third: still images from a generic lake scene, its rippled surface filling the frame and punctuated by the occasional duck. The images fill the walls, the passing figures larger than life and strangely distant at the same time, our point of view almost a simulacrum of surveillance: all disjointed editing and repetition. Clearly, there is a nature/culture divide at work, a certain question of migration, and an almost interactive mobilisation of the gaze, no longer cinematic, but webcast.

Most engaging is its strange opacity: no minuscule reading of its pedestrian imagery accounts for its gestalt. It produces an eerie silence and emptiness, the manipulated sound at once familiar and legible, truncated and elusive: a ‘somewhere else’ that would not be a meaning ascription for the work, but an interpretative gesture, and a reanimation of the question of the filmic frame.

Dead Flow, Adam Geczy & Thomas Gerwin; Detritical Vibration, Mark Brown; Terra Incognita, Maslen & Mehra; The Trailer Project, Claude Leveque & Valerie Mrejen, Artspace, Sydney, April 4-27.

LSSp is the cryptic acronym of a new, evolving Hobart studio space catering to some dozen artists and incorporating a much-needed, if very small gallery suited to solo shows—especially installations—not afraid to engage with the unusual (L-shaped) form of the gallery and its limited size.
It is clear on entering the labyrinthine complex (a former senior high school), that LSSp runs on a shoestring budget. This is not a criticism. The bulky doors and stairwells retain their institutional feel, the shared work spaces are identifiable as the classrooms and laboratories of an earlier generation, but when you enter the exhibition space you step into a creative microcosm, a fully-functioning contemporary art space full of constantly changing visual surprises and challenges.

LSSp was established in late 2001 and besides several excellent solo exhibitions, has hosted events including an artist’s residency and an evening of alternative short films to an overflow audience.

Of the solo shows, Conspiratorial Tones, by Samstag scholarship recipient Matt Warren, is part of an extensive multi-faceted on-going work, the absence project, which examines the effect of loss and bereavement in everyday life. Warren’s time-based installation accommodates both the confronting and the contemplative. A red strobe illuminates a video screen, functioning as a kind of closed circuit TV security device, revealing unlovely empty areas of the arts complex. Sequences of blank screen heighten a sense of unease, and a family anecdote involving, implausibly enough, a chair, is delivered as a poignant yet wryly amusing monologue. Warren is a powerful intellect and a masterful video artist, not afraid to examine personal issues in public. His next solo show opens at CAST (Contemporary Art Services Tasmania) on June 7.

By contrast, painter Neil Haddon’s show, Nihil sub sole novum, explores the possibilities of the painted modernist surface, with actual and trompe l’oeil peeling walls, the artist’s distinctive geometric striped acrylic paintings in a palette of colours reminiscent of 50s decor, and props such as pristine paint cans becoming part of a kind of all-enveloping environment that embraces almost the entire gallery space. A crucial, initially imperceptible element of Haddon’s work is that he subverts his apparently systematic colour patterns and meticulously executed perspectival lines, so that the colour sequences are not consistent and the perspective is actually impossible.

Sally Rees’ installation, the punningly titled A Loft is perhaps the most enigmatic and seductive offering to show at the gallery so far. Like a Kafka stage set, the space is arranged as a human scale replica of a budgie cage with outsize mirror, colourful exercise ladder and amusingly large bell, oversized balls of birdseed and a large seed tray. There is something intriguing about the idea of the artist fashioning these bizarre objects, not to mention the possible motivation behind them. It is hard to know if they are meant to be endearing, kitsch, comical or grotesque; they are surreal, certainly.

There is another element to the work: 2 medium scale photographs of—one assumes—the artist in a suburban bedroom, unremarkably clad but for a rubber rooster’s head mask. The sheer eccentricity of this image, the contrived unselfconsciousness of the gestures as the artist poses in very good imitation of a bird springing into flight, is confronting. And again, myriad interpretations are possible, from the grotesquely erotic to the theatrical and more.

The Letitia Street Studio artists group show was held at the new premises of arts@work, an arts advocacy/employment/ promotions body which now shares a building with CAST. Continuing with the esoteric names, this exhibition LSS@arts@work showcases the variety of work being produced at the studios.

Whilst the arts@work organisation has—once again—a small exhibition area, this group show, with 1 or 2 works per artist, was sympathetically hung throughout the complex. Besides the aforementioned artists, the show featured the compelling trademark broken-glass sculptures of Matt Calvert and Shelley Chick’s bizarre and beautiful wall-based lampshade incorporating steel, rubber and play-tiles and decorated with an image of an exotic bird.

Meg Keating’s oil and mica paintings are evocatively titled studies of figures in action, but they transcend the figurative. Her bright, limited palette and ‘marbled’ paint give them a satisfying quasi-abstract edge. Michael Schlitz is an accomplished printer, and his work in this show features more of his sparse gentle monochromatic ‘house style.’ Without advocating novelty for its own sake, I’d like to see something new from this artist.

Also in the show are textile artist Rosemary O’Rourke, painter Anne Morrison, digital artist Troy Ruffles, mixed media sculptor and installation artist John Vella and painter Richard Wastell—all of them significant, emerging Tasmanian talent to watch.

Conspiratorial Tones, Matt Warren, Oct 12-Nov 3, 2001; Nihil sub sole novum, Neil Haddon, Aug-Sept 2001; A Loft, Sally Rees, Nov 3-Dec 9, 2001, LSSp (Letitia Street Space), Hobart.

LSS@arts@work, Group exhibition by LSSp artists, arts@work Gallery Space, Hobart, May 2002.

Walking through Patrick Pound’s photographic installation, The Memory Room, is like entering a stranger’s home in their absence. At the CCP the installation is camped in a corner of the front gallery. At the ACP where I originally saw this work, it feels more like a bed-sitting room in the tiny backspace gallery.

An unmade bed, lamps left on, radio playing, a chattering television balanced on a suitcase, a heater, pieces of clothing, a cup and plate with the remains of a meal. On the floor, scraps of dog food in a bowl. Opposite the bed a wardrobe converts to a desk, a light dangling above what looks like someone’s work, put aside. Should you sit on the chairs, like Goldilocks? Better not. Might be sprung. You decide to take a closer look at the pictures on the walls. Nothing tells you more about people than their debris and the things they collect. The last thing you remember is a photograph of a man holding up a giant carrot.

You have entered the world of Patrick Pound. Hundreds of photographs, along with cartoons, plastic maps, small architectural models, pages from books, 26 Comparisons. Befores and Afters. A collection of brown objects arranged across the floor. Bizarre images. “Bless our Mobile Home”, Jaquie O cutout dolls, stills from The Fountainhead. It goes on. And on. And in. And out. What is going on here? A taxonomy of trivia or a homage to the god of small things? Perec in 3D? Abandon sense all ye who enter here! Jigsaw landscapes. Wax models. A cutting from a newspaper with a photograph of a building in a wilderness—“Lives on hold: Some of the people who have fled to Australia are sent to Woomera Detention Centre in SA which holds 1,026 people.” 1,026. Remember that. Measurements.Transformations. Suddenly, on the wall, a clue! Write it down. Quick!

You think, my boy, you have an obligation to describe everything fallaciously. But still, to describe. You are sadly out in your calculations. You have not enumerated the pebbles, the abandoned chairs. The traces of jism on the blades of grass. The blades of grass. All these people who are wondering what on earth you are driving at may as well get lost in the details or in the garden of your bad faith.

Walking through The Memory Room your mind wanders to the occupant and his (definitely his) whereabouts for a while and then you lose yourself altogether in the detail. While documentary photographers tussle over truth, Patrick Pound conjures the palpable persona of a documenter, then leaves you with the task of making sense (or poetry) of his evidence. He has vacated the room so you can replace him—you being the only solid thing here amongst all these fragments. You are. Aren’t you?

The Memory Room, Patrick Pound, CCP (Centre for Contemporary Photography, Fitzroy, Melbourne, April 12-May4; and as part of Peter Hill’s Stranger than Truth, ACP (Australian Centre for Photography), Paddington, Sydney, Jan 4-Feb 10

Something Something Video Something

Daniel Palmer
Pioneers of the artist-run commercial gallery, the gallerists at Uplands, are proving nifty at packaging artists working with video. A jukebox style, DVD menu of conceptual work screened on an over-sized TV offers a selection of work for viewing. (Tire of one, move on to another). The mix strikes a balance between the slick and game-inspired; Anthony Hunt’s Atari-style 1 minute digital poetry composed of every 3 letter word in the English language, or Stephen Honegger’s Doom-like virtualisation of the gallery space; and wackier grungier works by A Constructed World (Lane Cormick, Matthew Griffin). Also featuring Melbourne artists DAMP, Daniel von Sturmer and Meri Blazevski, David Noonan and Simon Trevaks, Dion Sanderson, Jacinta Schreuder, Laresa Kosloff, and Marco Fusinato.

Mary Scott

Diana Klaosen
Hobart-based digital artist Mary Scott currently works with large-format digital prints depicting women juxtaposed with pigs. This motif, whether as a plastic toy animal or, more subversively, as patterns etched or stitched onto skin, effects a (peverse) metaphoric coupling with the female figures. Pigs reference both a perceived lack of personal grace and the animal’s historic connections with female sexuality, specifically vernacular descriptions of female sex and prostitution. Strangely witty work.

David LeMay

The intimate distance of memory. Overhead projections throw layered fragments onto gallery walls and floor: text, photos of family and landscape, gestural marks. A row of ‘real’ photos, a ‘real’ drawing and a ladder standing on a plastic sheet overlap the projections. This distilled, erotic conjunction of the material, virtual and mechanical is as lyrical as its title. Beautifully just there.

Forgetfulness and Thunder, David LeMay, 24 Hour Art, Darwin, May 10-25. Performance Space, Sydney, June 7-29

Katrina Simmons

Katrina Simmons’ sleeping puppies is misleadingly named. The toys, in fact, are masturbating; floating contentedly—if stickily—in pools of hardened icing. Utilising the soft toy, that ubiquitous signifier of childhood, Simmons explores the role of artefacts within the mental process of memory-construction. The subverted objects are presented on spindly-legged plinths reminiscent of high chairs or precarious dream-ladders whose next rung remains always out of reach.

Kate McMillan

Bec Dean
One of Perth’s most tenacious (and tireless) young visual artists and curators, Kate McMillan is currently beginning a 3 month Australia Council residency in Tokyo. McMillan has taken extended leave from her position as Program Manager at Craftwest, to refocus on a career that has evolved from fine object-making to an installation-based practice that interrogates institutional waste, packaging excesses, and the by-products of cultural production.

In the 80s, Glasgow’s underworld tore itself apart over routes for ice cream vans. Not just because Glaswegians have a mania for the pig fat confectionery but because the routes were ideal cover for drug couriers and distributors. But you get the picture: bad food and violence. Glasgow’s main exports.
New Territories is one of the city’s claims to a cultural singularity of a different kind. Nikki Millican and team woke the city from its mid-winter hibernation with a mix of work from dance and performance art contexts. Millican is a key figure in this scene in Glasgow. At about the same time as the ice cream wars broke out she developed New Moves, a festival of experimental dance. She has also curated the National Review of Live Art (NRLA) for the previous several years. New Territories brings the 2 events together under one umbrella—and boy do you need one of those in a Glasgow winter.

Here are some fragments from one day of NRLA material: a room pulsing with heavy bass electronica as an installation, no dancing allowed (Alistair Macdonald). Documentation of an event exhibited as the event—a room full of papers with all the appeal of a KGB committee meeting (Third Angel). A sensible looking woman painstakingly cutting up Safeway bags and knitting the resulting plastic twine into a straightjacket (Elaine Dwyer). Yes, shopping can be a constraint on your time, but so can neurosis. An Indian woman with her eyes closed speaking a text directly into a microphone (Shamshad Kahn). Simple, personal and powerful performance delivered with a hypnotic pace and tone. This is what live art can be, but too frequently isn’t.

Then came Forced Entertainment. This Sheffield-based performance ensemble have been together for around 15 years but have never made it to Australia though they told me they’d love to come (take note live-art curators!). One of the ground breaking companies of recent British performance they, once again, found a fiendishly clever way to unbuild a performance event in And on the Thousandth Night (based on One Thousand and One Nights of course).

Here’s the scene. The company are onstage wearing red silk capes and paper crowns. One by one they address the audience and start telling stories beginning with “Once upon a time there was a…” They compete, interrupting and stealing each other’s stories over the 6 hours of the piece’s duration. Tim Etchells, the composer of much of their work, says he became interested in the performance potentials of this free narrative mode when having to invent bedtime stories to tell his kids. I liked the one about 2 duelling aeroplanes writing abusive messages to each other in the sky. Amazingly, despite or because of the relaxed mode of address, real conflicts build on stage and the mood in the auditorium shifts in and out of a kind of mild hysteria. I found that, though I knew there was no end to the stories, I listened as if there would be, my desire completing the structure of the event even as it was unravelling before my eyes, proliferating fragments.

The venue for this and the NRLA was The Arches, a series of dusty cavernous spaces under Central Railway Station. Used by clubs and bands more than conventional performance genres, it’s run a bit like Performance Space was at the end of the 90s but the bar and foyer areas are the stuff of designer fetishism: orange dangle bits and moulded plastic furniture. This collision of packaged space and found space mimes the city itself. That is, merchant city, tenement city, housing estates, and the liveliest club scene in the UK.

Right outside the Arches, a skateboarding performance event took place in the futurist abstract landscape New Plaza designed by Toby Patterson, artist and skater. A champion of his city, Patterson said on receipt of this year’s ICA/Becks Futures Arts Prize, “anything that puts Glasgow on the map is good.” More impressive was the collection of skater art videos including Patterson’s which was part of the Intersection program screened at Lighthouse, a contemporary art space in the city. These pieces brilliantly translate the traditions of body art into a contemporary urban context through the twinned technologies of digital video and skateboards. Gliding figures cutting through a variety of bleak urban environments may not be everyone’s idea of performance art—but which is more artistic: a skater passing an art gallery, or a skater wearing a suit of electric lights and zipping through a housing estate at night? Intersection is an intriguing mix of Dali and suburban leisure aesthetics and, believe it or not, there’s already a book on this phenomenon: Skateboarding, Space and the City. Architecture and the Body by Iain Borden (Berg, Oxford).

A short bus trip (I never skate in winter) away from the Arches is Tramway, the venue for much of the dance-theatre component of the festival. Occupying converted tram sheds in a derelict part of Pollockshields in South Glasgow, it’s a strangely pristine space for such a crappy environment. Here Ultima Vez, the Belgian based company of Flemish choreographer Wim Vandekeybus, presented Scratching the Inner Fields. This was a portentous piece that relied too heavily on a text by Peter Verhelst that relied too heavily on the use of the clause “they say that” (whoever ‘they’ are). Passages such as “They say that hunters enjoy chasing after game. That they enjoy the smell of a frightened animal. That they come when the blood flows over their hands. That they smear the blood over themselves”, had me pining for the chirpy discontinuous narrative of Forced Entertainment. The all-female cast did what they could with this cumbersome material. Meanwhile, some intriguing choreographic manoeuvres were playing themselves out. A woman with her hand locked in a casket. The staccato slap of rolled up cauls hitting the stage wetly and then stretched over lights to become membranous shades dividing the space into miniature red light areas. Three performers collapsing with exhaustion, being buried in dirt, then emerging, dirt clinging in patterns to their sweat drenched bodies. But the visceral and apocalyptic images of the piece do not cohere, and the sheer intensity of the staging is the only trace of Vandekeybus’ time with Jan Fabre.

Companhia Paulo Ribeiro of Portugal managed the interplay of the textual and the physical much better in a piece called Sad Europeans—Jouissez Sans Entraves —an effective counterpoint to the chaotic weightiness of the Belgians. This virtuoso dance-theatre piece mixed technical rigour with parodic reframing of technique. The dancers’ development of a movement was followed with a reflection on its construction redolent of Bausch and DV8—but with a quieter, more focussed staging. Ribeiro has the guts to rely exclusively on his own wit and the skills and animal energies of his company.

This piece was a suitable follow-up to Lisa O’Neill’s clever pastiche of Tadashi Suzuki (his technique and his critique of western ballet) in her Fugu San. My students at the University of Glasgow said they thought it was ‘cool’ and that they ‘didn’t know you could do performance like that’ (I think that’s what they said), but that they didn’t get the Suzuki stuff. It’s true to say Suzuki, and Japanese performance more generally, does not play the role in Scottish performance culture it does in Sydney and Brisbane.

They found Cazerine Barry’s Sprung easier to read with its claustrophobic exploration of domestic space suggesting a loss of dimensionality, a similar game played by Station House Opera in Mare’s Nest. This piece has 4 performers working both sides of a large structure comprising decking and a screen with a doorway connecting the 2 sides of the space. The interior of a room is projected onto the screen. In this virtual area we see a variety of images which we are denied in the flesh eg 2 of the performers turning their naked bodies away from us. At one moment, we see a performer on the screen shoving his penis at the doorway just as the real door is slammed. But it’s soon pretty clear that the switching between ontologies is the only game in town.

The idea of technology as performance took on an even more spectacular aspect in the work of Italian company Materiali Resistenti Dance Factory with their Waterwall. The piece consists of members of the company in black rubber suits cut off at the knee negotiating an enormous metal structure which eventually starts gushing water. This is the brainchild of Ivan Manzoni and it is pure retro-Futurist confection: part aqua-aerobics part biomechanics. Imagine 6 Irma Veps abseiling down a metallic waterfall and then sliding off into the audience. Choreography isn’t the right word, but the effort of the performers swinging rhythmically off ropes under the cascading water and maintaining timing and balance was the real achievement of this spectacle.

An image to close. Leaving the Materiali piece I approached the glass exit doors to see the company in street clothes under the eaves with a torrent of rainwater pouring down behind them. Someone should have told them that on the West Coast of Scotland in Winter, dancers should always wear their rubber suits all the way back to the hotel. Oh, and don’t buy the ice cream. Not until it warms up anyway.

New Territories: An International Festival of Live Art, Glasgow, Scotland, February 11 – March 16

A loose cluster of plays constellate, unikely companions, strange planets, sharing the unreliable gravity of Time in fantasias of recollection and projection. It’s a sometimes unnerving journey from theatre to theatre. It’s a long moment, lasting weeks, when synchronicity rules, déjà vu spooks and what makes immediate sense is later often inexplicable. Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen and William Shakespeare’s Macbeth at Sydney Theatre Company, Sam Sejavka’s In Angel Gear at The New Theatre, Alma de Groen’s Wicked Sisters for the Griffin Theatre Company and Jenny Kemp’s Still Angela for Playbox flicker and flare.
Frayn’s Copenhagen is performed on a planet. It’s Earth as an abstracted floor map pierced by a long wedge, on which physicists Bohr and the Nazi Heisenberg (and Bohr’s wife as accuser and commentator) create versions of their 1941 meeting and its abrupt ending, some predictable, one at least horrific. In this moral kaleidoscope, coherent purpose (why was Heisenberg there, to see a friend, to spy, to steal a secret that could make Germany a nuclear bomb, to compromise the Jewish Bohr?) evaporates into indeterminacy. Frayn boldly makes Heisenberg the self-interrogator, the primary constructor of the narrative, an act the playwright’s detractors have deplored (one going so far as to compare him with David Irving), but which makes this little journey into the heart, or rather the consciousness, of darkness, almost the nightmare it yearns to be. Copenhagen unsettles but finally fails me with is its inexorable neatness, from its pedestrian opening on through its ordered reconstructions and potted explanations of theories and the analogizing of these (like Heisenberg’s indeterminacy) with human psychology. The rationalist framework keeps us cosy, thoughtful, judges and jurors in a high-modernist in-the-round courtroom of Michael Blakemore’s direction and Peter J Davison’s design. There are moments when the temporal gears shift (however doggedly signalled by text and blocking) and the brain speeds up, attentive, accommodating another account that is like the one before, but then nothing like it. But Copenhagen stays strictly in the sphere of assaying moral relativism before driving its message home with a piece of perfectly executed stage spectacle. I left the theatre longing for the delirium of Polish cyberneticist and sci-fi writer Stanislav Lem’s chilling transformations of theories into projected realities in the novel Solaris and some hilarious short fictions where people bump into themselves with nasty consequences. Frayn’s Heisenberg never meets himself. I’d have to wait for Jenny Kemp’s Still Angela before I’d experience time and character illuminatingly out of joint. Nonetheless it was good to take the trip to Copenhagen, a serious talking head play which has generated debate and spinoffs that constellate around the play as it’s performed across the world, including Frayn’s elaborate updates in the printed program, The New York Review of Books (March 28) and a small companion volume, where he matches up his projections with the facts about an event almost lost to history as they begrudgingly emerge.

Macbeth is a butchering torturer, already a thug before the witches channel their prophecies of kingship through whoever happens to be available. Lady Macbeth is a trashy version of Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita, all brazen carnality but already quaking at her ambition for her husband. Duncan is a dwarf with a dancing lilt, sparkling like a faery king, too beautiful for murder. But the tale must be told, and it is with relentless determination, staccato delivery and rich and often bizarre imagery, some of it insightful, some of it silly (like the large, black, hairy muppet that rises from between the possessed Lady Macbeth’s thighs, bares its fangs and waves its long tongue at us). Instead of waiting for time to take its course and the witches’ prophecies to come true, Macbeth and wife take time into their own hands and push it fatefully along. Benjamin Winspear’s production works on and off, but it does remind us that Macbeth is no great intellect, that his wavering and his wrestling with superstition make him a creature of the moment, essentially blind to the future, and almost incapable of reflection. Russell Kiefel’s account of “Tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow…” therefore is bitter, impatient, not tragic. This is a man whose cure for his ailing wife is a lobotomy he performs himself. Macbeth is a killer from beginning to end; the verities of psychological development and character-as-time (one of Shakespeare’s inventions perhaps) are put to the test. Easy to dismiss, because it’s not the Macbeth we think we know, but the production conjures a frightening, claustrophobic timelessness that tyranny loves and that stays in the psyche for weeks to come.

It’s a short step from Macbeth to the subjects of Sam Sejavka’s In Angel Gear, junkies locked in the monstrous loop of addiction, in which time is either momentarily and ecstatically overcome or suffered as purgatory until the next hit. There’s little sense of the past and fantasies about the future remain just that. The play shows its age with creaky voice-overs that illustrate something of each of the characters in turn and there’s some awkward plotting, but the everydayness of the addict’s life with its narrow yearnings, squalor, glimpses of escape, criminal desperation, betrayal and easy violence are portrayed in both writing and production with an unequalled frankness for the stage and with the necessary sense of duration. The horror of time passing possesses these wracked bodies and restless psyches (fine, exacting performances from Winston Cooper, Jaro Murany and Victoria Thaine) as Sejavka and director Alice Livingstone allow the lived moment to unfold until you think you feel it in your own body.

Three sisters gather and reflect on the dead husband of one of them and on each of their thwarted lives. Secrets are revealed, darker and darker. Here was a man who screwed everyone sexually and emotionally, and a fourth woman professionally by stealing her research. He created a computer program, based on her ideas, that generates evolving ‘life’ forms. His womb envy lives on and he still dominates the lives of these women. The computer sits in a perspex swathed column in the wife’s home, university-controlled, humming, squealing if touched. In the Dead Husband genre (that includes Hannie Rayson’s Life After George and Tobsha Learner’s The Glass Mermaid) the challenge is partly to make the man intelligible, to understand how he could have had the impact he did, why this wholesale female surrender. Otherwise he remains a phallic archetype from a crude kind of feminism. Seeing the outcomes of his impact is to have only half the picture and that’s all we get in Wicked Sisters, a kind of verbal farce that edges towards Ab Fab but with heavy-handed playing, tiresome quipping and loaded plotting. Neither director (Kate Gaul, far better on more idiosyncratic projects) nor writer (Alma de Groen) are at their best and time stands still for all the wrong reasons as the characters rummage through each others’ lives. Only Judi Farr as the husband-murderer is allowed any gravitas, conveying a sense of weary, wounded interiority and a life where time is suspended, finished despite the revelations and the blackmailing that batter her.

In dark stillness, tall columns of moon-ish light slowly illuminate 3 seated Angelas (Lucy Taylor late 20s, Natasha Herbert early 30s, Margaret Mills 40 years old) in Jenny Kemp’s Still Angela. There are no explanations, these women and, soon the child Angela, simply co-exist in a shifting space of recollection and reverie across time. We enter of web of associations and resonances built out of things, animals, insects—lino, chess, horses, a spider, a bat—that like the women overlap and interweave. We hear the sound of a horse, a horse is spoken of, Angela calls the chess knight a horse. Lino, the backyard path, the chess board merge (“The truth of the matter is that there are always two landscapes, Viriginia. One always on top of the other.”) Angela 1’s scenes with husband Jack, little, spare naturalistic moments of out of sync emotion and sexuality, recur with Angela 2, same but different, quietly desperate—Angela: “You’re unconscious.” Jack: “We’re all unconscious.” There are 2 train trips to central Australia (narrow, several metre tall projections of the landscape rolling magically by), opening up not the landscape but the interior Angela—backyard and desert merge in the father’s making of a path like a chess board, the child is there, and her dead mother.

This simultaneity of actions and chronologies seems anchored in Angela 3, as if hers is the central consciousness, hers the challenge, speaking of herselves in first and third person: “There was something to discover about time, it was as if the sandwich, the bushes, the trees, the earth, were all getting on with something and she just wasn’t quite getting it. Something important was eluding her.” Perhaps it’s about being 40, feeling unconnected, living with the discontinuous narrative of past selves. As Angela 2 muses: “Am I six forever? Six in my thirty-third year?…27 years on a garden path?” The child Angela (dancer Ros Warby appearing tiny, marvellously angular, wrought, dropping…) evokes the mystery of a past almost too long ago to be understood except as play, watching and visceral anxiety. Perhaps it’s about a dead/lost husband. We don’t see Angela 3 with Jack (“I can’t hear you Jack you don’t have any sound, any presence, as if you were creeping along the pavement with bare feet, trying to trick me”). When asked “What’s wrong” at the play’s end, Angela 3 replies, “Probably grief.” But that’s all, because anything more literal would belie the larger forces at work in Angela’s psyche.

The return journey on the train from the desert unites the 3 Angelas in hilarious chat interspersed with glimpses of new strength. Angela 1: “Inside my clothes I’m an animal. Head neck sinews, lungs breathing, heart pumping. No one knows that between me and my dress, is a cosmic leap. A leap of faith into oblivion.” Angela 2: “His body hung in space like sexual atmosphere, you couldn’t help ingest him and even if his mind was elsewhere, he knew he was disappearing down your gullet and up your cunt!” Man: “And who was he?” Angela 1: “He was the Animus!” Still Angela is a liberating experience that realizes in performance the strange intersecting relativities of time, space and personality, theatre as dream. Jacqueline Everitt’s design, with its eerily inverted bushscape and startling depth of field, David Murray’s play with darkness and starry desert nights, Ben Speth’s film, and Elizabeth Drake’s nuanced score (horse, trains, distant songs, sometimes as if half heard, fragments from a dream) all merge with Kemp’s marvellous writing and the company’s deft delivery and fine movement (Helen Herbertson) yield an intensively subjective experience. A true play with time.

Time stands still. The recent death of Ruth Cracknell has deprived us of a great Australian actor. I treasure above all the memory of her rivetting performance in Beckett’s Happy Days. It’s as if I saw it only yesterday.

Michael Frayn Copenhagen, Wharf 1, Sydney Theatre Company, opened May 8; William Shakespeare Macbeth, Wharf 2, Sydney Theatre Company, opened May 11; Sam Sejavka, In Angel Gear, The New Theatre, Sydney May 3-June 1; Alma de Groen, Wicked Sisters, Griffin Theatre Company, The Stables, Sydney, April 11-May 4; Jenny Kemp, Still Angela, Playbox, Malthouse, Melbourne, opened April 10.

I imagined the title of this “marathon performance installation about culture and the sea” referred to Australia’s national anthem, Advance Australia Fair. Girt By Sea conjured up images of Australia, the island-continent surrounded by ocean, and the boatloads of refugees not allowed to land on Australian soil. It all depends on your perspective.
Having witnessed Badai Pasir, Deborah Pollard’s performance/installation on Baron Beach near Yogyakarta, Central Java in 1996, I was looking forward to its translation into an Australian context. Invited to Sydney to work with Urban Theatre Projects, Indonesian artists Hedi Haryanto and Regina Bimadona collaborated with a number of local performers. And in Australia, as in Indonesia, this performance installation was staged over the weekend at a local beach.

Arriving at Manly by ferry from the city, sunlight glistened on the ocean as you looked across to the West Esplanade Harbour Beach at Manly Cove. “What’s that on the beach?” asked a fellow passenger as 8 brightly coloured huts—black/white, green/orange, blue/yellow with lifebuoys hanging over their doors—came into view along the beach.

Greeted by lifesavers doing the hula, you couldn’t help but follow as their female companion—and her extra large box of NutriGrain—led them down the beach. Two nuns were playing volleyball at the water’s edge while someone else was in the water fishing from a fish bowl suspended in a blow-up ring.

Queues formed in front of the huts as inquisitive observers joined others to find out what exactly was inside. Three huts housed installations with images and shadows created by the play of light and shade. The other 5 hosted one-on-one, 2 minute performances. Upon entering, you were directed to pick up headphones and listen to your personal soundscape on a CD walkman. A story with soundtrack unfolded before your eyes. A cheeky face peered over an old Globite suitcase as its contents—a miniature beach with tiny towels, a seagull, flags and sand—were slowly revealed. A recipe was given for beach babes. You became part of a Chinese tourist visit to Bondi Beach. You listened to a Vietnamese legend.

The beach was alive—a chef basting a sunbather; an office executive in power pink sitting on a plastic dalmation-print inflatable lounge chair, mobile phone glued to her ear; a neat row of sandcastles; a girl in floral print dress and apron sifting sand through a flour-sifter, making patterns along the beach, and lifesavers buried in the sand, roaring for their Nutri-Grain or posing in early 20th century period costume, ankle-deep in water. As sunset approached, the light was tinged with pink and muted evening colours, giving the landscape an even more surreal quality.

The general public were exposed to something quite outside their usual beach experience as they stumbled across these events. Indeed, from whichever perspective you approached this amalgam of works, you couldn’t help but be touched, challenged and left pondering. Girt By Sea had many layers and many faces—a truly fascinating mix of cultural responses to the sea.

Girt By Sea, presented by Deborah Pollard in association with Urban Theatre Projects, artists Deborah Pollard, Hedi Hariyanto, Regina Bimadona, George PK Khut, Monica Wulff, Arif Hidayat, Simon Wise, Peter Panoa, The West Esplanade Harbour Beach, Manly Cove, March 23-24.

No Answer Yet is a new performance work that effectively critiques the holding of asylum seekers in detention. Presented by Ommi Theatre in association with Hunter Writer’s Centre, it was performed by a collective of young performers at the Palais Royale, a late 19th century landmark located on Hunter Street, Newcastle. The Palais has had multiple lives as a roller skating rink, dance hall and nightclub but now operates as a youth venue under the auspices of the City Council.

The Palais is a vast performance space. A parquetry and carpet covered dance floor is capped at one end by a raised stage of generous proportions. Tonight, a large square of sheer white material is stretched vertically from floor to ceiling before the stage. At the foot of the stage the performers sit individually or cluster in small groups playing chess or chatting. Tents are pitched on either side of the playing space. A white cage with a white bird inside it hangs from the ceiling. Spectators are huddled with others behind a barricade constructed from wood and rope located far from the playing space. Between the barricade and the performers are several rows of seating. The distance across the space makes it difficult to distinguish the individual features of the performers.

A video sequence plays on the large white screen opposite the barricade. One by one the performers appear in close up speaking directly to the camera. The faces fill the screen as they explain the circumstances leading to their detention as asylum seekers. Countering the Federal Government’s physical distancing, dehumanisation and demonisation of asylum seekers (see Bec Dean, The artist & the refugee), the strategic use of video in performance gives the human figures in the distance a face and a voice.

At the end of the video, a performer approaches the barricade and addresses the audience. She states that the camp guards are currently preoccupied with other business and that we, the new batch of detainees awaiting processing, can sneak into the camp to meet fellow detainees. The performer removes the barricade and leads the spectators to the performer-refugees. After a while the same performer ushers spectators to the reserved seating. She explains that the camp detainees would like to perform a small drama of their devising to entertain us.

The young performers stand alone in apparently random positions within the playing space. On impulse they run to the edges of the space. Some seem to be testing the boundaries of their confinement. Others seem to recognise a familiar face beyond the borders of their captivity. The movement increases in frequency and speed until the action reaches a state of chaos. There are no words spoken, only a mournful musical track playing in the background and the image of people running themselves down in anger or false hope.

The exhausted performers retreat to the edges of the space. Two men sit playing chess, watched by one of the women. Another woman sits at the back of the space simply staring back at the audience. Another performer, a young Korean woman, walks from performer to performer in an agitated state. She doesn’t speak but cradles a stuffed bear under her arm. With her free hand covered by a scouring mitt, she vigorously scrubs the toy.

This performance within a performance weaves together the different stories of the asylum seekers, focusing on how they came to be placed in detention. The mode of storytelling is fluid and fragmentary as performers advance towards and then withdraw from centre stage, the telling punctuated by the depiction of aspects of everyday life in the camp. For instance, performers are often interrupted by a voice from a loudspeaker summoning the detainees to mealtime. Life inside the camp is shown to be harsh. A couple who lost a child while making a dangerous border crossing, bitterly come to terms with having their second child born into captivity. One woman in the camp is mute though she does sometimes sing. At the end of the show she collapses and dies, presumably from sadness. Another woman becomes quite hysterical at any loud noises and fast movements. One detainee is called to the administration office by number (the detainees refer to each other by number rather than name) and does not return. It is explained that she doesn’t have the proper papers and must return from whence she came. In this and many other ways, No Answer Yet reveals the inhumanity in collecting together in a confined space a group of already traumatised people and leaving them with nothing to do.

Quite apart from the difficulties involved in watching material that is disturbing and upsetting, I had to question the representation of asylum seekers by young performers whose theatrical skills and emotional capabilities appeared, at certain moments, to be stretched by the task of representational identification with the psychological dysfunction, trauma and pain of asylum seekers. Iraqui-Australian writer-director Nazar Jabour responded that the efficacy of the performance lay in the process of taking young people through a research and rehearsal process. The performers, who wrote about their involvement in the project in a local zine produced by the Palais Royale Youth Venue, stated that No Answer Yet provided them with an opportunity to perform their thoughts and feelings about the detention of asylum seekers for the local community. Their identification with asylum seekers and the solicitation of audience empathy seem worth the risk of a sometimes difficult performance. Jabour is currently researching a second show on the refugee issue.

No Answer Yet, writer-director Nazar Jabour, performers Catherine Comyns, Michelle Nunn, Mathew Steele, Victoria Lobregat, Andrew Richards, Blayne Welsh, Holly Manevski, Jandi Kim, dramaturg Brian Joyce; Palais Royale Youth Venue, Newcastle, April 4-6.

Chunky Move, Wanted, Australia’s Most Wanted: Ballet for a contemporary democracy

Choreographer Gideon Obarzanek took the concept for Wanted from Russian artists Komar and Melamid, who in 1993 polled Americans on the most statistically desirable painting (see the interview with Obarzanek). A comparable survey on the elements of a dance production was carried out for Wanted. However the most and least desirable dances only feature during the opening and finale; most of the piece being what Obarzanek calls a “dance documentary.” That is, a seated woman reads findings, examples of which are then presented.

This self-reflexive, show-and-tell format is novel and engaging, a kind of postmodern Brechtian approach, with tongue firmly in cheek. Dance is fragmented down to its most basic elements to the point of absurdity, as spectators are offered a rough guide to dance terminology (erratic versus soft movement, etc). Obarzanek’s own muscular choreography does, however, inflect many of these examples.

The survey is a great springboard for devising material, but the comparative findings between the various polled groups, which give Wanted its humour, are devoid of statistical validity. Over 75% of the respondents were female teachers and dancers aged 15-45, mostly from Victoria and NSW. It is therefore unsurprising that other populations appear to exhibit unusual tastes—“Northern Territory people have a higher preference for techno/dance music.” These groups constitute such relatively small samples that a few strange responses amongst them displaces the mean.

The comic approach also eventually wears thin. Obarzanek’s own choreographic style consists of an aggressive form of dance theatre, exhibiting a high degree of dramatic expressiveness. Yet when “expressive movement” appears as one of the most wanted qualities, it is not Obarzanek’s own style which is displayed, but rather an inflated spoof of bad Graham technique, arms thrust to the sky as the dancers sigh loudly. Obarzanek thereby excludes himself from the critique of popularism he is offering.

The audience is therefore finally cheated, as the “most wanted” work itself is not performed at all, but rather a deliberately silly send up of it. Nowhere on the survey were respondents asked if they wanted their opinions mocked. Instead, one is left feeling that Obarzanek is talking down to his audience. ‘Here is the dance which you asked for’, he seems to be saying in a superior way, ‘and isn’t it crap!’ A valuable opportunity has therefore been lost. If the dancers actually meant it when they performed the most wanted piece, one might be better placed to discern what makes such choreography so statistically compelling. It is ironic therefore, that Obarzanek—a frequent champion of pop culture in dance—has employed a mass marketing model to generate a work that ends up conforming to the stereotype of elitist arts: showing up the masses for their poor taste. It is the simplistic bread’n’circuses critique of mid-century Marxism all over again.

The “least wanted” work, by contrast, provides a more satisfying spectacle, albeit also a comic one. The most wanted style is akin to Graeme Murphy’s Sydney Dance Company—no surprises there (though in an apposite program note Tom Wright compares the polled preference for soft yet athletic dance dealing with the human condition to the Nazi Triumph of Will). The least wanted aesthetic however, appears to be angular dance theatre performed to discordant music. Obarzanek offers us, therefore, an extremely funny Cubist take on The Three Little Pigs. A choice that—in a more generous vein than the show overall—implicitly sends up Obarzanek’s own dance history, as his 1999 piece All the Better to Eat You With explored another fairytale. The bemusedly deadpan delivery of this section is also far more respectful of its audience.

The program closes with Clear Pale Skin, an equally promising work which does not quite fulfil expectations. This features another of Obarzanek’s psychotic female characters, here superbly played by Fiona Cameron as a dancer obsessed with the measurements, aesthetics and form of a fellow dancer (Nicole Johnston looking suitably gorgeous). The narrative of obsessive narcissism leading to murderous intent is well handled, but the only surprise in this familiar tale (Single White Female etc) is how beautiful it all looks. Slight reference is made in the work itself to the outside forces which have made this character feel this way. The drive for perfection is therefore rendered primarily as the personal problem of this woman rather than a social one with which dance itself is complicit. Cameron’s own works (Looking For a Life Cure, Buy This) are more eloquent in this regard.

Overall, both Wanted and Clear Pale Skin are fine pieces, which nevertheless rarely move beyond pedestrian social observations, leaving aside more nuanced understandings of the relationship between the individual and culture. The strength of these works therefore lies less in their conception than in their assured execution, with Chunky Move’s long-term dancers looking better every day.

Wanted: Australia’s Most Wanted: Ballet for a contemporary democracy & Clear Pale Skin, Chunky Move double-bill: choreography Gideon Obarzanek; set & lighting Bluebottle; composition/sound Luke Smiles; costume Jane Summers-Eve; Chunky Move Workshop, Melbourne, May 24-June 9

Sound scultpure: Intersectionms in Sound and Sculpture in Australian Artworks by Ros Bandt

This book is welcome in many respects. It is welcome as a documentation of Australian sound sculpture, which has been—in Ros Bandt’s words—“an uncharted landscape of time and space.” It is very welcome for its lavish production, including some excellent photography, colour reproduction of artists’ scores and charts, and a 30 track CD coordinated with the text. It is also most welcome for the comprehensive account of artworks and artists provided by Bandt, who is herself prominent in the field.

As she remarks, the ephemeral nature of sound—and of most installation-based work—makes sound-oriented art difficult “to design, capture and document.” The book is a major step forward in the documentation process. Significant works by Nigel Helyer, Joan Brassil, Joyce Hinterding and many other artists are displayed, described, and represented on the CD. By combining audio excerpts with photos and illustrations, this book comes as close as a book can to document such multi-faceted work.

The range of artists covered is extensive. No doubt some readers will point to omissions, but that is inevitable in a book of this type. More important is that Ros Bandt has assembled a broad range of works here, and the book’s designer has presented them in an engaging format. The curious reader will be drawn in by the attractive design (some of the photos are superb), and to accommodate those unfamiliar with the field, the book includes a glossary, discography and bibliography.

For all its impressive qualities, this book would have been lifted into a higher league by a stronger conceptual account of the field. Consider the opening sentence: “Sound sculpture has been as ubiquitous as it is varied and ephemeral.” This confusing effort is a bad sentence anywhere, but as the opening of the book it doesn’t augur well. The problem with Bandt’s text, however, goes beyond sentence structure. It relates to the slight theoretical approach she takes to sound sculpture, which is nowhere adequately conceptualised as a form with its own specific attributes, criteria and history. The curious reader is likely to come away impressed by certain works, but confused by the incoherent account provided of sound sculpture.

Partly this problem derives from Ros Bandt’s rejection of recent sound-art theory, which for her “has borrowed heavily from other fashionable post-modern disciplines.” She complains that this theoretical work (well developed by Australian writers) lacks attention to specific art works, due to its dependence on “European linguistic and philosophical texts.” This is fair enough up to a point: at least here we’ll be spared the ordeal of theorists struggling to fit Derrida—with his literary bias—into the non-literary domain of sound. But for her book to succeed, she needed to replace this body of sound theory with something cogent.

Her (laudable) aim is to “present original artworks first”; from examination of these works, her hope is that “a relevant language will emerge in an appropriate way.” Yet the quest for this relevant language is a failed one in Sound Sculpture, mainly because there is no well-defined sense of what sound sculpture is. When generalisations are attempted, they are questionable. “Most sound sculptures,” we are told, “defy categorisation and are their own composite blend of visual and aural characteristics.” The visual/aural intersection or “ricochet” is repeatedly mentioned as the core of sound sculpture—which raises the question: “Is that all?” What of tactility, which is surely part of the sculptural element, and an important sensory factor?

The multi-disciplinary nature of this medium—with its fusion of music, sound, sculpture, electronics, architecture, acoustic engineering, design and other components—is part of the form’s fascination. But Bandt passes over this unique hybridity in a few sentences, preferring to discuss the works according to categories such as “machines and automata” and “indoor installation.” This creates the effect of a rather random detailing of works, with no thematic exposition. Any appreciation of sound sculpture as a specific art form is achieved only incidentally, with no developed idea of problems specific to the form, how artists engage with materials and technology—and no sense of the criteria by which works might be judged. This doesn’t require a canon to be built, or masterworks to be revered, but it does require some suggestion of ways in which the success of a work may be appreciated.

Strangest of all is the absence of a history of the form—or of any kind of context. Sound sculpture seems to have dropped out of the ether. Given that the book mentions work by Percy Grainger from the 1890s and the 1950s, there was the opportunity to sketch some of sound sculpture’s background or to detail the way its myriad components have come together to shape this thing called sound sculpture. Some exposition of this type would have provided the text with much-needed definition.

As it is, many of the observations are glib and superficial. In discussing Australia as an acoustic environment, Bandt compares “the hustle and bustle of Sydney’s Circular Quay” with “the quiet whispering of the casuarina trees in the remote Lake Mungo region.” Surely some recognition of the differences between urban built environments and natural ones is needed here. Later there is the claim, “Acoustic space is void. Sound fills it.” This peculiar statement—void of what? if the space is acoustic then it isn’t void of sound—shows the text’s need for at least some reference to the sound theory disdained by its author.

To be fair to Ros Bandt, she hasn’t set out to write a definitive theoretical work. She hopes that her book will “lay the foundation for more informed critical debate and discourse” around this topic. But for all this book’s impressive documentation and description, it could have laid a much more substantial foundation for future development.

Sound Sculpture: Intersections in Sound and Sculpture in Australian Artworks, Ros Bandt, Craftsman House, Sydney, 2001.

“It was at that time the business with the cat occurred.” Fassbinder’s killer opening line is also seized on by Nigel Kellaway. But this is immediately countered by Andrew Morrish—the always charming, disarming Morrish—who spins off into an hilarious, expansive impro along the lines of “Let’s just leave the cat alone.”

We have been warned. This is not a production of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s play Pre-Paradise Sorry Now, although it does draw on that work for at least part of its organising structure.

‘The cat’ was one of the early victims of Ian Brady who later, with Myra Hindley, terrorised, raped and killed 5 children in England in the 1960s and buried them on the moors. Leaving the cat alone, resisting violence and victimisation, is also an underlying entreaty of this piece which has been created “respecting those we sometimes dismiss as victims or less-than-losers” (program note).

entertaining paradise echoes the Fassbinder play in that it contains sections of narration about the exploits of Ian and Myra (or ‘Mein Führer’ and ‘Hessie’—after Rudolf Hess—as they called one another); dialogue between the 2, and a series of scenes “about the fascistoid underpinnings of everyday life” as Fassbinder saw it.

The ‘everyday life’ which Kellaway chooses to portray is that of the schoolyard—the performers are all costumed (by Annemaree Dalziel) in blue box pleated school tunics, and the piece opens with a giggling schoolyard courtship ritual. Their playground, populated by the loathsome bullies we all remember, is the triangular performance space (piano at its apex, complete with one of the school nerds playing; Michael Bell at the piano), and it is thoughtfully used to mirror the victimisation triangle of 2 ganging up on one. A triangle where allegiances shift suddenly and mercurially among the partners/victims in crime.

Here, the one-time Brady/Hindley victims are the aggressors—not to provide the simplistic excuse of arrested development or childhood trauma for adult atrocities, but perhaps rather to also allow for some timely self-reflection. Adults, of course, should know better than to persecute the innocent, the weak and the different. But are Ian, the bookkeeper and Myra, the secretary so different from the millions of other bookkeepers and secretaries who, closer to home, listen to Alan Jones, vote for John Howard, and hate their neighbours? It is the evil side to their banality that we need to worry about.

At one intriguing moment of the performance, peering deep into their music scores, Ian and Myra perceive the images of their victims. And so too, during this performance, are we uncomfortably reminded of the ugly hearts of glorious cultures that produce Berg and Hitler, Purcell and Brady. Closer to home, what ‘we’ love and hate is, literally, embodied in Indonesian-born Peretta Anggerek: the heights of Western musical culture emanating from the body of a despised and feared Other.

(And this is further subtly reiterated in performance: it is no innocent gesture for Anggerek in his school uniform to quietly read his Tintin book on stage. It points to an insidious and ongoing colonial project, which many seem so reluctant to relinquish. Not for us the putting away of childish things.)

Music is central to The opera Project’s work, and here Michael Bell provides the excellent live accompaniment (everything from Elvis to Berg); and Anggerek’s lovely counter-tenor is a pleasure in and of itself, whether he’s singing a traditional Indonesian tune or songs from the Western repertoire.

While an intense engagement with music is familiar territory for Kellaway’s productions, improvisation as a major element is a new departure and an inspired addition. What improvisation can so successfully do, in the face of the other very structured and often technically demanding performance elements (piano playing, opera singing, text-based theatre), is to undo them. It can rewrite and overwrite—it adds the dash of danger, the unexpected swerve, to performances which otherwise have their set paths to follow from beginning to end. And then there is also, simply, the pleasure of watching the performers create as they go, the thrill of the instant response to the immediacy of their situation.

Kellaway and Heilmann are—as always—riveting performers and seeing their work with the Fassbinder text (and especially as Ian and Myra) was enough to make me idly wish—heresy!—for the opportunity to see them do ‘straight’ theatre.

Clever, unexpected, provocative and captivatingly performed by all—I wish I had had the opportunity to return again (and again) as others did to see the re-creation of entertaining paradise each night during its season.

entertaining paradise, The opera Project, director Nigel Kellaway, performers Regina Heilmann, Nigel Kellaway, Andrew Morrish, counter-tenor Peretta Anggerek, pianist Michael Bell, The Performance Space, April 19-26

This year’s Totally Huge New Music Festival began, as did last year’s festival, in the bush 600 kms from Perth. This time there were noticeably fewer locals in attendance while a greater number of people had traveled up from Perth. So why the bush? “It’s the mixture of the unexpected”, explained Tos Mahoney, the festival’s Artistic Director. “All these artists together in this vast isolated space, who knows what could happen?” Indeed, the “unexpected mixture” proved to be an underlying thematic of the fifth Totally Huge.

Melbourne-based duo Clocked Out, pianist Eric Griswold and percussionist Vanessa Tomlinson, have been working for some time in Chengdu, China, with composer and musician Professor Zhou Zhiang and dancer Ziang Ping. Their performances offered the first fruits of that collaboration to be heard and seen outside China. Sampled street sounds and pre-recorded traditional performers blended with live music and dance to create a surprisingly seamless mixture of eras and cultures. In the bush, on the first Saturday, video images of modern China were projected onto the shearing shed behind the stage, and served as both backdrop and metre for the performance. The constant turning of the performers to reference the video sequences, and the strict association of music to vision periodically promoted an unfortunate sense of being a performance of live Foley. At each thematic change the music was temporarily subordinated to the visuals. Regardless, it was an outstanding work amongst others performed by this remarkable quartet.

Back in Perth, the following Friday was electronica night at the Amplifier Bar. Perth’s percussion and electronics group Zoo Transmissions opened the night. Transmissions are an enthusiastic and energetic group of performers beginning to make a real impression on the local club scene, proving that the music doesn’t necessarily need to be beat-driven to attract an audience. Lake Disappointment followed up, performing behind a projection screen showing dark and enigmatic images which complemented the group’s guitar-based, almost ambient sound. Eastern states visitor, Pimmon, topped off the evening. Pimmon, aka Paul Gough, has been making waves internationally with his glitchy, hard-edged laptop electroacoustics. His one-hour set began and ended with a visceral beat, but in between ranged over a breathtaking variety of textures and timbres, a swirling powerhouse of noise, that continually threatened to resolve into order.

When Rob Muir’s and Alex Hayes’ Project 44 was relocated from its bush premiere to the city, it was sited in fashionable East Perth. Overlooking an Aboriginal site of significance, it was simultaneously overlooked from the opposite direction by the latest inhabitants of medium-rise townhouse developments. Set between these 2 cultures, the industrial sounds from the 44-gallon drums echoed the recent white history of industrial occupation of this now expensive real estate. Apparently an uncomfortable mixture for some, Project 44 was moved several times until it found a home somewhat further from the public eye than originally intended.

Also in East Perth, but across the Claise Brook at the less peripatetic Holmes a Court Gallery, Ross Bolleter gave a single performance of thought-provoking narratives accompanied by the sparse and haunting sounds of 3 ruined pianos. Bolleter’s work with ruined pianos began in 1989, with the discovery of an instrument on a sheep station near Cue in Western Australia. No performance can ever be reproduced exactly because, by their nature, these instruments are in a constant state of entropic change. To Bolleter they are priceless rarities and, by the end of the evening, the capacity audience agreed with him.

Perth’s new music ensemble, Magnetic Pig, celebrated its tenth anniversary with a performance on the last Friday of the festival. The members of Magnetic Pig for the most part compose the works they perform. They have lost none of their exuberance and originality over the past 10 years. The offerings ranged from the recent, very approachable, almost cabaret-style pieces of Cathie Travers, through to the much denser and more difficult compositions of Lindsay Vickery. Incorporated into the evening were the Chinese performers Zhou Zhiang and Ziang Ping. Zhou played the ‘chin’ (a traditional Chinese string instrument) in Vickery’s Delicious Ironies 13, while dancer Ziang performed in a Miburi Suit, its midi controls effecting sound and video.

Before they left Perth, I asked Zhou and Ziang what they thought of their first Totally Huge New Music Festival. They replied, “The collaborations—working with Lindsay (Vickery) and the others—we were not expecting this. It was very good for everybody.”

Drums in the Outback, Wogarno Station, March 29-31, Totally Huge New Music Festival, Tura Events, Perth, April 12-21.

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Anthony Johnson

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AUSTRALIAN FILM TELEVISION AND RADIO SCHOOL (AFTRS)

VICTORIAN COLLEGE OF THE ARTS

QUEENSLAND COLLEGE OF THE ARTS GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY

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QUEENSLAND COLLEGE OF THE ARTS
GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY